As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
In case you missed it, on Sunday the 29 daily McClatchy newspapers (circulation 2.4 million) published an op/ ed co- authored by Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren on broad reforms needed to flush the corruption of the Trump regime out of the political system, illustrated by the corrupt bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic:
... Trump seems to think he can direct funding for the response to this crisis based on which politicians are nice to him, which states he’s trying to win in November and which businesses he wants to enrich — all without any accountability. We have a different view.
Taxpayer relief should go to those most in need. Hospitals, essential workers, small businesses, and state and local governments should get the help they need immediately. If large corporations want help, they should agree not to turn around and fire all their workers. The relief bill’s unconscionable tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires should be repealed. But that is not enough.The op/ ed goes to to talk about reforms in the areas of conflict of interest, lobbying and oversight that a Democratic administration would pursue.
During the recent presidential primary, both of us called for significant reforms to end Washington corruption and guarantee a government that works for the people. We urgently need those broader reforms now.
David Roth writes about how the media has become sucked into the "empire of stupidity" reigned over by Very Stable Genius Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump:
... The rhythm of every news cycle is more or less the same, just as the shape of every daily presidential press briefing is generally similar to the previous day’s. The variables have changed under the pressure of the pandemic, though, which has had the strange effect of destabilizing what had become a more or less automatic process without changing it in any meaningful way. Some very long shadows are now troubling the corners of those familiar shots, but the cameras still whir into action at the same time each day. That alone guarantees that Trump will keep showing up, because it’s simply not in the man to pass up an opportunity to talk on television. Similarly, when the reporters at these briefings see the president of the United States standing there, swaying oddly and doing accordion things with his hands while putting strange childlike questions to his team of experts, it is simply not in them to focus their attention anywhere else.
And so they ask Trump questions about what he’s saying, and he talks about what he always talks about; he never knows anything useful, cannot tell the truth about the few things he knows, and is pulled by his own preposterous vanity and insecurities back toward the only thing he really cares about, which is himself. This is what the news is made of, now—the things that a vainglorious fraud says, and then the things that other people on television say about how Dangerous and Irresponsible they are, and then what Trump says about that in his amphetamized after-dark Twitter sessions or scrambling tantrum-swept mornings. It’s not that the things Trump says aren’t actually dangerous or irresponsible: They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that the definition by which these things are considered news—basically, because the president says them—is no longer workable.Scott Lemieux at LGM has some thoughts about how the allegations made by Tara Reade will be used by the same media that plays along with Trumpland dystopia:
One thing we should be very clear about here is that Reade’s allegations are being used as a translucent pretext. Reade has never said that her complaint included a claim of sexual assault, and is now claiming that it didn’t claim sexual harassment either. And, in addition, the Senate Papers don’t include personnel files. There’s as much chance of finding something material to Reade’s claims in Biden’s documents as there is of uncovering secret Biden connections to the Kennedy assassination. This has nothing to do with Reade and everything to do with reporters wanting some raw material to churn out months of EMAILS! stories to balance out the corrupt president completely botching his handling of a pandemic and economic depression. That’s it.
It’s also worth noting that the Times’s ridiculous “clouds raised” stories about the Clinton Foundation make clear that there’s basically no chance that reporters are going to spend weeks looking through boxes of records in Newark, DE and just conclude “nope, turns out there’s nothing there.” Biden releasing the papers will just lead to a bunch of negative stories built on decades-old minutia hyped up by reporters and editors desperate to justify an unwise investment of time and resources. And when it turns up nothing about Reade, this won’t end the requests for more records — there’s always something else you could provide, more questions to be raised, more shadows to be cast. The only winning move in Transparency Calvinball is not to play.Over at Balloon Juice, Adam Silverman deconstructs a case in point of how the media is serving as a willing tool of right- wing propaganda, with a bogus claim about Biden that ABC News "reporter" Sasha Pezenik tweeted out:
What is really going on here, and it is going to accelerate and grow until or unless reporters, editors, and producers get their acts together, is a two pronged influence operation. The first part is to get misinformation about Vice President Biden out into the mainstream media as quickly as possible, Because once it is reported on, no matter how quick the debunking is, the misinformation will be seized on and promoted, while the debunking will, at best, get pointed to by people like me. Pezenik had a legit news story to break last night, but it wasn’t the story she broke. She even had all the pieces to break the real news, which was “failed Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is attempting to smear Vice President Biden with a false allegation, which we were able to debunk with two phone calls. We are continuing our investigation in an attempt to learn why O’Donnell is doing this.” That framing would have allowed Pezenik and ABC News to break the story last night. But that isn’t what they did. O’Donnell and whoever put O’Donnell up to this knows that reporters have a sweet tooth for this type of thing. And they also know that if they can get the allegation out there through a legitimate news source, they will have laundered the misinformation successfully because almost no one they’re trying to message to is going to pay attention to the debunking.
The second part of this influence operation is agitprop. It is to further the President’s, the Republican Party’s, the conservative movement’s, Fox News’s, prominent Republicans’, conservatives’, and their surrogates’ argument that the real and legitimate news sources in the US are actually fake. That they cannot be trusted to report accurately or fairly. It is to create cognitive dissonance where the false and debunked in real time accusations against Vice President Biden are accepted as true, while at the same time the argument that the news media is lying to everyone and can’t be trusted because they botched the story by reporting factually wrong information is reinforced. It is a have your cake and eat it too influence operation. It is also, exactly, what Putin has been trying to do within Russia, within the US, and around the world for well over a decade. It is the attempt to create the dynamic where because nothing is true anything and everything is possible.If you hoped the media learned its lesson from the disproportionate focus in 2016 on Hillary Clinton's email management protocols while Trump was demonstrating his grotesque, monumental lack of fitness for office, it appears you would be wrong. At least now we're forewarned how they're going to handle things. The blowback on this media behavior needs to be ferocious this time around.
Once again, Infidel 753 has labored to provide the best link round- up on the internet, so you would be well advised to check it out (as well as his regular posts, like this one!).
