Stop Broadcasting Trump’s Dangerous Coronavirus Briefings

In this new bizarre world of the Coronavirus, most Americans are trying to get true and accurate information about (i) what is happening and (ii) how to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Neither of these goals can be achieved by watching Donald Trump's propaganda driven "briefings" which sound more like constant bragging and disinformation campaigns.  More over, they continue to seek to mask how badly the Trump/Pence regime dropped the ball on preparedness for what is now facing the nation - a point made in one Washington Post editorial that argues that a president Hillary Clinton would not have dropped the ball in such a stunning manner.  When a narcissistic president only wants single page briefings and surrounds them self with sycophants it's a disaster waiting and all of us will be paying a price for Trump's incompetence and malfeasance.  Here are column highlights: 

The coronavirus is the most foreseeable disaster in history — and so is President Trump’s inability to rise to the occasion.

There were scattered warnings before Pearl Harbor and 9/11 of what was to come. But nothing like this. My Post colleagues report that throughout January and February, the U.S. intelligence community was warning Trump that the pandemic was going to hit America. “The system was blinking red,” one official said.

But Trump wasn’t paying attention. . . . Because of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators, and build new hospital beds. This past week, the Pentagon finally announced that a Navy hospital ship would be heading to New York — but it will take at least two weeks to get ready. Why wasn’t the deployment order given sooner?

Utterly lacking in empathy, Trump is incapable of rallying a shell-shocked nation. . . . . I weep in anger and frustration imagining what might have been if Hillary Clinton — a sane, sensible adult — had won. We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects. We could be South Korea (102 deaths) rather than Italy (4,825 deaths and counting).

It was precisely because we were afraid of how Trump would mishandle his weighty responsibilities that some “Never Trump” conservatives supported Clinton in 2016. On May 8, 2016, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “There has never been a major party nominee in U.S. history as unqualified for the presidency. The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.”

For the past three years, Trump supporters have scoffed at critics, claiming we are out-of-touch, pointy-headed, coastal elitists too focused on Trump’s unconventional way of speaking while ignoring his historic policy achievements — meaning an expanding economy that he inherited from Obama. Perhaps they would like to rethink that argument now that the stock market has given up all of the gains it made under Trump and the unemployment numbers are heading for Great Depression levels?

Now, the damage is compounding and rather than giving true and accurate information Trump is spewing lies and disinformation during daily briefings that do little to calm the public (other than Trump cult followers) and, if anything, mislead the public.  A second Washington Post column argues that broadcasting these sham briefings needs to stop immediately.  Whether the media - which bears a huge responsibility for Trump's election due to its false "equivalency"  obsession.  Here are column excerpts:

More and more each day, President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus.

These White House sessions — ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis — are in fact working against that end.

Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members. They come in search of life-or-death information, but here’s what they get from him instead:

 ● Self-aggrandizement. When asked how he would grade his response to the crisis, the president said, “I’d rate it a 10.” Absurd on its face, of course, but effective enough as blatant propaganda.

● Media-bashing. When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — Trump went on a bizarre attack. “I say, you’re a terrible reporter,” the president said, launching into one of his trademark “fake news” rants bashing Alexander’s employer. (Meanwhile, he has also found time during these news briefings to lavish praise on sycophantic pro-Trump media like One America News Network, whose staffer — I can’t call her a reporter — invited him to justify his xenophobic talk of a “Chinese virus” by asking rhetorically if he considers the phrase “Chinese food” racist.)

● Exaggeration and outright lies. Trump has claimed that there are plenty of tests available (there aren’t); that Google is “very quickly” rolling out a nationwide website to help manage coronavirus treatment (the tech giant was blindsided by the premature claim); that the drug chloroquine, approved to treat malaria, is a promising cure for the virus and “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” (It hasn’t been approved for this use, and there is no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the virus.)

Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit — a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the FDR of the 21st century. 

 The press — if it defines its purpose as getting truthful, useful, non-harmful information to the public, as opposed to merely juicing its own ratings and profits — must recognize what is happening and adjust accordingly. (And that, granted, is a very big “if.”)

Business as usual simply doesn’t cut it. Minor accommodations, like fact-checking the president’s statements afterward, don’t go nearly far enough to counter the serious damage this man is doing to the public’s well-being.

Radical change is necessary: The cable networks and other news organizations that are taking the president’s briefings as live feeds should stop doing so.

“There is a very real possibility that in broadcasting these press conferences live or in quickly publishing and blasting out his words in mobile alerts, we are actively misinforming our audience,” Alex Koppelman, managing editor of CNN Business, wrote in an email for the network’s Reliable Sources newsletter.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who wrote on his PressThink blog that the media needs to switch into “emergency mode”for covering Trump and clearly communicate that change to its readers and viewers.

