PRESS RUN: Recent Episodes
Eric Boehlert
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.
Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.
The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)
Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.
Axios contorted itself by claiming Biden’s promise to add “millions” of new jobs (which he’s already accomplished), was being threatened because there aren’t enough workers, because so few people are out of work— or something.
The home-run report itself was often depicted as a mixed bag. These were some of the glass-half-empty headlines that appeared in the wake of the latest runaway numbers:
• “America’s Job Market Is On Fire. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel Like It” (CNN)
• “Booming Job Growth Is a Double-Edged Sword For Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Why a Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Unemployment Hits Pandemic Low in March, But Uncertainty Looms Ahead” (Washington Post)
• “Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” (Washington Post)
Totally normal journalism, right? The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.
Note that the above headlines about the sour mood prevailing despite the great jobs, and how uncertainty looms, came from the Post, the same outlet that slotted the March jobs report into 87th placed on its website on Friday.
That afternoon readers on the daily’s homepage had to scroll down 87 headlines before they saw the first reference to the great economic news. Among the headlines that ran higher on the Post site that afternoon were, "What’s The Best Way to Share My Old Home Videos?" and "The Duke-North Carolina Rivalry, By the Numbers."
On-air, CNN also downplayed the jobs report, according to Dean Baker, senior economist for Center for Economic and Policy Research. “CNN’s coverage of the report quickly turned to inflation,” he wrote. “In its more general coverage of the economy, the jobs report — which tells us about the employment and earnings situation for more than 160 million people — was barely a blip.”
Sunday’s “Meet the Press” round table featured two segments with assembled pundits. One focused on how immigration might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms, the other on how Trump might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms. As usual, Biden’s historic economic record was ignored.
That’s why, according to a recent poll, 37 percent of Americans think the economy lost jobs over the last year, when it’s gained 7 million. (Just 28 percent of people know jobs were up.)
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
Biden is facing not just one organized opposition in the form of the GOP, but another in the form of the Beltway press corps.
Last week, they hit Biden with 14 separate questions at a press briefing over the supposed “gaffe” he made, expressing his moral outrage over the mass killings Russian President Vladimir Putn has unleashed in Ukraine. So focused on trying to trip up Biden, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.
And remember all winter how the press treated Covid as the most important “crisis” Biden faced and hung the pandemic around his neck? Today, the topic has vanished, the press has given the White House no credit for steering the country back to normalcy, and instead has latched onto gas prices as being a defining issue under Biden. The buried Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory.
The Beltway press needs to take its thumb off the Biden scale.
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
Who’s bankrolling these lawsuits? That’s my question after watching yet another Republican quickly lose a suit claiming media defamation.
From Reuters; “Trump Ally Devin Nunes Loses Washington Post Defamation Appeal”:
A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected former congressman Devin Nunes' effort to revive a $250 million lawsuit accusing the Washington Post of defamation for implying that he lied to former President Donald Trump, a close ally.
In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., said Nunes "does not point to a single statement" that was false or defamatory on its face in the February 2020 article about Russia's desire for Trump to win a second White House term.
🌶 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Black Summer”
It’s been 16 years since LA’s RHCP recorded with the band’s early ‘90’s guitarist John Frusciante. The results, thanks to his signature slide work, sound like the clock never stopped. Especially when the song takes flight at the 1:35 mark.
It's been a long time since I made a new friendWaitin' on another black summer to endIt's been a long time and you never know whenWaitin' on another black summer to end
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Eagerly deploying newsroom resources to the perpetually overblown Hunter Biden story — just as Trump and Fox News kick off a new smear campaign — CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post gladly did the GOP’s bidding this week. Signing off on the idea that the Hunter Biden story remains a scandal simply because Republicans say so, the press has adopted a Whitewater-like obsession with the perpetual dead-end story.
One White House reporter from CBS News, doing his best Fox News impression, asked if President Joe Biden would take the extraordinary step of pardoning Hunter — who is not accused of any crime.
Producing remarkably similar articles that were published nearly simultaneously this week, the CNN.com, Journal, and Post efforts all swung and missed. On paper, there’s no reason why they would pick the exact same moment to churn out nearly 7,000 words of Biden reporting. Especially since none of the investigations dug up any startling revelations about his business dealings from the previous decade.
The copycat nature of the reports raises questions about who the unnamed sources for these stories were, and if there was a coordinated effort by Republican operatives to push simultaneous Hunter updates.
It’s also telling that the hand-delivered leaks arrived the same time we’re learning even more about the Trump White House’s criminality. Specifically, the administration’s clear lawbreaking surrounding the January 6th coup attempt.
This was the big ah-ha moment from the Post piece: “The new documents illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.”
And?
The press can’t provide an answer to the “and” — they can’t find anything illegal or shocking — so they pretend that the business deals themselves are newsworthy and that Hunter’s career requires years of media digging. Meanwhile, the recent revelation about a Supreme Court Justice’s wife strategizing with the Trump White House to overturn an election has evaporated from most newsrooms in less than one week.
After years of media focus there’s nothing to suggest Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings or profited from them in any way, or that the senior Biden ever did anything remotely unethical in connection with Hunter’s career. The son has never run for office, never served in the government, never lobbied to change U.S. policy, and never acted as an advisor to his father in any way.
The fact is, he remains under investigation for matters related to tax payments and his foreign work, and there is a chance he could be indicted. Although, as the New York Times recently reported, Biden recently paid off “a significant tax liability,” which “could make it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence for tax-related offenses.”
It’s a relatively small stakes tax case that has produced a ridiculous amount of breathless Beltway coverage, much to the delight of the GOP. Context: 11 Trump associates who worked directly with the president have been indicted on criminal charges.
The press relentlessly pursues the Hunter story because they insist there’s the appearance of conflict of interest given the family connections. But Hunter began making overseas energy deals just as his father was leaving office in 2016 after eight years serving with President Barack Obama. If Hunter wanted to cash in on his father’s vice presidency, why did he wait until the end of his father’s vice presidency?
Still, the media fixation continues.
Look at the Post’s headline, “Inside Hunter Biden’s Multimillion-Dollar Deals With a Chinese Energy Company.” Why the assumption that there’s a need to delve “inside”? There’s no reason why a private citizen’s deals with a Chinese energy company should be considered newsworthy five years after the fact. It’s a detailed Post article about a short-lived business venture Biden had between 2017 and 2018 — what’s the point?
The paper makes no attempt to explain why any of this is important, and why the paper assigned three reporters to produce an exhaustive overview. The same was true of the media’s two-year obsession over Hillary Clinton’s emails. My guess is the Hunter enterprise is to show the Post, and the rest of the press, can be ‘tough on Democrats,’ and to perpetuate a poisonous brand of Both Sides journalism.
If the paper were honest with readers, it would tell them it spent a ton of time researching Hunter Biden’s dealings — because unhinged Republicans claim the “Deep State” is behind it all — and could not find anything newsworthy. But that’s not how the Beltway press treats Democrats (see: Whitewater), so the Post did its best to justify the GOP-sponsored fishing expedition. The article included a baffling, multi-paragraph examination of a dispute Hunter once had with an office building landlord, complete with angry emails about duplicate keys being made.
Other tell-tale signs of a journalism flop were sprinkled throughout the three articles. Buried deep down, they often included awkward concessions:
• “The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions”
• “Hunter Biden has not been charged with any crimes and has denied any wrongdoing. His father, President Joe Biden is not being investigated as part of the probe of his son’s business activities,” (CNN)
• “The progress prosecutors have made doesn’t mean they will ultimately bring charges.” (Journal)
“I’m so glad our colleagues are still doing strong reporting on this story,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins cheered last week. “Hunter Biden’s scummy business dealings shouldn’t be swept under the rug any more than anyone else’s.”
Swept under the rug? Good grief. Since 2017, “Hunter Biden” has appeared in more than 800 articles and columns published by the Times, according to Nexis.
The media’s Hunter Biden charade is becoming preposterous.
(Photo: Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
CBS News’ hiring of a former Trump lackey just keeps getting worse for the network.
From the Washington Post’s “Turmoil at CBS News Over Trump aide Mick Mulvaney’s Punditry Gig”:
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
🇨🇦 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Arcade Fire, “The Lighting I, II ”
The pride of Montreal, Arcade Fire and their cast of communal band members return with their energetic stew of rock. The new album sounds like a welcome return to the band’s boisterous roots.
From Pitchfork’s praise: “There’s a sense that after Arcade Fire steered away from shout-choruses and earnest sing-a-longs—those musty relics of aughts indie rock—they’ve found their way back home, sounding fearless and genuine once again.”
Fourth place anthem playing tonightOn a broken radioThought we reached the mountaintopBut now we just feel so lowThe sky is breaking open, we keep hopingIn the distance, we'll see a glowLightning, light our way'Til the black sky turns back to indigo
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via Apple Music.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Most of President Joe Biden’s historic foreign policy speech given over the weekend was washed away by the press. For days, journalists fixated not on how the Poland address marked a fundamental change in the West’s relationship with Russia, but on a nine-word ad-lib that Biden added to the text, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” in reference to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Journalists rushed in to claim the “gaffe” had produced “shock waves” around the world. (It did not.)
Swinging into theater criticism mode and searching for a conflict narrative, the press obsessed over the semantics story, portraying Biden as “undisciplined” and creating a monster “distraction” — an “unforced error” — as the war in Ukraine drags on.
Biden doubled down, saying that he was expressing his “moral outrage” over the mass killing that Putin had unleashed. He confirmed his comment came from the heart and did not represent a policy change for the U.S., which is not trying to change the regime in Moscow.
Still, journalists refused to drop the weird gotcha coverage. They hit Biden on Monday with 14 separate questions at a press briefing (“It sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia”), pretending the story was still shrouded in confusion. Meanwhile, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.
The media theatrics were especially galling since the previous president spent four years struggling to string together coherent sentences, garbling his way through a presidency.
Famous for being a habitual liar, as well as boasting often impossible-to-follow syntax that left people scratching their heads trying to make sense of his oddball pronouncements, Trump obliterated the idea that an occasional gaffe ought to define a politician, and the press stopped caring about his nonstop missteps. (To this day, Trump thinks "stealth" fighter planes are invisible to the human eye.)
Biden’s nine-word comment about Putin? That was Katie bar the door for the media — “gaffe” was mentioned on cable news over 100 times with regards to the Biden-Putin story, according to TVeyes.
It certainly appears the breathless pursuit of “gaffes” is a sport the press plays only with Democrats. “You will notice that the use of "gaffe" almost disappeared during Trump's term as president because most of what he said was a gaffe— or would have been under a previous president,” noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.
That, despite the fact Trump once called Apple CEO Tim Cook Tim Apple, referred to 9/11 as 7/11, claimed noise from windmills causes cancer, and told a crowd that “the kidney has a very special place in the heart.”
Trump spent years slurring his words and rambling like a madman. That look-away media coverage continues today. Over the same weekend that Biden was undressed by the media for his get-tough Putin ad-lib, Trump praised the Russian dictator. The D.C. “gaffe” police though, wrote no tickets in response.
How many news articles and television reports did you see in 2020 about Trump "gaffes" and how they might stand in the way of his re-election bid? Probably the same number as I did, which was basically zero. Even though Trump was urging people to inject bleach into their veins.
To this credit, CNN’s Don Lemon this week, while reporting from Ukraine, pushed back on the Beltway media’s pointless “gaff” pursuit. “Quite honestly, I think this is a media manufactured story,” he stressed, dismissing the idea that Biden had endorsed the idea of removing Putin from power:
I think that we need to take a step back and stop trying to make it into something that it is not. It is important I think that the -- this is what people want to hear from the president. This is the stance that the people of America, especially the people of Ukraine, want the leader of the free world to have, to be strong. And to say exactly what Vladimir Putin should not be doing.
The press for years has been overly interested in Biden “gaffe” coverage. The president famously grew up with a severe stutter, which he overcame but sometimes finds himself at a temporary loss for words. The press likes to lean into that to generate news, and especially during the 2020 campaign. One Hill headline read, “Do Biden's Gaffes Make Him Unelectable?” Mediaite labeled it an "insane gaffe" when Biden at a rally mistakenly referred to Super Tuesday as Super Thursday, before quickly catching his mistake. That doesn't seem "insane."
Around the same time, Vanity Fair was wringing its hands over the Democrat’s miscues: “The rake-stepping won’t stop, and the attacks won’t go away, raising the question of whether there will come a tipping point for Biden.”
Biden ended up getting more votes for president than any candidate in U.S. history, confirming that voters don’t care about Democratic “gaffes.”
(Photo: Getting Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
CBS just hired Trump’s former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as an “impartial” contributor to analyze economics. Substack newsletter author Christopher Ingraham explains all that’s wrong with the move.
From his piece, “CBS News Hires a Former Trump Official, Now a Lobbyist for the Wealthy and Powerful, to Offer Impartial News Analysis”:
The network has plenty of business journalists on staff, and they could easily call up any one of hundreds of academics or tax experts to offer something like real independent analysis of the Biden proposal. Instead, they went with a known liar who proudly identifies as a “right wing nutjob” and who is directly implicated in some of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. And [CBS] didn’t disclose any of it!
🧏♀️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Emilia Jones, “Both Sides Now”
I haven’t yet seen the Academy Award-winning movie “CODA,” but I have become transfixed by the movie’s simple, piano-only cover version of Joni Mitchell’s 1969 classic.
Performed by actress Emilia Jones, who also signs the song to her deaf parents during the movie’s crucial scene, the aching song remains a vessel of love and aspiration.
A must-watch clip.
Tears and fears and feeling proudTo say, "I love you" right out loudDreams and schemes and circus crowdsI've looked at life that way
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via Apple Music.
Subscribe at pressrun.media
Please consider subscribing for $6 a month to support fearless media commentary. Thanks!
Stay healthy.
Be kind.
The Sunday morning talk shows sprinted into “gaffe” patrol mode after President Joe Biden made a 9-word, ad-libbed comment in Poland over the weekend about how Vladimir Putin should not be allowed to stay in power in Russia.
On “Meet the Press,” USA Today’s Susan Page emphasized Biden’s comment was “distracting” and “undisciplined.” The assembled pundits spent nearly ten minutes discussion the story, along with a new NBC poll that was bad news for Biden. (Inflation!)
What was mostly ignored by the round table was the blockbuster story about Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, wife of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She had been texting unhinged QAnon-like messages to Trump’s chief of staff after the 2020 election, strategizing and urging that Biden’s victory be overturned, saving America from “the end of Liberty.” The NBC pundits on Sunday spent 45 seconds discussing that story.
Like when Trump was recently caught smuggling boxes of top-secret documents out of the White House, the Beltway press is treating Ginni Thomas’ seditious assault on democracy as a middling story; one that will likely receive little or no new coverage in coming days.
The revelation that Thomas’ plugged-in wife who enjoyed easy access to the Trump White House hoped that “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators … will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition,” came just after Republican Senators used QAnon signaling during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. She was smeared as a child pornography apologist.
“Meet the Press” was hardly alone in sleepwalking past the Ginni Thomas story, which represents another GOP direct assault on democracy and election integrity. “ABC This Week”s’ round table spent ten minutes dissecting Biden’s Putin “gaffe,” and just three minutes acknowledging the Supreme Court’s stunning setback in terms of its reputation for fairness. (The Court’s already at its lowest standing ever.)
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has yet to run a single page-one piece on the Thomas story and how she accused the “Left” of “attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” and complained about being “disgusted” with Vice President Mike Pence for approving the 2020 election results.
CNN announced Biden’s overseas Putin comment had set off “shock waves.” But I can find no CNN coverage that suggest the same thing occurred when we learned about Ginni Thomas’ relentless, high-level push to overturn the election (a “fight of good versus evil”) while Judge Thomas was the only justice who voted against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Thomas’ lone, radical dissent on another 2020 election case openly promoted Trump lies about mail-in ballots. Lies that sound a lot like Ginni’s.
Cable news in general has been slow walking the story. Look at how much TV attention the Thomas controversy received compared to how many hours this month were showered on the issue of rising gas prices in the U.S.
During the week of March 6-12, “gas” was mentioned 1,170 times on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, according to TVeyes. By comparison, three days after the Clarence Thomas story broke, he was mentioned just over 100 times on cable news. Contrast: Fox mentioned “gas” 580 times in that one week, “Clarence Thomas” just 14 times in the three days.
The press refuses to treat sledgehammer attacks on U.S. democracy as an all-hands-on-deck news story. Appearing on MSNBC when the story of Trump stealing top-secret documents broke, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker stressed the brazen theft might not raise to the level of being “nefarious” because Trump wasn’t a “traditional” president and because his aides were in a “frenzied” state during the month of January 2021.
Elite journalists are not comfortable depicting Trump’s GOP as a party at war with democracy. That’s too extreme of a narrative for the Beltway media, which prefers to cover the GOP as a mainstream outlet.
This country has been facing a looming and open threat for more than a year now, ever since September 2020, when Trump announced he would not abide by the election results if he lost. "Trump Won't Commit to Peaceful Transfer of Power" should have been the headline that ran on the front page of every newspaper in America. It didn’t run on any — the New York Times played that story on page 15. None of the network newscasts reported on Trump's stunning defiance in real time. (The Times today has done a better job with the Thomas story, in terms of giving it deserved attention.)
News organizations still see themselves primarily as witnesses in the anti-democracy drama, paid to document the beating it’s taking at the hands of radical Republicans who try to dismantle the concept of free and fair elections in America.
“The Thomases are a team. When I was a Heritage intern as a young conservative, Ginni brought in Clarence to visit with the interns. The idea that there’s some wall of separation btw their respective, uh, professional activities is willful naivety,” tweeted Matthew Sitman. He’s a co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which spotlights the conservative movement. “One of the most important tasks of our time is to see extremely obvious things and not pretend they’re anything other than they are because our brains’ have been poisoned by the idea that telling the truth and holding corrupt, lawless actors accountable is “partisan.”
The press isn’t all that interested in telling the obvious truth about Ginni and Clarence Thomas.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Nothing like finding your conscience after cashing Rupert Murdoch’s paychecks for two decades.
From the New York Times’ “Chris Wallace Says Life at Fox News Became ‘Unsustainable’”:
A down-the-middle outlier at Fox News who often confounded conservatives by contradicting the network’s right-wing stars, Mr. Wallace was also one of the channel’s fiercest defenders, disappointing liberals who hoped he might denounce colleagues like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
But in December, Mr. Wallace, 74, issued a final verdict: He was done. In a surprise move, he declined to renew his contract as host of “Fox News Sunday” and jumped to archrival CNN. His daily interview show — “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” — starts Tuesday on the new CNN+ streaming service.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Colin Hay, “When Does the End Begin?”
He’ll be forever known as the former lead singer of Men at Work, that quirky 80’s Aussie rock band. But Hay has established himself over the decades as a prized singer-songwriter, with deft touch for detail and melody. The melancholy “When Does the End Begin” comes from his new, excellent album, Now and Evermore.
There's a falling emptiness that I can't fillI can't make it all better with my wicked willIt's a mystery what's lying up around the bendBut we've come this far, we have to see the end
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via Apple Music.
Subscribe at pressrun.media
Please consider subscribing for $6 a month to support fearless media commentary. Thanks!
Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Hours after Trump took the extraordinary step of un-endorsing a Republican in the Alabama primary for the U.S. Senate race, the candidate responded. He claimed Trump had repeatedly pressured him, in 2022, to “rescind” the last election and to help illegally install the Republican back in the White House.
The stunning and bitter feud is just the latest that Trump has detonated within the GOP. A one-man wrecking crew who’s committed to sowing discord throughout the Republican Party, Trump seems to take glee in pitting it against itself as he insists his personal grievances about the “stolen” election be the GOP’s most pressing electoral issue.
Dems in Disarray has been a Beltway media go-to narrative for years. Why won’t they apply it to today’s comically fractured GOP?
Trump views the unfolding primary season not as a way for the party to position itself for midterm contests against Democrats, but as a chance to exact revenge on Republicans whom he considers to be insufficiently loyal to Mar-a-Lago.
Lashing out at the previously-endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks in Alabama, Trump insisted the withdrawal was because Brooks had recently told a radio show host it’s best for the GOP to look forward, not back. The implication is that Trump will now find a primary candidate in Alabama who is fixated on Trump’s win being “stolen” and he’ll support that person. But there is no such candidate in the race. There are two other leading players besides Brooks and neither seem interested in running on Trump’s laundry list of 2020 grudges and slights.
Trump’s throwing a tantrum and the GOP has to clean up the mess. Again. It didn’t help that Brooks, a right-winger who rode the Tea Party wave to office, was floundering in Alabama GOP primary polls and that Trump hates being associated with a loser.
So where’s the nonstop “feuding,” “civil war,” “chaos” coverage for today’s fractured GOP? Those were the hysterical words the press used last spring to describe Democrats when just two senators initially refused to support the White House’s infrastructure bill.
Rememnee when Biden and his team were filling out their cabinet in an orderly manner? The D.C. press lost its mind with Dems in Disarray coverage — the president-elect was facing a "considerable challenge" while "confronting factionalism and fierce impatience." Alliances had been "strained," his choices were "vexing" "frustrated" and "increasingly skeptical" supporters. Biden had "irritated" Democratic lawmakers who are "complaining."
Oh my!
And don’t forget during the spring of 2020 when the New York Times basically wrote off the Biden campaign, insisting the "perilously passive" candidate was "grappling," "uncertain," "tentative," "cloistered," "stuck at home," and "struggling with basic technical difficulties," while Democrats were "worried" and "perplexed" — Biden won the election by 7 million votes.
In Georgia today, not only is Trump trying to end the career of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in his high-profile reelection run, the egomaniac is targeting Kemp’s allies, too. “For the second time in as many weeks, the former president endorsed a little-known Republican challenger to one of Kemp’s closest political loyalists,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Trump is likely fuming that the candidate he is backing against Kemp, former U.S. Senator David Perdue, is trailing, setting up a potentially humiliating Trump defeat.
