Lost Causes

 

Oliver Willis, having witnessed the latest example of the corporate media rolling over for fascists in the form of Lesley Stahl's tongue- bath of Rep. Marjorie "Traitor" Greene on last Sunday's 60 Minutes, is convinced there's no hope in expecting that media to change.  Instead, he offers two responses for progressives:

Stop holding fire on the media. Criticizing the press isn’t the same as Donald Trump declaring them the “enemy of the people.” Press criticism is a long-held American tradition and while it is unlikely to produce real change in the underlying dynamic, it at least educates others about the media that is being consumed. Most politically active Americans are terrible at media literacy and don’t understand that a lot of this coverage is bad. They wrongly view the press as neutral and give the people pushing Greene and Trump and the rest too much of a benefit of a doubt.

Promote progressive media and progressive breakthroughs in the mainstream media. Liberals don’t need the equivalent of Fox News, digital cults devoted to worshipping Republican politicians. But there isn’t anything wrong with a fact-based news outlet with a progressive point of view (and yes, I work for one). Similarly, it is worth it to reward progressive breakthroughs within the mainstream media with attention, showing political leaders that their messages can work while showing mainstream media gatekeepers that it isn’t only right-wing coded stories that can add to their bottom lines (the only thing they really care about)...

We would only clarify that Democratic elected leaders at all levels need to be much more aggressive in calling out Republican- friendly media malpractice.  There are worse things than not being invited back on a program or to a reception -- like losing your democracy.  They should take a cue from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who knows how to deliver an appropriate, timely punch.  

The corporate media is not going to challenge the burgeoning fascism being offered by the Republican/ Seditionist Party;  we know that from the last 8 years, and that the only thing that matters is getting eyeballs on the product and money in the bank (and Fox "News" isn't alone -- see Moonves, Les).  They're going to give the fascists as much print and air time as they need as long as the profits go up. 

We don't usually quote Lenin here, but what he purportedly wrote rings true, to the effect that capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with.  Problem with that today is that all our heads, and democracy's, would be in the noose.

Monday Reading

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

Nothing to see here!  Move along, move along!  Putin puppet and bumbling crime family head Donald "Not Exonerated" Trump is acting like, hmmm, he might just have something to hide (ya think?):

President Trump said Sunday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should not testify before Congress, reversing course from his previous position that the decision is up to Attorney General William P. Barr.

“Bob Mueller should not testify,” Trump said in an afternoon tweet. “No redos for the Dems! [snip]

Trump’s Sunday tweet marks a shift from what he said Friday during an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. Asked then whether Mueller should testify before Congress and whether he would like to see the special counsel do so, Trump replied, “I don’t know. That’s up to our attorney general, who I think has done a fantastic job.”

Barr said at a news conference last month — and reiterated during his testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee — that he has no objection to Mueller testifying.

The little man seems increasingly panicked, doesn't he?

For anyone under the delusion that the rotted out Republican Party is up to the job of reining in, much less taking down, the malignancy in the Oval Office, here's a dose of reality:

For people who really believed President Donald Trump could be toppled by a significant primary challenge in the 2020 election, a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal should set them straight: 90 percent of Republicans polled think Trump is doing a great job as president. (our emphasis)

Trump = Republicans, Republicans = Trump.

That Trump is a pathological liar is a known fact,  having just passed his 10,000th lie while in office. Leonard Pitts, Jr., writes about how his own profession is coddling the vicious clown:

Indeed, the very same weekend he notched his dubious milestone, Trump told a particularly gruesome whopper about supposed legislation empowering a new mother and her doctor to “determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

And how did The New York Times respond to this flaming canard? It called it “inaccurate,” which raised something of a stink on Twitter. That’s not surprising. Calling that hogwash “inaccurate” is like saying Titanic was “delayed.”

The Times is not alone; most news organizations have resisted calling Trump’s lies lies. Their reasoning, it must be conceded, is thoughtful. After all, to call something a lie is to impose judgment. Sometimes, when people are incorrect it’s not a lie, only a mistake.

But 10,000 times in a little over two years? How gullible must you be to believe someone could be that wrong that often by accident? If any other man told you half that many untruths, you’d call him a liar. You wouldn’t hesitate. Yet here, we do.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article229865539.html#storylink=cpy

Pick a side;  waffling isn't a side.

Anne Laurie has a cautionary tale:

Confession time: I voted for John Anderson in 1976 1980, because I was young & furious about Jimmy Carter’s ‘Ehh, anti-choice legislation is just something we’ll have to live with’ stance. That was the year Ronald Reagan got elected. Odds are that Reagan would’ve been shoehorned into office regardless of the Anderson protest vote, but that was a lesson for 21-year-old me: Protest votes can have ugly consequences.

