What a Jersey drone panic is really telling us | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’m back from my long hiatus, which ended with me under the weather for a few days, so you’re getting a slightly truncated newsletter today. Luckily, almost nothing happened while I was away, other than a CEO assassination in midtown Manhattan, a bended-knee capitulation by the mainstream media to Donald Trump, and a moral panic over drones (see below). Don’t worry — my “bias meter” is still cranked up to “11.”

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It came on an autumn night, when the world already felt like everything was falling apart. After a decade of economic turmoil, the headlines now were all about dictators, appeasement, and troops marching halfway across the globe. And folks were learning about this on new technologies they could have barely imagined a few years earlier.

No one expected the weight of a changing planet would all come crashing down on a place like central New Jersey. But no one could ignore the news bulletins — great flashes of light in the cosmos, followed by a spacecraft the likes of which no one in the Garden State had seen before, rocketing toward earth in Grovers Mill, N.J. The news coverage sent thousands of angry citizens out into the darkened night, demanding their public officials save them from this alien invasion suddenly on their news.

The night was Oct. 30, 1938, the newish technology was the radio, and the event was a young storyteller named Orson Welles' interpretation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic War of the Worlds, which was broadcast nationally on the CBS Radio Network in a taut, newsflash style (based on another, real-life New Jersey air tragedy, the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg) that made true believers out of millions.

This week, which began with me laid up in bed for a few days and thus half-watching more CNN than usual, showed me what it must have been like to have been around that fraught fall evening, just 10 months before the launch of World War II, when it seemed like civilization — but especially its strange pocket known as central New Jersey — was losing its freaking mind.

At a moment when the world’s richest men were descending on Mar-a-Lago to carve up and feast on the Thanksgiving carcass of American democracy, when strongmen were falling on the road to Damascus yet rising on our own shores, and when the masses were so mad that murderers of the humans they blame for it all — a millionaire CEO for some folks, a homeless guy on a subway for others — were feted as heroes on posters and at football games...

... New Jersey looked up.

CNN and MSNBC, which saw their ratings drop nearly in half in the days right after Donald Trump’s narrow-but-clear-plurality election in November, have covered drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere on the eastern seaboard with a breathless frenzy that makes the late Welles’ clever radio stunt of 86 years ago seem tame. It’s kind of like a bizarro-world Jaws watching this parade of small-town mayors getting their 15 minutes of fame demanding that Washington do something about these modern-day shark attacks, these flying saucers over Grovers Mill, even if it’s not clear who who’s supposed to be sending these contraptions or exactly what we’re supposed to be so afraid of.

And look, I have no doubt that people are seeing some drones they’ve never seen before, given that today more than 1 million of them are legally registered with the Federal Aviation Administration — for everything from hobbyists to pizza delivery to the folks who may actually be spying on you: your local police department. But, as the New York Times reported Monday, only 100 of 5,000 reports of mysterious drones have merited further investigation. The vast majority of the UFOs supposedly terrorizing central Jersey this time around are just airplanes, taking off and landing at the many airports of a heavily populated state.

In the most embarrassing episode, a highly detailed drone sighting from a highly credible-sounding source — former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan — was actually just him watching the movement of the constellation Orion. Of course, Hogan’s gullibility wasn’t as bad as the willful ignorance of the man who’ll be running the federal government in just 34 days, as Trump told a Mar-a-Lago news conference. “Look, the government knows what is happening,” the president-elect claimed, with — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — zero evidence. “Look, our military knows where they took off from.”

Maybe Trump was just thrilled that reporters tossed him a softball on the drone panic and didn’t go for the 100 mph high heat by asking why an incoming president is launching a cryptocurrency venture that just accepted what amounts to $18 million in cash from a billionaire under an SEC fraud investigation — just part of a tsunami of the looming kleptocracy‘s corruption that’s overtopping the dams once built to stop this. And maybe an increasingly castrated mainstream media would much rather talk about flying saucers as well.

But what about the everyday folks who form the foundation of America’s next great moral panic? I’d say, no one should blame them for being scared.

