QOTD -- Working The Refs

 

"If Republicans really want to slash spending – including to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – that’s their right. There’s nothing preventing the party from spending the next two years talking about their plans in hopes of winning the White House and Senate and then executing them. Indeed, there’s nothing preventing them from spending the next two years talking about 'critical race theory' and girls’ sports in hopes of winning the White House and Senate and then springing their plans on the public.

"But they don’t seem interested in trying that, presumably for the same reason that unified Republican governments under Presidents Trump and George W. Bush didn’t lead to massive spending cuts – those cuts would be incredibly unpopular and would likely destroy the party’s political standing.

"Instead, the GOP plan for cutting spending is to try to force the Democrats to agree to (maybe even propose) the cuts as the price to avert global economic catastrophe. That sounds insane when you write it out, so a big part of the strategy is trying to prevent the press from doing so. The party’s leaders and its propagandists are busy working the refs..." -- Matthew Gertz, Media Matters, on the Republican/ Seditionist Party's expectation that the "mainstream media" will engage in both sides "bad journalism" in their coverage of the debt ceiling hostage- taking efforts.  In a related Substack piece, James Fallows points out the need for the media to learn from its mistakes in its coverage of other "scandals," and how the public can spot signs that the media "refs" are being worked by Republicans.  Good reads.

QOTD -- Wrong!

"[W]hat has happened appears to be entirely at odds with what the political-reporter cadre — the people whose entire job is predicting and pre-explaining political trends — had been preparing the public for. [snip]

"No one knows what is going to happen. Least of all — it seems — the political 'experts.' So let’s waste less time pretending to know, and invest more in looking into, sharing, and learning from what is actually going on.

"How about this, in practical terms: For the next three stories an editor plans to assign on 'Sizing up the 2024 field,' or the next three podcasts or panel sessions on 'After the midterms, what’s ahead for [Biden, Trump, DeSantis, etc.],' instead give two of those reporting and discussion slots to under-reported realities of the world we live in now.

"Whatever you say about the 2024 race now will be wrong. And what you say about the world of 2022 could be valuable." -- James Fallows, on the political press' exceptionally poor (and counterproductive) prognosticating in 2022, and what they should be doing instead (good luck with that).

Never have so many been so wrong about so much.

(Cartoon:  Mike Smith, Las Vegas Sun)

 

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

We've recently heard from coup-adjacent Trump sycophants Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Kevin McCarthy complaining about Democrats "politicizing" the January 6 insurrection.  Joel Mathis says we should do more politicizing, especially after January 6:

Politics, after all, is how we work out our collective problems. But it's a messy and sometimes ugly process, which makes charges of "politicization" so easy and potent: Regular Americans often don't like the way politics makes them feel. A USA Today poll taken last month found that for all our political polarization, nearly three-fourths of us would love for there to be less political hostility and more focus on finding common ground. 

That sounds lovely. Almost.

With rare exception, we don't start with common ground on big issues. We have to journey to meet there. Sometimes that doesn't happen, sometimes it does, and sometimes it occurs only after a years-long process of bickering and argument. Americans — humans! — have wildly disparate visions of what constitutes the common good and how to achieve it. We use politics to hash out those disagreements so that we can come to some mutually acceptable (or acceptable enough) resolution of our differences. To complain about the politicization of some issue or event, then, is often an attempt to silence that process — a way to shout "shut up!" from some ostensible moral high ground.

The release of text messages exchanged by Fox "News" blowhards and then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before and during the January 6 insurrection opened the door to more revelations about just how much Dolt 45 relied on "advice" from right- wing talking heads, and what a problem it was for his staff:

Michael Pillsbury, an informal Trump adviser, said he realized how powerful Fox News was in Trump’s orbit when the former president began embracing Sidney Powell — an attorney promoting Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud — and other election fabulists after seeing them on Dobbs’s show. Pillsbury added that while it seemed obvious that many of the claims were patently false, Trump was inclined to believe them, in part because he was watching them on TV and had affection for Dobbs in particular.

“It taught me the power of the young producers at Fox, and Fox Business especially,” Pillsbury said. “These young producers who are in their mid-20s. They come out of the conservative movement, they‘ve never been in the government. They are presented with these reckless, fantastical accounts. And they believe them and put them on for ratings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former White House communications director, said the four most influential Fox hosts were Dobbs, Hannity, Igraham, and Pirro — and in the final year of the Trump administration, Hannity was the most influential. Other former top administration officials also mentioned Mark Levin, another Fox News host, and Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business host, as two other network stars in regular touch with the White House.

From the point of view of the staff, Farah said, the goal was simply to “try to get ahead of what advice you thought he was going to be given by these people” because their unofficial counsel “could completely change his mind on something.”

An unqualified, deluded President being advised by unqualified, deluded entertainers:  what could possibly go wrong?

James Fallows wonders about coverage of inflation vs. improving job numbers:

Why does it matter that worsening inflation gets so much more play than dramatically improving job prospects?

—There’s an obvious national-politics answer, which is that this emphasis makes people “feel worse” than they should about overall economic trends. This in turn makes them feel more cynical and fatalistic about the chance of progress on any policy front. It’s related to the long-term pattern of U.S. crime rates going down, but fear of crime going up.