Meanwhile, Trump can’t stop insulting the GOP’s most senior senator, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), calling him a "dumb son of a b***h" and a "stone cold loser." Can you imagine what the D.C. press coverage would look like if a former Democratic president launched grenades at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from the sidelines on a weekly basis? For Trump though, the press shrugs, committed to its Trump-being-Trump mindset, where there’s nothing does truly damages his party.
Trump is still the party’s presumptive 2024 nominee and there is a cult-like following around him. But his runaway narcissism is taking a toll on the party, and the press ought to center its Trump coverage that way.
Republicans know all too well how Trump can spoil their chances for success. Democrats swiped two surprise, run-off Senate victories in January 2021 largely because Trump was still obsessed with overturning his election loss, while waging war on Georgia Republicans for not doing enough to help him steal away Biden’s win.
Trump not only distracted the GOP during the crucial run-off elections, he likely animated Democratic and Independent voters by loudly lying about the 2020 election. Recall that Republicans lost the White House, House and Senate while Trump was president.
There’s also no indication Trump’s revenge tour is connecting with voters. A recent Gallup poll offered participants a chance to rank the 30 most important issues facing America. “Election reform” was a choice that nobody selected.
It’s the GOP that’s in disarray, trust me.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
While Trump is clearly dividing the GOP, I’m skeptical of reports that his influence is fading inside the party.
John Harris at Politico gives it a shot though, with “Why Trump Is Losing His Grip on the GOP”:
The move [to un-endorse Brooks] put an especially bright light on a trend years in the making: Trump has moved from being the beneficiary of America’s instinctual suspicion that most politicians are phonies who don’t really believe a thing they say, to being the enforcer against politicians who are insufficiently phony in professing blind devotion to him.
🇨🇦 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Beaches & Lights, “Let’s Go”
The Toronto all-woman band The Beaches rework their alt-rock single from 2021 with the help of Lights, Canadian-born singer Poxleitner-Bokan. The Canuck collaboration celebrates life on the rock road and does it with a punchy, irresistible beat. The Go-Go’s would be proud.
I'm just a girl who used to loathe at a Toronto art schoolSkipped college, joined a band, made out with boys I liked to talk toThey told me to turn myself into another indie-pop starF- that I'm just gonna be me they can be whatever they are
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via Apple Music.
Subscribe at pressrun.media
Please consider subscribing for $6 a month to support fearless media commentary. Thanks!
Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Signaling that the Republican Party would not allow the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be an entirely serious and dignified one, Republican senator Josh Hawley began trafficking vile claims about the first Black woman tapped for the Court.
For the last week, Hawley and his allies have been trying to turn Jackson, arguably the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in the last half-century, into a child-pornography apologist. It’s breathtaking, unconscionable and straight out of the QAnon cult playbook— but the press doesn’t care. In their eyes, there is no decency line that the GOP can ever cross. Nothing is out of bounds for them.
On Fox News, Hawley specifically described Jackson as protecting pedophiles when it came to sentencing: “I haven't been able to find a single case where she has had a child porn offender, a pedophile, in front of her where she hasn't given him the most lenient sentence she possibly could.”
Still, the New York Times downplayed the outlandish GOP smears against the mother of two, describing the claims as merely “hostile critiques,” and Republicans “forcefully attacking Jackson’s record.” In a puff piece highlighting four GOP senators this week, the Times elevated Hawley as one “to watch” during the confirmation hearings.
The allegation that Jackson operated as some sort of pro-child pornography outlier on the bench because she sentenced below federal guidelines is obviously false, as ABC News, among others detailed [emphasis added]:
Federal appeals court Judges Joseph Bianco of the Second Circuit and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit, both Trump appointees, had each previously sentenced defendants convicted of possessing child pornography to prison terms well below federal guidelines at the time they were confirmed with Hawley's support.
Hawley didn’t make the bogus claims because he thought they were valid, or that they could withstand a moment of scrutiny. He made them to link Jackson to the odious phrases “child pornography” and “pedophile,” which are signaling mechanisms for the QAnon cult.
And the press obediently played along. D.C. journalists regurgitated the allegations when Hawley first made them, incorporating them in endless headlines:
• “Republicans to Roll Dice by Grilling Jackson Over Child Pornography Sentencing Decisions” (The Hill)
• “Ketanji Brown Jackson, Child Porn Sound Bites and America's Angry Parents” (Newsweek)
• “Ketanji Brown Jackson Defends Her Record on Child Pornography Cases” (Today)
• “Durbin Defends Supreme Court Nominee Jackson’s Record on Child Pornography” (Washington Post)
Mission accomplished — Jackson became the first Supreme Court nominee in history associated with the phrase, “child pornography.”
When Hawley’s smears did get debunked it was with timid, non-judgmental language — Republicans had merely “omitted context,” and the child pornography charges were “misleading.” The press treated the allegations with respect, as if Hawley were just questioning Jackson’s judicial philosophy.
More importantly, the D.C. press completely ignored the blatant QAnon framing in play. Still reluctant to tie the GOP to a cult that believes that the Democratic Party harbors a secret network of pedophiles who drink children's blood, the mainstream media continues to look away from the ugly truth. Hawley’s attack on Jackson was simply confirmation politics, according to the Beltway conventional wisdom. There was nothing sinister at play.
But there clearly was, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte noted:
It's also part of a larger strategy by leading GOP figures like Hawley to radicalize the Republican base by funneling them to conspiracy theories like QAnon. The end game here isn't particularly mysterious. QAnoners were the backbone of the January 6 insurrection and continue to be a source of energy for the growing fascist movement that backs Trump.
The far-right media didn’t miss the message Hawley sent. On OAN, RedState editor Brandon Morse spouted QAnon rhetoric, claiming Jackson “has a scary history when it comes to pedophilia or handling people who are pedophiles. It's one more drop in the bucket when it comes to dealing with the left and their problem with pedophilia.”
There’s a direct line between Hawley slandering Jackson as child pornography apologist and the right-wing’s sprawling conspiracy culture. During the 2016 campaign, Pizzagate was concocted. It alleged that prominent figures in the Democratic Party were running a child sex ring in tunnels beneath a pizzeria in a residential Washington, DC, neighborhood.
Today, bizarre claims of child abuse, sex trafficking, and pedophilia remain the center of the crazed QAnon belief system. It’s no coincidence Hawley picked those issues to baselessly smear Jackson. In fact, the wider QAnon conspiracy theory insists that Trump remains on the verge of uncovering a throng of liberal elites for facilitating and participating in a sprawling child sex ring.
That’s the garbage today’s Republican Party is tapping into during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. And the press shrugs.
GOOD STUFF:
From The Nation’s “The Pandemic Made the Rich $1.7 Trillion Richer”:
Elon Musk was worth $24.6 billion when Trump issued his pandemic proclamation in mid-March of 2020. Today, he is worth $234 billion—an 851 percent spike that adds up to roughly $209.4 billion. During the same period, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin doubled their wealth, to nearly $114 billion and $109 billion, respectively. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos enjoyed a more modest increase in his fortunes, gaining a mere $52.1 billion during the period. But Bezos still finished this remarkable run for the billionaire class as the second wealthiest man in America, with a net worth of $165.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s latest study of “The World’s Real-Time Billionaires, Today’s Winners and Losers.”
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Weezer, “A Little Bit of Love”
For 30 years, Rivers Cuomo and his California guitar band have functioned as a pop-rock bakery, churning out endless confectionery delights. It’s been an impressive run and the hits just keep coming.
The latest, “Little Bit of Love,” has you hooked after after bouncy eight notes. It’s the musical equivalent of sunshine.
All your wounds are healing fineI'm so glad I've got you in my lifeNow the winter frost is goneNow is a chance to live the life we want
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When it comes to gas prices, here’s math the media doesn’t care about:
Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, crude oil was trading for $99 a barrel, and American motorists were paying $3.61 at the pump. Crude then quickly jumped to $130 and gas prices soared to $4.30. Last week, crude tumbled back down to $99, but we’re still paying the same $4.30 for gas, according to AAA.
For a press that obsessed over gas prices as they climbed, while platforming Republican claims that President Joe Biden was to blame for the energy inflation (another White House “crisis”), the media have now lost interest in the gas station saga. It’s another case of putting extra energy into chasing Bad News for Biden stories. And news outlets have shown no interest in putting Big Oil under a microscope to highlight what role they play in today’s stubbornly high gas prices.
Is price gouging a factor today? Democrats think so. “As American families work to make ends meet, Congress must take action to investigate reports of illegal profiteering, anticompetitive business practices, and price gouging within the oil and gas industry and hold public hearings, as appropriate,” wrote 32 members of Congress who signed a letter to U.S. House and Senate leaders urging “immediate investigations.”
The press couldn’t care less. During the week of March 6-12, when they were in a frantic mode, often reporting live from outlier gas stations that were pushing astronomical prices, “gas” was mentioned 1,450 times on CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and MSNBC, according to TVeyes. By contrast “price gouging” that week was referenced just 45 times. There hasn’t been an ounce of media skepticism in play for this story.
As gas prices skyrocketed, the media presented a very succinct cause-and-effect storyline: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted the global energy market, which caused the price of crude oil to jump, triggering U.S. pumps prices to increase immediately and dramatically, sometimes by more than 15 cents in a single day.
• “Russia’s War Is Raising Gas Prices” (New York Times)
• “Ukraine-Russia War Sparks Price Increases Across U.S.” (Wall Street Journal)
• “How the Ukraine-Russia conflict may push up prices for Americans” (CNBC)
The press was clear, “Gasoline prices are based on the cost of crude oil, which jumped in response to the invasion and Western sanctions,” the Times recently stressed. Added the Washington Post, “Every $10 increase in the price of crude oil adds about 24 cents to the cost of each gallon of gasoline and is quickly reflected in what you pay at the pump.”
So how come when the price of crude oil dropped $30 in a week, consumers kept paying the same high prices at the pump? Why isn’t that considered a big news story — is there no media formula for how prices are supposed to come down?
This continues the media’s pattern of refusing to hold Big Oil accountable.
Gas and oil companies, currently banking record profits, are usually portrayed in the ongoing coverage as disinterested players who have nothing to gain from higher prices because, according to the narrative, Big Oil is simply passing along the marketplace increases to consumers. Rather than drilling for more oil as demand naturally surged when world economies recovered from the pandemic, energy companies are instead using billions in profits to reward shareholders by buying back their stock.
“For now, most large shale companies aren’t answering the White House’s call [to drill more], sticking to commitments they made to limit production and return more cash to shareholders, an effort to win back investors who fled the industry after years of poor returns,” the Wall Street Journal reported last month. Companies say they don’t care how high the price of crude climbs, they’re committed to not drilling more. “Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, told investors in February: “$100 oil, $150 oil, we’re not going to change our growth rate.””
The Journal recently profiled a West Texas oilman whose private company is among the few that’s actively expanding drilling operations. He said he’s never seen a market with surging prices yet so little drilling competition from the major, public corporations. “This is almost too good to be true,” he said. Good for him, bad for U.S. consumers.
Virtually none of that context regarding Big Oil has been included in breathless gas price reporting. They’ve been given a free ride about drilling, raising gas prices, and why they remain sky-high when barrels of crude dropped 20 percent in a week.
There was a time when the mainstream media cast a constantly skeptical eye not only on Big Oil, but on Big Business in general. Today, they get a pass, while Biden gets the blame.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
Axios wandered into strange territory last week when it published a story based on a document editors were told could not be authenticated.
From CNN’s takedown, “"Appalled" at Axios”:
The White House spent much of Friday frustrated by an Axios report that it believes was based on a fabricated letter purportedly written by Ukraine's top national security official. The Axios story, written by reporter Zachary Basu, said that Oleksiy Danilov had asked the US earlier this month "to go beyond traditional military aid and provide the country with the funding, training and weaponry to support a long-term resistance movement."
But Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova later told Axios that she believed the letter was "falsified." And officials at the National Security Council also told Axios they have no record of receiving such a letter from Danilov.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs, “State of Mind” (featuring Margo Price)
Tom Petty’s longtime guitarist returns with a new album, via his admirable side band. “State of Mind” sounds instantly timeless, largely thanks to Nashville’s Margo Price who elevates the song to a trance.
Fun Mike Campbell fact: He wrote “Boys of Summer.” Petty was offered the song but opted not to record it. Don Henley did, and turned it into a smash.
Home is a state of mindState of mindHome is is a state of mindState of mindAnd you left a hole in my heartBig enough to drive a truck throughBut now there's no way home that I can find
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On the eve of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked no fewer than six times at the daily press briefing if the Biden administration would grant Zelensky’s military request of creating a “no-fly zone” over the bombarded country.
Ever since Russia invaded, the administration has made clear there’s no chance that the U.S. or NATO is going to create a no-fly zone, because that would mean direct warfare with a nuclear power inside Russia.
“First thing that we would do in order to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine would be to send the U.S. military to attack military units inside Russia--the anti-aircraft batteries that are there, the anti-aircraft artillery,” Democratic Congressman Jim Himes recently explained. “United States Air Force planes would be killing thousands of Russian military members inside Russia."
Especially because Putin appears to be increasingly unstable in the decisions he’s making, a no-fly zone is not going to happen. The U.S. previously created no-fly zones over Iraq, Libya, and Serbia during times of crisis. None of those countries had an arsenal of nuclear missiles. They were also extraordinarily complex operations.
“When the U.S. and United Kingdom imposed no-fly zones in the south (to protect Shiites) and the north (to protect Kurds), American combat planes flew over 200,000 sorties and dropped more than 1,000 bombs on more than 240 targets,” Slate recently noted.
Yet for three weeks, the press has been relentless in asking the same question over and over, even though White House responses each time have been an unequivocal, no. A few of the inquiries from Tuesday’s session:
• “Has the administration’s thinking shifted on that at all?”
• “To put it bluntly, is Zelensky wasting his time tomorrow asking for these things?”
• “How does the President plan to continue being, like, a voice of restraint in these situations and holding back some of those requests?”
The media inquiries are usually framed as President Joe Biden not doing enough to help Ukrainians; that he represents “restraint” in the face of human suffering. After piling on Biden following the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Beltway media — echoing GOP talking points — seem anxious to put the White House on the defensive, again.
When two dozen “foreign policy elites” signed an open letter advocating a no-fly zone, Politico’s Playbook ran the story as big news, trumpeting it as the day’s most important item. Later that week, when 78 experts signed a letter opposing a no-fly zone, Politico buried the item.
On March 7, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar compared the lack of a no-fly zone to the “bare minimum” countries like Britain and France did at the start of World War II. But Hitler’s Germany didn’t have 1,500 nuclear warheads deployed on strategic long-range systems and almost 3,000 more in reserve, the way Putin’s Russia does today.
The media chatter continues to be incessant. “No-fly zone” has been mentioned more than 700 times on cable news since the invasion began, according to TVeyes.
What explains this obsession? Why do reporters and pundits think there’s a chance Biden would change his mind and risk nuclear war? Why do they present the no-fly zone as a reasonable option? (They’re not constantly asking if Biden is going to send tens of thousands of U.S. troops to fight Russians inside Ukraine.) And why do journalists constantly, and recklessly, omit crucial context surrounding the topic?
Interviewing Americans about the invasion and what the U.S. should be doing to help Ukrainians, the New York Times this week quoted a Michigan voter saying she’s been unhappy with the Ukraine response so far and is in favor of establishing a no-fly zone. “I truly believe that [the U.S.] could be doing more to help,” she said. The Times made no mention that guarding the Ukrainian skies could spark a nuclear war.
Truth is, most Americans have no idea what a Ukraine no-fly zone would mean militarily, simply because the media have not educated them. When Americans do find out, their support for the strategy drops dramatically.
“A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up "no-fly zones" to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes,” Reuters announced last week, trumpeting its “exclusive” polling results. The findings were framed as bad news for the White House: “That puts pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden to take more aggressive actions against Moscow.”
The report though, came with a boulder-sized caveat: “It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict.”
Oh.
A subsequent CBS poll found that “Support for a no-fly zone … drops off considerably when people are asked if it meant U.S. forces might have to engage Russian aircraft, and be considered an act of war by Russia.” U.S support for the move dropped from 59 percent to 38 percent, once people were given proper context. We don’t know how big the drop would be if CBS had specifically spelled out that a no-fly zone could lead to nuclear annihilation.
The no-fly zone isn’t going to happen, and for valid reasons. The press needs to stop playing gotcha with the White House.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
The brutal invasion continues to generate bouts of heroic journalism.
From Vanity Fair’s, ““This Is Personal for Them”: Two Ukrainian AP Journalists Capture the Most Devastating Moments of War”:
In Mariupol, Ukraine, two Associated Press journalists, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov, have captured the most devastating realities of Russia’s war. Their photographs are not only a record of the utter destruction, but a direct rebuttal to the Kremlin’s propaganda, giving the world a window into the lives destroyed every day as Russia pushes further into the country, attacking civilian targets. It was Maloletka who captured the bloodied, pregnant woman being taken from the bombed maternity hospital on a stretcher; ”one of the most iconic images of this war so far,” AP executive editor Julie Pace tells Vanity Fair.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
War on Drugs, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore”
The pride of Philadelphia, Adam Granduciel’s band continues to expand and impress as he details our stumbles through life, wrapped in a majestic sound. This is the second single from the band’s latest album by the same name.
When I think about the old days, babeYou're always on my mindI know it ain't like I rememberI guess my memories run wild
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via Apple Music.
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Be kind.
Russian president Vladimir Putin stands as one of the most hated world figures in recent history, with a barely-there favorable rating of 4 percent among Americans. Yet his influence within MAGA America grows. The dictator’s unique brand of propaganda and disinformation — dubbed the “Fog of Unknowability” — has been embraced by the Republican Party, Trump and Fox News.
It’s a stunning collective that’s become more pronounced during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The evidence of that alliance was on display when Kremlin forces teamed up with Fox News and GOP players to push the obvious distraction about Ukraine being the home of secret, U.S.-funded bioweapons that target certain ethnicities, thereby producing some sort of justification for Russia’s land war.
It’s shocking to watch an American media outlet such as Fox routinely suggest the U.S. provoked the Ukraine invasion, side with Russia over America, and smear Ukrainians as being unworthy of U.S. support. Still, the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.
Look at how the Washington Post recently described Putin-era propaganda: “Russian disinformation often begins with a speck of fact, which is then twisted into a full-blown conspiracy theory. The technique makes it easier to spread and take root among the country’s supporters.” Sound familiar? They’re describing the foundation of Fox News’ daily programming.
For some reason though, the D.C. media which so easily identifies Russian propaganda, refuse to apply the same term when the GOP engages in the exact same behavior.
Note that the Post piece suggested Fox News’ Tucker Carlson had “fallen” for Russian disinformation about a bioweapons program in Ukraine. Trust me, nobody at Fox News, in the right-wing media, or inside the GOP has “fallen” for the bioweapons story — no one got duped. They have knowingly embraced the campaign of lies. That’s why state-run Russia TV is encouraged to air clips of Carlson. The two validate each other.
What makes Putin’s brand of propaganda unique is that it’s not designed to win over converts; it’s not built to ‘prove’ a point. The goal is to create confusion and raise doubts, often through a stream of contradictions and lies. Using the Kremlin’s firehouse approach, so much confusion is created so often via a multitude of media platforms, it becomes impossible to navigate the deliberate fog. Putin has buried Russia in that misinformation morass for more than two decades.
This isn’t traditional Beltway spin, where partisan players tease out and extend the facts in order to make a preferred point. It’s a sophisticated, KGB-influenced brand of postmodern propaganda that deftly mixes facts with fiction, with constantly shifting storylines, to the point where it’s not possible for most Russian news consumers to discern the truth. They stop even trying. Collective passivity is the goal.
“At the heart of this mind-set is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or even facts, because everything is spun or disguised to reflect advantageously on one group or another,” Vanity Fair noted in a seminal piece from 2017 about Trump’s early embrace of Putin’s propaganda playbook. “This dark internal logic allows for the Kremlin propaganda machine's single greatest achievement: to rub out all distinctions between truth and lies, so that facts, conspiracies, reality, and fabrications are all pulled down into the same indistinguishable muck.”
The result? The dense fog of unknowability. “Once you've successfully swamped truth, you're no longer accountable for your actions,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Mike Mariani.
Authoritarian Trump immediately adopted the Putin strategy as president. Three quick examples from early 2017:
• When the White House announced it was abandoning the Paris climate accord, the administrating claimed it was because of a “slush fund” that the U.S. was flushing billions of dollars each year into and letting other countries spend — but the “slush fund” doesn’t exist. It was a choreographed lie.
• That May in 2017, the White House trumpeted the news that it had brokered a $110 billion arms sale to a Middle East power. But the deal never existed. It was fabricated.
• One month later, after Trump announced plans to privatize the U.S. air traffic control system, he and Republican members of Congress then staged a fake bill-signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House. There, supportive politicians gathered around the seated president, who signed nothing more than a letter to Congress stating his support for the proposal. The entire event was Kabuki theater.
In four years, the D.C. press never adjusted to Trump’s lies and contradictions. The media was soon enveloped in the Fog, in part by refusing to begin each news cycle with the assumption that Trump lied without pause. Instead, the press became distracted by each morsel of disinformation, overwhelmed by the spectacle of constant chaos.
Putin-style propaganda has been a political win for American conservatives. Now they’re repaying the Kremlin by running interference for its invasion.
🇷🇺 GOOD STUFF:
More from that must-read, 2017 Vanity Fair piece, “Is Trump’s Chaos Tornado a Move From the Kremlin’s Playbook?”:
What if all the Trumpian chaos that the “mainstream media” have come to take for granted as pugilism and vanity was part of a more cunning plan? What if Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon were actually drawing from a sophisticated postmodern propaganda model developed by none other than Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov, and their political technologists at the Kremlin? While Trump may not have state-controlled media at his disposal, as Putin does, to serve as 24-7 propaganda organs both domestically and abroad, his team is finding ways to shrewdly approximate Putin’s capacity to shape narratives and create alternative realities.
🚂 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dolly Parton, “Blue Smoke”
The queen of country music made headlines this week when she asked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to remove her name from the list of eligible nominees this year because she said she hadn’t earned the right to be inducted.
Parton continues to be a beacon of good will in so many important ways, and an American icon.
