Midday

As the Democratic presidential hopefuls barrel toward the Super Tuesday primaries in less than two weeks, President Donald Trump's re-election campaign continues to amass a huge war chest. The Trump juggernaut plans to spend more than one billion dollars on his re-election. According to my guest today, a lot of that money will be spent on a media disinformation campaign unparalleled in US political history.


McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic who has been reporting extensively on Mr. Trump since 2014. Mr. Coppins spent the past several months immersed in the pro-Trump media universe, exploring the new techniques the Trump campaign and its supporters are using to spread disinformation, discredit journalists, and permanently dismantle the mainstream media.


He describes what he learned in his piece in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic: “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President: How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election.”

McKay Coppins joins us today from The Atlantic’s studios in Washington, DC.

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Today, another in our series of Conversations with the Candidates running in the 2020 elections for offices to lead Baltimore, the region and the nation.

This week, we've turned our attention to the race for Baltimore City's second-most-powerful post, after the mayor -- the office of City Council President. It's a job being sought by eight contenders — seven Democrats and one Republican. One of those Democrats is Councilman Leon Pinkett, who was elected in 2016 to represent Baltimore’s 7th Councilmanic District in West Baltimore.

Leon F. Pinkett III was born and raised in Baltimore. He earned a degree in economics from Guilford College in North Carolina. He was the senior economic development officer at the Baltimore Development Corporation, or BDC, for nine years. He later joined Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s administration as Assistant Deputy Mayor in the Office of Economic and Neighborhood Development.

On the City Council, Pinkett serves as the vice chair of both the Budget & Appropriations Committee, and the Transportation Committee.

Councilman Pinkett is 52 years old. He and his wife, Marika, have two teenaged children and they are long-time residents of the Reservoir Hill community.

We welcome audience comments and questions for the candidate.

This conversation is being live-streamed on WYPR's Facebook page. You can watch the video here.

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Tom's guest is Democratic Councilwoman Shannon Sneed. She is one of 8 candidates running for City Council President. Councilwoman Sneed was elected in 2016 to represent Baltimore’s 13th Councilmanic District, where she’s lived since 2008.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and a Master’s Degree in Communications Management from Morgan State University.
Before she became involved in local government, Sneed worked in local journalism as a producer and editor for Fox45 and WJZ Channel 13.

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Jerry Mitchell's tenacious reporting about killings committed during the Civil Rights era re-opened cases that led to convictions of men who, for decades, had literally gotten away with murder.

His efforts led to justice for Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman Vernon Dahmer and four young girls killed in a 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Mitchell has chronicled each murder, from cold case to conviction, in his new book, "Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era."

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There is no institution that is more integrally connected to Baltimore than Hopkins. Hopkins is the largest employer in the state of Maryland, with more than 17,000 Baltimore City residents on its payroll. The Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, the School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, its programs in Europe and Asia and its work in public health around the world make the Hopkins’ imprint global.

President Ron Daniels joins Tom to discuss his 10 years at the helm of JHU, and what's next for the university.

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We begin today with a conversation about hunger in Maryland. Elliot Jaspin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written a multipart series for the great website, Maryland Matters, about the scope of the problem, which persists not just in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore City, but in places like Anne Arundel County. Jaspin points out that Anne Arundel is one of the richest counties in our state, which is itself the richest state in the country. Yet the number of children in Anne Arundel County who are eligible for a free school lunch has skyrocketed in the last 10 years, up 81%. Jaspin looked into why that is, and the result is a revelatory and assiduously reported series, which you can read here.

Elliot Jaspin joins Tom in Studio A. Also joining us is Michael J. Wilson, the director of Maryland Hunger Solutions, an organization advocating in the General Assembly for a number of bills around the issue of hunger.

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Today, acclaimed French-Dominican jazz vocalist Cyrille Aimee joins Tom live in Studio A, for a preview of her 5-show engagement this weekend at Baltimore's Keystone Korner jazz club.