“We are not obliged to assist him in misinforming the American public about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government,” Rosen wrote.

Will the Media Re-Elect Trump?

Meet the Press gives Sarah Huckabee Sanders a platform to spew lies.

It's only the early stages of the lead up to the 2020 presidential election and already much of the mainstream media appears set to repeat the mistakes of the 2016 election campaign cycle as Trump and his minions lie with abandon and find little or no challenge or push back from talking heads and anchors.  These instances of journalist malfeasance go far beyond the absurd obsession of false equivalency where somehow dishonest statements and outright lies are treated as a counterpoint to actual fact and science based positions of Democrat elected officials and candidates. A column in the Washington Post by former Republican Jennifer Rubin takes the media to task and focuses on both Trump's lies and the lies of his minions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Liz Cheney, one the daughter of little more nowadays than a scamvangelist and the other the daughter of the cynical liar, Dick Cheney who pushed to have America squander thousands of lives and billions and billions of dollars in the Iraq War fiasco (one would almost believe that lying is genetic). Lies and untruths need to be challenged and exposed as lies. Here are column highlights:

The New York Times gives prominent placement on its home page to list all of President Trump’s juvenile nicknames for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including the racist Native American slur directed at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). This serves no purpose other than to highlight his name-calling and reinforce his abusive conduct.

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders goes on “Meet the Press” to repeatedly accuse former FBI director James B. Comey of treason. She insists everyone knows about corruption at the top levels of the Justice Department. . . . She claims “they” leaked information and lied. (Who? What information? When?) . . . Sanders falsely insists the FBI was guilty of “unprecedented obstruction and corruption.”

Trump’s press secretary is not challenged on her exaggerations, distortions and outright lies, although she in essence concedes Trump has already made up his mind, issued his verdict and is expecting the attorney general to come back with evidence.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance White tells me, “I think what is crucially important to remember here is that two FBI agents can’t launch a coup against a president, even if they want to.” She explains, “Our system is set up so that independent judges must sign off on warrants and wiretaps. And given all the contact between the campaign and Russia, it would have been irresponsible for the FBI not to investigate.” She adds, “I have never heard a response from Trump to that point.”

The same Trump talking points were used by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) without challenge on “This Week.”

This is balderdash. In no sense were either of them [Peter Strzok and Lisa Page] “in charge of launching the investigation,” and in any case, private gossip doesn’t amount to “treason.” Cheney is not challenged on her assertions. Were Trump appointees former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray also guilty of treason?

Aside from repeating the same factual distortions, White suggests that Cheney “needs to read the Constitution, because this can’t possible be treason.” She says, “It’s irresponsible for an elected official to engage in talk of coups and treason, knowing it’s untrue but also that there is a possibility it could incite additional attempts at violence.”

Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe concurs. Cheney “is too smart to believe even a bit of what she’s saying. That makes her prattling away about a ‘coup’ and particularly about ‘treason’ especially pernicious and dangerous,” he says. “Only dictators threaten those who dare to question and investigate their use of power with prosecution for treason.”

The mainstream media must pick up its game. Its role is not to act as Trump’s megaphone for childish insults, which directly aids his efforts to defame presidential opponents. It’s one thing to explain that Trump uses insults and to debunk them; it’s another to reinforce and popularize them.

More important, Republicans who repeat blatantly untrue talking points should not go unchallenged. To do so merely assists Trump in his war on the truth and his efforts to smear national security officials. Republicans would like to bury an already-completed inspector general’s report that found Strzok and Page did not influence the investigation.

The courts are doing their part. House Democrats are doing their part. Now, the media need to exercise the same diligence in calling out Trump’s lies. Instead of learning from the mistakes of 2016 — when Trump was allowed to spew his racism and falsehoods at length on live TV coverage of rallies — the media risk a repeat by simply recycling his slurs and lies. Do better, please.

Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020?

There have been many post mortems of the 2016 presidential election, some of which have been, in my view wrong - especially those who down played racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters - and some that looked at the irresponsible coverage cranked out by far too many in the media, many driven by laziness or idiotic false equivalency.  When one candidate lies repeatedly while the opponent  has science and fact based positions, a responsible journalist doesn't treat them the same and should not allow the lies to go unchallenged and unexposed. Yet we saw that again and again in 2016 - and again in 2018 during the midterms - where Trump and GOP lies were treated as if they were true and were reported as if they had equal merit with legitimate policies and positions. The other failing was the constant reporting on Trump's efforts to draw attention and cause media circuses to distract when negative stories were surfacing.  Something Trump is doing at the moment as the release of the Mueller report nears.  Sadly, many in the media seemingly have learned nothing.  A piece in the New York Times I bookmarked in January lays out how critical it is for the responsible media (which excludes Fox News) not to repeat the same mistakes.  Here are highlights:

“Pocahontas” won’t be lonely for long. As other Democrats join Elizabeth Warren in the contest for the party’s presidential nomination, President Trump will assign them their own nicknames, different from hers but just as derisive. There’s no doubt.

