QOTD -- On Chuck Todd, Willful Disinformer

 

"... Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that? If so, then you break faith with the audience and create a massive problem in real time fact-checking. If not, then you just broke the show in half.  

"There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. As I have tried to show, they didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it."  -- NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, focusing on NBC/ MSNBC's Chuck "Not My Job" Todd's role in catapulting Republican propaganda through hosting Meet the Press and elsewhere.  In an interview with Rolling Stone, Todd pleaded to being "naive" about Republican "alternate facts" and disinformation, though for years he has regularly booked Republican liars and rarely pushed back on them.  That Todd continues to be disingenuous about his role as an enabler of Republican "alternate facts," look no further than who he's giving valuable air time this Sunday on MTP -- Dumbest Senator Ron "Tiny" Johnson (R- Sanitarium), a frequent guest, dedicated Trumpist, conspiracy peddler, and all- around dolt:

 

TOMORROW ON #MTP: Covid continues to ravage the nation as the Senate debates over stimulus checks for Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci and @SenRonJohnson join. Plus, Georgia Senate runoffs with @StaceyAbrams. #IfItsSunday pic.twitter.com/c0cymD9WO5

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 2, 2021

 

Check out the rest of Rosen's article for more details on Todd's willful blindness.

BONUS:

One of these Senators will be on Meet the Press tomorrow. https://t.co/DkMl3f2JT1

— Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg) January 2, 2021

 

 

Trump's Character: "It's Never The Lead Story"

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog observes what the general takeaway is from coverage of Golden Turd Donald "Moron Vector" Trump's daily bullshit sessions:

... What Trump is doing every day -- it's hard to say whether he's being shrewd or has just stumbled on a routine that seeks to work for him -- is weaving his pathology into a briefing that generally has at least some real news. That news is what a lot of Americans take away from the briefings, because news organizations generally treat it as far most important than Trump's outbursts. Some news outlets seem to regard the news as the only important part of the story. [snip]

It ought to matter that, in the midst of a crisis, we have a president who's accusing desperate healthcare workers in a viral hot zone of being grifters trying to steal and sell face masks, all because he can't accept numbers predicting exponential growth of demand for health services that are extremely dangerous to provide. It ought to matter that Trump bullies and insults reporters for quoting his own words back to him. It's an election year. When it suits us, we decide that "character" is an important criterion when we're judging who's fit to serve. But the media isn't treating Trump's character as an important story.

Trump parcels out just enough news every day that the takeaway, for people who can't read the news in depth, is A serious man is leading us through a serious crisis.

We keep waiting in vain for the corporate media -- especially in the form of the nightly network newscasts -- to cover Trump's manifest moral rot and mental incompetence, mostly displayed in his unscripted remarks and tweets, but... they don't.  Instead of seeing some of his more sociopathic tweets like these highlighted --

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2020

So much of the Lamestream Media is writing and broadcasting stories with facts that are made up and knowingly wrong. They are doing it by quoting unnamed sources that simply do not exist. These are very dangerous & corrupt people, who will do anything to win. NAME YOUR SOURCES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2020

I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2020

-- we get valuable minutes wasted on "good news" pablum that infantilizes the audience and whistles past Trump's existential grave yard.

Jay Rosen has suggested the media, among other things, use a "truth sandwich" approach in covering Trump's firehose of falsehoods:

Experience has taught us that there will occasionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a news writing formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true...

This should also apply to the unhinged comments/ tweets/ etc. that the low information public needs to see.  Rather, we believe the media has largely adopted the stance that "Trump's low character is already a given" and that nothing is gained by further hammering his moral rot and mental incapacity into the public consciousness.  So, one of the lessons of 2016 is being repeated, even with three years of hindsight.

Before Trump was even sworn in as "president," Ned Resnikoff at the sadly departed Think Progress wrote some advice for the media, which has only fitfully been heeded, if at all (no link): 

Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.

They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy.

With the exception of a few stalwarts (Yamiche Alcindor, being the most recent to stand up to the bully), the media continue to gloss over what is plain to see -- a mentally unhinged, morally unfit sociopath floundering and deflecting at a time of national crisis.

Is the truth that hard to tell?

The Strategic Blindness Of Chuck Todd

By now you may have read about the Chuck Todd interview in Rolling Stone, the purpose of which was to promote a special December 29 Meet the Press edition focused on the spread of disinformation in the Trump era.  Todd, the political director at NBC News since 2007 and host of MTP, has a well- documented history of playing the "neutral" "journalist" who, in fact, is simply a "both sides" cultist --  for example, notoriously claiming it was not his job to correct Republican lies about Obamacare, saying Hillary Clinton was "over- prepared" in a 2016 debate with the incompetent shitgibbon, and reinforcing the diversionary Republican narrative that the Mueller hearing was an "optics" disaster for Democrats.