“Blue Smoke” is from a decade ago and it’s my favorite Parton song ever. Give it a listen, it will change your day for the better.
I packed my suitcase full of heartachesHeadin' to the train depotAnd I bought a one-way ticketOn that train they call Blue SmokeI left the station straight-up midnightFeelin' lonely, lost and blueIn a trail of blue smoke with my heart brokeSaid good-bye to you
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
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The media’s goalpost moving on Covid has become exhausting.
For months, the press hammered President Joe Biden for not returning “normalcy” to America, especially as the Omicron variant surged. Thankfully, new cases have fallen 95 percent from a peak of 800,000. In New York City, which got pummeled by the surge, officials now count fewer than 700 new infections each day, down 99 percent from the winter spike. The pandemic is not over (Barack Obama just tested positive), but the news is mostly good these days. That’s why so many mask mandates have been lifted nationwide, and virtually all schools are open.
What’s the media’s response to that long-awaited turn for the better? They shrug and move on. Instead of celebrating and crediting the Biden administration, returning towards normalcy has instead stirred “disappointment, frustration and queasy ambivalence,” according to a New York Times front-page piece on Sunday. Using anecdotes only, the article suggested that lots of residents in “Covid cautious cities” are reluctant to return to normal.
Talk about heads you lose, tails you lose. The Times somehow managed to frame Covid’s rapid decline in the U.S as upsetting news. (People are “bewildered.”) Can you imagine the coverage today if cases under Biden were still rising?
The press, which treated Covid as the most important news event for two years and hung it around Biden’s neck like a political anchor for the last nine months, suddenly thinks gas prices in the U.S. represents a bigger news story.
Americans have noticed the welcome Covid developments. Eight in ten acknowledge we are in a better place than we were a year ago. Approval for Biden’s handling of the pandemic jumped eight points in the most recent NPR poll. And Google searches of “Covid,” a good indication of public anxiety, are now at their lowest point of the two-year pandemic. (85 percent of Americans 12 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine.)
For months this winter, the press was adamant Covid represented the defining issue of the Biden administration. It was the “central crisis” according to NPR. Added Puck, “Presidencies are just as defined by events beyond one’s control as they are by promises, and the primary culprit for Biden’s woes is an unmistakable five-letter word that would slot nicely into the first row of a morning Wordle: COVID.”
CNN not long ago demanded Biden address his Covid “crisis,” stressing that the pandemic had led to a sense “that events at home and abroad are cascading out of control.” Covid this year spurred, “growing doubts over whether [Biden] can fulfill his promise to solve problems,” according to the network.
When the U.S. economy added nearly 700,000 new jobs in February, Politico announced it represented a “rare spot of bright news” for Biden’s “mired” presidency. Apparently, Covid cases plummeting to pandemic lows in 2022 doesn’t constitute a “bright” spot.
Today as infections plunge, the topic has virtually disappeared. “Covid” mentions on cable news during the first two weeks of March are down nearly 90 percent compared to the first two weeks of January, according to TVeyes. (References dropped nearly 95 percent on CNN, from 1,170 to 85.)
It’s true that the mainstream media are more interested in relaying bad news vs. good news, simply because it’s more compelling and likely more alluring to news consumers. But the Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory. Look for the same look-away coverage when gas prices and inflation eventually go down.
Some might argue that Covid coverage has been thinned out because there’s an unprecedented land invasion taking place in Ukraine and the media are rightly focusing their time and resources on that life-and-death story. That argument would ring true if the same press corps — and especially TV news — didn’t lose its mind last week with its around-the-clock gas price coverage. ‘Breathless’ barely begins to describe the relentless, hyperbole-laced reportage that has dominated the airwaves in recent days.
In that environment, the good news about Covid — and the good news for the White House — has been treated as an afterthought.
Ukraine bumped lots of stories off the front page and off the airwaves, including Covid’s sharp decline in America. Still, the press made sure to carve out oceans of space to constantly remind news consumers that gas prices are up, and that is trouble for Biden. Over that same, recent seven-day period, “gas” was mentioned a total 1220 times on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, compared to “Covid” being referenced just 205 times.
The salivating press lost touch with context and reality, last week treating the bloody, murderous war in Ukraine as being just slightly more pressing than the fact Americans are paying $10 more each week at the gas pump. (Fox News: 720 “Kyiv” mentions, 605 “gas” references.)
Covid remains a hugely important story today and should be covered that way, even if most of the news is good.
(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
🇷🇺 GOOD STUFF:
Kinda says it all.
From Mother Jones’ “Leaked Kremlin Memo to Russian Media: It Is “Essential” to Feature Tucker Carlson”:
The document—titled “For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)”—was produced, according to its metadata, at a Russian government agency called the Department of Information and Telecommunications Support, which is part of the Russian security apparatus. It was provided to Mother Jones by a contributor to a national Russian media outlet who asked not to be identified. The source said memos like this one have been regularly sent by Putin’s administration to media organizations during the war. Independent media outlets in Russia have been forced to shut down since the start of the conflict.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Caamp, “Believe”
Finally.
After nearly a year-long delay, this magnetic rock trio from Ohio have a release date for their new album. “Believe” is the first single and it’s glorious, in an understated Caamp kind of way.
I believe in you babyAnd I'll always be aroundI believe in you babyI won't let you hit the ground
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Please consider subscribing for $6 a month to support fearless media commentary. Thanks!
Stay healthy.
Be kind.
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Rupert Murdoch for years has enjoyed a Trump-like ability to avoid responsibility for the avalanche of lies he promotes. That all may be changing thanks to a pair of billion-dollar defamation lawsuits surrounding Trump’s Big Lie campaign — Murdoch appears powerless to stop the looming legal reckoning.
This week, Justice David Cohen of State Supreme Court in Manhattan issued a stinging rebuke of Fox News. Denying the network’s attempt to dismiss a $2.7 billion lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, the election technology company that Fox smeared as part of Trump’s Big Lie offensive following the 2020 campaign, Cohen waved off Murdoch’s attorneys.
“Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote in his 61-page opinion. The judge repeatedly signaled that the lawsuit can proceed because there’s a reasonable chance that a jury would find Fox guilty of defamation.
The finding comes just three months after a judge in Delaware issued an identical ruling in another defamation lawsuit against Fox News, this one seeking $1.6 billion in damages. That one was brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which claimed Murdoch’s network smeared the election software company by casting it as a central villain in the GOP’s “rigged” charade.
“Fox possessed countervailing evidence of election fraud from the Department of Justice, election experts, and Dominion at the time it had been making its statements,” the judge wrote. “The fact that, despite this evidence, Fox continued to publish its allegations against Dominion, suggests Fox knew the allegations were probably false.”
For years, Fox News has gotten away with blatantly lying and slandering people, most often Democrats, and have paid almost no price for it. The reason Smartmatic and Dominion are having success in court is because they are businesses, not individuals, and they’re not “public figures.” If they were, it would be extremely difficult, under U.S. legal precedent, to prove they were defamed. They are both easily able to document how their brands have been damaged, and the amount of business they have lost, thanks to Fox smears.
What’s so damning for Murdoch’s legal team is that the facts of the recent Smartmatic case are not in dispute. That’s because Fox News defamed the company in plain view, repeatedly, on national television, alleging the company’s software switched California votes in the 2016 election, switched votes in Michigan in 2020, and did the same thing in overseas elections, among many wild and false allegations.
Because the facts are not in question, the best Murdoch’s lawyers could do in court was claim that the voting lies that aired almost nonstop did not constitute defamation because there’s no proof they were aired out of malice. Instead, Fox was just covering a big story and including lots of voices.
“When a sitting President and his surrogates claim an election was rigged, the public has a right to know what they are claiming, full stop,” Murdoch lawyers argued.
The judge rejected that defense, without reservation. “This Court finds that plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice, since it conceivably had a “high degree of awareness of falsity” or “serious doubts as to the truth” of the statements made.” He added, “Since Fox News allowed allegedly defamatory statements about [Smartmatic] to be repeated on its network, a jury may therefore find that it acted with intent or reckless disregard of the truth.”
The Smartmatic lawsuit can now proceed to discovery, which means it’s likely Murdoch will try to settle, in part because Smartmatic wants access to emails from Murdoch to his top executives to confirm the likelihood they knew the “rigged” allegations were false.
In 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, after the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staffer, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian hacked the emails.)
The settlement came just before key hosts Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity were set to be deposed. Reaching an out-of-court agreement with Smartmatic will cost Murdoch a fortune considering the strength of the company’s case. Then double that with the Dominion lawsuit.
The irony is that in the days right after the 2020 election, Fox News initially resisted echoing Trump’s wild claims about a stolen election.
When Kayleigh McEnany held a White House press conference to double down on allegations of fraud, illegal voting, and a rigged election, Fox News host Neil Cavuto cut away from the event: “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this."
That right-wing void was quickly filled by players like NewsMax and OAN. The Trump sycophants rushed in and eagerly became the home of “rigged” propaganda. As their audience mushroomed, Fox took note. Refusing to let itself be outflanked on the fringe-right, the network embraced the Big Lie.
Now Murdoch’s going to pay a very high price.
GOOD STUFF:
🔬 CNN has a thorough debunking of the recent right-wing chatter about ominous Ukraine “biolabs.”
From Donie O’Sullivan’s piece, “Russia and QAnon have the same false conspiracy theory about Ukraine”:
There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, that much is true. But they are not building bioweapons. Actually, it’s the opposite: Part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics. The State Department has described the claims as nonsense – and the US and Ukrainian governments have repeatedly, and for years now, tried to bat down conspiracy theories about the labs and spoken about the work that is actually being done in them.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Head and the Heart, “Virginia (Wind In The Night)”
Commonwealth native Jonathan Russell, the Head and the Heart’s lead singer, penned this new, evocative folk-rock beauty. It starts off as a piano whisper then ignites into an open-road wonder. The Head and the Heart continue to find their glorious groove.
I've traveled all over in my lifeBut nothing's slowed me downThis place that I used to love wellIt's just another town
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With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
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Stay healthy.
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The media’s gas price theater reached new heights of drama this week. Eagerly reporting from outlier gas stations that charge far above the national average, journalists remain obsessed with pinning the global pump trend on President Joe Biden.
At Monday’s White House press briefing, CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe actually recited quotes from motorists he interviewed at a local gas station. Then he asked press secretary Jen Psaki, “What is the President’s message to Americans who are going to the gas station today and seeing prices so high?”
The pump coverage in recent months has been especially intense because the media under Biden has gone all in on the larger issue of inflation. It’s constantly portrayed as a crushing force on the U.S. economy, even though the economy continues to expand and add jobs at a record pace.
The last time gas in the U.S. climbed above $4 per-gallon was in 2008. But we know news coverage then wasn’t as incessant and breathless as it is today because at the time President George W. Bush had no idea prices were heading towards $4 a gallon — that’s how little coverage there was.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has disrupted the global energy markets and once again set gas prices higher, the coverage has become truly ceaseless. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. And that’s all just from one day.) “Gas” has already been mentioned 500 times this week on cable news, according to TVeyes. A huge majority of Americans say they’re fine paying more for gas because the U.S. now refuses to buy oil from Russia. Yet most of the news coverage suggests consumers are furious about the price increases.
Worse, today’s reporting consistently lacks crucial context that lets giant oil companies off the hook. Instead of shining a spotlight on their behavior and the central role they play in increased prices by refusing to drill for more crude, the press whitewashes Big Oil from the story, and keeps its focus on the White House. In doing so, they miss a big story.
“Rather than increase production or reinvest to meet the energy demand increase caused by the world reemerging from COVID-19 lockdowns, oil and gas companies are taking advantage of bloated prices, fleecing American families along the way,” noted Accountable US, progressive advocacy group that recently produced a report on Big Oil.
Gas and oil companies, currently banking record profits, are usually portrayed by the media in the day-to-day gas price coverage as disinterested players who have nothing to gain from higher prices because, according to the narrative, Big Oil is simply passing along the marketplace increases to consumers. That’s just not the case.
Oil companies have said again and again that their sky-high earnings in recent quarters are because of “higher commodity prices.” Big Oil doesn’t function as a mere middle man, collecting the same fees regardless of what motorists are paying at the pump. They love higher gas prices.
That’s what BP CEO Nernard Looney told investors late last year: “This has been another good quarter for bp - our businesses are generating strong underlying earnings and cash flow while maintaining their focus onsafe and reliable operations. Rising commodity prices certainly helped.”
And from W&T Offshore’s CEO: “It is encouraging to see commodity prices at these levels.”
Meanwhile, instead of drilling for more oil to ease shortages as demand and prices surge, energy companies are using billions in profits to reward shareholders by buying back their stock. “Investors are now demanding greater returns so oil companies are forgoing crude expansion and instead returning cash to shareholders while vowing to keep spending in check,” Bloomberg explained last year.
Virtually none of that context is included in today’s breathless gas price updates. Or the fact that Trump in 2020 urged a global reduction in oil drilling in order to boost U.S. firms during the pandemic when motorist demand for gas was low. That look-the-other-way approach fits the media’s larger trend of whitewashing the role of corporate America in the ongoing inflation story. Big business has most often been portrayed as merely passing along increased costs to consumers, with almost no consideration given to the idea that lots of companies have been cashing in during the pandemic.
The media blackout is especially odd considering CEO’s have boasted on their earnings calls about how they’ve pushed through multiple prices increases while simultaneously posting huge profits.
“Companies benefiting from the dynamics have told investors to expect solid sales and profitability in 2022 even as rising costs tied to supply-chain woes show no signs of letting up,” the Wall Street Journal reported in November. “P&G, maker of Tide detergent and Pampers diapers, last week announced a third round of price increases, which will go into effect over the next few months, and told investors to expect profitability to accelerate as the year progresses.”
Meanwhile, Chipotle jacked up pandemic menu prices and its net income more than doubled during a recent quarter.
It’s misguided for the press to treat gas prices as a political story. It’s actually one about corporate greed.
GOOD STUFF:
Surprise! Trump’s new social media platform is a gigantic flop.
From Slate’s “Pretty Much No One Is Using Trump’s New Social Media App (Not Even Trump)”:
Now, as more people are getting in, they’re finding a veritable ghost town, as no one really appears to be using the social network, not even the former president. Trump is followed by only 140,000 people, a fraction of the almost 90 million who followed him on Twitter before he was kicked out of there after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. According to reports, Trump only has one message, or “Truth,” up on the network: “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” He wrote that before the app’s launch and it has 7,750 “ReTruths,” the app’s version of retweets.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Khruangbin & Leon Bridges, “B-Side”
This unique collaboration continues to produce musical dividends. The Houston-based trio Khruangbin reunite with Forth Worth’s Bridges to follow-up their beloved 2019 soul EP, Texas Sun.
“Sounding more like something Curtis Mayfield worked out while writing and recording his classic Superfly soundtrack, “B-Side” has a constant, subtle guitar fill by Mark Speer,” notes Central Track. “Laura Lee and DJ Johnson keep the rhythm section down pat, allowing Bridges and Speer to riff off each other.”
You may not beEverywhere I goJump backBut you stay on my mindWherever I goLike that
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Right before traveling to Helsinki in 2018 to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Trump went off on a tirade, declaring much of the U.S. media to be the “enemy of the people.” The timing of the pre-summit attack was jarring considering that phrase gained its notorious association during the purges ordered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, which killed tens of millions of people. Trump’s “enemies of the people” blast came days before he met with Putin whose reign has included murdered journalists.
Fast forward four years, and Putin is now putting Trump’s deep hatred of the press into practice, signing into law a ban on all independent news reporting about the Ukraine invasion.
For anyone doubting the direct, autocratic line that connects Trump to the Kremlin, Moscow’s move to criminalize journalism should illuminate that disturbing political path. Putin’s sweeping censorship law, designed to eradicate “fake news” about Russia’s immoral incursion, represents Trump’s anti-media fantasy come to life.
“Russian officials claim that journalists writing critically about the war — or calling it a “war” or an “invasion” — are undermining the national interest, even referring to them as traitors,” the New York Times reported. “Besides criminalizing the sharing of “false information,” it makes “discrediting” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calling on other countries to impose sanctions on Russia or protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine punishable by fines and years of imprisonment.”
Last week, two of Russia’s best known independent broadcast outlets, the Echo of Moscow radio station and the TV Rain television channel, shut down under pressure from the state.
The draconian law, which passed unanimously through the Russian Parliament, threatens to criminalize the work of foreign correspondents reporting from inside Russia. Consequently, most major news operations, including BBC News, Bloomberg, and CNN, have suspended operations — there are no more TV reports airing from Moscow. The Washington Post is removing bylines from articles that originate inside the country so Kremlin officials do not know who wrote them, and therefore can’t charge the journalists.
Ironic: After years of lavishly praising Putin (“Why shouldn’t I root for Russia?”), and more recently holding him up as a strong leader compared to “weak” Joe Biden, Fox News today cannot report safely from inside Russia.
Targeting the press and demonizing reporters is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders who are anxious to undermine journalism's crucial oversight role in open societies. Trump, of course, did his best to endanger journalists in the U.S., where media death threats became commonplace during his presidency. Does anyone doubt that if Trump were re-elected he would try to outlaw portions of independent journalism in the U.S.?
Consider the autocratic loop: Russian dictator Putin helped Trump get elected in 2016 by flooding U.S. media with misinformation. Trump unleashed an unprecedented attack on the free press in America, haranguing journalists as “enemies of the people.” (Trump: “"Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!") Putin then invades Ukraine and using “fake news” propaganda, outlaws all independent journalism in Russia, which further solidifies his power.
In fact, one day after Putin’s “fake news” law was signed, Trump this weekend denounced “fake news” in the U.S. He was mad that outlets accurately portrayed his admiring comments for Putin during the run-up to Russia’s deadly invasion.
At the same time, the Kremlin has announced it will block access to Russian-language media produced outside the country, such as the websites of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the popular Latvian-based news outlet Meduza. Russia’s last major independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is deleting all content about the war in Ukraine.
For years Trump has been following Putin’s lead on the press. “Trump’s team is finding ways to shrewdly approximate Putin’s capacity to shape narratives and create alternative realities,” noted Vanity Fair in 2017. “Specious narratives, conspiracy theories, and indeed fake news have been part of Russia’s geopolitical playbook for more than half a century.” They soon became hallmarks of the Trump administration.
Government-sponsored propaganda isn’t supposed to thrive in a vibrant democracy where openness flourishes. A free press is positioned to deter and undercut those kinds of heavy-handed attempts. Trump’s style worked because mainstream news media were timid in calling out the endless deceits, which gave him room to operate. Overly concerned with accusations of bias, the press showed deference to the administration and its radical brand of misinformation.
Trump was able to successfully sow the seeds of a chaos culture, or the “fog of unknowability,” as former Russian TV producer Peter Pomerantsev called it in the Vanity Fair piece:
The Kremlin does this by flooding television and digital media with biased coverage and wanton spin. The Trump administration has discovered something equally effective: lying to reporters and publicly attacking critics are like tossing grenades into the media eco-system. The press is constantly scrambling to respond to a never-ending river of slime, and the system is gradually overwhelmed.”
Trump learned so much from Putin. You can be sure the Republican would love to follow the dictator’s lead and criminalize journalism at home.
🇷🇺 GOOD STUFF
Speaking of the Kremlin, Eric Alterman had an interesting look at how Putin’s public relations team over the years dealt with the Western press, alternatively trying to sway them to produce soft coverage and then trying to punish them when writers failed to comply.
From Alterman’s Friday piece, “My Adventures With RT”:
RT/Ogilvy flew in a smattering of other journalists from all over the world for the occasion. A reporter who kept an eye on such things during the Trump administration recently emailed me to say that of all the people who had been brought in to the conference, I was perhaps the only one who did not come back and write nice things about Russia and RT.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Joan Osborne, “Make You Feel My Love”
This Bob Dylan ‘90’s classic has been recorded by more than 450 artists (!) and it’s easy to see why. The simple, piano-based ode still packs a haunting punch.
Osborne, a genius pop interpreter, delivers the goods on her newest album.
I know you haven't made your mind up yetBut I would never do you wrongI've known it from the moment that we metNo doubt in my mind where you belong
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Barrelling into camera view at full speed on Wednesday, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lit into a group of assembled Tampa area students from Middleton High School who were selected to stand behind him while he announced a $20 million investment in cybersecurity workforce education. With his voice raised and his index finger pointed, he bullied and mocked the teenagers who opted to wear masks inside the school.
"You do not have to wear those masks," the angry governor announced. "I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it's not doing anything. We've got to stop with this COVID theater. So if you want to wear it fine, but this is ridiculous." He then turned to the lectern, let out an dramatic, annoyed huff, shook his head and began the press conference.
The next day, DeSantis used his attack on children to create a campaign ad and a fundraising appeal, suggesting the confrontation may have been premeditated by his political team. And the press let him get away with it by whitewashing the ugly event.
The hypocrisy on display was off the charts — conservatives like DeSantis for a year have railed against mask mandates for schools, demanding that individual parents and students ought to decide. It’s about personal choice! But when DeSantis saw teens opting to wear masks inside, he became unglued and told them they looked like fools, blowing away the GOP’s “choice” rhetoric.
According to CDC data, Hillsborough County in Florida, where DeSantis held his event Wednesday, remains an area with high levels of the coronavirus in the community and where masks are recommended indoors. “It’s just shocking that the governor told these kids ‘Take off your mask,’” said Dawn Marshall, the mother of a Middleton student who was behind DeSantis. “He pretty much said take off your mask, it’s stupid, and take off your mask, your parents don’t matter.”
The dressing down represented an unhinged display for any sitting governor, let alone one who aspires to be President of the United States. Aside from mocking and harassing the elderly in public, it’s hard to think of an outburst that, politically, is considered more verboten than attacking school children.
These were not student protesters who picked a fight with DeSantis and he then responded. The teens were minding their own business, while exercising pandemic-era caution, when he launched a public attack and bullied them. (My hunch: He was afraid of what the optics on Fox News would look like if he stood in front of a group of masked teenagers.)
It’s the type of stunning misstep that the political press, always looking for unusual unscripted moments, normally pounces on and makes the politician pay a high price. Not with DeSantis.