But how much heed will we in the media pay to this stupidity? Will we sprint to Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker or Mike Bloomberg for a reaction to what Trump just called one of them and then rush back to him for his response to that response? Or will we note Trump’s latest nonsense only briefly and pivot to matters more consequential?

That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency. There were plenty.

With the dawn of 2019 and the acceleration of potential Democratic candidates’ preparations for presidential bids, we have a chance to do things differently than we did the last time around — to redeem ourselves.

Our success or failure will affect our stature at a time of rickety public trust in us. It will raise or lower the temperature of civic discourse, which is perilously hot. Above all, it will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.

“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.

And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”

[R]eaders’ news appetite isn’t infinite, so they’re starved of information about the fraudulence of his supposed populism and the toll of his incompetence. And he wins. He doesn’t hate the media, not at all. He uses us.

Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has been analyzing that coverage since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Patterson found that for much of that year, the number of stories about Trump in the country’s most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in polls at the time justified.

And those stories were predominantly positive. . . . In stark contrast, stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative.

Through the first half of 2016, as Trump racked up victories in the Republican primaries, he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals — unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative.

Only during their general-election face-off in the latter half of 2016 did Trump and Clinton confront equivalent tides of naysaying. “On topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone,” Patterson wrote.

Regarding their fitness for office, they were treated identically? In retrospect, that’s madness. It should have been in real time, too.

[W]e fell prey to a habit that can’t be repeated when we compare the new crop of Democratic challengers to Trump and to one another. We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s. If we were going to pile on Trump, we had to pile on Clinton — or, rather, keep piling on her.

“It was wall-to-wall emails,” said Jill Abramson, . . . . “When you compare that to the wrongdoing that has been exposed so far by Robert Mueller,” Abramson told me, “it seems like a small thing.” The considerable muck in Clinton’s background never did, and never could, match the mountain of muck in Trump’s.

Trump also benefited from the media’s excessive faith in polls and its insufficient grasp of what was happening among Americans between the coasts. “The basic flaw of the press coverage, and I count myself in it, was the total assumption that Hillary would win,” she said. “The firepower of the investigative spotlight turned on Trump was a little bit less, because no one thought he would be the president, and that was a grave mistake.”

Regardless, he won’t get any pass along those lines in 2020. There are formal investigations galore into his behavior. The media needs only to track them — and is doing so, raptly.

We need to do something else, too, which is to recognize that Trump now has an actual record in office and to discuss that with as much energy as we do his damned Twitter feed.

We’ll have evidence aplenty to demonstrate that he’s ineffective and incompetent, an approach more likely to have traction than telling voters that he’s outrageous. They already know that.  We just have to wean ourselves from his Twitter expectorations, which are such easy, entertaining fuel for talking — or, rather, exploding — heads.

“It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.

So does anything, really, that tugs us from issues of policy and governance into the realms of theater and sport. That puts a greater premium than ever on avoiding what Joel Benenson called “the horse-race obsession” with who’s ahead, who’s behind, who seems to be breaking into a gallop, who’s showing signs of a limp.

[I]t’s on us to try to interest them [readers and/or viewers] in more and to leaven that concentration of attention with full, vivid introductions to Trump’s alternatives. Dozens of Democrats are poised to volunteer for that role, and when we in the media observe — as I myself have done — that they must possess the requisite vividness to steal some of his spotlight, we’re talking as much about our own prejudices and shortcomings as anything else. We can direct that spotlight where we want. It needn’t always fall on the politician juggling swords or doing back flips.

It’s on us to quit staging “likability” sweepstakes . . . Every four years we say we’ll devote more energy and space to policy and every four years we don’t. But in an environment this polarized and shrill, and at a crossroads this consequential, following through on that vow is more important than ever.

It’s on us not to surrender to tired taxonomies that worsen the country’s divisions and echo Trump’s divisiveness. Black voters, white voters, urban voters and rural voters aren’t driven solely by those designations, and the soul of the country doesn’t belong exclusively to former factory workers in the Rust Belt.

It’s critically important that we find ways to get at what it is people imagine government should be doing and that we really look at what kind of leadership we need.”  Nicknames have nothing to do with it. So let’s not have much to do with them.

