QOTD -- The Credulous, Optics-Obsessed Press

 

"... Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination for a third time on July 17 with a rambling, incoherent mess of a speech that offered a terrifying vision for America during its rare moments of coherence. His performance was widely regarded as a disaster. But a range of major newspapers didn’t cover it that way.

"More than a few headlines actually raved about it. The Boston Globe: 'In a departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America.' The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 'Trump urges unity after assassination attempt while proposing sweeping populist agenda.' Baltimore Sun: 'Subdued Trump describes assassination try, accepts nomination.'

"As media critic Parker Molloy pointed out, these papers seemingly reported on Trump’s speech based on the prepared remarks, not the speech as he actually delivered it.

"In reality, Trump’s RNC coronation was a collective failure of our justice system, political process, and a mainstream media ecosystem that has consistently failed to hold him accountable. He still faces a tough challenge to win this election — especially now that Harris is on the top of the ticket — but he got a significant propaganda boost from a credulous, optics-obsessed press..." -- Aaron Rupar, in Public Notice, on the continuing role of the media in portraying the convicted felon Malignant Loser as a near- mythical strongman.  If we survive as a democracy, it will be in spite of the media, not because of it.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Sunday that he expects Speaker Mike Johnson to bring a Ukraine aid bill to the floor after Easter, despite the risk that it could drive support for a vote to oust him from leadership.

“His commitment is to put it on the floor after Easter,” McCaul said Sunday during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Johnson, McCaul acknowledged, is “in a very difficult spot.” There’s a chance the Louisiana Republican could be ousted from his speakership thanks to a motion Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed last week to remove him from his post after he leaned on Democratic support to pass a $1.2 trillion government funding deal.

So far, Republicans aren’t biting — at least not publicly. Conservatives weren’t happy with Johnson’s decision to shuttle the funding the bill along with the help of Democrats, but most have indicated they won’t go as far as Greene for now. And no other Republicans have publicly committed to voting to oust Johnson yet.

Ukraine aid could complicate things. Some Republican hardliners have come out against sending more assistance to the country as it struggles to beat back Russian forces after more than two years of fighting.

But McCaul voiced optimism about the prospect of a bill on Sunday.

“I believe [Johnson is] committed because he understands national security- he leans on, you know, myself, the Chairman of Armed Services, House Intelligence for advice on this. And he knows how important this is,” McCaul said.

McCaul didn’t get more specific on the timeline, but said he hopes to get Ukraine funding done “as soon as possible.”...

Well, we won't be counting any chickens yet, but whether through a discharge petition being driven by House Democrats, or through MAGA Mike Johnson caving and allowing a floor vote on the Senate-passed bill, this funding is critical to Ukraine and to our national security, is long overdue, and we believe it will pass.  Johnson will undoubtedly face a motion to end his short term as Speaker led by braying ass seditionist Marjorie Traitor Greene and her Putin caucus;  a bargain to receive enough Democratic votes to keep him as Speaker in exchange for this aid, and other Democratic priorities, is likely in the works.

The bad:

The Supreme Court will again wade into the fractious issue of abortion this week when it hears arguments over a medication used in the most common way to end a pregnancy, a case with profound implications for millions of women no matter where they live in America and, perhaps, for the race for the White House.

Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and cleared the way for bans or severe restrictions on abortion in many Republican-led states, abortion opponents on Tuesday will ask the high court to ratify a ruling from a conservative federal appeals court that would limit access to the medication mifepristone, which was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States last year.

That decision to reverse Roe had immediate political consequences, with Democrats making the case that the court had taken away a right that women held for half a century and winning elections as a result. Even conservative-leaning states like Kansas and Ohio voted against abortion restrictions. If the court were to uphold restrictions on medication abortions it could roil the election landscape in races for Congress and the presidency.

By rolling back Food and Drug Administration changes to the use of mifepristone, the ruling would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal. The restrictions would shorten the time when mifepristone can be used in pregnancy, to seven weeks from 10 currently...

The Pandora's box opened by the Republican Supreme Court when it overturned Roe v. Wade and 50 years of precedent is continuing to produce toxic results for American women.  Once again, we can thank then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for enabling the Malignant Loser to load the Court with trad Catholic Republicans when we should have a 5-4 liberal majority right now.  Elections matter.

The ugly: 

Former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel faced brutal criticism during her first NBC appearance Sunday since the network hired her as a political analyst, including tough questioning about her failure to push back against former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and visceral aggravation from journalists who said her hiring raised “credibility issues” for NBC.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” McDaniel, who stepped down from the RNC this month, was not asked about the firestorm from critics who said her newly announced role as a paid contributor was unethical due to her work to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Kristen Welker, the show’s host, said McDaniel’s interview was scheduled weeks before her hiring was announced. She added, “This will be a news interview, and I was not involved in her hiring.”

McDaniel, who as RNC chair had repeatedly said the election was “rigged,” told Welker during the interview that she disagreed with Trump’s claims of election fraud and his calls to free the inmates jailed for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The reality is Joe Biden won,” she said. “... He’s the legitimate president.”