Yes, the exchange generated lots of news coverage, but the way it was described made DeSantis look neither unglued nor bullying. According to many news outlets the raging governor had merely requested students to take off their masks, as if there had been a civil, respectful discussion, not a spectacle featuring Florida’s triggered governor openly mocking unsuspecting teens.
“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Asks Students to Take Face Masks Off at Press Conference,” read the CBS News headline, which wildly downplayed the event. NBC News followed suit: “DeSantis Asks Students to Remove Masks And 'Stop With This Covid Theater.'” And USA Today, “Florida Gov. DeSantis Asks High School Students to Remove Masks at Event.” The paper suggested that the governor had simply “encouraged” the students.
When a grown man in a position of authority loudly talks down to teenagers and tells them they look “ridiculous” for not doing what he wants, that’s not “asking” them to do something. That’s trying to humiliate them. And the press played dumb. You can be sure that if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris ever went off on a group of teens with a finger-wagging tirade, the media coverage would not go out of its way to whitewash the event.
The soft-pedaling coverage fits into a larger media pattern of treating DeSantis as some kind of Covid star for the GOP, despite the fact 70,000 Floridians have died from the pandemic. In a puff piece profile of him over the weekend, the Washington Post never even mentioned that staggering death count.
Meanwhile, the Post reported DeSantis had “admonished,” and “upbraided” the students this week. Lots of news sources opted for “scolded.” “DeSantis Chides Students for Wearing Masks at His Tampa News Conference,” read a Tampa Bay Times headline. And from the Miami Herald, “Governor Ron DeSantis Tells High School Students to Remove Masks”
Here are descriptions that would have more accurately captured the haranguing; words that are not used when journalists are trying to obfuscate and play nice:
• “bullied”
• “harassed”
• “mocked”
• “belittled”
• “attacked”
But using straightforward verbs like that would have opened the door for right-wing jabs at journalists for having a “liberal bias” against DeSantis, so reporters and editors pulled their punches.
The press just refuses to stand up to GOP bullies.
GOOD STUFF:
Interesting report on the unfolding information war. Click to tweet to watch.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bleachers, “How Dare You Want More”
The shout-along chorus, the freight train horn section, the call-and-response play among band members. It’s all here and it’s all a hoot.
Hey, lonely wants to stay foreverBut tonight we're gonna do a little betterYeah, tonight we're gonna do a little betterYeah, tonight we're gonna do a little betterHey, lonely wants to tear us down now
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The Biden administration got it right.
The unfolding Ukraine crisis has been a clear victory for U.S. intelligence. The decision to rapidly declassify secret intelligence effectively blunted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to use disinformation and lies as instruments of war. It also helped President Joe Biden bolster NATO allies during the run-up to the invasion.
What’s curious is that weeks ago the Beltway press angrily brayed at the White House, suggesting they were cooking up wild claims about Russia and not producing the intelligence to back up the allegations. Yet just years earlier, the same press corps raised no such concerns when the Trump White House engaged in baseless claims about a cooked-up foreign policy crisis.
The idea that journalists should always question authority, especially when the issue is war, remains a sound and important one. The question is, why did journalists aggressively press Biden officials about war intel but give the Trump team a total pass? Why does the D.C. press have two different standards when dealing with Democratic and Republican administrations?
Last month when the U.S said intelligence suggested Russia was planning a “false flag operation” with propaganda videos to justify an invasion, indignant reporters in gotcha mode demanded to know where the administration got that idea, even though Putin has a long history of doing exactly that.
“This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into,” complained Associated Press reporter Matt Lee, who got into a heated, five-minute, viral back-and-forth with State Department spokesman Ned Price, as the reporter ridiculed the administration’s position. “What evidence do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?”
Price explained that it was based on intelligence that had been declassified in real time as part of the administration’s information warfare campaign against Russia.
The AP, among others, responded by attacking the White House’s “lack of transparency.” It claimed, “Biden promised to restore truth in Washington after defeating Trump, but trust appears to be in short supply one year after taking office.” The clear implication was that because an AP reporter did not trust the White House, neither did the country.
“When the U.S. government makes a claim, it’s a reporter’s job to ask for evidence. History has taught the destruction that can be wrought when reporters don’t,” wrote Sebastian Murdock at HuffPost. He made the direct connection to the media’s bungled reporting during the run-up to the Iraq War which parroted administration talking points, suggesting the Biden White House’s information campaign this winter to stop a war in the Ukraine was the same as the Bush White House information campaign to start one in Iraq. That makes no sense.
It turns out virtually everything the Biden administration said about Russia’s plans for Ukraine has been accurate, including warnings about an imminent land invasion and the use of phony “false flag” videos. The same cannot be said for Trump era justifications. But back then, the press didn’t care.
In January 2020, Trump approved the drone killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. Administration officials told reporters the assassination was carried out in order to fend off vague looming threats against American troops in the region. Why those threats would disappear simply because Soleimani was killed, the administration never explained.
There was no documentation. There was no intel report, no photo surveillance, and no intercepted communications to give the attack context. It was the Trump White House, which lied about everything, making a hollow claim to cover for an unauthorized military strike. And the press ran with all of it. Instead of angry, five-minute showdowns with administration spokesmen and women demanding evidence for the attack, journalists simply typed up whatever the Trump team said about the raid.
CNN certainly didn’t question the paper-thin justification. Instead, it stressed that Trump, who was “wary of war,” had been “defiant” on the day the kill order was given, and seemed to “be freshly aware of the gravity of his role and the power he wields.” Perhaps most importantly, the raid represented an “immediate victory” for Trump, according to CNN. (Later, sources within the intel community conceded that the rationale Trump had used for the drone killing was a joke.)
That wasn’t the only time the press eagerly issued Trump a pass on war-related intel. In 2019, he invented a foreign policy crisis, which the press politely played along with. After Iran downed an unmanned U.S. drone, Trump blustered for days about possibly dropping bombs on Iran in response. When Trump didn’t attack a country of 80 million people, the press practically did backflips touting Trump’s leadership.
"Lawmakers in the room watched as the weight of his duties as commander-in-chief bore down on him, lives hanging in the balance," CNN breathlessly reported. "That cautious mindset would hang over Trump's deliberations throughout the day as he huddled several times with his national security team." The Washington Post newsroom cheered that Trump had avoided "a potentially devastating new crisis in the Middle East," while the New York Times stressed Trump "navigated his way through one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of his presidency."
All of this for a made-up crisis — Trump might bomb Iran! — for which the administration provided zero intelligence to support. News outlets didn’t care. They loved the storyline of a “consequential” Trump.
It makes no sense for the press to hold the Biden White House to a higher intel standard than the Trump one. Especially when the GOP lied about everything.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Some much-needed media accountability from the Washington Post’s “‘They Seem So Like Us’: In Depicting Ukraine’s Plight, Some in Media Use Offensive Comparisons”:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shocked the world as the largest cross-border European conflict in decades. But some observers see a troubling tone creeping into how some media outlets have attempted to contextualize it, describing Ukraine as more “civilized” than other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.
In one notable CBS News segment, senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata, reporting from Kyiv, said Friday that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Old Crow Medicine Show, “Paint This Town”
Borrowing the first line from “Pinball Wizard” (“Ever since I was a young boy”), the Medicine Show checks in with a new rowdy, rose-colored look at growing up in a small town.
Has any topic generated more endearing songs over the years? This one, all drums, guitars and fiddle, is instantly likeable and hummable, with a nifty Mellencamp feel to it. Also, they’re a great live band, go see them!
It's just a Waffle House jukeboxMy brains are scattered aroundBut one of these days, you and me, babеWe will spill the wholе bucketAnd paint this townPaint this town
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
You don’t have to be a political scientist to understand the Republican Party has found itself on the wrong side of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 85% of Americans now view Russia unfavorably — the country’s worst rating in over three decades — while GOP leader Trump publicly praises Vladimir Putin’s war moves as “smart” and “savvy” and as “genius,”
So why is the press ignoring the huge political blunder by the GOP? Why aren’t elite pundits lining up to warn about midterm implications for Republicans who foolishly blamed Biden last week, instead of Putin.
The strange silence comes as the Beltway media have spent months obsessing over the midterms — but only from the perspective that Democrats might be headed for lopsided losses. That story has been covered without pause, even though the midterms aren’t until November.
Every possible angle has been examined, over and over — Covid might hurt Democrats in November. Inflation might hurt Democrats. Education might hurt Democrats. The supply chain might hurt Democrats. There is been no shortage of media jumping off points as the press appears to be giddy over the prospect of GOP wins in November, and wants to spend the entire year detailing possible Democrats election woes.
Why the collective shoulder shrug when it comes to the spectacle of the GOP’s leader praising Putin as he launches the largest European land invasion since World War II? It may be the most astonishing foreign policy position ever taken by a major American political figure, let alone a former President of the United States. It’s not just Trump. In the days leading up to the invasion, Republicans were lining up to state their admiration, if not allegiance, to Putin, a despot whose political opponents are regularly killed, poisoned, and imprisoned.
Forever presenting Republicans as being savvy and outmaneuvering Democrats, the press remains blind to the possibility that the GOP has miscalculated by picking the Kremlin over the White House. Apparently, only Democrats can be in a state of disarray.
As I noted last week, what’s unfolding within the GOP would have been like in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait if members of the Democratic Party had praised Saddam Hussein. The media condemnations would have rained down without pause, as would have predictions of the party’s electoral ruin.
Today, Trump’s continued Putin bromance, which borders on treasonous, is portrayed as a minor problem for the GOP.
“Trump Praises Putin, Leaving Republicans in a Bind,” read a low-key New York Times headline, framing the issue as a minimal and passing one. Not one Democrat was quoted in a piece about Republicans embracing a foreign dictator during a time of war. There was no suggestion the bizarre alliance might hurt Republicans at the ballot box.
The Washington Post tried to dress up the GOP’s Putin embrace as Trump ushering in an era of isolationism with the party: “But during periods of populist politics — and especially when foreign wars crop up — many Americans embrace politicians who preach a strong, if not total, focus on domestic matters.”
That’s not what’s happening. The Trump wing of the GOP isn’t categorically saying that America should stay out of all foreign policy crises. It’s saying, ‘We heart Putin.’ That has nothing to do with isolationism. Like the Times article, the Post quoted no Democrats about the GOP’s embrace of Putin, and failed to suggest the issue is a losing one with voters.
Same with this NBC News report which highlighted the GOP’s “deep divide” over Russia. Zero Democrats were quoted and no allusions were made to this being a losing political issue for Republicans, who have gone off the rails on the topic.
“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” said high-profile Ohio Republican candidate J.D. Vance, who’s running for the Senate. “Why does Joe Biden care more about Ukraine’s border than the U.S. southern border?” the official account of the Republican House Judiciary Committee tweeted last week. Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, Eric Greitens, recently warned about “bloodthirsty Washington elites" and their "warmongering” against Russia.
Appearing on “ABC This Week,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) refused three straight times to answer the simple question: Why won’t you condemn Trump’s pro-Putin comments? Also on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) continued to blame the United States for Putin’s deadly invasion.
It’s not just the Republican Party. It’s the right wing’s billion-dollar media infrastructure. “I’ll stand on the side of Russia right now,” Joe Oltmann, a conservative podcaster, said on his show. Trump media sycophant Candace Owens tweeted that Russia posed no threat, while former Trump advisor Stephen Bannon assured his audience that the Ukraine invasion was “not our fight.”
And then there’s Fox News, which is synonymous with the Republican Party. As Ukrainians fought off the invaders, Laura Ingraham mocked President Volodymyr Zelensky’s passionate plea for peace as a “pathetic display” from a “defeated man.” Tucker Carlson announced, “No one on this show is…rooting for the Ukrainians for that matter,” insisting Putin “just wants to keep his western borders secure.” (In an odd twist, Carlson’s commentary became so unhinged that the far-right outlet NewsMax called him out for being anti-American.)
It’s hard to recall the last time a political party landed so awkwardly on the wrong side of a breaking news story. Why won’t the D.C. press put that in political perspective?
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
🇺🇦 GOOD STUFF:
How do you a hide an invasion in today’s hyper-information age? It’s not easy.
From the Financial Times’ “Kremlin Propaganda Machine Struggles to Conceal Putin’s Ukraine War”:
The campaign builds on a well-oiled machine that has shaped Russians’ perceptions to deliver sound support for previous conflicts in eastern Ukraine and Syria, as well as a brutal crackdown on dissent at home and in neighbouring Belarus. This time, however, the picture being painted by the Kremlin is so at odds with the reports from Ukraine itself that even top officials and spin-doctors have struggled to handle the cognitive dissonance required.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Amythyst Kiah, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
Beautifully slowing down Joy Division’s 80’s epic cry of anguish, which was released one month after lead singer Ian Curtis’ death, Tennessee singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah updates the classic with a version that’s oozing with empathy.
You cry out in your sleepAll my failings exposedAnd there's taste in my mouthAs desperation takes holdJust that something so goodJust can't function no more
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American politicians cheerleading a dictator as he sends tanks into a neighboring country and bombs a sovereign nation ought to be a huge news story. The fact that portions of a major U.S. political party, and its aligned media outlets, sanction Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine represents a stunning turning point for the Republican Party and how this country traditionally deals with foreign crises.
Assigning its loyalty and admiration to the Kremlin instead of the West Wing, key parts of the GOP, led by Trump who called Putin’s move “genius,” is embracing a truly radical worldview. But that’s not how the treasonous behavior is being portrayed by the press, which for days has matter-of-factly described the GOP as being “divided” over the prospect of a tyrannical Russian leader — his adversaries regularly end up dead — launching an invasion.
Ho-hum language abounds. There’s been a “split,” the New York Times reports, suggesting that Republicans who turn a blind eye to Putin’s invasion are merely “America First” “isolationists.” The party is facing “foreign policy factionalism,” Politico insisted. It’s sending “mixed messages,” NBC News announced, which went on to describe the GOP’s pro-Putin wing as “a newer brand of America Firsters,” “Republican doves,” and “the libertarian right” which has an “anti-interventionist strain.” None of that accurately describes this unprecedented trend in American politics of endorsing murderous autocrats.
More pedestrian presentation from NBC:
The fissures point to a growing divide in the Republican Party, between traditional foreign policy hawks who have advocated for a more confrontational U.S. posture to the Russian strongman and a Trump-aligned “MAGA” faction that has expressed some sympathy for Putin's tactics or described them as effective.
The Washington Post on Wednesday suggested it was a “novel phenomenon” that a portion of a U.S. political party was siding with the Kremlin over the White House. Novel? The Post article didn’t quote one Democrat or one expert on the rise of authoritarianism to put the GOP’s shocking behavior in context.
The Beltway press treats this as if it were nothing more than an inter-party squabble over taxes or immigration policy, not portions of the party tacitly supporting the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, a possibly brutal blitzkrieg that could leave thousands of civilians dead. And spearheaded, ironically, by the former Soviet Union, which for decades served as the epicenter of right wing suspicion and hostility; the proverbial Evil Empire.
Today’s kind words for Putin would be like in 1990 after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, if the Democratic Party had been “divided” over whether the deadly incursion was a good thing or a bad thing, and the D.C. press shrugging and treating it as normal political posturing. In truth, if a single elected Democratic official had even breathed a sentence of support for Hussein back then it would have been a huge story and created a maelstrom of media trouble for the party. Yet Republicans singing Putin’s praise in 2022 is treated as no big deal.
It’s the latest example of the media constantly normalizing reckless conservative behavior. “Trump’s own giddy rush to side with a foreign leader who is proving to be an enemy of the United States and the West is shocking even by Trump’s self-serving standards,” CNN’s Stephen Collison wrote. It’s “shocking” if you haven’t covered politics for the last six years.
The Putin appeasement coverage also lacks key context — what does this mean that one of America’s two major political parties supports a tyrant who invades his neighbor without cause? A U.S. party that politely regurgitates Kremlin talking points and embraces institutional appeasement for Putin, who in the previous decade stridently defended a Syrian regime that killed tens of thousands of its people in a civil war.
It’s not a minor faction either. Thanks to Trump’s worshipful embrace of Putin for years, 62 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents insist Putin is “a stronger leader” than Biden, according to a recent poll.
The GOP’s Putin bromance actually began under President Barack Obama, when Republicans and the right-wing media marveled at Putin’s political prowess. (Matt Drudge: “Putin is the leader of the free world.”) Why the sudden Republican attraction? Putin (a “macho man”) was defying the U.S. with regards to Syria and when Russia invaded Crimea.
Today it’s not just about oppositional politics — it’s not the GOP conveniently and temporarily embracing Putin because he’s squaring off against another Democratic president. Instead, it’s genuine admiration of an undemocratic strongman imposing his will, which is exactly why Republicans slavishly supported Trump for four years. This is another glimpse into the growing, and unapologetic, undemocratic movement within the GOP — and the press portrays it as normal.
That’s why Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions, told Fox News that Putin is “a very talented statesman” with “lots of gifts.” “He knows how to use power. We should respect that.” It’s why Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, Eric Greitens, warned about “bloodthirsty Washington elites" and their "warmongering” against Russia.
And it’s why Tucker Carlson tells his millions of Fox News viewers each night that Biden is the one who needlessly provoked Russia, and that Ukraine is not a country worth saving.
Stop whitewashing the madness.
(Photo: Getty Images)
🇨🇦 GOOD STUFF:
The New York Times failed badly in its coverage of the right-wing street protest that paralyzed parts of Ottawa, according to Canadian columnist Max Fawcett, at The National Observer:
On two separate occasions, the Times made fundamental errors of fact that skewed the way millions of people saw what was unfolding in Ottawa. First, they claimed in a tweet that the invocation of the Emergencies Act was a de facto suspension of civil liberties, one that it eventually walked back after nearly every constitutional expert in Canada pointed out its mistake.
Then on Saturday, as police were clearing out the remaining protesters, it ran a headline suggesting “police arrested demonstrators at gunpoint” despite that happening only once when police suspected explosives were inside a vehicle. The Times eventually softened the headline, but the damage was already done, and the story itself remained conspicuously biased towards the perspective of the protesters.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Amos Lee, “See the Light”
A former bartender with an English degree, singer-songwriter Amos Lee remains one of the most dependable and insightful in the genre today. His latest, “See the Light,” offer a simple yet hopeful message of perseverance and speaks to the power of community, all built over a lush, gorgeous soundscape.
Even when I feel I'm fallingAnd there ain't no one to catchFeelin' weightless even though I did my bestEven when I know I'm crying, I'm smiling on the side'Cause I know everything gonna be alright
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Veteran Fox News host Neil Cavuto returned to the network this week after an unexplained, month-long absence to tell viewers he not only got Covid for the second time, but he nearly died. “It really was touch and go,” he said, while describing his lengthy stay in intensive care. “Doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here,” he added.
The miraculously safe and effective Covid vaccine saved Cavuto’s life, but that won’t change Fox News’ programming as it remains committed to pandemic nihilism and aggressively spreading lies about America’s public health crisis. Even if the immunocompromised Cavuto had died, Rupert Murdoch’s network wouldn’t have spent ten minutes reflecting on its role in the carnage that surrounds the pandemic of the unvaccinated in 2022, where nearly 2,000 people are still dying everyday simply because they refuse to get the jab.
Incredibly, Cavuto continues to be part of Murdoch’s morbid machine, even after the virus nearly took his life. Rather than deciding enough is enough, and that he can no longer be a willing accomplice to Fox News’ relentless vaccine lies, Cavuto rather meekly addressed the issue on his show. “I’m not here to debate vaccinations for you,” he announced, stressing that, “my opinions don’t matter.”
Cavuto’s weak-kneed response might have been because last year when he more forcefully urged viewers to “stop the politics” and “get vaccinated,” the host became the target of an aggressive right-wing smear campaign. “I know we live in this hyper-politicised age. I get that, I appreciate that, but I’d like to urge people of all sorts, please get vaccinated,” Cavuto announced last October. “In the end, if you can get vaccinated and think of someone else and think of what that could mean to them and their survivability from something like this, we’ll all be better off.”
In speaking honestly and passionately about the vaccine, Cavuto had crossed the line. “I want you gone. Dead. Caput. Fini. Get it?” one angry viewer wrote the host. “Now, take your two-bit advice and deep-six it, and you!”
After his second, nearly-deadly bout of Covid, as he recovered in the hospital and realized that Trump voters in Trump counties who refused to get vaccinated were dying in record numbers, Cavuto could have followed the lead of Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, and other longtime Fox News staffers who have decided to walk away from their cable TV home. Instead, after checking out of intensive care, Cavuto rejoined the network, while it eradicates more of its viewers.
Fox News is never going to stop killing its audience in the blind pursuit of ratings and its love of trolling liberals. We’re watching a slow-motion, political mass suicide as millions refuse the vaccine and hundreds of thousands have died since the arrival of the inoculation one year ago. Clinging to political identity over personal health and safety, the Fox audience pledges its allegiance, making it more difficult for everyone else to get past the pandemic.
“A new study by four Harvard epidemiologists estimates that 135,000 unvaccinated Americans died unnecessarily in the last six months of last year,” the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of the virus, according to an ABC News analysis.
No other country in the world faces as powerful, deep-pocketed, and well-organized anti-vaccine propaganda campaign as the one now crippling portions of the United States.
Murdoch owns right-wing media properties and enjoys immense political leverage in other countries, such as Britain and Australia. But there’s been a conscious decision to unleash on America a special kind of anti-science, anti-vaccine campaign. Fox News is not only encouraging millions of viewers not to get vaccinated, but claims the inoculation might kill them, the government cannot be trusted, and that the vaccine poses a grave danger to pregnant women.
Pretending that American school children for nearly 70 years haven’t been forced to get vaccinated for lots of serious viruses, Fox has embraced a wholesale anti-vax conspiracy approach, portraying Covid jabs in the arms as signs of encroaching totalitarianism, condemning the shots in the most hysterical terms.
Today, the network remains perfectly aligned with the GOP, which is clearly pro-Covid. Republican politicians and commentators, who are fully vaccinated themselves, want the virus to spread in order to extend the deadly pandemic so it inflicts political damage on Democrats. There’s a reason every single Republican member of the House and Senate voted against the historic, $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill —they didn’t want newly-elected President Joe Biden to secure a legislative win.
