Competition, Adaptation; Thanksgiving, Music, and the American Experience

Colleagues,

MBN faces off every day against Al Jazeera, France 24, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Sky News Arabia, and Al Arabiya. Fierce competition includes a healthy and growing number of smaller, dynamic groups.

The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians have their outlets. In muddy waters, we battle scores of podcasters, You-tubers, and influencers that pump out prodigious amounts of anti-American content.

During the 12-day Iran-Israel war,  AI fakes showed U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets used by the Israelis destroyed by Iranian air defense. Abject failure of American technology is one pervasive narrative pushed by disinformation entrepreneurs in our region.

Adversaries create personas and fake news sites; they modify legitimate sites and use bots to drown out competing points of view.

During the Gaza war there was, even among the friendliest of our competitors, a conspicuous absence of coverage anytime the U.S. tried to help Palestinians, including through aid into Gaza.

We know that audiences yearn for truthful, accurate, responsible reporting. This includes focus on Washington politics and American culture. Our numbers surged during the Iran-Israel war.

MBN matters. We know MBN can compete — and will thrive with stable funding and adequate resources to build forward. At the moment, we’re awaiting fall funding from USAGM.

MBN Adapts

Over the past 18 months, we’ve enhanced oversight and accountability. MBN transformation began in the summer of 2024 as we cut 200 positions, saving the American taxpayer $20 million. Since then, we’ve gone all digital, saving millions more.

With a new editorial strategy we’ve sharpened our focus, launched new programs, and started a suite of popular newsletters.

No one questions the importance of our region. Recent White House visits by Saudi and Syrian leaders, the Gaza peace deal, and America’s commitment to end the Iranian regime’s long march to nuclear weapons all underscore the point. At Saudi urging, the U.S. is now turning toward a peace deal in Sudan. On Monday, President Trump ordered officials to examine whether to designate chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists groups.

We’ll keep reporting. 2026 looks promising for MBN. In the offing: new cost savings through relocation from Springfield to the nation’s capital, roundtables that showcase MBN’s best work, and more fine journalism — always aligned, to be sure, with broad U.S. foreign policy goals and the best of American values.

Thanksgiving  

Four centuries after the very First Thanksgiving, gratitude is still the essence of the day. On the fourth Thursday of November, America pauses to give thanks. I’m grateful — for your patience, resilience, kindness, and loyalty. It’s thanks to you that we’ve found our way through tough times.

I’m re-reading Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience by Melanie Kirkpatrick, former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Kirkpatrick’s book is a lovely read. She starts at the top.

Peace with the Wampanoag tribe, unexpected and welcome, was one reason for the Pilgrims to give thanks. At the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims welcomed their neighbors and hosted them for three days.

Things were hardly smooth thereafter.

In 1789, there was ferocious debate over who gets to decide whether Thanksgiving should be a national holiday, the executive or the legislative branch.

George Washington’s first Thanksgiving proclamation established that Thanksgiving was essentially religious, but not at all sectarian. It was a holiday Christians, Muslims, Jews, and non-believers could all celebrate.

Not all proclamations that followed were ecumenical. In 1844, a Governor in South Carolina insisted that Thanksgiving was Christian. Jews in Charleston chose not to celebrate that year.

Music and the American experience

America has always been a work in progress. Music has always had something to say about the American spirit and national character. Simple Gifts is a classic that comes to mind at this time of year.

For the American experience through the lives of musicians and their music, I’ve assembled the following to share for Thanksgiving.

Brooklyn-born Aaron Copland (1900-1990 ) had a fascination with American history and culture. Among his works: Appalachian Spring, Lincoln Portrait, Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Down a Country Lane, the opera The Tender Land and the ballet Rodeo. Here’s the 1938 ballet-suite Billy the Kid.

Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. Ives’s father led a band for Union forces during the Civil War. Charles started banging on a piano at home as a kid. He became captain of the high school baseball team and after college established a career as an insurance adjuster in New York City.

As a composer, he was nothing like Copland. Ives respected tradition, but was more the pioneer. He was passionate about innovation, loved experimenting with dissonance and atonality. Deep breath. Take time with this; it’s Ives’s intense Three Places in New England. Leonard Bernstein called Ives a “musical revolution” and “our first great American composer.”

Mariela Shaker is a Syrian-American violinist. Born in Aleppo in1990, Shaker began taking violin lessons at the age of 10. She flourished. Talent and hard work earned her invitations to participate in the Dubai Arabian Competition and to perform with the Emirate’s Youth Symphony Orchestra. In 2018, civil war forced Shaker to flee Syria and begin studies at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois.

Shaker has performed for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, at the Kennedy Center, and at the White House. Try this.

I’m reading the biography of Jelly Roll Morton by Howard Reich and William Gaines. His was a life of relentless adaptation.

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, later Jelly Roll Morton, shared a birthday with Charles Ives; he was born 16 years later into a New Orleans Creole community on October 20, 1890. His father left the family when he was three.

As an early teen, Morton played piano in a brothel. He told his great-grandmother, who was raising him, that he was working at a barrel factory as a night watchman. Great-grandma threw the boy out when she discovered he was fibbing.

By the 1920s, Morton had made his way to Chicago, where he produced a handful of hits. His influence waned, though. He moved to New York where he struggled. In the midst of the Great Depression, RCA Victor declined to renew his recording contract.

Morton ended up in Washington, DC in 1935, in the Shaw neighborhood, where he played piano and managed a bar called the Music Box (that was 1211 U Street, the location today of Ben’s Next Door, next to Ben’s Chili Bowl). It was tough going wherever he went in those days. Jelly Roll was once stabbed and seriously injured by a patron during a gig. He was taken at first to a whites-only hospital where he was denied treatment.

Here’s Wolverine Blues. Here’s Tiger Rag. This is a Jelly Roll hit, his famous Honky Tonk Blues.

Morton’s music started from ragtime and evolved. He ended up a jazz giant.

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton’s conversations — musical recordings and oral history — are today part of a Library of Congress collection.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear colleagues. Eat well. Rest, relax, and take care of yourselves. Keep perspective. Listen to music. And be proud of your hard and important work.

Gratefully, Jeff