But minutes later, a panel of journalists on the show questioned the credibility of her answers and laid into NBC executives for their decision to hire someone who had long attacked the network.

“Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don’t know what to believe,” Chuck Todd, NBC journalist and former “Meet the Press” host, told Welker. “... I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract.”

The airing of internal dissent reflected deep discomfort at NBC and many media organizations with how to treat Republicans who indulged Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and undermine Americans’ trust in the media.  [snip]

Before Sunday’s show, NBC News had sought to defend McDaniel’s hiring as a way to examine “the diverse perspectives of American voters,” according to an internal memo by Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees NBC News’s political coverage, that was shared with The Washington Post.

Another ugly media debacle driven by the insatiable desire to sanitize and monetize the MAGA cult, er, we mean "examine 'the diverse perspectives of American voters.'"  Credit to Todd for calling it out (here's a link to his salvo).  Carrie "Bugger off" Brown needs to get sacked for this execrable, indefensible decision.

"We Might Be Living In A Different World"

The Guardian's Margaret Sullivan looks at the failing mainstream media as they create false equivalences and "news" that helps the Republican / Shooters / Forced Birth cult of the Malignant Loser. An excerpt from her excellent article:

'The big problem is that the mainstream media wants to be seen as non-partisan – a reasonable goal – and bends over backwards to accomplish this. If this means equalizing an anti-democratic candidate with a pro-democracy candidate, then so be it.

Add to this the obsession with the “horse race” aspect of the campaign, and the profit-driven desire to increase the potential news audience to include Trump voters, and you’ve got the kind of problematic coverage discussed above.

It’s fearful, it’s defensive, it’s entertainment – and click-focused, and it’s mired in the washed-up practices of an earlier era.

The big solution? Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.

Headlines will include context, not just deliver political messaging. Overall politics coverage will reflect 'not the odds, but the stakes', as NYU’s Jay Rosen elegantly put it. Lies and liars won’t get a platform and a megaphone.

And media leaders will think hard about the big picture of what they are getting across to the public, and whether it is fair and truthful. Imagine if the New York Times, among others, had stopped and done a course correction on their over-the-top coverage of Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign. We might be living in a different world." (our emphasis)

That different world would have dealt with immigration, the COVID 19 pandemic, our foreign adversaries and friends, and our domestic divisions in a rational and productive way, not the way a would-be autocrat and demagogue did. Keeping the heat on the press to follow that "north star" of truth is essential as we face the greatest threat to our democracy ever in the candidacy of the Malignant Loser.

 

Quotes Of The Day -- Justifying And Succumbing

 

Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine about the need for some Republicans to blame (wait for it) Democrats for the Malignant Loser:

... That this theory is totally deranged hardly requires saying. There is no evidence any, let alone all, of the prosecutors investigating Trump have coordinated with the Biden administration or have any interest in affecting the Republican nomination. Trump’s legal woes are easily and parsimoniously explained by the fact he has habitually flouted the law throughout his career, beginning at least 50 years ago, when he and his father refused to allow Black people to rent apartments, and continuing through decades of assorted schemes and swindles.

More to the point, the Republican electorate’s attachment to Trump is explained even more easily. The party’s voters thrill to his bullying style; they believe his stream of lies and exist in an information ecosystem in which every fresh piece of evidence of Trump’s misconduct merely affirms the scope of the conspiracy against him. The fact that they wish to renominate a man whom they consider one of the greatest presidents in history, and who most of them believe legitimately won the 2020 election, follows naturally from their own beliefs. The choice was not imposed on them by the Democrats, the liberal media, or Jack Smith.  [snip]

...The Republican voters may be misguided in their adoration of Trump, the anti-anti-Trumpers would concede, but they had been driven to that point by any number of Democratic crimes: the smearing of Mitt Romney, the Russia investigation, Bill Clinton’s sexcapades, or any of an endless list of grievances.

The anti-anti-Trump right’s need to explain Trump as a Democratic plot serves one additional psychological function: It excuses their own apologias on his behalf. After all, if the Democrats are to blame for Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, then the anti-anti-Trumpers are justified in refusing to defect from a Trump-controlled party. By focusing their opposition on Trump’s left-wing opponents, they are directing their main energies against the very people who are responsible for Trump’s rise in the first place...

They'll fall in line, and they'll justify it by blaming Democrats, just like the common anti- democracy hypocrites that they are.