We know for a fact Fox doesn’t care its viewers are dying. Last month when a Washington state trooper died of Covid, the network made no mention of the fact even though the trooper had appeared on Fox several times last October to brag about his decision to quit his job rather than getting vaccinated. The network touted him as a hero, until Covid claimed his life.
That’s why nothing at Fox will change, even if its hosts fall victim to the virus.
📰 GOOD STUFF:
Veteran media watcher James Fallows agrees that the New York Times needs to bring back its public editor in order to restore reader trust. From his Breaking News piece, “Journalism Needs to Engage With Its Critics”:
For 14 years, the Times had a partial answer to this problem, by creating the Public Editor position. (That move itself, in 2003, was itself part of the Times’s reckoning with a previous coverage failure.) Some of the public editors were very good; some were not. But simply by their presence they represented the expectation that the paper’s leaders should engage, respond to, and explain serious questions about its coverage and framing. (For instance, as a current question rather than a provocation: Why has the Times decided not to cover this Amnesty International report?) Rather than wave questions off or say they “could care less.” Having a public editor did not solve all problems, but it was a step.
🌖 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Brothers Comatose (featuring AJ Lee), “Harvest Moon”
You can’t go wrong covering Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the wistful single from the singer’s landmark 1992 album of the same name.
Here the Brothers Comatose, a five-piece outfit from San Fransisco, deliver a warm, new interpretation. AJ Lee, from the bluegrass band Blue Summit, gives the song its welcome twist by putting a female vocal of Young’s unhurried, contemplative track.
But there's a full moon risin'Let's go dancin' in the lightWe know where the music's playin'Let's go out and feel the night
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Maintaining the New York Times’ strident, defensive stance of refusing to acknowledge any fault in the paper’s spectacularly failed 2016 campaign coverage, executive editor Dean Baquet last week insisted the paper made no mistakes covering Hillary Clinton’s historic run.
The denial comes as the press is faced with a stunning double standard used to cover Clinton and Trump and their handling of classified documents. In 2015 and 2016, the press, led by the Times, treated that topic and Clinton’s private emails as the defining issue of the day. Today, news that Trump smuggled boxes of top-secret documents out of the White House is treated as a minor event, by comparison.
“I don’t have regrets about the Hillary Clinton e-mail stories,” Baquet recently told The New Yorker. “It was a running news story. It was a serious F.B.I. investigation. The stories were accurate.”
The Times published hundreds of But Her Email articles and columns. Is Baquet vouching for all of them? Here’s one that was corrected twice and still contained a false claim.
Baquet suggests the paper dedicated so much time and attention to the emails because there was a “serious FBI investigation.” But the Times didn’t know the FBI was investigating until August 2015, five months after the paper began its relentless and hyperactive coverage.
The editor’s next sentence in The New Yorker interview after he mentioned the FBI? “My God, we were writing stories about Donald Trump harassing women—we did the first of those.”
That’s the weak defense Baquet has clung to for years — the Times’ coverage of Clinton wasn’t dishonest because the paper treated Trump the same way. In 2016, Trump was a known pathological liar and sexual predator who openly appealed to racists. Clinton was the former secretary of state, First Lady, and U.S senator. Why would any newsroom cover them the same?
Banquet also told The New Yorker he never thought Trump would win in 2016, which confirms the idea that the paper’s gotcha email coverage was designed to make sure Clinton’s probable historic victory didn't taste sweet, and that she limped across the finish line. (The paper has a long and embarrassing history of harassing the Clintons.)
The Times embraced a misogynistic, But Her Emails narrative that depicted the first female presidential nominee as being deeply untrustworthy in a way that powerful men in politics were never depicted when they used private emails. (See here and here.)
Baquet has a history of making sweeping, baseless claims in an effort to coverup the egregious 2016 sins that unfolded on his watch. When the Times switched over to the other Clinton email story in the summer of 2016, they helped boost Russian hackers who peddled leaked emails. Two years later, Baquet claimed the paper had no idea Russians were involved. “We didn’t know then what we know now," he claimed in 2018. "Obviously the origins of the emails are a far bigger story than what was contained in them. But we didn’t know that at the time."
They didn’t know? In June 2016, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee posted a public notice that concluded the hack had been carried out by two groups associated with Russian intelligence. That July, top U.S. officials confirmed that Russians were behind the illegal attack on the DNC.
Refusing to deal with legitimate criticism has been a hallmark of Baquet’s tenure. He oversaw the elimination of the paper's public-editor position. At the time, the newspaper claimed that social media would serve as the paper's collective public editor, because readers would hold the paper accountable.
Not only hasn’t Baquet embraced Twitter as a public forum to hold the newspaper accountable, he’s told his newsroom to ignore the online critiques. (Especially if they come from the left.) Staffers, “shouldn’t be afraid of taking on subjects that are edgy and complicated…They should report those subjects independently and fairly, and if Twitter doesn’t like it Twitter can jump in the lake,” he boasted to The New Yorker.
Apparently at the Times, typing up a conveyor belt of fawning stories about Trump voters in Midwestern diners qualifies as “edgy and complicated.”
A note about the New Yorker interview. There was zero pushback or follow-up to Banquet’s proud boast that he has no regrets about the emails fiasco, or that the paper was right to treat Trump and Clinton equally. Baquet refuses to expose himself to serious criticism. When he gives interviews he knows that he won’t have to mount a serious defense of the paper. That he’ll likely be asked perfunctory questions about criticism the daily faces and then move on.
It’s always startling to watch journalists who demand transparency from public officials refuse to provide it themselves.
(Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
🇺🇦 GOOD STUFF:
From Jon Allsop’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, “A week of Whiplash And The Need For Cool Heads Over Russia and Ukraine”:
[Volodymyr Zelensky] and others do have a point, however, when they call the current US media coverage alarmist—very simply, much of it is sounding the alarm, loudly and incessantly so. Again, this tone is often entering coverage downstream of American politicians’ own alarming statements, and alarm might be warranted. But our job is to do more than write down what officials are saying, and alarm, when not immediate and independently corroborated, can be an unhelpful—even harmful—mode in media coverage. The facts here are murky, but journalists should know full well by now that the media is in the crossfire of an information war, and that fact, at the very least, should be a prominent and omnipresent caveat in our coverage of intelligence assessments and predictions.
🎹 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Eddie Vedder & Elton John, “Picture”
Can these two just make an entire album already? Last year, they recorded two new songs. The first, “E-Ticket,” appeared on John’s latest record. It was an undeniably fun, classic rock, piano romp.
Now comes “Picture,” off Vedder’s new release, and it’s just as raucous and infectious. The duo clearly had a blast recording these songs, and hopefully they’ll circle back for more.
A picture tells a thousand words, some of them were mineCombing through the evidence, afraid of what we'll findThe sun could lift us up, should this thunder ever stopThere's no over, there's no under, there's no shame
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
What a way to mark Black History Month.
Turns out when Spotify’s right-wing podcast host Joe Rogan isn’t spreading lies and misinformation about a life-saving vaccine during a public health crisis, he’s been chronically using the N-word.
One week after he offered a semi-apology for trafficking in Covid lies, Rogan offered another public mea culpa regarding his regular on-air use of racist language, and for comparing a Black neighborhood to the “Planet of the Apes.” The after-the-fact apology rang hollow, since just days ago Rogan was telling his listeners Black people aren’t really Black. This, while 70 older Rogan podcasts got yanked down last week, reportedly because they contained more racists slurs.
Over the weekend, as a compilation clip of Rogan’s 20-plus N-word utterances went viral, actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson walked back his support for Rogan, whose Covid lies have prompted a number of famous musicians to demand their catalogs be pulled from the music playlist platform. (Joni Mitchell: “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.”)
It’s the latest public relations fiasco for the audio content giant Spotify, the billion-dollar media behemoth that made a huge bet on GOP favorite Rogan, signing him to a $100 million contract despite knowing about the host’s long history of bigotry and baseless conspiracies.
Spotify’s unfolding Rogan fiasco comes as the company does deep damage to its own brand by steadfastly defending a chronic purveyor for right-wing lies and hate; a modern-day Rush Limbaugh. Rather that setting common-sense guidelines for Rogan, Spotify has opted to to treat him as untouchable as he wreaks havoc on the company’s image.
Once seen as a fun, feel-good brand for music and podcasts, Spotify is now synonymous with Fox News in terms of peddling toxic content; a poster child for corporate cowardice.
“Its failure to take any meaningful responsibility, other than adding a few disclaimers, is all too reminiscent of the way Facebook, for years, has dodged accountability for spreading so many harmful lies,” noted Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post.
In refusing to take meaningful action, Spotify is trying, and failing, to present itself as both a steward of free speech, guarding the rights of hosts to say whatever they want, while at the same time paying lip service to the idea of maintaining editorial guidelines.
Here’s the simple fact: When Spotify made Rogan a millionaire one hundred times over with a nine-figure deal to be the exclusive home of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” they knew exactly what they were getting. They knew some of Rogan’s content was so objectionable that Spotify wanted nothing to do with it.
How do we know? Because in 2020 when Spotify purchased the entire Rogan catalog of podcasts and hosted them, dozens of older episodes were deleted, featuring friendly interviews with reprehensible, far-right figures such as Sandy Hook shooting conspiracist Alex Jones, Holocaust denier Chuck C. Johnson, neo-Nazi fan Milo Yiannapoloulos, and Proud Boy founder Gavin McInnes. (Rogan dubbed his interview with the white supremist McInnes to be “fun times.”) Those chummy chats on a national platform helped normalize their racist and deranged behavior.
At the time, Spotify agreed to silence those interviews because they were, presumably, so objectionable that the company did not want to be associated with them. The same thing happened last week when 70 episodes mysteriously vanished while Spotify was in damage control mode.
But Spotify has remained silent when Rogan and his guests have claimed, “It’s more dangerous to get vaccinated than it is to get Covid,” that you’re “more likely to get infected if you’ve had three jabs,” that Dr. Anthony Fauci “produced the pandemic,” that Biden got a fake booster shot on TV because his aides were afraid he’d die if he got a real one, and the government is monitoring everyone’s texts looking for anti-vaccine messages.
Rogan last year bragged that the company was letting him say whatever he wanted about the pandemic and the vaccine — “They’ve been amazing. Spotifty has given me no pushback whatsoever.” That, despite the fact Spotify had in place a policy that “prohibits content on the platform which promotes dangerous false, deceptive, or misleading content about COVID-19 that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health.”
Spotify recently told the Wall Street Journal that it has taken down thousands of podcast episodes in violation of “detailed content policies” related to COVID-19. Just none of Rogan’s. He has violated those rules countless times and none of his Covid episodes have been touched. Last year, when Rogan urged people under the age 21 not to get vaccinated, Spotify somehow concluded those comments were not anti-vaccine.
Late last year, Rogan hosted Dr. Robert Malone, a world-class Covid denier and medical quack, who told Rogan’s millions of listeners that public health experts advocating for vaccines today are akin to Nazi’s in the 1930s. The episode got banned by YouTube, where the “Joe Rogan Experience” often gets uploaded, for violating the platform’s rules about trafficking in pandemic lies. For Spotify, the interview, which was conducted at the height of the Omicron surge which flooded hospitals with Covid patients nationwide, was deemed to be just fine.
Today, the public face of Spotify is an anti-vaccine zealot who has a long history of spouting racial slurs. Rupert Murdoch would be proud.
GOOD STUFF:
Lots of excellent points made in Amanda Marcotte’s recent Salon piece, “Stop feeding Joe Rogan's Trolls: Progressives Must Reclaim the Politics of Pleasure”:
It's not just that the right has done a surprisingly good job at marketing themselves as edgy trolls and painting the left as a bunch of dour snowflakes. Progressives in the past couple of years haven't been doing ourselves many favors. The dominant discourse is so often focused on suffering and surviving, without any talk about happiness and thriving as a counterbalance. (Calling the stimulus checks "survival checks" is a good example of the grim vocabulary that dominates lefty rhetoric.) Humor is in short supply. The gleeful progressivism I used to know has been replaced by competitive self-denial.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
John Mellencamp & Bruce Springsteen, “Did You Say Such a Thing”
This is the second collaboration between Mellencamp and Springsteen from the Hoosier’s new album, Strictly A One-Eyed Jack.
Mellencamp doesn’t do the arena rock songs any more; he hasn’t for years. These days his music smartly focuses on the smaller crevices of life. “Did You Say Such a Thing,” a gritty and catchy blues-rock shuffle, wonders if people have been talking behind the singer’s back, which is ironic because the famously headstrong Mellencamp has never cared what people thought of him.
What people say about meDon't amount to muchI guess some may be trueBut who can you trustDid you say such a thing?How come you said such a thing?
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If you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider doing so now. It’s the paid subscriptions that sustain PRESS RUN and make it all possible. Today I’m offering a special discount to my loyal readers.
Stay healthy
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News that Jeff Zucker, CNN’s longtime, larger-than-life chief, has been forced out for failing to disclose a consensual relationship he was having with a colleague, signals the end of an era for the all-news channel. One of the most celebrated TV programmers of his generation — he was “Today’s” executive producer at age 26 — Zucker leaves an indelible mark on CNN. He exits as the network struggles through a steep, post-Trump ratings slump, while desperately trying to manufacture Biden-era theater by relentlessly hyping “crisis” coverage. (Afghanistan! Inflation!)
His messy departure gives CNN executives a chance to review the network’s addiction to selling drama over news — to manufacturing storylines for the sake of viewer continuity.
Zucker is a storyteller first and foremost, a newsman second. Learning a key lesson from Roger Ailes at Fox News, Zucker preferred that there be running storylines with easily identifiable characters that ran for weeks and months on end, which made it easy for viewers to follow along the moment they tuned in because they already knew the plot line and the main characters. Why do you think this week Fox News is back pushing the phony story that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president again? Because for the Fox audience, Clinton serves as a popular, instantly recognizable villain.
Under Trump, it was easy for CNN to execute that strategy because his presidency was a long-running drama, often with unbelievable plots twists driven by an array of outlandish characters. The most important thing to understand about CNN and Trump is that the network’s profits doubled after he became president. Doubled.
CNN famously helped Trump get elected and then treated him as a reality TV star. According to a leaked phone call from the height of the Republican primary season, Zucker buttered up Trump's longtime attorney Michael Cohen: "You guys have had great instincts, great guts and great understanding of everything." (I guarantee you Zucker was not having similar phone calls with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.)
Zucker stressed how "fond" he was of Trump, wished he could talk to him "every day," and then floated the idea of giving Trump a "weekly show" on CNN during the campaign. The whole thing was inconceivable, unless you view American elections as nothing more that entertainment, and your job as the head of CNN is to secure pleasing content. (Zucker turned Trump into an “Apprentice” TV star a decade earlier when he oversaw NBC.)
These were some of the questions put to Trump by Anderson Cooper during a CNN campaign town hall:
•"What do you eat when you roll up at a McDonald's, what does - what does Donald Trump order?"
•"What's your favorite kind of music?"
•"How many hours a night do you sleep?"
•"What kind of a parent are you?"
•"What is one thing you wish you didn't do?"
In an unprecedented campaign move, CNN aired endless Trump rallies live and in their entirety. No explanation was ever given why the events were covered as "news," while no other candidates’ rallies received that kind of uninterrupted airtime. “I like Donald,” Zucker told the New York Times in 2017. “He’s affable. He’s funny.”
During his presidency, CNN refused to pull the plug on Trump no matter how outrageous and dangerous his behavior became, like after one of the most bizarre televised performances by a sitting president. That planned rant from April 2020 featured a campaign-style commercial that aired in the White House briefing room and attacked the media as well as Trump's critics. Immediately following the meltdown, CNN anchor John King admitted, "That was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room."
So why did CNN keep airing Trump briefings? Because the network saw it as a compelling storyline — it was dramatic.
Also, why did CNN keep hiring congenital liars who were paid by the network to fabricate nonsense in the name of defending Trump?
In 2019, the network hired Sean Duffy as a commentator to blindly defend Trump during his first impeachment. The former Republican congressman quickly created problems by constantly fabricating facts and spreading reckless and dangerous conspiracy theories.
That same year, CNN for weeks stood by its inexplicable decision to hire as its national political editor Sarah Isgur Flores, who spent her career flacking for Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and Carly Fiorina. Flores had absolutely no journalism experience. As Norman Ornstein succinctly put it, “Time after time, to curry favor with the right, Jeff Zucker and CNN soil themselves.”
Addicted to that drama and the Breaking News culture of the Trump years, CNN has desperately tried to recreate that frenzy under President Joe Biden, even though his administration represents the antithesis of the chaotic, criminal enterprise that Trump oversaw.
During the Afghanistan troop withdrawal, CNN’s Kabul reporter famously announced the U.S. would never be able to airlift 50,000 people out of the country (“it can’t happen”), and the network claimed the U.S. was inflicting “moral injury” by “abandoning” allies. Yet the U.S. ended up evacuating 130,000 people, in the most successful post-war operation of its kind. CNN also claimed that Biden’s long-expected troop withdrawal meant the U.S. was “walking away from the world stage” and “leaving Europe exposed.” Fact: Most European troops left Afghanistan eight years ago.
On and on it went as CNN insisted on injecting hysteria into an already compelling event, all in the name of chasing ratings and selling drama over news.
(Photo: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
From Media Matters’ “Fox News is Filling Its Editor Positions With GOP Operatives and Trump Staffers”:
Since the start of President Joe Biden’s term, Fox News has hired at least nine editors who previously worked for former President Donald Trump's administration, Republican campaign offices, or Republican politicians. Many of those editors now cover politics for FoxNews.com.
Fox's Republican hiring spree has come as the network has further cast aside its so-called “news” division in favor of right-wing opinion and Republican-friendly “reporting.” (The division between Fox News’ “opinion” and “news” division has always been a sham.)
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Lumineers, “Where We Are”
Who doesn’t need a tuneful reminder these days that “it will be okay?” Denver’s piano-and-mandolin export, the Lumineers, deliver the much-needed message of optimism and personal perseverance with its latest release.
Staring at the ceiling fan, I'm feeling far awayLeaning on the reasons like it wasn't even fairWhat was that?Driving in the rain, what was that?Calling out your name
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Overly impressed with Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ “mastery of his party’s hostile relationship with the mainstream media,” the New York Times published its latest valentine to the right-wing Republican this week. Marveling at his ability to mix “bluster and grievance” while following the obvious anti-media Trump playbook, the Times cheered the “underestimated politician” for his “vintage” attacks on the press that have “worked to his advantage.”
DeSantis has “proven remarkably deft at fighting back” against the media, the newspaper announced, without ever explaining what’s so difficult or unusual about a conservative mindlessly bashing the press without any evidence of wrongdoing. The GOP has been doing that for decades as a way to work the refs and intimidate journalists. It clearly works. Today the Times functions as a clearing house for DeSantis puff pieces.
Why is the paper obsessed with constantly putting a Southern governor in a glowing light? Look at the premise of Tuesday’s article: “If Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida somehow becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2024, two factors will help explain why.” The Times for the last year has been a leading press player in pushing the idea that DeSantis is a runaway Republican star, and the Times’ general practice is always to treat rising Republican stars as savvy and imposing.
The absurd DeSantis media piece was a perfect example of the newspaper’s chronic failure in the covering the governor. The soft look did not include a single quote from a Democrat to put the bullying in context. The piece also failed to quote any experts on press freedoms and what it means to American democracy to have so many prominent Republicans constantly denigrate the role of the free press in this country; to lock reporters out of bill signing ceremonies and withhold public documents, the way DeSantis does.
The article offered no insights as to why DeSantis bashes the press without provocation, even though the answer is obvious to local observers. “Tearing a page out of the Trump playbook, he tries to de-legitimize the role of a free press in a democratic society,” noted Sun Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet. “The strategy mostly reveals DeSantis’ thin skin and a reluctance to have contact with people who don’t agree with him. What’s he afraid of?”
Note the double standard: While the Times clearly admires DeSantis’ “rocky” relationship with the press and his constant attacks on the Fourth Estate, the paper last year dinged President Joe Biden for having a “low-key” relationship with the press. Do you think if Biden constantly bullied journalists the Times would toast his strategy?
What about the fact that more than 65,000 Floridians have died from Covid-19 and 5 million have been infected under DeSantis, who has taken extreme steps that have prolonged the pandemic? The Times politely sets most of that aside. During the height of the Delta variant sweeping across Florida last summer, when the Sunshine State became a global Covid epicenter, the Times reported that for “better or worse” DeSantis “refuses to change course” with his policies. “For better”??
This is a governor who has barred schools from mandating masks, stood in the way of hospital vaccine mandates, and demanded cruise lines allow unvaccinated passengers to set sail. He even secured one million useless doses of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump. Then late last year the state announced one million unused Covid tests had expired while sitting in warehouses as Floridians across the state waited in line for hours to find valid tests.
The Times’ love affair with DeSantis began in earnest last April when the daily cast not one but two long, admiring looks at the right-wing governor. The first was published April 10, and it read like an elongated press release, “Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? He’s Certainly Trying.” Quoting friends who touted his “intellect” and his love of “poring over articles in scientific journals,” the Times celebrated DeSantis’ “sterling” resume.
Just twelve days later the Times followed up with a front-page valentine, typing up DeSantis’ press office spin about how Florida was “booming” and he had somehow carved out a Covid-free region for the Sunshine State. “In a country just coming out of the morose grip of coronavirus lockdowns, Florida feels unmistakably hot,” the Times gushed.
By last summer the paper had no choice but to cover Florida’s runaway pandemic during the Delta variant surge. But reading the Times’ gentle coverage you’d think DeSantis, who was referenced just four times in one lengthy piece, was a bit player in this man-made drama. You’d think the state’s descent into mass Covid death was some kind of unavoidable twist of fate. “Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit remains an elusive question,” the Times reported, throwing up its hands.
Once again, the newspaper piece didn’t bother quoting a single DeSantis critic, even though just days earlier Miami Mayor Dan Gelber had announced unequivocally that DeSantis’ policies “are literally killing people.”