The popular cabaret and recording star, who makes her home today in New Orleans, is renowned for her graceful improvisations, a gypsy-jazz vocal styling she says she learned as a young girl singing at Roma encampments in her native France. Aimée has gone from singing on street corners in Europe to headlining at some of the world’s most prestigious jazz festivals.

Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as "one of the most promising jazz singers of her generation" and called a “rising star in the galaxy of jazz singers” by the New York Times, Aimee's latest CD is called Move On: a Sondheim Adventure.

This Valentine's Day weekend (Feb. 14-16), Cyrille Aimee will perform five shows, Friday night through Sunday, at Keystone Korner jazz club in Harbor East. For more information, go to the club's website.

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It's Thursday, and time to welcome back our theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuck, for another of her weekly reviews of the Maryland stage. Today, she tells us about the new production of We Are Proud to Present, the powerful 2012 work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, now on stage at Baltimore's ArtsCentric organization.

The full title of Drury's play is We Are Proud to Present: A Presentation About the Herero of Namibia (Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German SudwestAfrika) Between the Years 1884-1915. It does indeed present the story of the nearly forgotten Herero and Namaqua genocide that took place in what is today the southwest African nation of Namibia between 1904 and 1907, when the region was a German colony. After Germany confiscated tribal lands and the Herero people rebelled, German soldiers carried out harsh retributions that resulted in more than 65,000 deaths. The play spotlights this tragedy by creating a play within-a-play, in which present-day actors making the "presentation" also respond emotionally to the historic horrors during their first "rehearsal."

Co-directed for ArtsCentric by Kevin McAllister and Terrence Fleming, the play's cast includes Lauren Erica Jackson, Jonathan Jacobs, Allison K. Bradbury, Martin Kasey, Ryan Gholson, and Mike Smith.

We Are Proud to Present...continues at ArtsCentric's new home at 2600 North Howard Street in Baltimore, Maryland, through Sunday, February 16.

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Today, analysis of the New Hampshire primary, as Democrats turn to Nevada and South Carolina.
NPR’s Mara Liasson and Politico’s Stephanie Murray unpack the results and look ahead as the 2020 primary season heats up.

Plus, President Trump weighs in on Rogers Stone sentencing. Darlene Superville of the Associated Press joins us from Washington with the latest.

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In the race for Mayor of Baltimore, most of the major candidates have promised to spur economic development and expand the footprint of development to include historically neglected neighborhoods. Several high profile locations, like Harborplace downtown and Cross Keys in north Baltimore are in need of a facelift.

A redeveloped State Center complex remains a dream for adjacent neighborhood associations who have been waiting for something to happen for more than a decade. In Poppleton, on the city’s west side, an $800 million dollar project near the University of MD Bio Park has been stalled for just as long.

The fortunes of Under Armour have changed substantially since the Port Covington deal was signed nearly four years ago. Founder Kevin Plank’s role has been reduced, and the share price of Under Armour stock is down. Will this in any way affect the $5 and a half billion dollar Port Covington project?

Towson, on the other hand, is awash in construction cranes. The new projects there have thrilled some business owners, and made others nervous about increased traffic and other problems that can attend residential and retail development.

Today on Midday, an update on the status of a few of these projects, and the potential impact they’ll have on the local economy. Later in this hour, we'll check on the status of State Center, the aging 28-acre complex in Midtown Baltimore. Plans to revitalize State Center have been in the works since the Ehrlich Administration, many moons ago.

We’ll get the latest on the State’s plan -- as well as a brief recap of city-focused elements in Governor Hogan's new budget -- when Luke Broadwater of the Baltimore Sun joins Tom from Annapolis.

But we begin with Harborplace here in Baltimore. The shopping center has numerous vacancies, and it’s in receivership as its owners and the city wrestle with how to revive what was once the crown jewel of the City. Joining Tom in the studio are Anthony Hawkins, a former Vice President with the Rouse Company who was the first general manager of Harborplace; and Melody Simmons, who reports on economic development for the Baltimore Business Journal.

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