Despite that warning, in 2000, protest voters chose Ralph Nader — and that gave the Repub ratfvckers enough leverage that we ended up with George Bush.

Despite that warning, in 2016, the staunch protest voters refused to ‘waste’ their precious artisanal ballot option on the filthy centrist Hillary Clinton — which gave the Repub ratfvckers and their Russian helpers the chance to install… well…

ATTENTION “LEFTIST” PROTEST VOTERS: The field experiment has been run at three intervals over the past forty years, and it’s failed ever more catastrophically every time. Stop making the same mistake!

Everything Trump touches dies, part infinity:

Michael Cohen, the former lawyer, media attack dog and all-around fixer for President Donald Trump, is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence Monday for crimes including campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments made on Trump’s behalf.

Cohen faces a 2 p.m. deadline to report to the Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, a federal prison in the countryside 70 miles (113 kilometers) northwest of New York City. A minimum-security prison camp there has become a haven for white-collar criminals.

We'd much rather his former boss and the rest of his crime family and crooked regime occupy some of this space, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

How foolish and wretched a species are we to destroy the one world that's been our home (see, in part, polling data above)?

Up to 1 million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction, with devastating implications for human survival, according to a United Nations report released Monday.

The report’s findings underscore the conclusions of numerous scientific studies that say human activity is wreaking havoc on the wild kingdom, threatening the existence of living things ranging from giant whales to small flowers and insects that are almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

But the global report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services goes a step further than previous studies by linking the loss of species to humans and analyzing its effect on food and water security, farming and economies.

Now for our tip of the week:  check out Infidel 753's link round- up for a great array of items of interest.  You might spend the rest of the day clicking through it, but you won't be sorry you did. (And if you missed it the other day, please check out his "Indivisible" post, and take it to heart.)

NBC Nightly News Abets Lie About "No Collusion" (UPDATED)

On last night's NBC Nightly News, news of the sentencing of convicted felon Paul Manafort managed to get buried nearly half- way through the broadcast.  When it did appear, former Justice Department spokesman under George "Dumbya" Bush, Pete Williams allowed a bold Trump camp lie to stand, i.e., that Judge Amy Berman Jackson had said the case showed "no collusion" with the Russians. The lawyer liar mouthing this falsity, Kevin Downing, had just left court with Judge Berman Jackson's words ringing in his ears:

“The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand,” she said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur.”

Then she added: “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate, because the investigation is still ongoing.”

Downing is working hard here to signal Trump that Manafort remains a loyal stooge and should be granted a pardon.

You'll note, if you saw other footage of Downing, that NBC cut the video before crowd chants of "Liar!" and "That's not what she said!" could be heard.  Here's the footage from NBC Nightly News, with the salient part starting at 13:19:



For reference, here's a clip with the crowd reaction that NBC News cut out:

Just so it's crystal clear, this is all part of the campaign for a presidential pardon. https://t.co/crCEqzycgb

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 13, 2019

Judge Berman Jackson also said,

“Court is one of those places where facts still matter,” Jackson said, adding at another point: “If the people don’t have the facts, democracy can’t work.”

It appears the facts don't matter to NBC Nightly News or to Pete Williams, and that's why we can't expect corporate media to save us.

BONUS:  Williams also makes a point to tell us Manafort is "seated in a wheelchair," although Judge Berman Jackson made a point of questioning why he was, and that she hadn't received a letter from any doctor explaining that.  Cue the tiny violins.

UPDATE:  More mischief, this time from other NBC- affiliated cogs.

It's Past Time For The Media To Step Up

We're Hackwhackers and we endorse these messages.

From Medium (h/t Mock Paper Scissors):

Politicians have always told some lies. This is different. The people running our government, and their key supporters, have launched a war on honest journalism, on facts, and on freedom of expression in general. They are using misinformation as strategy. They want the public to become so confused by what is true and what is false that people will give up even on the idea that journalism can help sort things out. This is not business as usual. You may wish otherwise — and the relentless normalizing journalists still do of this abnormal crew shows how much you wish otherwise — but at some point you have to recognize reality and react to it. 

Your job is not to uncritically “report” — that is, do stenography and call it journalism — when the people you’re covering are deceiving the public. Your job is, in part, to help the public be informed about what powerful people and institutions are doing with our money and in our names.

From Philip Bump (on a headline in The Hill, "Trump: 'There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea'"):

Most Americans don’t follow Trump on Twitter but come across his tweets on a regular basis. Many, if not most, Americans also rely heavily on headlines to convey news to them. Meaning that many Americans learn about what Trump says in his tweets through the summaries that appear in headlines. 