Virginia First Lady's "Cotton Situation" Deliberately Misrepresented?

In a prior post, I took a Washington Post story to task for its apparent aim at creating sensation and fanning racial strife in Virginia.  The articles author, a former food editor, seemed to hear only what she wanted from what transpired with an obvious goal of harming the reputation of Pam Northam, First Lady of Virginia. In my view, it is part of a larger effort by some in Virginia's black community, the Legislative Black Caucus and some in the leadership of the Virginia Democrat Party (and, yes, I can name names) to drive Ralph Northam from office through any means so that they can install Justin Fairfax as the state's second black governor.  Now, as the Virginian Pilot is reporting, other legislative pages and their parents are disputing the claims of a state employee and her daughter who seem to be part of this plot to stir racial discord and disparage the governor and his wife.  Shame on the Washington Post - which is now being sued over its similarly botched reporting of the Covington Catholic students - and other news outlets that never bothered to get the full story.  Here highlights from the Pilot:

Virginia first lady Pam Northam did not focus on black students as she handed out raw cotton during several back-to-back presentations on slavery at the Executive Mansion, several participants and their parents said in interviews Friday.

"Nobody was singled out," said state Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, whose teenage son took a tour of the mansion with others serving as pages in  Virginia Genaral Assemnly.

Petersen was reacting to allegations made this week by a state employee whose daughter was in the page program. She alleged in a letter that Northam singled out three black students in a group of about 20 as she handed out cotton bolls and talked about imagining slavery.

In all, 10 pages gave their accounts to The Washington Post, either directly or through their parents, most of whom did not permit their 13- and 14-year-olds to be interviewed because of their age. In four of those cases, the pages were in the same tour group as Walker's daughter. The other six visited the kitchen with different groups on the same day.

In all 10 cases, the pages or their parents insisted that the first lady - a former science teacher - conducted their tours with sensitivity and with no special focus on the black pages.

"She didn't pick out anything or anybody," said Celina Harris, 13, of Chesapeake, a page who was in a different tour group from Walker's daughter.

Celina, who is African-American, said Northam passed around raw cotton bolls and tobacco leaves for the whole tour group to touch. In the case of her tour - one of perhaps four Northam led for pages that day - the first lady handed the cotton to a white page.

"When it came to the cotton part, she handed it to the nearest page and passed it around the room to everybody, and explained that the slaves had to pick cotton, and it was difficult for them because it was sharp," Celina said. "She asked us to feel around the cotton. It wasn't normal cotton balls that we use today. It was hard and prickly. . . . It was interesting. I didn't see any problem with it at all. I don't think learning about our history should be counted as offensive in any way. And it's not like she purposely looked at me while talking about it, or any of the other black pages in the room."

Resisting calls to resign over the blackface controversy, Gov. Northam has pledged to focus on racial reconciliation in his remaining three years in office. But the criticism over the first lady's presentation about the house's slave history - something she has long highlighted - shows what a minefield that territory can be.

"Traditionally, you'd give a tour of the mansion and say, 'Look at this beautiful upholstery.' And now they try to give a full historical tour, 'This was built by slaves,' " Petersen said. "It's kind of like damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you try and incorporate alternative voices, suddenly you're triggering someone. As opposed to if you're breezing through like Better Homes and Gardens and you're being oblivious or privileged."

Sen. William Stanley, Jr., R-Franklin, said that his daughter was in the tour with Walker's and that no one was targeted.

"The first lady's intent was to show the horrors of slavery and to make sure everyone felt the pain they felt in some small measure," Stanley said.

Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said his daughter, also a page, gave a similar account, although she was in a different tour group.

"I have also spoken to witnesses who were present and the *cotton situation* during the Page Governor's Mansion tours did not happen at all the way it's been portrayed in the press," Surovell wrote on Facebook.

Sadly, don't expect the Post and others to retract their false accounts of what transpired. Generating controversy and page views is all that matters. 

The Washington Post Fans Contrived Outrage

Virginia's Executive Mansion which dates from 1813

I'm not sure what's up with the Washington Post, but it seems hell bent on throwing aside serious journalism and focusing instead on sensation, feeding outrage and satiating those looking to find grievance and offense anywhere and everywhere.  Indeed, given the manner that the Post staff have sought to fan the flames of racial friction in Virginia, rather than being a serious source of news, elements of the newspaper seem to be holding up the National Inquirer as their template.  What's caused me to go off? A ridiculous piece in the Washington Post authored by Laura Vozzella who's claim to fame based on her bio is that she was a food writer and sometime political columnist at the Baltimore Sun that takes totally uncalled for cheap shots at Pam Northam, First Lady of Virginia, a woman I have known for close to 12 years.   The story arises out of a tour for legislative pages of the Executive Mansion and the former kitchen located in an separate building (as all kitchens were in Southern homes built in 1813) that has been maintained in its original condition for the purpose of teaching  about the history of the mansion and Virginia, both the good, the bad and the ugly.