—For those in economist-land, there’s the intensifying discussion about the “transitory” versus the “persistent” nature of this moment’s inflation. And about how the relationship between unemployment and inflation rates has changed, since the era when I learned about the Phillips curve in grad-school economics courses long ago.

But to me, the “human” importance of the mismatch matters most, and it spills over into the media-related, political, and economic dimensions. The over-emphasis on inflation numbers, relative to employment trends, blurs the fact that while both are problems, for the people living through it unemployment is much worse.

Inflation erodes a family’s purchasing power. Unemployment eliminates it.

That makes a huge difference.

The James Webb Telescope achieved a major milestone on Saturday:

Work for the James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning.

On Saturday (Jan. 8), the new observatory, the largest space telescope ever built, successfully unfolded its final primary mirror segment to cap what NASA has billed as one of its most complicated deployments in space ever. The Webb mission team is now turning its attention to directing the telescope to its final destination, while getting key parts of the observatory online for its astronomy work.

Webb is expected to arrive at its "insertion location" by Jan. 23, putting it in place to fire its engines to glide to a "parking spot" called Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2) about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet. If Webb gets to the right zone, it can use a minimum of fuel to stay in place thanks to a near-perfect alignment with the sun, Earth and moon. [snip]

As commissioning ends, Rigby said the team plans a set of "wow images" that are designed to show the telescope's capabilities. Those first targets have not yet been released to the media, but Rigby said the goal of these first pictures will be to "showcase all four science instruments and to really knock everybody's socks off."

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The first images will include things such as stars (to check for precise alignment) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (to assess the telescope's ability to render shades of luminosity, or inherent brightness), officials said during the press conference.

Following commissioning (which will take about six months) will be a preliminary five-month science operations period made up of "early release science programs", with a set of six categories of work ranging from planet formation to stellar physics.

Trust me, our socks will be ready to be knocked off!

Lastly, a visit over to Infidel 753's link round-up is strongly encouraged to appreciate the array of links  that he somehow manages to curate every week, in addition to his thoughtful essays.

QOTD -- Coronavirus Crash And Burn

"...The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, 'Go.' And that person was Donald Trump.

“'Here is the way I would put it,'” a person who has been involved with the President’s Daily Brief process told me, referring to Trump. “'The person behind the desk is the same person you see on TV'”—emotional, opinionated, fixed on his own few hobbyhorses and distorted views of reality, unwilling or unable to absorb new information. “'In a normal administration, the president would have seen the warnings unfolding from January onward. But this president hadn’t absorbed any of it.'” [snip]

"The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “'Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.'” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom."--  James Fallows in The Atlantic, using the analogy of an investigation into the cause of an airplane crash to describe the epic failure of Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic.  It's a long, fascinating read.

How The Media Is Or Isn't Coming To Terms With Republican Extremism

As a companion piece to the post below, please take time to read long- time journalist James Fallows' article in The Atlantic on the traditional practices of the "mainstream media" and how Republicans have played it for decades. 

Hardly anyone still working in today’s media can remember an era in which “mainstream media” practices, as we now think of them, actually prevailed. By which I mean: a few dominant, sober-sided media outlets; a news cycle punctuated by evening network-news shows, morning (and sometimes afternoon) newspapers, weekend newsmaker talk shows, and weekly news magazines; and political discourse that shared enough assumptions about facts and logic that journalists felt they could do their jobs by saying, “We’ve heard from one side. Now let’s hear from the other."

I can barely remember any of that, and I got my first magazine job (with The Washington Monthly) around the time of the Watergate break-in and subsequent Woodward-and-Bernstein scoops, when all parts of the old-style journalistic ecosystem were still functioning.

Although that era is long gone, and had its share of problems even at its best, its mental habits persist, as we’ve often discussed in the “false equivalence” chronicles. The recurring theme here is the discomfort of reporters, old and young alike, with recognizing that the United States doesn’t currently have two structurally similar political parties approaching issues on roughly comparable terms. We have one historically familiar-looking party, and another converting itself into something else.

The article takes off from there to illustrate how the "mainstream media" has been slow to pick up on the increasingly nihilistic extremism of the Republican Party, it's obstructionism, and the use of the Benghazi!!! tragedy to score political points against Hillary Clinton.  The question is, are we seeing a longer- term adjustment to the way the media covers politics, or is it just a temporary, belated clarity in some media quarters =cough= David Brooks =cough=.  (Our guess is below.)

And how has the "mainstream media," with its traditional practice of "he said, she said" journalism, and its reliance on and commitment to unnamed (i.e., Republican) sources enabled Republicans in catapulting "perceptions" of a Clinton "email scandal?" 

Thanks to the endless leak-driven reports, “everyone knows” that there’s a problem with Hillary Clinton and her emails. It’s not a one-day story, like Colin Powell’s also having used personal email when he was secretary of state, or Mitt Romney’s having erased all email records at the end of his time as governor of Massachusetts. Instead it “feeds the perception” of Hillary Clinton’s shady evasiveness. It “raises questions” and “has a drip-drip-drip” effect, to quote things I’ve heard on the news in the past day. Count how many times you hear the phrase “Clinton email scandal” in the next news report you listen to, and wait to see if anyone explains exactly what the scandal (as opposed to misjudgment, bad decision, etc.) was. 

Of course, it's long past time for this charade of treating the Republican Party as a responsible political entity to end.  But, as we and others have said, it's not likely you'll see that happen in the "mainstream media."