That’s why a headline like the Hill’s is a disservice. It provides no context for Trump’s claim, acting instead like a retweet of Trump’s false assertion across another platform. What Trump tweeted is false, and news outlets should make that as clear as possible when covering his tweets (or his statements more broadly), including in headlines.

From Greg Sargent, on the media's falling for bad faith misdirection by the Trump regime:

One of the most important but overlooked lessons in the bombshell report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation is that bad-faith, right-wing ref-working, via purely instrumental attacks on institutions, works. Buried in the report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general is evidence that former FBI director James B. Comey undertook actions that damaged Clinton’s candidacy, in part, because he had been spooked by such attacks. 

Right on cue, the news media’s coverage of the inspector general’s report is also confirming the same lesson: Bad-faith ref-working is producing its desired results once again. 

The report’s core finding is that the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Clinton was untainted by bias or politics. This lays waste to one of the most important narratives pushed by President Trump and his allies in the quest to undermine special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by claiming law enforcement is riddled with anti-Trump corruption. 

But in many of this morning’s accounts about the report, you find versions of this additional claim: The IG report nonetheless provides fodder and ammunition to Trump and his allies to discredit Mueller’s probe. 

We will note, in the sh*t show pathological liar Trump provided to the media on the White (Supremacist) House grounds yesterday, several reporters tried repeatedly to call out his lies. That needs to significantly ramp up to the pace and level that the pathological liar is spreading lies (the article in Medium noted above offers some suggestions for that). Even if the effects are marginal (and they won't penetrate the cement between Trump supporters' ears), one of our last free institutions must show that they understand the gravity of the situation and can respond accordingly. Acting as though we're in normal times today must be seen as acting abnormally.

If you see this occurring, please call or write the media outlet to let them know that their job is, as noted above "to help the public be informed about what powerful people and institutions are doing with our money and in our names," not sit by and watch the lights go out all over America.

Word Clouds - How The Media Influenced The Election

'Nuff said:

.@digby56 with Gallup-based word-cloud of what voters had heard about candidates https://t.co/ieZOlVMxd2
Similar to Gore/Bush coverage 2000 pic.twitter.com/gmsUvyfmwL

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) November 10, 2016

Remember this.

(You remember the media's Bush narrative:  the guy you'd want to have a beer with.  Gore's narrative was =snicker= he's a liar =mumble mumble= "invented the Internet"=snicker= "Love Story" =mumble mumble= and he sighed, too!  F*ckers.)

"Calling A Liar A Liar Isn't An Opinion If You Can Prove It" (UPDATED)

We've got three great clips from Samantha Bee's return to "Full Frontal" for you -- the first one covers recent topics like OMG HILLARY'S HEALTH!, the sad third party candidates, and "George Wallace in a wig" and his "basket of deplorables:"



In the next clip, she recaps last week's "Commander in Chief Forum," hosted by the ludicrously unqualified, Matt Lauer:



In the final clip, she lays wood to our cowering media who won't do their f*cking jobs in calling out the historically mendacious campaign of neo- fascist demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump:



It says something when comedians (like Bee, John Oliver, Steven Colbert, Seth Meyers, etc.) have more insight and guts than those who are supposed to be dedicated to reporting facts.  Actually, Bee put it best when she said in the last clip:

"Calling a liar a liar isn't an opinion if you can prove it.  That's what we call a fact."

We think she proved, in these short clips, that the media by and large is failing the American people in its coverage of this election.  That's a fact.

UPDATE:  Brian Beutler has a really interesting article about why the media is "botching the election" with its false equivalence treatment of Clinton and Rump.  Good reading.

Morning Reading - Our Broken Media (And Maybe How To Begin Fixing It)

Lots of articles coming out recently about the many failures of the media in this existential election. Here's a longish sampling of some good reads (as always, please take time to read the entire articles):

Nancy LeTourneau

Do you remember that time when Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in February as “proof” that climate change is a hoax? He was being what we might call a “merchant of doubt.” Never mind that the scientific community has been studying the rise in global temperatures for quite a while. One snowfall in Washington raises doubts about what they’ve found.  [snip] 

Can I suggest that, much as the “question” about Benghazi continues in the fevered minds of some (after even multiple Republican Congressional inquiries have produced nothing), “the question that arises yet again” is as dispositive as Inhofe’s snowball in February. We are, at this point, dealing with nothing more than merchants of doubt.

Jeff Jarvis

If journalism had informed and educated the American electorate, I am confident there would have been no room for Trump to spread his virus of ignorance, lies, and bigotry. It is patently clear that journalism is doing a terrible job informing the public. Judge the results. 