That’s not the story the Times wants to tell.
GOOD STUFF:
From Vice’s “Trump’s Favorite Candidates Are Getting Crushed in Fundraising”:
Former President Donald Trump may be the most prolific fundraiser in the GOP, but his cash vacuum isn’t doing much for the candidates he’s endorsed for 2022.
Many of the GOP candidates Trump is backing in open-seat races are struggling to raise significant funds as well against better-funded opponents—and every single one of the GOP candidates Trump has endorsed against a GOP incumbent is getting crushed in fundraising, according to newly released campaign finance reports.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
In case you didn’t see this from this weekend. It’s a brilliant piece of comedy writing, combined with former NFL star Peyton Manning’s dead-on delivery.
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Want more proof that the mainstream media remains committed to downplaying good news about the Biden economic boom?
When the Commerce Department on Thursday announced that the economy just grew at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years, posting robust growth numbers not seen since the Reagan era, none of the network newscasts treated the announcement as a big deal. In fact, two of the three newscasts, “ABC World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” didn’t even cover the story on Thursday — “NBC Nightly News” gave it one sentence.
The same media that remains in inflation hyperventilation mode, just cannot work up the energy to consistently inform news consumers about the red-hot economy under President Joe Biden. It won’t billboard the fact that it grew so rapidly in the fourth quarter of last year that it pushed the annual gross domestic product rate — the broadest measure of economic activity — to an eye-popping 5.7 percent. (The GDP under Trump never got above 3 percent.) Consumer spending also soared 7.9% last year, the quickest clip in since 1946.
So attached to the idea of using economic news to bash Biden, the press doesn’t know what to do when the data demolish the media’s preferred storyline. That was obvious by the fact that the coverage of the blockbuster GDP news seemed to go out of its way not to mention him.
In its GDP news piece, the New York Times made no reference to Biden or that the soaring economic data were a boost for the administration. But when the Times covers jobs reports and inflation updates it makes sure to emphasize, prominently in the coverage, that that news is bad for Biden. In its reporting on the jump in the December inflation rate, the newspaper mentioned Biden in the very first sentence, referencing, “a troubling development for President Biden and economic policymakers.”
This trend is quite common. The Associated Press in its reporting on high inflation in December also mentioned Biden in the first sentence, while its recent report on GDP figures didn’t mention him until the tenth paragraph, and made no suggestion that the figures represented a win for the White House.
Then there were the news outlets that acknowledged the GDP numbers were good news, but stressed that bad news was likely around the corner. “Economy Caps Strong Year as Worries Lurk,” was the Wall Street Journal page-one print headline. CNN rushed in with similar, glass-half-empty analysis: “The Economy Boomed in Biden's First Year. His Second Will Be Harder.”
The CNN spin was especially remarkable because the network spent the second half of last year burying Biden with doomsday economic coverage, especially regarding inflation, which was deemed a “political nightmare for Biden.” (Remember CNN’s wacky report about gallons of milk?) Then when GDP numbers confirmed that the economy had been on fire last year, CNN begrudgingly acknowledged the fact (“the economy boomed”), then quickly insisted Biden faces economic trouble in 2022.
Heads, Biden loses. Tails, Biden loses.
That media drumbeat of negativity, cheered on by the GOP, has taken its toll. Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.) Those results came in the wake of a media study that showed Biden was getting worse coverage late last year then Trump did in late 2020.
Note that the same day the GDP announcement was made, a National Public Radio reporter was on Twitter asking listeners to share their stories of economic gloom: “Has your 2021 raise been wiped out by #inflation? Has your 401k taken such a steep dive you're rethinking retirement? The@nprbusiness desk wants to hear from you.” The plea raised the obvious question: Why does NPR only want to hear bad news about the economy?
Another key fact about the coverage: The GDP for 2021 obliterated expectations that had been set by economists during the run-up to the announcement. Yet still the press shrugged. That’s telling because when it comes to reporting on monthly jobs reports, the press bases its coverage entirely around the same type of expectations. When 199,000 new jobs were added in December, the press treated that as bad news (“faltering,” “a major disappointment”) because the key number failed to beat expectations.
Last year, NPR announced the 210,000-jobs report for November was a “bust” even though the unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent in just 30 days. By contrast, back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy under Trump was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. That jobs report was good news because it beat expectations.
So why wasn’t the estimate-beating GDP news treated as a huge deal? NPR, which has been committed to doomsday economic coverage under Biden, tried to downplay the news, suggesting that “believe it or not” the economy grew last year.
For NPR, good economic news under Biden is treated as a mirage.
(Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Kudos to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez for doing what so few journalists are willing to do — profile Democratic voters, and specifically ones of color. In this case, he connects with an Obama supporter he profiled 13 years ago and meets up with him at his South L.A. barbershop.
From his piece, “They Never Thought They’d See a Black President, or Another assault on voting rights”:
Last week, I met with the Tollivers and some of the longtime customers at the barbershop. The language was as sharp as Tolliver’s shears. The tone was a bitter blend of heartbreak, rage and resignation that the nation’s most reprehensible sins may never be buried.
These are people whose ancestors were sharecroppers, and whose families headed west to escape Jim Crow. Lawrence Tolliver said his elders told him a country built on the backs of slaves would never be free of bigotry, and yet he wanted to believe the country could evolve.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Beatles, “I've Got a Feeling”
If you haven’t watched “Get Back,” the fly-on-the-wall documentary on Apple TV, you should definitely give it a look. Among other things, it captures the band’s final live performance, which took place oddly enough, in front a couple dozen people on the roof of a London building during a blustery day in 1969.
Now a shortened version of the eight-hour documentary is heading to IMAX theaters, “Get Back: The Rooftop Concert.”
“I’ve Got a Feeling” is my favorite from the performance, an overlooked rock-blues Beatles nugget. I’m not enough of a band scholar to say for sure, but I feels like it’s one of the few from the Beatles where Paul McCartney and John Lennon take turns singing verses within the same song. When Lennon takes over duties at the 2:00 minute mark, it turns the ditty into something special.
Everybody had a good yearEverybody let their hair downEverybody pulled their socks upEverybody put their foot downOh yeah, oh yeah
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Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal brought troubling news about Covid-19 deaths as the paper detailed how they “have reached the highest level since early last year,” emphasizing that the virus “spread wildly through the country and caused record-shattering count cases.”
The Journal article painted a dismaying picture of pandemic America, depicting the Omicron variant that was ravaging a defenseless nation as traveling at a “breakneck speed.” It wasn’t until near the end of the article though, that the newspaper noted, “data have shown that infection rates remain higher among the unvaccinated and that those without shots are significantly more likely to be hospitalized.”
Talk about burying the lede. Wednesday’s Journal headline, “Deaths Highest in Nearly a Year,” would have been more accurate if it had been, “The Unvaccinated Drive Death Surge to New Heights.”
As we approach our third year of the pandemic, here are three key ways the news media are failing the story right now.
- Conservatives are volunteering to get sick and die.
The Journal piece was a perfect example of how the press is turning away from the pandemic story — tens of millions of Americans who have been fed a mountain of vaccine lies refuse to get inoculated, thereby sacrificing themselves on the altar of right-wing misinformation.
Is it deeply irrational and unprecedented in American history for a large swath of the country to refuse free, safe, and effective vaccines knowing they all run the clear risk of getting sick and dying? It’s not only unheard of for the United States, it’s unparalleled for any nation with an educated population.
Think back twelve, thirteen months ago when the much-anticipated vaccine was going into circulation and thankful first responders and elderly citizens queued up for the shot — did anyone think that one year later nearly four thousand Americans would be dying each day, only because so many refused to take the vaccine?
We knew there would be organized and partisan vaccine skeptics. But key portions of the Republican Party, as well as Fox News’ entire primetime lineup, urging people not to get vaccinated; warning them the shots might kill them? The press never anticipated that type of mass, delusional behavior, and today it’s still not sure how the cover the surreal phenomena that continues to unfold.
Nervous about offending Republicans and Fox News by depicting anti-science conservatives as flat-earth deniers who would rather risk the welfare of themselves and families than get a vaccine (developed under Trump!), the press tiptoes around the obvious insanity.
- Liberals are not trying to close schools
When the Omicron variant began sweeping through the country late last year, forcing a small percentage of schools to close temporarily because of staff shortages, pundits galvanized around the idea that over-anxious Democrats supported the closures and would pay a political price for shutting down schools again.
Insisting the news was “quite grim for Biden and Dems,” Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report, stressed that new polling showed most parents are more concerned about their children missing out on education than they are about kids getting Covid. But why is that “grim” for Democrats, since Walter cannot point to a single elected Democrat in this country today who is advocating for school closures? As Biden pointed at his press conference last week, 95 percent of schools in America remain open today.
At the New York Times, David Leonhardt propped up the same straw man argument, insisting liberals are being just as illogical about the pandemic as conservatives who refuse to get vaccinated. “Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives,” he claimed. Question: Do you know any progressives in 2022 who organize their lives around Covid as a core identity? It’s an absurd, sweeping claim, designed to make liberals look irrational when all they’re doing is getting vaccinated and following common-sense public health guidelines.
Meanwhile, polling clearly undercuts the media’s odd premise that parents today are irate at Democrats because most schools were closed in 2020 when Trump was president. “Surveys have also shown that voters—particularly Democrats and independents—are not holding Democrats responsible for last year’s school closures,” notes Rachel Cohen at The New Republic.
- Biden cannot stop a global, mutating virus
Assigning four reporters to write a 4,000-word piece on all the “setbacks” President Joe Biden has supposedly suffered while trying to curb the pandemic this year (fact: 85 percent of Americans 12 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine), the Times, like so many other outlets, omitted all context about how every leader around the world has struggled with the same unpredictable virus hurdles. Presenting the pandemic in a silo, the Times report made it seem like if Biden had simply done x, y, and z, the Omicron variant wouldn’t have spread like wildfire across the country.
Worse, the Times piece actually dinged Biden for the GOP’s irrational behavior: “The president tiptoed around an organized Republican revolt over masks, mandates, vaccine passports and even the vaccine itself.”
This isn’t to say that the White House shouldn’t be held accountable for its crisis management during the pandemic, and serious questions were raised about the country’s preparedness regarding testing late last year. What cannot be overlooked though, is the fact that it makes a difference if the president is committed to following science, as Biden is, compared to someone who urged Americans to inject bleach into their veins.
If Covid is a uniquely American problem today, it’s only because one of the two political parties wants it to be.
GOOD STUFF:
Covering the pandemic in the U.S. would be so much easier if there weren’t a committed, deep-pocketed propaganda campaign designed to spread nonstop lies. In a strange way, that’s made the topic easier for kids media to cover — they don’t have to deal with misleading adults.
From the new Atlantic piece by Kate Cray, “How 'Sesame Street' Is Handling the Pandemic”:
Despite these hurdles, or perhaps because of them, kids’ media have achieved a level of clarity and directness in their pandemic coverage that can be hard to find in outlets geared toward older audiences. Articles are straightforward because they have to be; it’s the only way kids will understand them. They’re also heavy on context, making few assumptions about what the audience already knows. And though they’re mostly neutral in their tone, many will also acknowledge children’s feelings and soothe them where they can.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kyle Kinane, “Pancakes on the Plane”
Only standup great Kyle Kinane would get seated next a guy who ate pancakes out of a Foot Locker bag, and then have eight priceless minutes of material about it.
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Be kind.
Looking for additional ways to pile on President Joe Biden, more news outlets have turned to focus groups in recent weeks. Rounding up tiny numbers of voters and treating their utterances as sacrosanct, the media aggressively push the idea that “moderate” and “independent” voters have universally turned on Biden, even though the findings from the bull sessions are not statistically relevant.
The poorly thought out focus group featured on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” included a grand total of six people who were identified as three Biden voters and three Trump voters. But all of them sounded like Trump voters.
The Biden voters interviewed by CBS were completely unsupportive of him, blaming the president for “Covid fatigue” and misleading the public about the virus. “I think that things are just as bad as they were when the pandemic started,” stressed one “Biden voter.” Added another: “COVID has not improved. Biden has not, you know, stuck to any of his promises.” The third Biden voter blamed him for the high price of bacon today.
In CBS’s aired focus group, not one person uttered a word of support for the president, who in the latest Fox News poll has a 47 percent approval rating.
At the New York Times, its recent focus group consisted of 14 “independent” voters, none of whom think Biden can improve the economy, even though a record 6.4 million new jobs were created during his first term. One of the so-called Biden supporters complained that Democrats (!) are trying to change election laws because they can’t win fair contests on their own.
Meanwhile, here’s how longtime Republican operative Frank Luntz led the conversation among “independent” voters as the moderator for the Times focus group: “Raise your hands if you agree with that statement, that this is the lowest point in your lifetime.” [emphasis added]
No loaded questions there, folks.
More oddities from the Times focus group, which confirmed the “independent” voters they assembled did not reflect the country at large: Luntz asked 14 participants who they’d vote for in a hypothetical presidential match-up, Biden, Trump, or West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. An overwhelmingly majority said Manchin, even though in the real world a strong plurality of Americans have no idea who Manchin is.
In a long article about Biden’s supposed failed presidency this month, the Washington Post touted a focus group of “10 suburban women swing voters.” The Post highlighted them because the women said unflattering things about Biden. (“Old.” “Incoherent.” “Lazy.”) But who were the women? Had they voted for Trump in the past? Was there any ethnic diversity among them? The Post, too enthralled by comments made by ten random voters, didn’t care.
On Twitter, McClatchy’s White House correspondent Alex Roarty went into great detail about a focus group he watched which featured ten “moderate” voters. He stressed the session produced very little good news for Democrats, even though Roarty provided no information about the ten voters, or why people should read significance into what they said considering this is a country of 160 million voters.
Focus groups can be useful for understanding public policy — when they’re done right. When Pew Research recently wanted to take the temperature regarding globalization, they hosted 26 separate focus groups around the world. That’s not what news outlets have been doing recently, though.
Not only are the media sessions too small and too infrequent, they’re also set up all wrong. Focus groups are designed to record extended reactions that a small group of participants have when they experience something together. Focus groups are meant to gauge the response to a specific stimulus.
For instance, gathering moderate and swing voters and have them watch Biden’s recent press conference or his upcoming State of Union speech and then recording their impressions would be a helpful way to use focus groups in the political arena; to find out what voters liked and what they didn’t like about something they just experienced. What focus groups are not designed to do is to gauge opinion of a small group of people who are asked, “Tell us how you feel about X,” without experiencing X in that group.
That’s why focus groups are used most often for product research and branding — consumers are shown a specific product, given information about it, and then asked to share their opinions about it. That’s not what’s happening with these Biden focus groups, which is why the results are such a mess. But the press loves the results because they’re producing content they want — voters say Biden is “lazy”! It’s basically voters repeating back to the press all the narratives that the press has been emphasizing about Biden for the last six months. (Media: They’re so perceptive!) It’s a convenient closed loop.
These recent focus groups have also been a fountain of misinformation, which moderators don’t correct because they see their jobs of facilitating a conversation, not fact-checking participants. That means in the “Face the Nation” focus group, a Trump voter was able to announce that her weekly grocery bill under Biden had “doubled,” even though grocery store prices are up 7 percent over the last year, not 100 percent. Another participant claimed it takes “12 days” to get results from at-home Covid testing kits, when the results are known within minutes.
Rounding up a handful of random, “independent” voters who echo GOP talking points isn’t as insightful as the press thinks it is.
GOOD STUFF:
I did not see this coming. And good for him.
From CBS’s “Neil Young Threatens to Leave Spotify Over Vaccine Misinformation”:
Neil Young had a strong message for Spotify on Monday: "They can have Rogan or Young. Not both." The 76-year-old rocker apparently doesn't want to share a platform with Joe Rogan, whose podcast, "The Joe Rogan Experience" has an exclusive deal with Spotify and has frequently spread false information about COVID-19.
Rogan has famously questioned COVID-19 vaccines on his show, and when he got COVID-19 last year, said he took ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that's been heavily promoted on social media despite having no proven benefit against COVID-19.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Temptations, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”
I actually saw this clip on TV this week as I was scrolling by MeTV, which airs old Ed Sullivan shows. This episode from January 1969, when this single hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, was playing and it reminded me of what an iconic, but often overlooked, Motown classic this was for the Temptations.
“I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” was originally recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1966 and reached No. 88 on the charts. It was Eddie Kendricks’ signature falsetto that transformed the song into a run-away hit.
Look here, my love is strong, you seeI know you'll never get tired of me, oh babyAnd I'm gonna use every trick in the bookI'll try my best to get you hooked, hey babyAnd every night, every dayI'm gonna say
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Two days after it was reported that a detailed plan to seize voting machines was passed around the White House in December 2020, as part of Trump’s plan to steal the presidential election, the New York Times on Sunday published a gentle profile of MAGA’s who were part of a violent insurrection on January 6.
Portraying the deadly coup attempt as a spiritual rebirth for right-wing activists, one that “has given them new purpose” and a sense of “community,” the Times’ front-page piece detailed how insurrection participants had returned home renewed and committed to the Trump cause — how the attack on the Capitol “became a galvanizing new beginning.”
What was missing from the article was context. The Times did not reach out to a single Democrat for a quote, or any experts in the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., or even any Republicans who don’t view an insurrection as the crowning achievement of the conservative movement. As with so many loving profiles of Trump voters over the years, no dissenting voices were allowed.
The Times piece never tried to explain what the news value of the exercise was. The media’s firm fixation on Trump voters isn’t normal — the idea that our politics needs to concern itself with the feelings of voters who supported the presidential loser has no basis in how the press traditionally views the election season.
It’s all part of the paper’s steadfast commitment to normalizing Trump and the dangerous movement he leads — the paper’s hallmark devotion to constantly elevating white, middle-class voters from red states and portraying them as the most important political voices in America.
“Here's the bottom line: When America elected a neo-fascist president in 2016, the New York Times didn't ask, how can we save democracy?” tweeted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer, after reading the Sunday puff piece. “It asked, why didn't we listen more to the enablers? And it's never stopped since.”
The Times remains so institutionally committed to publishing updates about Trump Voters, while whitewashing the danger they pose to this country, that the paper can no longer recognize the absurdities of the premises they use. It would be like publishing a fawning profile of Neo-Nazis who traveled to Charlottesville in 2017. Remember the Times’ misguided profile of a Trump-supporting Nazi from Ohio? (Nazis are people too!)
The Times stressed that the people profiled in the Sunday article, the ones who came home from the riot and became even more impassioned about the Big Lie, weren’t insurrectionists, they were merely “marchers” — they “never breached the Capitol,” which somehow is supposed to make their actions less objectionable, and therefore make them more sympathetic in the hands of Times reporters. They “simply went home” after the day’s rally, the paper reported.
But the “marchers” angle represents a pointless distinction. None of the people quoted in the piece say they stayed out of the Jan. 6 violence because they thought it was wrong; none of them made a deliberate decision in real time to not try to stop a legal election from being certified. Maybe they didn’t breach the Capitol only because the crowd outside was too large for them to get inside.
In fact, one “marcher” told the Times he wished the day had featured a heavily armed mob: “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.” Another “marcher” insisted that he and his son never tried to ransack the Capitol that day, but his son was arrested and charged for doing exactly that, in part because the son posted an update on Facebook about how he had ransacked the Capitol on Jan 6.
The key point is that the MAGA’s featured by the Times all fervently support the insurrection. They desperately wanted to void millions of legal votes in 2020. They hold fundraisers for insurrectionists currently in custody and refer to them as political prisoners who are fighting a “holy war.” If another Trump mob were to storm government buildings in an effort to dismantle the democratic process, these people would all be at the front of the line. And the Times won’t stop profiling them in the nicest terms possible.
This all goes back to 2016. Anxious to brush off claims of liberal media bias after Trump’s surprise victory, reporters fanned out to GOP bastions to eagerly record every utterance from his supporters. We witnessed a conveyor belt of stories about blue-collar voters in virtually all-white counties inside red states announcing that they really, really like Trump. (“Hitting it out of the ballpark”; “I think he’s doing a great job.”)
When Trump lost in 2020, journalists again swooped into GOP-friendly outposts such as Youngstown, Ohio (ABC News), Colorado Springs (Washington Post), and Mason, Texas (New York Times), for what seemed like group-hug sessions, as the press gave close-minded Trump supporters a platform to spread untrue claims about the election and about President Joe Biden.
It was bad enough when the Times glorified Trump voters. Now they’re celebrating insurrectionists.
(Photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
From Robert Shapiro’s timely piece in the Washington Monthly, “The Biden Jobs Boom Is Bigger Than We Thought”:
The current employment boom is fueled by a highly successful economy and soaring rates of business creation. The Census Bureau reports that Americans created nearly 5.4 million private businesses in 2021—68 percent higher than the average of 3.2 million per year from 2015 to 2019. This historic level of business formation helped make the record level of quits possible, including those who left their jobs to start their own business. It also should help sustain healthy job gains throughout 2022.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Sam Fender & Holly Humberstone, “Seventeen Going Under”
Two weeks ago I highlighted this breakout UK hit from Fender. Now he’s returned with a duet version with the compellingly talented 22-year-old, Humberstone. Together, they slow down the hard-driving song about teen against and turn it into a haunting meditation.
I was far too scared to hit himBut I would hit him in a heartbeat nowThat’s the thing with angerIt begs to stick around
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It wouldn’t be surprising if President Joe Biden felt a strong sense of déjà vu as he marked his first year in office and the D.C. press eagerly writes him off as a failure buried by a mountain of crises, while at the same time erasing his accomplishments. (Record job gains, ending the Forever War.) Reading from GOP talking points, journalists remain in hyperventilation mode, obsessively detailing Biden’s soft polling numbers while loudly — and falsely —claiming he can’t get his key legislative initiatives passed into law.
Biden’s lurking sense of been-here-before would be driven by the fact that as Barack Obama’s vice president, he watched the same media story play out under a different Democratic administration. Hounded by a D.C. press corps that was often obsessed with tagging Obama as a failure, depicting him as overwhelmed and outsmarted by Republicans, and occasionally just losing its mind over relatively minor unfolding stories (remember Ebola and the glitchy Obamacare website?), the press misjudged one of the most successful and popular presidents of the last half century.