Well, it seems the Rolling Stone interview became a moment of confessional clarity to Todd, who now realizes that he's been "naive" about Republican bad faith and lying all these years. But, Todd's not a slow learner.  He's just providing a little disinformation of his own.  Here's a small excerpt from Jay Rosen's epic takedown of the "naive" Mr. Todd in "Press Think":

Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)

You cannot call that an oversight. It’s a strategic blindness that he superintended. By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”  (our emphasis)

Rosen goes on to pick apart Todd's rationale for sleepwalking* through his entire tenure as political director at NBC News, but it basically is captured in the Upton Sinclair quote above.  As far as Todd's "naive" excuse, Rosen outlines what many have observed for years about how Todd and others in the "elite" media have handled the asymmetrical devolution of the Republican Party into madness;  Rosen rebuts the naiveté argument in several areas (each has supporting narrative worth the read):

It’s not naive of him. It’s malpractice...

It’s not that he was naive. He did not care to listen...

It’s not naiveté. It’s a willful blindness to what the Republican Party had become...

He’s not naive. He’s an insider who thought his read was better...

It’s not naive. It’s a lack of imagination, a failure of insight... 

But, as Rosen says, Todd and his fellow news packagers across the "mainstream media" spectrum have no clue how to escape the cycle (Rosen calls it an "epistemological crisis").  Therefore, after Todd hosts his "special" MTP on disinformation, expect next week's guests and pundits to include those very same purveyors of Republican disinformation Todd now admits he was "naive" about.  Rest assured it will be the same on "Face the Nation" and "This Week" and on the op/ ed pages of your newspapers.  "Strategic blindness" is here to stay.
______________________
*  We note the incompetent shitgibbon's epithet for Todd is "Sleepy Chuck Todd," a rare occasion we'll give him credit for accuracy.

Monday Reading

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

Iowa's Art Cullen sets everyone straight on who and what's behind the racist war on immigrants who are doing much of the dirty work many "real 'mericans" won't take:

To set things straight: The people who want to deport the undocumented are the same people who wanted to bust the unions because they had too much power. Once busted, meatpackers were able to cut wages in half in the 1980s. The United Food and Commercial Workers is hamstrung by the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Act during the Reagan Administration. Since then, rural meatpacking communities have become weaker. Immigrants get blamed for taking jobs that resident citizens could have. But the jobs in Mississippi for poor people have always been exploitive. It’s a messed-up system: Put value on skills so no one wants to work in unskilled labor, recruit the unskilled to fill the jobs that Biff and Buffy who went off to college don’t want, exploit them, criminalize them, deport them, then complain about low wages brought by the great unwashed. The immigrants and poor black people do not set the wage. The boss does. He made sure the union went down. He made sure everyone thought that the Hygrade union man was getting paid too much. He convinced everyone that the union was stealing your paycheck. And now people complain that immigrants are ruining this country.

They didn’t break the unions, and they don’t set the wage. We want cheap food. Immigrants provide it, so we crucify them. Biff is learning arbitrage and hedging to be used later on livestock contracting.

We need a big change in this country.

So we do.  But let's not look to the press to be on the side of positive change.  Pressthink's Jay Rosen has several problems with the press he worries about going forward, one of which is this:

Explicitly or implicitly, it seems likely that Trump is going to run a racist re-election campaign in 2020, in which “othering” (not a word I like, but it’s the best I can do…) is basic to his appeal to voters. This goes way beyond noisy controversies like whether to use the term “racist.” Is the press ready for a campaign like that? Does it have the people and practices in place to respond? Is it willing to break with precedent to meet a threat without parallel? I doubt it.

From what we've seen so far, we doubt it also (see Masha Gessen's timeless piece on surviving an autocracy, especially rule number 3).

But, to give credit where due, the Tampa Bay Times uncovered the revealing Congressional Republican memo directing how members should respond to white nationalist/ supremacist mass shootings:

Congressional Republicans recently circulated talking points on gun violence that falsely described the El Paso massacre and other mass shootings as “violence from the left.”

A document obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and sent by House Republicans provides a framework for how to respond to anticipated questions like, “Why won’t you pass legislation to close the ‘gun show loophole’ in federal law?” and “Why shouldn’t we ban high-capacity magazines?" The answers are boilerplate Republican arguments against tougher gun restrictions.

But it also included this question: “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?” The suggested response is to steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.

The amoral bastards are aiding and abetting their shock troops shooting up innocent civilians with their NRA- approved military grade automatic weapons.  That's about par for the course for them.

And at least one journalist, the Washington Post's Dave Weigel, casts a knowing wink at a habit of media types who regularly go on safari to capture the thoughts of the heartland:

Feels like an incumbent who can’t break 40% against any top challenger is in trouble, but we don’t know how many of these voters were polled in rust belt diners. pic.twitter.com/frKnLP3PFo

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 15, 2019

Your next stop should be Infidel 753's round- up of links to interesting posts around the internet, if you haven't already been there.  Also, his analysis of the pro- democracy movements in Russia and China is a good read on a topic that's frequently lost in our self- absorption as Americans.