In addition to knowing the Northams for years, I have been to the Executive Mansion many times and spent the weekend there back in July, 2018, at which time Pam Northam gave my husband and me a detailed tour of the mansion, the historic kitchen dependency and the grounds - the Governor had given us an abbreviated tour on a prior visit - during which she stressed how she was seeking to have the mansion reflect it's early history for good and for bad, including the presentation in the lady's parlor, the men's smoking room, and the original kitchen which is largely in its 1813 condition. By profession, the Fist Lady of Virginia is an educator and believes knowing and understanding accurate history is important, something I agree with heartily as a history major in college.  The reality is that just because some aspects of history are not pretty or nice, doesn't mean that today's students and youths do not need to know what really happened. 

I cannot help but suspect that Ms. Vozzella has (i) never met the Northams, (ii) has never visited the Executive Mansion, (iii) has never take the First Lady;s guided tour, and (iv) knows nothing of the mansion's history.  Seemingly, all that mattered to Ms. Vozzella (and her editors) was stirring the pot, ginning up controversy, and hopefully promoting her own name.  That's not responsible journalism.  It's yellow journalism and what one would expect from the National Inquirer or Fox News.   The telling lines in the piece which are NOT reflected in the least in its headline is as follows: 

Northam’s office and one other parent of a child who was present said the first lady did not single out the African American students and simply handed out the cotton to a group. . . . she simply handed the cotton to whoever was nearby and wanted everyone to note the sharpness of the stems and leaves on the raw cotton, to imagine how uncomfortable it would’ve been to handle all day.

Is the Post really so desperate for page views that it is endorsing this type of squalid journalism (which of course also regurgitated past slams at Governor Northam)?  If so, I know of one subscription they are about to lose.  On a larger scale, I suspect that pieces like this will have the opposite effect of what Ms. Vozzella intended - other than promoting her own name, of course - which is building support for racial equality and harmony in Virginia going forward.  Tawdry journalism like this will only serve to drive more whites into the Trump/white supremacist camp.  Shame on Ms. Vozzella and shame on her editors.

Pam Northam and the 19th century original kitchen to the Executive Mansion.

An Open Letter to Trump From the US Press Corps

Sadly, the American media has been failing in its duty to expose lies and untruths for well over a decade and a half.  The consequences have been horrific: the Iraq War that set the stage for ISIS, Republican obstructionism for the entire presidency of Barack Obama, and now the election of Donald Trump, a vulgar, narcissistic bully who my late maternal grandmother would have deemed to be white trash with money, as president of the United States.  Now, faced with continued attacks by Trump and his allies in the fake news industry - think Fox News and Breitbart for starters - the US Press Corps has issued an open letter to Trump and his fellow would be fascists.  The letter sounds great and it would be wonderful if the press delivered on its threats to Trump.  Given the press' past failings, I will not be holding my breath.  Here are excerpts:

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT ELECT:

In these final days before your inauguration, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how we see the relationship between your administration and the American press corps.

It will come as no surprise to you that we see the relationship as strained. Reports over the last few days that your press secretary is considering pulling news media offices out of the White House are the latest in a pattern of behavior that has persisted throughout the campaign: You’ve banned news organizations from covering you. You’ve taken to Twitter to taunt and threaten individual reporters and encouraged your supporters to do the same. You’ve advocated for looser libel laws and threatened numerous lawsuits of your own, none of which has materialized. You’ve avoided the press when you could and flouted the norms of pool reporting and regular press conferences. You’ve ridiculed a reporter who wrote something you didn’t like because he has a disability.

All of this, of course, is your choice and, in a way, your right. While the Constitution protects the freedom of the press, it doesn’t dictate how the president must honor that; regular press conferences aren’t enshrined in the document.

But while you have every right to decide your ground rules for engaging with the press, we have some, too. It is, after all, our airtime and column inches that you are seeking to influence. We, not you, decide how best to serve our readers, listeners, and viewers. So think of what follows as a backgrounder on what to expect from us over the next four years. 

Access is preferable, but not critical. You may decide that giving reporters access to your administration has no upside. We think that would be a mistake on your part, but again, it’s your choice. We are very good at finding alternative ways to get information; indeed, some of the best reporting during the campaign came from news organizations that were banned from your rallies.