This is what depresses me most and makes me realize more than ever that we must rethink and reinvent the very core of journalism, its relationship with the public, its forms, and its business models. For it’s the business model that makes Les Moonves at CBS and Jeff Zucker at CNN rub their greedy little hands in glee at the audience and revenue the Trump Circus brings them. It’s the business model that has newsrooms chasing rabid squirrels and outrageous Trumpisms to get more volume, less value. It’s the form of journalism — the scoop, the exclu, the provocative TV yelling match, the savvy political roundtable— that brings out our worst in political opportunism and sensationalism, leaving no room for substance. And because we in journalism separate ourselves from the public we serve — sitting above them, in judgment — we try to argue that it’s not our fault if they’re not informed. Because of that separation, we cannot credibly contend that we know what the public’s concerns are; we’re not good at listening. And because of that separation, we still expect people to come to us for the news, when we should be going to them wherever they are.

Paul Glastris

Another way of looking at it is that the press is beginning to treat the Clinton Foundation story the way the Republican still treat Benghazi. The legitimate questions surrounding that incident—What were the precipitating events that lead to the deaths of four diplomats? What might the federal government have done differently to prevent it?—were basically answered when the first after-action press investigations and the 2012 Accountability Review Board Report were published. Keeping the controversy alive with half a dozen more congressional investigations was just a way for Republicans to rough up Clinton. 

The GOP at least had an obvious political motive for refusing to admit the obvious on Benghazi. Why the mainstream press is refusing to concede the facts of its own investigations on Hillary and the Clinton Foundation is not so clear. But unless it stops that behavior and starts speaking honestly, and soon, there’s a very real chance it could throw the election to Donald Trump. 

Paul Krugman

So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air. 

And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today. 

In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo. 

Josh Marshall (linked to previously, but worth repeating)

The [New York] Times uniquely, though only as a leading example for the rest of the national press, has a decades' long history of being lead around by rightwing opposition researchers into dead ends which amount to journalistic comedy - especially when it comes to the Clintons. But here, while all this is happening we have a real live specimen example of direct political and prosecutorial corruption, misuse of a 501c3 nonprofit and various efforts to conceal this corruption and the underlying corruption of Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. It's all there - lightly reported here and there - but largely ignored.  [snip] 

So here you have straight-up bad acts, political corruption to enable prosecutorial corruption to escape the consequences of fraud perpetrated on vulnerable consumers. And yet the page space gets dedicated to Clinton Foundation stories which raise 'questions' that could 'create appearances' and all other journalistic workarounds reporters use when they haven't found what they were looking for.  [snip] 

I should be clear here that while the Times is possibly the worst offender because of the scale of the failure and the influence the Times exerts far beyond its own pages, it's far from alone. They're just the tip of the spear of the generalized failure to apply even a small fraction of the scrutiny to Trump that they have to the Clintons or to make an honest evaluation of the fact that the story they were sold by various right wing groups - critical ones funded by none other than Breitbart's Steve Bannon (now Trump's campaign manager) - simply didn't pan out. 

In the simplest sense, they were just suckered and used and got played. It's a failure of great proportions, not at all unlike back when they were played by similar forces in the 'whitewater' era. As Trump might say, Sad!

Sad, indeed.  But also dangerous.

We'd also like to reiterate our support for Tengrain's appeal to actively push back when you see media malfeasance and false equivalence rearing its ugly head.  (At the same time, as commenter wjbill suggests, we must support alternative sources of information.)  It's important that they know we're not fools and we're not going to take their dangerous game- playing anymore.

Civic Ignorance And Republican Politics

Salon has back-to-back articles today on roughly the same topic:  civic ignorance.  We've seen how, as an example, supporters of neo- fascist fartbag Donald "Rump" Trump seem impervious to facts that challenge their views , even becoming more certain of their misinformation when challenged.  Certainly, this is not unique to Rump's supporters but is endemic across the right- wing Republican spectrum. This "misinformation" (or, less politely, lies) that has been allowed to enter political discourse in this country has only grown stronger in recent decades, as nearly half of the nation holds to "facts" and concepts that are made out of whole cloth by the usual spinners. 

Here's Daniel R. Demicola's conclusion:

We have now developed a culture in which ignorance is celebrated, perversely flaunted as a badge of pride. This is not good ole American anti-intellectualism. It’s deeper than that. It involves not only the distrust of expertise and mainstream sources of information, but also the rejection of rationally relevant factors for adopting beliefs. It seems to abandon hard-won standards of knowledge and institutions like science that have served us since the Enlightenment and brought us the standard of living we enjoy today. Evidence and conclusions are accepted selectively or resisted stubbornly. Some adopt ridiculous conspiracy theories, believing they have the “real truth”—but this is false knowledge, ignorance in elaborate disguise.