Today, the Beltway media remains in groupthink mode (CNN headline: “Is Biden's Presidency Doomed?”), with everyone eagerly hitting the same points regardless of the facts. "For now, virtually none of the groups that fueled Biden’s 2020 victory are happy,” the Associated Press recently reported, despite the fact that polling shows 80-plus percent of Democratic voters approve of Biden’s performance in office.
The Washington Post published a long obituary on Biden’s presidency this week, casting his first year in office as a failure. (“Disarray,” “tensions,” “worry,” “stumbled.”) Left unmentioned in the article’s 43 paragraphs was the fact that a record 6.4 million new jobs have been created since Biden took office, and that the U.S. now enjoys full employment with workers earning all-time high wages.
The Post article indicated that Biden’s polling numbers (“stuck in the low 40s”) were a key part of his presidency. Yet after one year in office, Trump’s approval rating was in the 30s and the press rarely obsessed over it. His historically unpopular standing simply became the new norm, as journalists instead marveled as Trump’s loyal base.
For Biden, the Sturm und Drang coverage today — the cinematic sense of panic — must seem familiar. The press did the same thing to Obama. Even though the Democrat was swept into office with a landslide victory in 2008, the press immediately began trying to frame his presidency as a flop.
“Is President Obama's Carter Moment Nearing?” was the headline for a David Broder piece in the Democrat’s first term, in which the Post columnist compared an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Iranian hostage crisis, which lasted a year-and-a-half. There was this Associated Press lede from early in Obama’s first term: “Barack Obama's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year got off to a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad start.”
And look at this doomsday, Year One pronouncement from the Post: “A year into his presidency, President Obama faces a polarized nation and souring public assessments of his efforts to change Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”
The Punchline? Obama’s approval rating in that poll stood at a robust 53 percent.
Then there was the derailed, hysterical coverage of Ebola and Obamacare. The virus disease that sprang from Liberia in 2014 claimed the lives of exactly two people in the United States. But the political press covered it like a raging plague.
From one apocalyptic Post pundit: “You could feel a shiver of panic coursing through the American body politic this week as the country struggled with a metastatic set of crises: the spread of the Ebola virus, the surge of Islamic-State terrorists and the buckling global economy.”
During one peak Ebola news week, cable news channels mentioned the virus over 4,000 times, while the Post homepage one night featured at least 15 Ebola-related articles and columns.
The Boston Globe announced that Ebola had “moved closer to becoming the next great American panic -- an anthrax or SARS for the social media age,” while CNN lamented that government officials seemed “too confident” they could contain the disease. At one point, the Post's Chris Cillizza dubbed Ebola the “October surprise” of the 2014 elections, while Bloomberg inexcusably published a magazine cover featuring a creepy “Ebola is Coming” headline, ominously portrayed by swaths of dripping blood.
All for a virus that killed two people here.
That was preceded by the memorable media freak-out over Obamacare, and specifically its launch to consumers. “Why Obamacare May Be Obama's Katrina, Iraq,” crowed an absurd doomsday headline from the era.
Weeks before the deadline for signing up for then-new Obamacare, the AP reported the administration would need a “miracle” to reach its stated goal of six million people enlisting. By the time of the deadline arrived, seven million signed up for private coverage, spurring the largest expansion in health coverage in America in half a century.
Post columnist Megan McArdle, then working for Bloomberg, made a career out of being wrong about Obamacare, with columns like "Is Obamacare in a Death Spiral?" "Why Obamacare Is Like Three Mile Island," "Resolved: Obamacare Is Now Beyond Rescue," "Young Invincibles Are Killing Obamacare," and "Is Obamacare Now Beyond Repeal?"
Then with the Obamacare website hiccup, the breathless press covered the IT story like a blockbuster event for weeks, suggesting deep, lasting political damage for Obama — he left office with a 60 percent approval rating.
Biden can be forgiven if he feels like he’s seen this movie before.
(Photo: Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
From Houston Chronicle’s, “Houston philanthropies invest $20M to launch nonprofit news outlet”:
Five foundations, including three local philanthropies, are investing more than $20 million to launch an independent nonprofit news outlet in Houston, entering the city’s competitive media landscape.
The Houston Endowment, the Kinder Foundation and Arnold Ventures on Wednesday said the yet-to-be-named news operation will be one of the largest of its kind nationally when it launches late this year or early next year on multiple platforms. The philanthropies, joined by journalism foundations American Journalism Project and Knight Foundation, said they seek to “elevate the voices of Houstonians” and “answer the community’s calls for additional news coverage.”
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Aoife O’Donovan, “Phoenix”
I found my favorite new release of this new year. It’s from O’Donovan, a wildly talented, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter who echoes bits of Rickie Lee Jones.
The New York Times notes this week, “O’Donovan’s songs are rooted in folk tradition but full of musical surprises: daring melodic leaps, unexpected chord progressions, subtle rhythmic shifts.”
It’s really wonderful stuff.
Everybody's looking for somebody to blameThe stages of sadness how many can you nameI stopped at anger, never felt the same
They say it'll fade my scars my tears will dryAnd i'll lie under the stars againNot wondering where you are
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After spending much of 2020 and the first half of 2021 raging against mask mandates and whining about how forcing workers to get vaccinated represented the trampling of individual liberties, Fox News in recent weeks and months has proudly sprinted ahead into the realm of unrestrained anti-vaccine propaganda.
Loudly embracing what until just a couple years ago was considered loony fringe rhetoric about mainstream inoculations, Rupert Murdoch’s network — where all hosts are fully vaccinated — now unapologetically peddles every conceivable form of medical misinformation as America battles its second year of a public health crisis.
Question: Will we ever know how many people Murdoch’s empire killed during the pandemic?
“Why are we forcing people to get vaccinated when you’re more likely to get the virus if you’re vaccinated in the variant that we have right now?” the network’s Rachel Campos-Duffy recently asked, echoing Fox’s primetime anti-vaxxer, Tucker Carlson: “There is evidence that people who get the booster are more likely to get the latest variant.”
In no other country where Murdoch owns properties and enjoys political leverage, such as Britain and Australia, have his media outlets endangered so many lives the way Fox News has in the U.S. There’s been a conscious decision by Murdoch to unleash on America an anti-science, anti-vaccine campaign the likes of which has never been seen before in modern media, which is why this NPR headline surprised nobody: “Study Finds More COVID-19 Cases Among Viewers Of Fox News Host Who Downplayed Pandemic.”
Why is Murdoch allowing, and even encouraging, the life-threatening programming to fester on Fox? He’s terrified of being outflanked by even more rabid, right-wing media outlets, such as OAN, and Newsmax. Committed to never allowing a sizeable audience take hold to the right of Fox News, Murdoch has made a calculated decision that actively endangering his viewers is preferable to them switching over to another channel.
One month after the 2020 election, Fox’s ratings were reeling as Newsmax vacuumed up MAGA viewers by telling them it's not possible to know who had won the presidential election this year, and that Trump's second term was still within reach. The channel specifically attacked Fox News for crowning Biden president-elect on November 7.
It worked. Back in September of 2020, Newsmax drew just 100,000 viewers a day. Following the election, and while championing Trump’s undemocratic claims of a "stolen" election, Newsmax's audience ballooned to nearly a million viewers. Soon after Joe Biden was declared president-elect, Sean Hannity's 9 p.m. program slid into a last-place position behind MSNBC and CNN, among viewers 25-54.
Murdoch caught a glimpse of Fox News’ future if viewers left in favor of more fringe and even more reckless outlets. His solution? Become more fringe, even more reckless, and use a global health crisis to accomplish that. (Fox soon handed over its 7 p.m. “news” block to a chronic liar, Jesse Watters.)
Today, the billionaire’s media empire inflicts a special kind of pain on the U.S. It’s true his right-wing outlets around the world have been awful on Covid, but it simply doesn’t compare with the war Fox News has unleashed here. For instance, when Australia’s Murdoch-approved Prime Minster Scott Morrison recently said the government would no longer provide free rapid antigen test kits, several Murdoch pundits unloaded on him, denouncing the move as being mean-spirited and “out of touch” with everyday Australians who deserve free and fast testing in order to control the spread of the virus. When Morrison reversed course, Murdoch newspapers mocked his “backflip.”
Also, Murdoch’s News Corps made headlines last summer when it cancelled a longtime, right-wing commentator in Australia. The move was widely seen as punishment for the pundit’s Covid lies. That’s because in Australia, Murdoch’s company operates under different rules and is willing to stand up for common sense when it comes to not pushing obvious Covid-19 lies.
In the States we have an entire Murdoch network that’s not only encouraging millions of viewers not to get vaccinated, but claims the inoculation might kill them, the government cannot be trusted, and the vaccine poses a danger to pregnant women.
Too cowardly to pull back his top-rated U.S. hosts, Murdoch refuses to protect American news consumers from Fox News’ cult-like disinformation regarding a miraculously safe and effective vaccine.
That’s a huge reason why the U.S. vaccination rate has stalled so far behind other industrialized nations — the Biden White House is facing a cynical and powerful anti-vax movement that’s unlike anything else in the world. We are the only country that’s simultaneously trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic while battling a homegrown, deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going for partisan reasons.
The U.S. has become a global leader in pandemic lies, and that’s because of Murdoch, who rushed to get vaccinated one year ago. All that while the network churns out lies about the pandemic and it couldn’t care less that nearly one million Americans, including a huge block of Fox viewers, have perished.
Fox’s ratings are up and Biden’s approvals are down — that’s all Murdoch cares about.
(Photo: AFP Contributor/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
Dan Froomkin continues to ask the right media questions. From his latest, “Where Are the Interviews With Regular Americans Terrified For Our Democracy?”:
What about talking to non-racist parents who worry their children will be taught propaganda at school? Or people in Black or brown communities who worry about barriers to voting, increased poverty and more militant policing? Or people in immigrant communities who don’t want to see their neighbors deported? Or trans people, who would have reason to be scared for their lives? Or government employees who would be asked to do things they consider abhorrent?
Or hang out at a Unitarian Church, or a reconstructionist synagogue, or a mosque, or a Common Cause meeting? Or, hell, just talk to people in a blue-state diner, if that’s easier? (Maybe make that a deli.)
📽 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
“We Don’t Talk About Bruno”
This Disney smash, penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has become a surprise international sensation since the release of “Encanto” in November.
According a recent New York Times article, the ridiculously catchy song about the movie’s sinister character, “recently topped the Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes charts in the United States, reached No. 1 on the global YouTube music videos chart and currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.”
He told me that the life of my dreamsWould be promised, and someday be mineHe told me that my power would growLike the grapes that thrive on the vine (óye, Mariano's on his way)
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Stubborn ABC News executives refuse to acknowledge a costly breach at the network that prompted bogus, right-wing attacks on a key administration official who is trying to shepherd the country through a pandemic. It’s the latest example of elite news outlets that won’t come clean about glaring mistakes — often involving Democrats — while at the same time they demand transparency from public officials.
The clear misstep came when “Good Morning America” edited an interview with the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky. In the TV clip, she discussed how a recent study of vaccinated people showed Covid-19 deaths were restricted mostly to people with preexisting medical conditions: “The overwhelming number of deaths — over 75 percent — occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities.”
But in the editing, ABC omitted the context that Walensky’s “75 percent” was in reference to a tiny percentage of fully vaccinated people who got sick or died.
Thanks to the botched presentation, Republicans, Fox News, and anti-vax zealots seized on the clip and claimed that 75 percent of all Covid-19 victims — 800,000 and counting— suffered from comorbidities. They used the ABC blunder to bolster their bogus claims about how masking and vaccines don’t work and that the government has been lying about the pandemic for years.
The firestorm generated by ABC’s misrepresentation became so intense that Twitter blocked the clip from being shared.
It’s especially egregious that ABC won’t come clean about its failure because the network’s miscue created news — it generated real confusion and the CDC found itself under siege for days thanks entirely to ABC’s misstep. If ever there were a time for a news outlet to step forward, provide guidance, and concede mistakes were made, this was a prime example.
Instead, leaders at ABC News abdicated their responsibilities, which in turn makes the network’s demand for accountability from others seem hollow and hypocritical.
Transparency and accountability used to be hallmarks of respectable news operations, which often employed ombudsmen or public editors who served as the readers’ representative and held newsrooms responsible. Today, the message being sent is that journalists don’t have to acknowledge obvious mistakes and shortfalls, and that news outlets are more committed to riding out controversies instead of addressing them.
And Democrats keep getting hurt in the process.
Rather than admit failures in its 2016 campaign coverage, the New York Times famously fired its public editor after she wrote two columns criticizing the paper’s coverage of Russia’s election interference — she said it was too slow, too timid. Times editor Dean Baquet was so upset about the critique he took the extraordinary step of criticizing her in the pages of the Washington Post.
There still hasn't been any meaningful media acknowledgment of the signature sexism that dominated in 2016. The press remains much more committed to the idea that Hillary Clinton was a uniquely flawed or a "bad" candidate, that way scribes don't have to acknowledge the obvious sins of the coverage. Why is it important for the press to admit mistakes? Because that's how lessons are learned and how bad behavior is fixed.
In March 2019, the media opted to foolishly play along with Attorney General William Barr's dubious, three-and-a-half page “exoneration” summary of the Mueller Report, pretending the cherry-picked document was a credible stand-in for the contents of the sprawling, two-year investigation. Using only the Barr press release, which didn’t quote a single, complete sentence from the Mueller Report, the Times crowed that the probe had delivered a “powerful boost” for Trump’s re-election run.
When it soon became obvious that Barr had simply lied about the contents, the press never offered up any mea culpas — never explained why journalists took the word of a partisan Trump appointee like Barr as fact, and spent weeks commenting on the Mueller report without ever reading one page of it. Journalists, who typically demand access to documents when evaluating investigations, made sweeping conclusions based on no evidence. The "Mueller report is out," CBS News erroneously announced. It was an extraordinary failure of journalism, and one that reporters, editors, and producers didn’t want to address.
Then late in the 2020 campaign, NBC’s “Today” show got duped by the Trump team, which ripped a video clip of Joe Biden out of context to make it look like he thought George W. Bush was still president. "Biden making headlines overnight after appearing to confuse his opponent's name," NBC reported the next morning. "It comes as the former Vice President was pressed to respond to the president's claims that Biden is mentally fit to serve." Instead of apologizing to Biden for the egregious error, NBC attached a pointless editor's note to its original, erroneous report.
It’s not too late for ABC News to do the right thing and concede its failure. It shouldn’t be that hard for journalists to hold themselves accountable. Last year, I deleted and apologized for a PRESS RUN column as soon as I realized the premise — based on faulty research I had done — was incorrect. If a newsletter writer like me to can admit mistakes, why can’t ABC News?
💉 GOOD STUFF:
The Salt Lake Tribune published a punishing editorial about the state of Covid misinformation.
From, “Utah Leaders Have Surrendered to COVID Pandemic”:
Government officials, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, were apparently determined not to be caught governing in the face of this challenge. Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms.
Instead we were left to listen to various forms of foolishness and misinformation, promises of being rescued by everything from a bleach cocktail to horse dewormers to, most recently, drinking our own urine.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Carson McHone, “Still Life”
I hadn’t heard McHone’s music before last week, but I’ve been quickly won over by her new, gently swaying folk-rock single that’s not afraid to find another gear as the song picks up steam. She’s a captivating singer with a welcomed poetic touch.
(It’s so new I can’t find the lyrics online anywhere.)
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News that U.S. inflation inched up 0.5 percent last month set off another round of excited media reports, as news outlets pounded one of their favorite themes in recent months. Convinced that rising prices are the defining economic issue of the day — not huge job gains, record-setting GDP predictions, or boosted wages — the press continues to portray inflation as a uniquely American problem that’s hounding Democrats.
“President Joe Biden suffered a new blow to his economic agenda this week,” Politico announced, pointing to the new inflation figures. “That prompted the Biden White House to scramble to do damage control in the face of attacks by Republicans.” The Associated Press on Wednesday stressed that inflation is “heaping pressure on President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve to address what has become the biggest threat to the U.S. economy.”
The New York Times: “A troubling development for President Biden.” The Washington Post headline: “Democrats Worry Biden Could Pay the Political Price For Rising Inflation.” (The first person quoted in the piece was a GOP pollster.)
What’s missing from the inflation coverage is the consistent acknowledgement that the trend of rising prices is a global phenomenon, fueled by the pandemic. The Politico report made no mention of worldwide inflation, neither did the Times or Post dispatches; the AP included just one sentence.
Dismissed or downplayed is the fact that systemic, record-setting inflation has taken hold in virtually every major economy:
• “Germany: Annual Inflation Hits Highest Rate Since 1993”
• “Italian Inflation Hits Highest In More Than A Decade On Energy”
• “Mexico Ends Year With Inflation At 7.36%, Most In 20 Years”
• “Russian 2021 Inflation Accelerates To 8.39%, Preliminary Data Shows”
• “Spain's Annual Inflation Jumps To 6.7% At End Of 2021, Highest Since 1989”
• “UK Inflation Hits 10-Year High Ahead Of Key Bank Of England Meeting”
• “Canada's Annual Inflation Rate Matches 18-Year High, Set to Keep Rising”
Thanks to international reporting, we know inflation is on the rise around the world. But news consumers here have to search that information out because it’s rarely included in coverage of the U.S. economy. Most often, domestic inflation is presented in a silo, independent from the global economic trend that has been sparked by a worldwide virus.
Meanwhile, the press eagerly trumpets Republican claims that Biden’s agenda is responsible for inflation, while failing to point out that it wasn’t the infrastructure bill or Covid relief legislation that prompted inflation to jump to 4.7 percent in Canada, 5.1 percent in the U.K and and 6.7 percent in Spain. Inflation is occurring everywhere, so it’s not Biden’s policies that are to blame. The press prefers a more linear narrative, and seems to deliberately leave out the international context. That allows journalists to frame the story as a Dem vs. GOP one, as if policy adjustments from Biden would cure inflation.
Today’s unfortunate economic trend is clearly caused by the pandemic, which warped global supply and demand patterns, creating a mismatch that has driven prices higher. Energy costs and shipping bottlenecks are two major, driving factors. One reason inflation sprouted so quickly in the U.S. is that consumer demand is booming as the economy has recovered from Covid faster and stronger under Biden than most people ever thought possible.
Still, Republicans claim Biden is driving up prices by passing large spending bills. Government spending is bad because it fuels inflation, the GOP claims over and over in the press.
Yet eager Republicans just helped pass a $768 billion Defense budget. When Trump was president, Senate Republicans supported pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in order to battle the effects of the pandemic shutdown. The GOP, with help from the press, is still able to frame inflation as a problem Biden created and must be penalized for. The Post: “Republicans argued the new inflation numbers were another sign that Biden’s policies are not working.”
There’s nothing subtle about what the GOP is doing. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) last year told the Wall Street Journal that rising prices were a “gold mine” for Republicans, suggesting the party hopes consumers will continue to have to pay higher prices this year.
The press trumpets that GOP message. Inflation is a “political nightmare for Biden,” CNN recently stressed. The Associated Press, while conceding that consumer spending is way up, claimed inflation was “casting a pall” and that upward prices, not plummeting unemployment, dominated water cooler talk in the U.S. When weekly jobless claims recently fell to a 52-year low, the New York Times ran yet another excited Biden inflation piece on the following day’s front page. News of the historic jobless numbers ran on page B3.
It was no surprise that a recent AP poll found consumers fixated on inflation: “Income Is Up, But Americans Focus on Inflation.” Why is that? Americans are inundated with the media’s constant inflation coverage, most of which omits the fact the trend is now happening all around the world.
🎙 GOOD STUFF:
Yesterday I examined how Trump had spent the last year hiding from mainstream journalists. Right on cue he called into NPR. There were hopeful signs in terms of Trump being held to higher account these days.
From NPR’s “Pressed On His Election Lies, Former President Trump Cuts NPR Interview Short”:
The interview was six years in the making. Trump and his team have repeatedly declined interviews with NPR until Tuesday, when he called in from his home in Florida. It was scheduled for 15 minutes, but lasted just over nine. After being pressed about his repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump abruptly ended the interview.
🎷 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, “Face Down in the Moment”
I wholeheartedly concur with Holler’s take on this glorious, new simmering rock track: “‘Face Down in the Moment’ ends amidst a triumphant wall of horns, while Rateliff’s voice crashes around you with palpable passion. It’s a real standout on the record; evidence of the band’s capability to produce soul-infused music.”
You were following blind When they stole your nameYou were planning a way outWhen you lost your wayBent to a hunch nowLike a broke down showFace down in the moment just waiting to let go
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At first glance, Trump’s last-minute decision to cancel the press conference he had scheduled for Jan. 6, where he was going to tout his cascade of elections lies, looked like just another erratic move from a hardcore narcissist — he was piqued his Q&A session wasn’t going to be picked up live by enough TV outlets.
But by scrubbing the session, Trump continues his long-running streak since leaving office of refusing to address mainstream journalists and take their questions. For a politician who wallows in media attention and spent four years as president using the spotlight to validate his self-esteem, Trump’s current hibernation is strange. It’s especially odd since he’s the most powerful person in the Republican Party and refuses to answer a single, live question from a mainstream reporter.
Always eager to mix it up with journalists when he was president, where he’d insult them and then lie to them nonstop (journalists too often served as eager, willing props), Trump has spent the last year hiding from them. In fact, he has given no live interviews to serious journalists since he left office.
The drastic change in media strategy is curious and foreshadows what a possible re-election from Trump might look like. It could also answer the question, can someone run for President of the United States by hiding from the press during the entire campaign?
Not only won’t Trump answer journalists’ questions, he also has no presence on social media, having been banned from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for constantly violating terms of service guidelines with his online lies and threats. Reduced to issuing press releases for his strange pronouncements, which don’t generate nearly as much news and attention as his tweets did, Trump’s online influence has shrunk dramatically. “Since his social-media ban—just days before he left the White House—mentions of Mr. Trump on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have decreased 88%, according to Zignal Labs, a company that analyzes content on social media,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Locked out of social media and floundering as he tries to create a new company, Trump’s mainstream media footprint has been surprisingly small since leaving office.