Off the record and other ground rules are ours—not yours—to set. We may agree to speak to some of your officials off the record, or we may not. We may attend background briefings or off-the-record social events, or we may skip them. That’s our choice. If you think reporters who don’t agree to the rules, and are shut out, won’t get the story, see above.

We decide how much airtime to give your spokespeople and surrogates. We will strive to get your point of view across, even if you seek to shut us out. But that does not mean we are required to turn our airwaves or column inches over to people who repeatedly distort or bend the truth. We will call them out when they do, and we reserve the right, in the most egregious cases, to ban them from our outlets.

We believe there is an objective truth, and we will hold you to that. When you or your surrogates say or tweet something that is demonstrably wrong, we will say so, repeatedly. Facts are what we do, and we have no obligation to repeat false assertions

We’ll obsess over the details of government. You and your staff sit in the White House, but the American government is a sprawling thing. We will fan reporters out across the government, embed them in your agencies, source up those bureaucrats. The result will be that while you may seek to control what comes out of the West Wing, we’ll have the upper hand in covering how your policies are carried out.

We will set higher standards for ourselves than ever before. We credit you with highlighting serious and widespread distrust in the media across the political spectrum. Your campaign tapped into that, and it was a bracing wake-up call for us. We have to regain that trust. And we’ll do it through accurate, fearless reporting, by acknowledging our errors and abiding by the most stringent ethical standards we set for ourselves.

We’re going to work together. You have tried to divide us and use reporters’ deep competitive streaks to cause family fights. Those days are ending. We now recognize that the challenge of covering you requires that we cooperate and help one another whenever possible. So, when you shout down or ignore a reporter at a press conference who has said something you don’t like, you’re going to face a unified front. 

We’re playing the long game. Best-case scenario, you’re going to be in this job for eight years. We’ve been around since the founding of the republic, and our role in this great democracy has been ratified and reinforced again and again and again. You have forced us to rethink the most fundamental questions about who we are and what we are here for. For that we are most grateful.  Enjoy your inauguration.

The irony is that, had the press corps (and the mainstream cable news networks) followed these standards from the first day Trump announced his candidacy, he would not have won the 2016 presidential election.  Indeed, he would not have won the GOP primary.  I hope the press corp does what it claims it will do going forward.  It has much to atone for and will likely be judged most harshly by future historians.  With freedom of the press likely to soon be at risk, just maybe these media types will at last do their jobs.

Media Lameness, a Gullible Public, and GOP Political Whores Enable Russian Propaganda

Yes, I view Donald Trump as a dangerous, foul and unprincipled individual.  The same holds for his buddy, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB thug who appears to have encouraged the murder of his political opponents, assuming he didn't order the murders himself.   Yet despite the un-savoriness of both men, one is president elect of the United States and the other seems to have actively worked to throw the election to Trump.  How did this happen?  A piece in Salon suggests that Russian covert action was added and abetted right here in America by a lazy and largely irresponsible media - the same folks now trying to normalize the Trump nightmare - ignorant and gullible voters (mostly Trump voters) and unprincipled Republicans only too happy to sell their soles to Trump and, by extension to Putin.  Here are article excerpts:

Much attention has been paid in the past month to the role that fake news — a combination of conspiracy theories from places like Infowars and stories from hoax websites — influenced the course of the U.S. election, helping Donald Trump win the presidency. But over the weekend, we were reminded that sometimes effective propaganda can be misleading without being fake at all.

The Russian government, according to the CIA, pulled off an astonishing bit of psy-ops on the American electorate without ever technically lying to anyone. CIA agents reportedly presented a formal analysis to lawmakers last week, arguing that the Russian government hacked the email accounts of Democratic Party leaders and then used WikiLeaks to strategically release the emails, sowing conspiracy theories and paranoia to dampen voter turnout for Clinton.

Assuming this was the Russians, their strategy worked because too many power players in the American political ecosystem were too short-sighted, lazy and selfish to look past their own immediate self-interest and consider the big picture. What the Russian email hack ended up doing was illustrating the various weaknesses in our political systems and culture, weaknesses that Trump, likely with Vladimir Putin’s assistance, was able to exploit to claw his way into the White House.

Here’s a short list of the various political weaknesses that Russian hackers were able to take advantage of.

Mainstream media outlets are more interested in appearing fair than actually being fair. Trump is so corrupt that he coughs up more genuine scandals before breakfast than most dirty politicians can come up with in a lifetime. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, is a clean politician, which we know because she’s been under some kind of dogged investigation for the better part of three decades, without a speck of real dirt coming up on her.