Phil Torres notes a primary reason for this culture of civic ignorance:

Not only is the U.S. unique for its love affair with anti-intellectualism, but this romantic relationship appears to have grown stronger over the past few decades. A primary reason for this is no doubt the huge influence that conservative media have had on American culture, such as Fox News, which is currently the most trusted news network in the country. The problem is that “Fox News” is a misnomer. The network is, to quote Jon Stewart, more of a “relentlessly activist” organization for conservative causes than an intellectually honest conveyor of information. Indeed, there are to date at least seven academic studies that have found that Fox News’ viewership constitutes the most misinformed audience out there. 

And yet, a willful purveyor of civic ignorance like Fox "News" is deemed a "sister organization" by "mainstream media" enablers!

Republican appeals to intolerance, anger and resentment have fertile soil to grow in this field of ignorance, an ignorance that extends far into the American public, of whom only 36 percent can name the three branches of government(!).  With a media obsessed with pre- determined, simplistic "narratives" and shiny objects, don't expect an enlightened voting population to suddenly emerge in 2016.  That's perhaps the most frightening unknown we can imagine.

Monday Morning Read - Where Republicans Have Been Headed For Decades

(Gavin Coates, Earthypublications.com)

Paul Krugman traces the devolution of the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid/ Shooter's Party and its knuckle- dragging base from Dumbya to Palin to Trumpism (a.k.a., American fascism):

Almost six months have passed since Donald Trump overtook Jeb Bush inpolls of Republican voters. At the time, most pundits dismissed the Trump phenomenon as a blip, predicting that voters would soon return to more conventional candidates. Instead, however, his lead just kept widening. Even more striking, the triumvirate of trash-talk — Mr. Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz — now commands the support of roughly 60 percent of the primary electorate.

But how can this be happening? After all, the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?

Well, part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?

Krugman also gives the god- awful American media a significant role in this devolution of right- wing politics.  With their focusing on the trivial, the "who would you rather have a beer with" inanities, the eliding of right- wing lies, the failure to come to grips with the evermore extreme drift of the Republican Party, the American media can share a great deal of discredit for what we're seeing today in the ascendance of the brutish on the right.

Of Dog Whistles And Monsters Of Their Own Creation

There seems to be a theme developing this morning.  Something about "reaping what you sow."

Paul Krugman:

The story is quite different in America [than France], because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes. 

But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.

Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican. [snip]

What I am saying, however, is that this ugliness has been empowered by the very establishments that now act so horrified at the seemingly sudden turn of events. In Europe the problem is the arrogance and rigidity of elite figures who refuse to learn from economic failure; in the U.S. it’s the cynicism of Republicans who summoned up prejudice to support their electoral prospects. And now both are facing the monsters they helped create. (our emphasis)

Catherine Rampell:

Donald Trump isn’t that extremist, unserious or bigoted.

At least not when you look at the supposedly more reasonable candidates he’s up against. Trump has merely brought the dog whistle down a few octaves, making it audible to most humans.  [snip]

Americans have just been so distracted by the carnival-barker craziness of Trump that we’ve been ignoring the slightly less colorful craziness of the other candidates.

In fact, despite constant Republican- establishment bellyaching that their party and primary have been hijacked by an unserious candidate, Trump’s campaign has in a way been helpful to the likes of Rubio, Cruz, Christie and Bush. By comparison, their own far-right, unserious, unreasonable ideas start to look moderate, serious and reasonable, and their own xenophobic rhetoric sounds a little more mannerly. Not to mention that Trump’s bombast and self-obsession make just about any other politician look grounded, polished and temperamentally tame (no small feat if you’re Chris “sit down and shut up” Christie).  (our emphasis)

Now let's see how a media obsessed with deeming both "outsider" and "establishment" Republicans as merely "conservative" (but perfectly acceptable in our horse race narrative!!) analyzes, adjusts and responds to this reality.  =crickets=   Hahano.

Today's Read - The Media And Trump

Want to understand why some in the "mainstream media" are beginning to focus on Donald "Rump" Trump's ugly lies and raw racism?  David Roberts at Vox has a must- read article analyzing the political media's self- perceived role in political campaigns and why Rump threatens that role. After tracing a history of Republican "truthiness," Roberts focuses on why Rump makes these faint- hearted guardians of "both sides do it" so anxious, and concludes:

Thus the dilemma. The old-guard political media has always seen itself as a disinterested referee. But what they confront now is aggressive, unapologetic nonsense, piped up from a nationalist, ethnocentric, revanchist conservative base through the mouth of one Donald J. Trump. He is forcing them to choose sides, to accept his bare assertions and make a mockery of their purported allegiance to accuracy ... or to call him out and, in the eyes of his supporters, formally align against him.

