003: The Reckoning: SCOTUS Breakpoint

The long-time voice of sports, ABC’s iconic commentator Howard Cosell, dubbed it the first rule of “jockocracy” – sports and politics don’t mix. 

The last thing a nation of couch potatoes wanted to see was a political hot potato on their fields of dreams. Sports, for most Americans, were the sacrosanct refuge where we went to get away from it all, to escape the tension and drama and conflict that colors daily life. 

But now many of our most divisive debates about class, race, religion, sex and the raw quest for political power are played out on the field. From the Pee Wee League to the Olympics and the Pros, sports mirror our polarizing divisions with athletes becoming icons of the polarizing debates razing the country’s cultural touchstones. 

In “Common Ground with Jane Whitney’s second show of the season, a bevy of headline grabbing athletes and sports authorities will examine Americans’ perception of the appropriate social role of sports and why we increasingly demand that athletes become warrior avatars for our cultural civil wars.

The legendary anchorman of the classic film "Network," Howard Beale, became a cultural icon for the axiom "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

We're all Howard Beales now, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy.

If the country has a national mood, it's mad. The fury has become so intense that it has fractured our national psyche and has provoked daily speculation from even the most blasé pundits about whether America is on the verge of another civil war.

But what are the roots of the intemperate disunion that pervades almost every aspect of daily life? Where did all this anger come from, why can't we just get along and how can we stitch our splintered country together again?

Those are the questions an all-star panel of nationally known headliners will explore as part of "Common Ground with Jane Whitney's" first program of the 2022 season.

Often referred to as “the conscience of America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Jon Meacham joins Jane Whitney to talk about how America’s history of overcoming crises makes him confident and hopeful that the country once again will prevail over these tumultuous times.

Former mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg headlines a panel of leading activists, including Jonathan Capehart, Sharice Davids and Danica Roem, to talk with Jane Whitney about the landmark successes of the LGBTQ rights movement and the remaining hurdles of the movement.

Three renowned experts on international affairs discuss America’s standing in the world and the impact of President Trump’s relegation of the country’s traditional allies and alliances. In the face of the country’s most consequential foreign policy election in the post-war era, the trio of preeminent panelists also will debate how to project American power and how to protect the country from foreign threats.

Don’t wait until November to find out who won the 2020 presidential campaign! Or if Republicans maintained their Senate majority. Or what happened in the House. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki will tune up his big board with other nationally recognized prognosticators to explain the election’s dominant forces and how they will determine the outcome. The panel, also including Rachel Bitecofer and David Axelrod, will explain how the major campaigns are assembling their coalitions, which states are key and what voting groups will tip the outcome. But be forewarned: the show carries a spoiler alert.

Three nationally known voices - Maya Wiley, Joy Reid, and Dr. Jason Johnson - come together in Conversations On the Green's third event of the season to discuss the role of race in American politics and how identity issues will shape the 2020 campaign for the presidency and Congress.

The second Conversation of our 2020 season, brings together a panel of renowned legal scholars to discuss the threats to the rule of law, which contains the furious competition among the Federal government's three branches.

In a symposium to benefit charities on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, three of the nation’s sagest visionaries will come together on May 17 to discuss how the pandemic will indelibly change the country and affect the daily life of every American.

The trio of renowned panelists are the historian Douglas Brinkley, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a leading voice on devising national policies to battle the ongoing pandemic. 

The forum, which will be moderated by former NBC correspondent and national talk show host Jane Whitney, is the opening event of Conversations On the Green’s eighth season and will be interactive, allowing viewers to participate and pose questions for the panelists.

The discussion, “Life After COVID-19: A Brave New World,” is designed to sketch an outline of how the pandemic’s legacy will reverberate through time and grows out of the history of previous contagions. The fall of the Roman empire is widely attributed to the Antonine Plague in the late 100s while Europe’s social order was upended by the Black Death in the mid 1300s.

More recently, even less deadly crises - such as The Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of Lehman Brothers - sent shockwaves racing around the globe and provoked profound but previously unimaginable changes in the way we live and think.

COVID-19 is the latest in this long line of seismic shifts to shatter our preconceptions about our futures. Just as it has destroyed lives, disrupted markets and exposed the incompetence of governments, it inevitably will reorder society and lead to permanent changes in political and economic power. 

But the crisis concurrently presents unexpected opportunities: more sophisticated and flexible use of technology, a new commitment to battling climate change, a realignment of the global order, renewed appreciation of personal responsibility, a reduction in materialism as well as fresh gratitude for the joys of rural lifestyles and other simple pleasures. 

To help us make sense of these history shaping prospects, the symposium will be headlined by trio of prescient savants:

Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author of more than a dozen best-selling books on myriad social and cultural trends. A Rice University professor, he is a noted student of the presidency and international relations, a CNN commentator and a Vanity Fair contributing editor as well as a prominent spokesperson on conservation issues.

The winner of two Pulitzer prizes including one for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests, NY Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof grew up on an Oregon sheep and cherry farm, covered economics and presidential politics for the paper and is renowned for giving, as the Pulitzer committee noted, “voice to the voiceless.” 

Celebrated as a renaissance thinker, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and bioethicist, a leader in crafting national COVID-19 policy, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization.

Since the time of the Roman Empire, the fourth estate has been celebrated as a pillar of democracy, a guardian of the separation of powers and a systemic counterbalance of the natural propensity of power to corrupt.

But in a challenge to the American system of checks and balances, it has become a recurrent theme of the daily news cycle for President Trump and his allies to marshal their base under the banner of “Fake News” and to accuse journalists of being “enemies of the people,” a phrase with grim historical roots dating to Joseph Stalin and The Terror of the Jacobin dictatorship of the 1700s.

All presidents spar with the press. Richard Nixon pioneered the depiction of the media as liberal bogeymen, “nattering nabobs of negativism” in immortal phrase of William Safire, an administration speech writer who later became famous as a New York Times columnist. But a president schooled in the ways of entertainment sleight-of-hand has mutated what was an accepted parlor trick to rally conservatives into a full-blown assault on the American press.

The administration has stopped holding regular press briefings and when it does pass out information, it frequently lies; Trump himself has been documented telling more than 10,000 lies, reporters now do their jobs in an unprecedented climate of intimidation and fear. Many are bullied or harassed — online or in real life. And in Annapolis, a man with a gun walked into a newsroom and slaughtered five staffers.

In response, the Main Stream Media has galvanized a range of norm shattering strategies as the spearhead of civil society. Once defined by its fierce independence, the press has banded together in collective solidarity, publishing mass editorials. Breaking with tradition, it has done away with diplomatic double speak in calling out mendacity and tries to confront falsehoods with an army of fact-checkers charged with defending delegitimized facts.

Jim Acosta, one of President Trump's chief whipping boys in his war against the press, is joining MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle to discuss the trials, tribulations and constitutional imperatives of covering The White House as a headliner of the October 27 Conversations On the Green, "Working Without A Net: On Air In The Age Of Trump."