But to report this basic truth — that one candidate was irredeemably corrupt and the other was not — would have drawn accusations from the right that the media was in the tank for Clinton. So, in order to appear fair, mainstream media outlets embraced a policy of being incredibly unfair to Clinton, blowing every non-scandal out of proportion.

WikiLeaks and its Russian buddies were able to exploit this media bias towards “balance” over truth by slowly releasing emails regarding the Clinton Foundation, Democratic National Committee strategy, and other hot-button topics.

Most people don’t really read the news, but just glean general themes from headlines and cable TV. Those who actually bothered to read the stories under the blaring headlines about the email leaks would generally find that the headlines were wildly misleading. As Matthew Yglesias at Vox wrote, one hacked email chain “doesn’t raise the question of whether Clinton Foundation staff got special access to passports from the State Department. It answers the question. They didn’t, as the story says.”

Only 31 percent of the people who read online articles, going by statistical averages, read more than a few paragraphs. But the big reveal — that there’s no scandal — usually came well into an article, after the part where most readers had disengaged.

Most Republican politicians put party before country. One of the scariest revelations in the Washington Post piece about the CIA report was that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a secret meeting between Democratic and Republican leaders, “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.”

The threat, and it was a threat, seems like it was effective, because the White House decided against the release. But the whole thing is a neat distillation of the entire Republican attitude towards any Trump-based corruption: They’re happy to look the other way as Trump and his supporters plunder the country, spread racism and bigotry and undermine our democracy, so long as they get a crack at destroying Social Security and Medicare.

The Betrayal of Democracy by "Moderate" Conservatives

I suspect that history will blame much of the mainstream media for enabling the rise of Donald Trump and the extremism that has devoured the Republican Party.  During the Obama presidency, "moderate" conservatives who never did anything to support or defend the legitimacy of America's first black president did nothing to condemn or criticize the growing extremism and out right racism, religious fanaticism, and bigotry of the Republican Party.  Only when it was too late did the likes of David Brooks, Michael Gerson and a host of others begin a rear guard effort to stop Trump.  But it was too little and much too late.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this failure and targets Brooks in particular although the criticism applies to many who foolishly see themselves as "moderates".  Here are highlights:

Of all the failures that have led to the historical disaster of the Trump presidency, perhaps the least-remarked-upon is the abdication of responsibility of the American center. Those of us with moderate inclinations need an effective center as a brake against extremism. When one party veers too far from the center, the center joins the opposing party, until the extreme one can be coaxed back into the mainstream. David Brooks calls for a rejuvenation of the center under the Trump presidency. But Brooks himself is the perfect encapsulation of why the center has proven so hapless, allowing itself to enable extremism rather than prevent it.

The premise of Brooks’s column is that there needs to be space “between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.” This is a terrible way to conceptualize the political map. First, it distorts the ideas of the two sides, equating a small-d democrat like Sanders (who merely proposes more regulation, taxes, and spending) with Trump, who — as Brooks concedes — is authoritarian. And second, it distorts their power. Sanders remains a left-wing outlier among his party, while Trump is the dominant force within his.

Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.

If Obama offered a deal to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody was willing to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements. If Obama favored education reform, an infrastructure bank, and more high-skill immigration, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody favored those things. 

The effect of all this commentary was not to empower the moderate ideas Brooks favored, but to disempower them. Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand. The well-documented reality that the parties were undergoing asymmetric polarization was one they refused to accept, because their jobs was to be bipartisan, and it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon not understanding it.

The centrists could have played a role in braking the growing extremism of the Republican Party. It would have meant telling the country that there was now one moderate, governing party and one extremist faction, and parking themselves with the moderate party until such time as the dynamic changed. They could not do it. If there’s not much of a center left to stop Trump from trampling democratic norms, it is because the centrists abdicated their responsibility and destroyed themselves.

Is the Media Putting Lipstick on the Pig, Donald Trump?

As noted previously, much of the main stream media, after normalizing Donald trump's toxic, bigotry filled campaign and constantly conveying false equivalency between trump and Hillary Clinton's "scandals", is now acting as if Trump's election and transition are normal and not an affront to decency.  I book marked a piece in The Daily Beast a while back that deserves note.  The bottom line message?  That the media and pundits alike need to stop putting lipstick on the foul demagogue known as Donald Trump.  Here are article excerpts:

What is happening in America right now is not normal.

It is not normal that a presidential candidate with no prior government or military experience, who unambiguously and repeatedly vowed to violate the Constitution should he be elected president, will soon become commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces.

It is not normal that an individual helming a vast family business empire with holdings domestic and international will soon be in a position to use the instruments of the world’s most powerful government to enrich himself and his kin.