The conceptual space for neutrality has all but disappeared. Media outlets are being forced to take sides, and facing the grim possibility that even if they do, they have no power to affect the outcome. Their twin idols — objectivity and influence — are being exposed as illusions. That's what has them so anxious about Donald Trump.

Well, at least Mad Magazine has taken sides.

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."

Ernst Captures The Goldmacher Vote

There's a piece in the National Journal by Beltway narrative plumper Shane Goldmacher giving Iowa tea party Republican Senate candidate and pig castrater Joni Ernst an admiring, loving tongue-bath. Several of our blogging betters have jumped in with their reviews of Goldmacher's journamalism:

Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly talks about the glossing-over of Ernst's crackpot positions (see, "Agenda 21", nullifying Federal laws):

Now I freely admit I have my own biases here: it infuriates me to see the label “the better candidate” attached to anyone running for high office who has ever, ever promoted the insane John Birch Society conspiracy theory of Agenda 21, as Ernst has—much less to suggest that her “toothy grin” and her cute but substantively idiotic “hog castration” ads offset her extremist record. And I don’t know that what national media types say about this race really matters much at all. But it’s part of an atmosphere whereby there are “no Todd Akins or Sharron Angles” to get in the way of the presumed outcome of a GOP takeover of the Senate in part because candidates with extremist positions and records are being cut an awful lot of slack by the supposedly neutral media. Joni Ernst pretty much is Sharron Angle with a better bio and a greater willingness to weasel out of her prior statements; she pretty much is Todd Akin with a superior ability to avoid a dangerous line of questioning by changing the subject. It’s alarming to think such superficial talents are enough to turn champions of the mad fringe into “breakout stars.” (our emphasis)

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog takes on Goldmacher's strawman of the "Democratic machine" (i.e., get out the vote efforts) thwarting the will of the plutocrats people:

This line of argument dovetails nicely with Republican vote trutherism (Democrats win because of massive voter fraud!) and its lite, polite variants (Democrats win because they give so much free stuff to moochers! Republicans lose some elections in the overall vote count, but win the votes of the right people, so, really, the GOP wins!). Either way, America -- or "real Americans," at least -- prefer the GOP no matter what the vote totals say. Democrats don't have a mandate to govern even when they win (because they don't really win), and Republicans have a mandate even when they lose.  (our emphasis)

Charles Pierce also has a short piece highlighting the contribution of pundit-for-hire and former Obama guru David Axelrod in building the myth of "brave woman versus the Machine:"

Axelrod's latest contribution is to join the chorus summoned up for an almost incomprehensibly hagiographic profile of Joni Ernst, the outright nut whom the voters of Iowa may bestow upon the nation as their next senator.

"She's got momentum. She's got charisma. But Democrats have great organization there," former top Obama strategist David Axelrod said of the race on MSNBC earlier this month. "It's really organization versus momentum and charisma, and we'll see."

The fact that her politics are not just retrograde, but completely insane, ought to figure into every assessment of Joni Ernst. At least that's the way I see it.  (our emphasis)

But to Goldmacher, this "Sharron Angle with a better bio" is "the better candidate" and "a rising star!

Sic transit gloria, America.

BONUS:  The Des Moines Register, to their credit, blasts Ernst's paleolithic views on government safety net programs.

Saturday Morning Reading: Two Sets of Rules

Paul Rosenberg has a must-read piece at Salon about how and why right-wing Republicans have historically managed to play off a different set of rules than those for progressives/ Democrats, and why the media lets them get away with it, and in fact amplifies (or, as Charles Pierce frequently refers to it, "catapults") the Republican message.  Here's a teaser:

Put simply, there are two sets of rules: one for liberals and Democrats, the other for conservatives and Republicans. The former are supposed to be fair-minded and rule-abiding, as befits a tradition that harkens back to the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Montesquieu and Locke. The latter are expected to be Nixonian streetfighters—whatever they do is “just politics,” and “everybody does it,” so there’s “nothing to see here.”  [snip]

For months, years, even decades on end, liberals and Democrats have played by these bifurcated rules, and they have repeatedly gotten clobbered as a result. The single biggest reflection of this lies with attitudes toward presidential impeachment. Republicans and conservatives routinely think of impeaching Democratic presidents, expending considerable energy to roil their bases, elaborating paranoid, fantastical, conspiratorial narratives. Democrats do quite the opposite—preemptively discouraging talk of impeachment, even when major political scandals raise serious questions of legitimate rule. 

For anyone who has seen "professional rasslin'", the analogy to this phenomenon is when the referee (i.e., the media) always gets "distracted," leading to the bad guy (you know who) winning the match by cheating and skullduggery, suddenly pinning the good guy (you know who, too) in front of the suddenly alert referee.  Too bad in the real world, this behavior has real consequences.