____________________

Jon Allsop writes in Columbia Journalism Review about media coverage of the Malignant Loser, especially after his latest indictment:

... With Trump’s prior indictments, my top initial takeaway from the coverage was its sheer breathlessness, which, while instinctively justified by the stakes, often felt uncomfortably like it was playing into Trump’s broader rigging of our attention economy: he played assignment editor with his social media posts; cameras followed him to court like he was O.J. in the white Bronco; punditry often focused on the strength of the cases against him, but also fussed over optics and his mood. Roughly the same things have been true this time—and yet my top takeaway has been how tired and rote a lot of the coverage has felt, despite its persistent wall-to-wall extent. At this point, there is both everything and nothing to say about Trump; the indictment is both unprecedented and precedented, astonishing and unsurprising. Many of the words written and spoken about his subversion campaign have stressed its enormity—and yet I increasingly can’t shake the conclusion that too many reporters and editors have normalized it, at least implicitly, by covering Trump as in any sense a normal candidate for 2024. In recent days, my thoughts have returned to an observation that the media reporter Brian Stelter made in Vanity Fair last month (prior to the latest indictment): that “many news executives and political analysts appear to have succumbed to revisionist history, downplaying Trump’s destruction of a shared reality and his shredding of democratic norms”; that “it’s hard to even recall that sliver of time after January 6 when it seemed like Trump was being excommunicated from American politics.”

It's not hyperbolic to say that the Malignant Loser is the greatest threat to our country since the Civil War. He's a deranged, would-be dictator with a large following of American Christofascists who care nothing for democracy.  It's not "partisan" to observe that;  it's objective reality.

Last Night's Shameful Spectacle On CNN

 

Disclaimer:  we didn't watch the 70- minute Malignant Loser infomercial the amoral suits at CNN put on. If there ever was a reason to turn off that lost network, last night was it.

Here are some brief takeaways from some who did watch the "lie-a-palooza":

Rex Huppke, USA Today

The audience at CNN’s lie-a-palooza showed us exactly how devoted Trump’s base remains, how hungry they are for a faux-strong man who's deathly allergic to empathy.

CNN abandoned any claim to journalistic integrity by giving Trump so much free airtime. Host Kaitlan Collins tried to fact-check the former president, but she swiftly sank like a toddler in a ball pit of mendacity.

Michael Fanone, former Metropolitan Police Department officer nearly killed on January 6

It’s worse than I could have ever imagined. It’s an absolute disaster. There’s no way to fact-check this guy in real time. He’s a volcano of bullshit.

James Fallows, former editor and speechwriter for President Carter

This is CNN's lowest moment as an organization. (And I remember the glory days of their "balanced" panels back in 2015-2016.)

Justin Baragona, media reporter for The Daily Beast

Immediate reaction from a CNN on-air personality to me just now on this Trump town hall: "It is so bad. I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism. It is awful. It's a Trump infomercial. We're going to get crushed."

David Rothkopf, columnist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Hard to say what was the worst part of the CNN debacle: Trump repeating the Big Lie, promising to pardon Jan 6 insurgents, further victimizing E. Jean Carroll, not promising to honor the 2024 election result, not calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal...

...or condemning his invasion of Ukraine, implying that there was equivalency between Russia and Ukraine, attacking our allies yet again, promising to double down on many of his worst policies, taking credit for the abomination that was the Dobbs decision...

...the lies upon lies upon lies, the clear message he sent that if elected again would could face even worse than his disastrous, scandal-ridden, failed first term, his insults to Kaitlan Collins for doing her job, the way the audience was constituted...

...the fact that giving him this platform normalized him, allowed him to spread his disinformation & will help him raise $? Each of those was terrible, each chilling in light of the past 7 years. But no, worst of all was CNN's decision to air this in the first place. Disastrous. 

Dan McLauglin, conservative columnist for The New York Post

What we saw was a reminder that Trump and CNN deserve each other.

In 2016, America’s cable TV news networks, including CNN, were effectively Donald Trump’s biggest donors.

During the Republican primary, they lavished him with free TV coverage, including airing his rallies live.

That unchallenged airtime would have been worth billions of dollars for a campaign to buy.  [snip]

When the circus comes to town, everyone wants to be a clown.

CNN could have done a serious interview, it could have done a genuinely engaging town hall, or it could have denied Trump a soap box. 

But it wanted the old Trump Show, so that is what it gave America.

And, from CNN's own media critic Oliver Darcy

 
It's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening. [snip]

Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins throughout the evening as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe. A professional lie machine, Trump fired off falsehoods at a rapid clip while using his bluster to overwhelm Collins, stealing command of the stage at some points of the town hall.

Trump lied about the 2020 election. He took no responsibility for the January 6 insurrection that those very lies incited. And he mocked E. Jean Carroll's allegations of sexual assault, which a jury found him liable for on Tuesday.

And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump's unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage. And Collins was put in an uncomfortable position, given the town hall was conducted in front of a Republican audience that applauded Trump, giving a sense of unintended endorsement to his shameful antics. [snip]

...CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event.

How Licht and other CNN executives address the criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial. Will they defend what transpired at Saint Anselm College? Or will they express some regret?

For now, CNN is defending itself.

CNN and Chris Licht in particular have the moral clarity and judgement of a slug (no offense to slugs). This is how we got the Malignant Loser in 2016, and nothing has been learned by these ratings- obsessed hollow suits. To follow the same media playbook again is beyond journalistic malpractice; it's anti- American and suicidal.

BONUS:  Steve Benen discusses why the Malignant Loser may have compounded his legal woes with some of his blathering.

BONUS II:  Mark Sumner has a good recap.

(Image: screenshot via Wonkette)