It is not normal that the preferred candidate of conspiracy theoristslike radio host Alex Jones will soon have access to the nation’s top secrets. 

And yet here we are being told to act like all of this is normal. That the voters who willed this unmitigated disaster into being have legitimate grievances and that their collective decision must be respected. While the democratic expression of the American people should of course be respected, that does not make it respectable. To use an analogy to which our insult-strewing president-elect can relate: I refuse to put lipstick on this pig.

We’re hearing a lot these days about how this election result represents a “backlash” to left-wing political correctness gone berserk. There’s no question that many self-described liberals patronize ex-urban and rural Americans. But the call for empathy goes both ways. If it were African-Americans overwhelmingly voting for a black demagogue who bragged about “grabbin’ pussy” (imagine that!), called upon his followers to assassinate his opponent, and asked the Russians to hack her email, would we be treating this hypothetical phenomenon with even one-tenth the amount of sympathy and understanding we’re being asked to confer upon Trump voters?

To comprehend what the electorate has just done, consider that 63 percent of Americans believe Donald Trump lacks the temperament to be president, yet 20 percent of those people voted for him anyway. Figures such as this leave one asking: What sort of man would Trump have to be for his supporters—and those rationalizing their decision as deriving from anything other than ignorance, racism, and misogyny—to conclude that he is not fit to serve as president of the United States?

Would he have to be a sexual predator? A sociopath? A mountebank? What if he were the willing instrument of a subversion operation mounted by a hostile foreign power?  Because all of those things are true of the man who will be swearing the oath of office on Jan. 20.
 “Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress,” 

Rahn is right about the media’s piss-poor predictive capacities. But the normative assessment about what last week’s election result forebodes is another story entirely. Rahn and many others seem to think it justified that people who feel condescended to by liberal elites would respond to this condescension by putting a demagogic clown in the White House (whereas I’m inclined to believe such spiteful behavior confirms the condescension).

Here’s the thing: Hillary Clinton was without question a “deeply flawed candidate,” as Rahn writes. The economy is not working as well as it should be for a large number of Americans. Our society is becoming increasingly stratified in all sorts of discomfiting ways. All of these things are true. And yet none of them justifies a vote for Donald Trump.

The temptation to do so, to normalize the very disturbing things that Trump’s election portends about our democracy and the fate of the world as we know it, is entirely understandable. It’s comforting to tell ourselves that, Trump’s eccentricities aside, everything will turn out OK in the end; that American democracy is resilient and has endured far worse events.

The paradigmatic example of this reasoning’s erroneousness is Nazi Germany, where a movement that nearly destroyed Western civilization came to power democratically in one of the world’s most advanced societies. More recently, a large majority of Venezuelans voted into power Hugo Chavez, and now they’re rioting over toilet paper. Most people used to believe the Earth was flat. I have no doubt that within 40 years—if Trump doesn’t launch the Third World War he warned Clinton would plunge us into—we’ll look back on those who voted for him as the equivalent of flat-earthers.

[E]ven in the best-case scenario, where he abjures the behavior and ideas that have characterized him for 70 years and governs as some sort of latter-day Rockefeller Republican, Trump would still have irreparably poisoned our democratic culture by moving it into a post-modern realm where words and actions have no meaning. Under his reign, America risks become the sort of place where, to cite the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s brilliant book about contemporary Russia, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

Well said.  Trump and those who voted for him are a toxic evil.  We all need to be honest about this reality and stop being apologists for the indefensible.

Farewell, America - The Day the Republic Died

I continue to fell as if someone has died in the wake of Tuesday's election results.  I feel for the first time in a long time the depths of depression reaching out and taking hold of me.   Something did die on Tuesday: the American republic and any continuing ability to pretend that overall America still had some latent goodness.  Hate and bigotry and extremism prevailed and now, those of us who have not drunk the Trump Kool-Aid will finding ourselves waking each day with a sense of dread and impending doom. For gays and many other minorities the fear will be that each day will carry the question "is this the day our rights are curtailed and/or discrimination against us legalized?"  More frightening, there will be the daily fear that our new fuhrer may rashly bring on some nuclear holocaust in his quest to satiate his unquenchable ego?  A piece at Moyers & Company describes my feelings and fears.  Here are lengthy excerpts:

America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.

We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. . . . They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. . . . Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.

What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. 

[T]he disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.

Terrifyingly, much of the mainstream media is already normalizing Trump through its bloviating about the peaceful transition of power while utterly ignoring the nightmare to come, the incompetence and extremism of  Transition team or the goal of utterly destroying the social safety net.    I am truly in mourning.  America has died.