Pols and Pundits: Betting on Obamacare Failing, And Losing

Pardon our indulging in a little more schadenfreude over the success of Obamacare in its first enrollment cycle.  After years of gibberish about "death panels," tripling insurance premiums, beellions being kicked off of their insurance plans, deficit busting, and the end of Freedom in America (courtesy of right-wing media, the Koch brothers and other lying malefactors), we have millions more Americans being covered by affordable health insurance.  While the dead-ender right isn't finished with Obamacare (and will never give up), they may yet pay a price for going all-in on opposing this humane and decent achievement.  Here are snippets of some worthwhile readings:

Greg Sargent:

The announcement of eight million Obamacare sign-ups may finally be enough to jolt commentators into realizing that maybe, just maybe, the Republican plan to build an entire campaign against the law for the next six months might suffer from a few imperfections. The President, for his part, seized on the moment to urge Democratic candidates to stand proudly by the law’s achievements — and to attack Republicans for wanting to strip them away.

Josh Marshall:

On Obamacare, the Republican party has bet big on failure for four years. Now the results are in. And they lost. Big time. 

Of course, substance policy success and political outcomes aren't the same thing. And just as importantly they do not always run on the same time scale. So it is entirely possible. I would say it is likely that the GOP will still derive benefits this November from the core of voters who are extremely upset about Obamacare, extremely motivated to vote and also happen to be the same people who routinely turn out in disproportionate numbers in mid-term elections. But on the core of the policy, which I think there is good reason to believe will align with political outcomes in the future, the results are in. And they lost. 

And, finally, Lucia Graves at the National Journal calls out specific Republican journalists pundits who, in toeing the hyperbolic party line on Obamacare, are seeing their predictions of doom blow up in their smug faces.  The list of numbnuts is much longer than Graves has space or patience to cover, unfortunately =cough= Fox "News" =cough= Krauthammer =cough= Will =cough=.  Of course, the "mainstream media" is/was often complicit in peddling Republican lies in their typical "he-said, she-said" narratives (because,  as NBC's  Chuck Todd has schooled us, it's not the media's job to sort out the truth!). Nonetheless, history will surely and righteously enroll all of them in its Book of Shame.

Everybody Continue to Breathe Normally, Please

From BooMan:

...The extremely temporary problems with the Healthcare.gov website are of no lasting import whatsoever. The only potential problem here is that it doesn't get fixed quickly enough to avoid a deficit of healthy consumers and the rates are annoyingly high as a result. But even that would be fixed and forgotten within a couple of years.

Before long, the website will function exactly as it was intended to and people will get good, solid and affordable access to health care. And the only kind of stories worth writing about the political impact of ObamaCare are ones that look at what it will mean for millions of people to get their healthcare with the assistance of government subsidies, and what it will mean for a political party to oppose those subsidies or seek to diminish them.

And John Cole:

I just watched the SNL opening skit mocking Sebelius and ACA, and the only thing I could think was thank fucking ALLAH that Social Security and Medicaid were rolled out in the pre-internet days.

Think about it, you fucking jackasses at the Wonkblog and you other alleged liberals. All the programs you claim to love, like SS, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. At this point in the rollout for these programs 50, 60, and 70 years ago, the mail would just be reaching the respective offices. Problems people are experiencing today would not even be noticed for four months in those days, yet people still participated, just as people are right now.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, which includes execrable hackery from the likes of CNN.

More Media Malpractice

Here are two good reads on how the media amplifies story lines and faux scandals ginned up by the  right-wing:

Steve Benen at Maddowblog on how the New York Times (!), once great Washington Post Kaplan Daily, and (not surprisingly) Politico uncritically trumpeted the right-wing line on the IRS nothingburger, but were far less interested in trumpeting contrary facts as the "scandal" started to implode.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog notes CNN's Jake "Tippy" Tapper dutifully pushing the latest Rethuglican narrative course correction on BENGHAZI!! 

And you wonder why we can't have nice things in this country?

How The Scandal-Driven Media Blew The IRS Story

This is a small taste, but the whole article is really worth the read;  a case of report first, ask questions later journamalism:

While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.

Unfortunately, the Rethugs know how to play the media like cheap violins.  There's certainly a symbiotic relationship between the "win the morning" types looking to be this generation's Woodward and Bernstein, and the Rethugs who want to keep the Obama Administration on the defensive as much as possible.  Throw into the mix what Seitz-Wald calls the media's eagerness to show they're not the "liberal media" in the tank for Democrats -- a meme that the Rethugs have been eagerly pushing since the 1960's--  and you have the IRS nothingburger (following on the Solyndra nothingburger, following the Benghazi! nothingburger, follow... well, you get the picture, even if the ink-stained wretches out there don't).