Ironically, while I was watching CNN’s summer-of-the-shark drone coverage on one screen Monday morning, on the other I was reading claims that Microsoft Word is hoovering up everything you write and feeding it into its vast computers to brew more artificial intelligence. The changes that Silicon Valley billionaires are threatening to ram down our throats with AI — taking away jobs, robbing kids of learning opportunities or worse, all powered by a nuclear plant that nearly melted down once — are both frightening and incomprehensible at the same time.

Also beyond the comprehension of mere mortals like us is the wealth of a man like Trump’s new Mini-Me Elon Musk — $400 billion and counting — or why that hasn’t stopped him from going after food stamps. We have been trained by thousands of years of evolution to step outside and scour the skies for the threats we can see, something we can understand, something that looks real even when it’s fake. In a world that once again is at the edge of an abyss, we are staring at the pale reflections of 1938, and we are afraid.

Although it seems like years ago, it was reassuring to hear from a bunch of you over the Thanksgiving break about the things that you are grateful for as this eventful 2024 nears its end: Family, good health, and the folks who continue in the face of hardship to fight for a better America. At age 91, Alvin Gilens told me “I’ve seen some of the best and most remarkable advances in science, health, environmental concerns for both the planet and its inhabitants...” Adds Susan Rea: “This year I am thankful for the professional journalists who stand for democracy and truth in the face of the newly elected POTUS...” I am so thankful for readers like you...all of you. You are what keeps me doing this!

📮 This week’s question: Am I wrong to dismiss the New Jersey (and elsewhere) drone sightings as mostly a moral panic? Or is there a serious problem that I’m missing? Please email me your answer and put “Drone sightings” in the subject line.

It’s hard for a major political figure in the United States to successfully sue a news organization that covers them — because it’s supposed to be that way. In its landmark 1964 New York Times vs. Sullivan ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that public figures would need to show “actual malice” — essentially, that a false statement was published on purpose — to win a media libel case. That very high bar — which is essential for fearless investigative journalism — hasn’t stopped Donald Trump over the years from using different strategies to challenge and intimidate his media enemies with lawsuits. His earlier cases, and I believe I’m using the correct legal terminology here, have mostly been “laughed out of court.”

That’s why it was stunning this weekend to see that ABC News, owned by the Disney Corp. conglomerate, not only settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump over how its anchor George Stephanopoulos had characterized the New York sexual assault verdict against the president-elect, but announced that it would pay a whopping $15 million towards the still not fully established Trump presidential library or museum. The unusual decision by ABC/Disney to not only settle the case but make public the size of this large payout came just 24 hours after the GOP-appointed Florida federal judge in the case said there were grounds for the case to go forward with depositions.

As my friend Bill Grueskin, a newsroom veteran who teaches at Columbia Journalism School, wrote Monday night on Bluesky, Stephanopoulos’ interview with South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace earlier this year that triggered the suit was indeed a “train wreck.” It seemed to badly mischaracterize how E. Jean Carroll’s allegation of a sexual assault and the manner in which the question of “rape” — the word used repeatedly by Stephanopoulos — was adjudicated in Manhattan.

Nonetheless, the speed of ABC News’ decision to essentially capitulate with a large, publicly announced payout stunned the media world. That’s partly because it seemed to open the floodgates for Trump and his allies, like the world’s richest person Elon Musk to follow through on threats to sue and bully journalists into quiet complicity during his 47th presidency. It also felt like Disney Corp. was way too eager to join the conga line of corporations like Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI that openly made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund as some kind of imperial “tribute.”

Sure enough, Trump immediately told Monday’s Mar-a-Lago news conference that he’s looking at legal action against a range of press critics that includes CBS' 60 Minutes and author Bob Woodward. In the most shocking move, the president-elect followed through Monday night with a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its renowned (and retiring) pollster Ann Selzer for the now famous November Iowa Poll that suggested, incorrectly as it turned out, that Trump was on track to lose the Hawkeye State.

Trump’s second go-round is fast becoming a war on a free press, except we’re already seeing — both in the almost laughable obsequiousness from the owners of the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and Time magazine, among others, but also in fairly tepid newsroom coverage so far — that one side is starting to look like the Vichy Republic. I can assure you that won’t be the case in this space. Hopefully I’ll be waging that battle right here, and not from inside a courtroom.

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