FREE SPEECH
New elements in media are influencing how campaign strategists think about elections. The glaringly obvious one is the proliferation of lies from President Donald Trump. On Oct. 14, CSU Monterey Bay’s Presidential Speaker Series hosted an event titled “Truth, Fiction and Alternative Facts.” Panelist Mike Madrid, founder of The Lincoln Project – a conservative PAC determined to lure Republican voters away from Trump – says they’ve taken notes from Trump’s own playbook, prolifically using Twitter to counteract the president’s monopolization of national media. “We’ve out-Trumped Trump,” Madrid said. He said that giving national news outlets an “alternative” to follow can help avoid the “circling down the drain effect,” and that big cable networks – like MSNBC, CNN and Fox – can (and should) choose to diversify sources and stories. The panelists, however, agreed that smart and truthful communication are not the priority of these networks. The pressure to make money and hold a viewer’s or a reader’s attention increasingly relies on entertaining audiences – exactly why Trump’s lies thrive. Madrid’s advice is to avoid the “Jerry Springer-esque” debate format.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
When I got knocked down, I didn’t panic, I just continued to execute my game plan. The fight was not over.” -- Boxer Ruben Villa IV, on losing the world championship.
GOOD WEEK / GREAT WEEK
GOOD:
The embrace of renewable energy by the agricultural companies of the Salinas Valley continues. At the last meeting of the Monterey County Planning Commission on Oct. 14, Dole Fresh Vegetables was cleared to build two wind turbines on a site surrounded by farmland on Camphora Gloria Road near Soledad. The towers will each be 292 feet tall and the tip of blades at their highest point will reach 499 feet. They’ll add to the six other commercial wind turbines already in operation in the valley. At 2.7 megawatts each, the new towers will generate roughly the equivalent of what 800 homes consume in electricity. But with no homes nearby, the power is intended for Dole’s adjacent ag processing facility. The project was approved after an environmental study that found no significant impacts on the California condor, golden eagle, burrowing owl, and other raptor and bat species.
GREAT:
It can be surprisingly challenging to find locally caught, sustainable seafood with any degree of confidence about the information on the label. A pair of Monterey County entrepreneurs bet they could find a market for such seafood and started Real Good Fish eight years ago. The company began connecting consumers to local fishermen. When the pandemic hit, business ballooned on the heightened demand for a transparent and short supply chain. By June, Moss Landing-based Real Good Fish expanded out of California. More big news arrived this week when the company announced it had found a partner in Maine. About 150 fishermen now sell 40 species of seafood through the community-supported fishery. The average distance from boat to plate is 122 miles. “We’ve seen the resiliency of our local food system in a crisis,” Chief Nutrition Officer Jenn Gerard Lovewell says.
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