More Media Malpractice

Fresh evidence from President Obama's news conference yesterday that the whiz kids of the Beltway press corps wouldn't recognize the top political story of the last 20 years (spoiler alert: it's the movement of the Republican party to the extreme ultra right) if it bit them on their keister.

First comes Kaplan Daily's Dana Milbank's brain-dead meme that, gosh darn it, if Obama would just schmooze more with those Congressional Republicans, he might just get more votes. We can only say, that's some rock you've been living under for the past 4 years, Mildew! You must not have rock home delivery of the Kaplan Daily, otherwise you might have read this.

Exhibit two is from the presser in the form of a question from ex-Fox "News" and current CBS White House Correspondent Major "Asshole" Garrett, echoing fellow voice of reason and both-sides-are-equally-to-blame Chuck Todd (NBC):

"What Chuck [Todd] and I and I think many people are curious about is this new adamant desire on your part not to negotiate when that seems to conflict with the entire history in the modern era of American presidents in the debt ceiling and your own history on the debt ceiling."

So, the answer is to encourage Rethugs to engage in negotiating hostage taking every time a debt limit vote comes up? So they can move the goal posts further and further right every subsequent time?? It seems to us we just had an election, the American people voted, and... we won. Bottom line, as the President said, you don't hold the American economy hostage to score/ make a political point. The economy is people's lives, not a bargaining chip.

Exhibit three comes from Buzzfeed's John Stanton, whose article is titled "Obama Looks to Saddle Republicans With Blame for Debt Limit Fight." Well, sir, if the saddle fits the horse, put it on! Here's what Stanton went on to say:

"To hear Obama tell it, he’s simply trying to pay the country’s bills..."

and

"But even as he was calling for cooperation, Obama took a shot at Republicans..."

The "shot" Obama took was to basically remind everyone that the election was fought over certain principles and... we won. To hear John Stanton tell it, he's simply practicing unbiased journamalism.

UPDATE: Mr. Pierce, skewering MoDo for the same "Obama hasn't been nice" meme as above, puts the cap on it:

"This is the silliest goddamn meme in the history of silly goddamn memes. There is nothing this president can do to move the Republican opposition toward reason. (You can lead the whores to water...). They don't like Democratic presidents. They particularly don't like this one. They don't think Democratic presidents are elected legitimately. The particularly don't think this one was, twice. They are insulated in safe districts. They are the occupants of a self-sustaining universe of think-tanks, sugar daddies, talk-radio cowboys, and ideological chop shops. This simple fact is not going to change even if the president were magically to become a combination of Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier over the soup course. He could sprawl across a staircase, and it wouldn't matter."

End of discussion.

(Photo: Milbank, Garrett, Todd or Stanton - take your pick.)

Media: Still Looking For A Clue And A Spine

Dan Froomkin at HuffPo discusses how your elite political media have yet to report on The Big Political Story of 2012 (actually, we think it's The Big Political Story of the Past 20 Years):

"Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.

"But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth."

In addition to the insights of Mann and Ornstein, readers of Charles P. Pierce's sublime blog see an example of media craven cluelessness every Monday. As he often does, Pierce focuses a light on serial obfuscator of truth, "Press the Meat" host "Dancin' Dave" Gregory who, week in and week out, aids and abets the continuing decline of political discourse in America:

"But, of course, the topic of the weekend, the topic of all our weekends these days, was pain. Who would bring it? How much would there have to be? And, of course, how to explain to the country that granny-starving is a patriotic act that will keep us from becoming Greece. There's no better place for that kind of talk that Dancin' Dave's Disco Dance Party. Surprisingly, some actual Democrats wandered into the studio this week — OK, Dick Durbin, but any old port etc., and god, did I need some old port by the end of this. — and there was some tepid push-back against starving all the grannies all together. The Dancin' Master never got rolling because his show turned quickly into Camp Runamuck. First, though, there was some prevaricatin' to be done from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, noted for taking his marching orders from mediocre Ben Affleck movies, although Allen West, his partner in comedy gold, will not be returning to Congress, which is why people have been seen removing padding from the walls."

Favorite line? "Let us begin with the Dancin' Master, who hosted Rick Santorum on the overtime part of the program, and sat there like a pile of leaves while Santorum... accused the president of being soft on Sharia law." (our emphasis) As long as the Dancin' Daves of the media are more concerned with staying on the Georgetown cocktail circuit than staying on The Big Political Story of the Past 20 Years, we're in for more of the same.

BONUS: Here's more, on the "winning the morning" Internet side.