I’m not suggesting Trump is ducking the Beltway press because he’s afraid journalists will pierce his shield of lies and hold him accountable in real time. They certainly didn’t do that during his four years in office, when eager White House journalists, addicted to the chaos he created, mostly stayed in star-struck mode and happily relayed Trump’s lies while politely downgrading them to “falsehoods.”
The so-called White House sprays, where reporters were marched into a room and encouraged to shout questions at Trump (who then lied about everything), were relatively pointless exchanges. The same was true for the embarrassing ritual of yelling questions at Trump while he stood near the whirling blades of a Marine One helicopter on the White House grounds.
The so-called Chopper Talk sessions allowed Trump to simply bluster and ramble through questions that clearly stumped him. And because the sessions were strangely covered as breaking news, Trump's lies were instantly amplified by the press, often with reporters failing to provide proper context for them. For years, the press kept bringing knives to the Trump gunfights—to the point where an obvious calculation had been made by the access-hunger Beltway press to not push too hard.
There’s no indication much has changed since 2020, were Trump to grant reporters access this year.
What’s interesting is that last spring Trump did invite down to Mar-a-lago a dozen journalists who were working on books about his presidency and gave them off-camera interviews. “It suggests that the former president is keen on keeping his name in the political conversation with the 2024 election on the far horizon,” Politico noted at the time.
The strategy seemed to backfire though, when several of the books released last year painted disturbing portraits of a White House determined to undercut democracy and obsessed with installing Trump for an illegal second term. Ever since then it’s been mostly crickets from Trump, who finds himself the target of more litigation.
While he hides from mainstream journalists, Trump’s been sitting down for Q&A’s with the sycophantic right-wing media. He’s given extended interviews to One America News, Newsmax, Fox News, pillow huckster Mike Lindell, along with fanboys Nigel Farage, Hugh Hewitt, and Glenn Beck. The "right-wing media, with a few honorable exceptions, is one giant safe space for the Big Lie," historian and "On Tyranny" author Timothy Snyder recently told CNN.
The sessions unfold pretty much as you’d imagine — GOP journalists who resemble potted plants ask opened-ended questions while Trump rambles on, not even pretending to stay within the lanes of coherency or the facts:
• Biden "didn't get 81 million votes, there's no way," he told OAN.
• Gas costs $7.77 in California.
• “When I was running, 2016, Christmas was like you couldn't say the word.”
For someone who is obsessed with, and feeds off, mainstream media attention, Trump’s disappearing act paints the picture of a charlatan.
UPDATE: As I was finishing the column, NPR’s Steve Inskeep tweeted that Trump called in for an interview with him on Monday, which ended with the Republican hanging up on the host. The interview is scheduled to air Wednesday morning.
(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
From Ron Filipkowski’s excellent piece at Bulwark, “How Democrats Can Win the Information War”:
If the Democratic party had even five intelligent, relentless, full-time people working as a team to fight the right-wing disinformation war, it would be more effective than all the traditional media outlets combined. Again: It isn’t the media’s job to fight partisan battles and the media as it currently exists simply isn’t configured to fight bad-faith, malicious propaganda and disinformation. But also, there are things that can be done by a partisan political group that traditional media cannot, will not, and should not do.
🤠 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Miranda Lambert, “Y’all Means All”
“Queer Eye” heads to Texas for Season 6 and country star Lambert contributes the inclusive, sing-along hootenanny.
You can be born in Tyler, TexasRaised with the Bible BeltIf you're torn between the Y's and X'sYou ain't gotta play with the hand you're dealt (woo)
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Be kind.
The U.S. economy just set the record for the most jobs created in one year, but you’d never know it from the continuing doomsday economic coverage under President Joe Biden.
The new jobs report, released Friday, offered the latest evidence of the purposeful disconnect the media maintain, and specifically how journalists rely on consistently unreliable “expectations” for job report numbers in order to portray the results as “disappointing,” and to paint a picture of a faltering U.S. economy even as it shatters growth records.
The U.S. economy just posted 199,000 new jobs in December, during a pandemic surge. That sounds like a good thing, right? Especially considering that in December 2020, under Trump and during another wintertime pandemic surge, the U.S. lost 140,000 jobs. Instead, the press was uniformly pessimistic about Friday’s news.
It was a “major disappointment,” CNN announced, despite the fact employee wages hit record heights and the unemployment rate tumbled to 3.9 percent. (Last winter, the CBO predicted it would take five years for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate that low.) NPR stressed the US added “only” 199,000 jobs. Hiring had “faltered” the New York Times reported. All because the key number failed to meet estimates.
The expectations game is set by economists and banks which publish their estimates on the eve of each job survey. It’s an easy-to-use model the press has employed for decades to analyze monthly results. But economists’ expectations no longer work during the pandemic. They’ve been wildly inaccurate during the Biden recovery and should no longer serve as the determining factor in how jobs reports are presented by the press.
“During one of the most volatile periods in recent memory, private and public-sector economists have a less firm grasp of what the labor market is doing,” the Wall Street Journal recently conceded. During 2021, economists cumulatively missed the jobs mark by well over 1 million jobs. And that’s in a year when the U.S. created more than 6 million jobs, the most since records began in 1939.
The expectations model often produces dubious journalism. When last November’s job report was released, NPR quickly announced it was a “bust” because just 210,000 jobs had been created. But back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy was “revved up” because 225,000 positions had been added.
Why the drastically different NPR spin for the Biden and Trump years? Expectations. Trump’s 225,000 job gains surpassed that month’s modest expectations, while Biden’s 210,000 fell short of estimates.
Another key hurdle is that the government has shown for the last year that it chronically undercounts, by large margins, the job gains data that are released to the public, and when it goes back and quietly post revisions they’re mostly ignored by the media.
August was a perfect example. That month’s initial jobs report claimed 235,000 jobs were added, which prompted lots of “disappointing” news coverage based on the established expectations. That total was soon revised all the way up to 483,000 new jobs, a development that received little press attention. Look at last September. The initial report announced 194,000 jobs. (“Lackluster,” announced NBC News.) After two revisions, the job total nearly doubled to 379,000.
Why the big revisions lately? Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys 145,000 employers, extrapolates data, and produces an initial estimate of monthly job gains or losses. Lots of employers don’t initially reply, so the BLS goes back a second time, which produces the revised number. The problem is that during the pandemic, the percentage of employers who are responding to the survey has dropped dramatically, which means the initial numbers are less reliable. Yet those numbers are still the ones the press blasts out in headlines the first Friday of every month, when the unemployment figures are released.
It’s a one-two combo: The BLS is regularly undercounting jobs, which is bad news for the White House, and economists are regularly overestimating what the monthly BLS jobs number will be, which is also bad news for the White House. Then when the BLS revises the monthly gains, the media are nowhere to be found.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
That means Biden just oversaw a stunning jobs-creation year, while consumers were constantly fed headlines about “disappointing” jobs reports because the initial reports didn’t align with skewed “expectations.”
There’s also the lingering suspicion that the press simply likes to tell bad economic news — and hide upbeat newsflashes — during the Biden years. Just look at this pretzel-logic headline from the Washington Post yesterday, “2021 Shattered Job Market Records, But It’s Not as Good as it Looks.”
When last summer’s blockbuster July jobs report showed a jaw-dropping gain of nearly one million jobs, “NBC Nightly News” completely ignored the development. NBC did the same thing for the October survey, which announced a robust 531,000 jobs. It certainly feels like there’s a preferred media narrative in play.
The current approach for how the press handles monthly jobs reports isn’t functioning as it should. So why do journalists stick to the broken model?
💉 GOOD STUFF:
File it under the burgeoning folder dubbed Mandates Work.
From New York Daily News, “Vaccine Appointments Multiply after Quebec Requires Shots for Weed, Alcohol Stores”:
First-dose vaccine appointments quadrupled in Quebec after the Canadian province required vaccine passports to buy alcohol and marijuana.
Quebec announced the new rules Thursday, when there were an average of 1,500 first dose appointments, the Montreal Gazette reported.
On Friday, there were 6,000 first dose appointments, according to Quebec Health Minister Christian Dube. The new rules require a COVID-19 vaccine to enter state-run Societe des alcools du Quebec (SAQ) and Societe quebecoise du cannabis (SQDC) locations beginning Jan. 18.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Sam Fender, “Seventeen Going Under”
Currently lodged inside the UK pop charts top 10, this urgent retelling of the singer’s chaotic and disruptive youth is a master work of stroytelling and self-examination.
It also rocks to an irresistible beat.
See I spent my teens enragedSpiralling in silenceAnd I armed myself with a grinCause I was always the f****n' jokerBuried in their humour
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Late last year, popular podcast host Joe Rogan invited onto his show Dr. Robert Malone, a world-class Covid denier and medical quack, who told Rogan’s millions of listeners that public health experts advocating for vaccines today are akin to Nazi’s in the 1930s. Getting vaccinated against a deadly virus was a sign of “mass formation psychosis,” and Malone suggested Biden was leading a hypnotized cult. It was a misinformation-fest that Rogan said at the time he hoped would go viral.
It did. Then the whole thing got banned by YouTube, where the Joe Rogan Experience gets uploaded, for violating the platform’s rules about trafficking in pandemic lies. It was the latest, reckless example of a once-libertarian podcast host with an eclectic past (actor, comedian, “cage-fighting commentator”), hitching his wagon to conservative lies and distortion, as he whips up distrust of the government and science.
As Rogan takes a hard turn to the right, you get the feeling he wants to be the new Rush Limbaugh — the source of GOP misinformation and conspiracies. More than any other daytime talker, it’s Rogan who could fill Limbaugh’s shoes after the GOP host passed away last year.
Like Limbaugh, Rogan preaches to a mostly male audience of roughly 10 million that wallows in victimhood while the host lashes out at imaginary forces trying to keep the White Man down in America. (“Straight white men are not allowed to talk.”) Like Limbaugh, Rogan faces no consequences for peddling ceaseless lies. Spotify, which has exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, refuses to acknowledge the torrent of misinformation that flow from his show, while at the same time pretending Spotify podcast hosts must adhere to company guidelines.
And like Limbaugh who landed a $100 million contract for the endless litany of smears he trafficked in for decades, Rogan last year penned a nine-figure deal.
The podcast host made political headlines in the winter of 2020 when he said he would support Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Democratic primary. Lots of progressives rushed to embrace the host, suggesting he reached an audience outside of the traditional Democratic base, even though Rogan appears to despise the Left.
Since then, Rogan has lurched to the far right, announcing last year he preferred Trump over Biden in the general election.
With the pandemic, the host has become aggressively and arrogantly dishonest. “I believe he’s become more emboldened to push baseless conspiracy theories and right-wing lies over the past year,” Media Matters researcher Alex Paterson recently told The Verge. “Just from listening to him every day, he’s by no means remitting conspiracy theories and false rhetoric on his show. If anything, he’s leaning into it more. He’s a darling of the conservative right in the United States. Joe Rogan has shown really clearly that he will use his podcast to spread conspiracy theories, right-wing lies, [and] racist rhetoric in order to sort of promote himself.”
Rogan gladly plays hosts to chronic GOP liars such as Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones, while remaining a huge supporter of Tucker Carlson.
There’s big money in right-wing hate and conspiracies, and Rogan’s leaning into all of it —“Nancy Pelosi is the head witch” of the Democratic Party — at the same time Limbaugh’s death created a hole in the far-right media landscape. When Rogan endorsed the baseless notion that the Clinton family was somehow connected to the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staff member, he sounded just like the deceased AM talker. Same with Rogan’s regular anti-trans rhetoric.
The similarities don’t end there. Just as Limbaugh in 2020 claimed Covid was “no worse than the common cold,” Rogan today lies without pause about a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of nearly one million Americans, going as far as claiming “actual microchips” are “being injected into your arm to see if you have COVID-19.” The show has become a cesspool of unhinged anti-vaccine rhetoric.
He endorsed the nonsensical lie that the government was monitoring private citizens’ text messages for anti-vaccine content. He urged young people not to get vaccinated because “exercising” would protect them. He said use of Ivermectin would effectively treat COVID-19, claimed Biden didn’t actually get his vaccine shot live on TV because they’re too dangerous, warned vaccine passports would move the country towards a “dictatorship,” and insisted immigrants crossing the Mexican border were driving a Covid surge.
It’s all indistinguishable from the bile that Limbaugh made his career spreading and amplifying. We’ll never know how many of Limbaugh's loyal, elderly listeners died from the virus, in part because he assured them the infection was essentially harmless. And we’ll never know how many of Rogan’s (younger) listeners got sick or died from Covid because of the host’s nonstop propaganda campaign against a miraculously effective, and free, vaccine.
Rogan seems eager to carry on Limbaugh s toxic legacy.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
De-platforming works.
From NPR’s “Kicked off Facebook and Twitter, Far-Right Groups Lose Online Clout”:
Since then, far-right groups that had used the big tech platforms to spread lies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, stoke conspiracy theories and call for violence have been scrambling to find new homes on the internet.
"Deplatforming...produced this great scattering where groups that were banned or groups that believed their bans were imminent or forthcoming [joined] in this giant game of musical chairs, hopping from platform to platform," said Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and the author of a new report on domestic extremism.
📻 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lumineers, “A.M. Radio”
Colorado’s favorite folk-rock band their new album this month and “A.M. Radio” finds them returning to their instantly recognizable sound — stripped down acoustic guitar, lingering piano, and a foot-stomping chorus.
Standin' on the corner, I could listen to the radioWhen the savior sang from the fire escape on the second floorYou were always saying we would make it to the catacombsIn the end, it came when you wrote my name on the bathroom stall
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For the second time in three weeks, Fox News has been shoved into the insurrection spotlight by the House select panel investigating Trump’s coup attempt. It probably won’t be the last time the Congressional body sets its sights on Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda network. The unprecedented glare is highlighting just how duplicitous its hosts are, as we learn they were beseeching the White House 52 weeks ago to call off the insurrection hounds on the eve of Jan. 6.
Today, Fox News dismisses the Trump riot — the same way it dismisses Covid — and attacks Democrats over their fact-finding mission. But the latest Sean Hannity insurrection texts released by the committee don’t lie. And they were flying fast and furious one year ago. More importantly, it’s clear that the media-savvy committee is going to keep up the pressure on Fox News in a way no government body has since the network debuted more than two decades ago.
The Jan. 6 panel announced yesterday it wants to call Hannity as a “fact witness.” It’s not trying to subpoena Hannity because he can hide behind laws that are designed protect journalists, even though he isn’t one. (Hannity a journalist the same way Alex Jones is a journalist.) So this isn’t going to be a long drawn-out legal battle. It’s a public relation showdown, and so far the committee is scoring wins. (Murdoch hates playing defense.) Especially as the panel releases the damning texts in batches, instead of all at once, which generate rolling headlines.
The revelations pull back the opaque curtain Fox News tries to hide behind in terms of claiming to be a legitimate operation. The communications show Hannity to be a plugged-in operative for an administration he was supposed to be covering.
There has been a long media tradition inside the Beltway of opinion journalists getting the ear of a president and acting as something of an ad hoc advisor. The New York Times’ Arthur Krock did it with FDR and JFK. But Hannity was doing something entirely different. He became entangled in a criminal enterprise to obstruct justice by trying to stop Congress from certifying legal election results.
The texts highlight just how unglued Hannity thought Trump was in late 2020 and early 2021. The host angrily referred to the president as basically being unreachable on the topic of the election. These aren’t Democrats making the claim that Trump had lost his bearings, it was his closest media ally.
“Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” Hannity frantically texted to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 10. “He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”
Days before the actual seige, Hannity was deeply anxious about the looming, Trump-made storm. On Jan. 5 he sent Meadows a note saying he was “very worried about the next 48 hours.”
Hannity’s texts are telling because Fox News had worked feverishly for weeks to build up hysteria around the claims of a stolen election. “They laid the groundwork in the months leading up to the election for Trump to cry fraud, and once he did, they cheered on his cynical effort to subvert the vote and usher in the end of American democracy,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote one year ago.
The latest Hannity text headlines come three weeks after it was revealed a laundry list of Fox News hosts anxiously texted Meadows on January 6, begging Trump to stop the deadly mob that was laying siege to the U.S. Capitol.
“Please get him on TV,” the network’s Brian Kilmeade messaged. “Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Pleaded Laura Ingraham: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” And from Sean Hannity, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?”
All three have since moved aggressively to dismiss the violence that day at the US Capitol. Just last month, Kilmeade mocked news outlets for focusing too much on the insurrection inquiry. “It's 45 minutes an hour on January 6, that's all they got. ‘Mark Meadows, what’s going to happen?’ January 6, that's all they got,” he complained. “So they don't even want to report any other things, so it's non-reporting by omission.”
This, while “Fox News host Tucker Carlson produced a documentary, “Patriot Purge,” for the Fox Nation streaming platform that included the baseless claim that the deadly attack was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives,” Huff Post reported.
Thanks to the Jan. 6 committee we now know Fox hosts were frantic about the unfolding coup attempt, and demanded Trump stop making claims about the ‘stolen’ election. What will be the next Fox shoe to drop?
🎤 GOOD STUFF:
It’s truly good stuff: Trump canceled his scheduled Jan. 6 press conference.
From the Washington Post:
In a statement released Tuesday by his Save America PAC, Trump blamed the media and the bipartisan congressional committee that is investigating the attack. Trump’s lawyers are fighting the panel’s efforts to obtain his records.
“In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona—It will be a big crowd!” Trump said.
🎶 FUN STUFF – BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Phoebe Bridgers, "Day After Tomorrow”
The sterling, critically acclaimed California singer delivers a haunting and moving new cover of the old Tom Waits track. The song adopts the perspective of a shipped-off soldier who’s coming back home, wrestling with the acceptance of killing other people for a national agenda.
They fill us full of lies, everyone buys'Bout what it means to be a soldierI still don't know how I'm supposed to feel 'Bout all the blood that's been spilledWill god on this throneGet me back homeOn the day after tomorrow
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Normalizing radical Republicans while stacking the deck against President Joe Biden were two telltale media malfunctions in 2021. Here’s three specific examples of the type of journalism that needs to be erased this year.
Politico: “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic”
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis ended 2021 in hiding, as Covid swept over the state like a crashing wave. After branding himself into an anti-mask and anti-mandate warrior in order to tap into the GOP’s anti-science base, Florida got knocked on its heels once again as 2021 closed, surging past 75,000 new daily cases. (That’s up from 500 daily cases in July.)
Still, for much of the year the political press cheered him on, most famously in the form of a Hall-of-Fame-awful Politico headline, “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic.” The staggering newsroom miscue last spring came after 30,000 Floridians had already died from the virus, and after DeSantis spent 2020 and 2021 trying to silence scientists, covering up data, rescinding mask ordinances, and playing down the virus' threat. He rolled out harmful executive orders, launched dubious legal actions, and made bullying threats in order to undermine local school boards. He even foolishly placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump.
So eager was the press to pump up a Republican governor and present him as a Covid leader after Trump’s colossal failure as president that DeSantis was crowned a savvy star. “DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight," CNN cheered in March, adding that he remained "defiant and combative.” And when the governor recently took the irresponsible move of forbidding local school districts from mandating masks for students, CNN ran a pro-GOP chyron: “DeSantis signs executive order giving parents power to choose whether to mask kids at school.”
Then came the summertime Delta variant and Florida became the epicenter for the deadly Covid outbreak, as the governor continued to loudly rail against life-saving mandates. The infection cycle was then repeated in December as Omicron swept the state with Floridians scrambled to find testing, which the state refused to provide.
Eagerly portraying DeSantis as a Covid maverick as he pushed public health misinformation and oversaw a year of unnecessary deaths represented a media low point in 2021.
CNN’s hour-long Chris Christie
What a bizarre spectacle it was when CNN aired an hour-long primetime special featuring former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who launched a failed 2016 presidential run, famously flaming out after just one primary contest, and then left office in New Jersey as the most unpopular sitting governor in American history.
CNN held Christie up as a Very Important Person despite the fact he currently has no national standing, no constituency, and no voice or vote in public policy. Worse, during the show, CNN’s Dana Bash never once asked Christie about the BridgeGate scandal that ended his political career.
Not only did the special flop spectacularly with CNN viewers, garnering barely 600,000 viewers, it failed to sell copies of the book Christie was peddling at the time, “Republican Rescue.” According to the industry’s BookScan tabulations, it sold just 2,300 copies during its first week in stores, which constitutes a colossal publishing flop.
How Christie was able to sell so few books after lining up so much national media attention during his marketing roll-out — “This Week” and “The View,” “Fox & Friends,” along with Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Show, HBO twice, and CNBC — confirmed the media’s extraordinary disconnect with everyday Americans.
The press keeps trying to prop up a Republican like Christie as a Populist Straight Shooter. Most people view him as a has-been.
NBC ignores blockbuster 943,000 new jobs report
It’s hard to believe this actually happened, but it did. On August 6, the Department of Labor released the July jobs report which produced mind-boggling results — nearly 1 million new jobs were created as the U.S. economy roared back to life following the pandemic. For some inconceivable reason, “NBC Nightly News” on August 6 did not cover the jobs report; no mention was made at all.
They weren’t alone in shrugging off the fantastic economic news for the Biden administration. At 4 p.m. on that Friday, roughly seven hours after the stellar July job numbers were released, the story was highlighted in the 37th headline as you scrolled down the NBC News homepage. At the CBS News homepage, none of the top 50 headlines at that time addressed the jackpot economic report.
At CNN, by Friday afternoon the jobs report had been blacked out as the network’s homepage made way for “This Underrated Form of Exercise is So Good for You,” and “Lucy Lawless Reunites With 'Xena' Costar.”
The episode was perhaps the best indication that when it came to economic news, the press had a very specific story it wanted to tell in 2021 (inflation!), and that good news could be set aside.
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
Nobody knows what’s going to happen with the midterms this year, and clearly Democrats face a tough road as they control the House, Senate and White House and the party in power often suffer setbacks.
But the D.C. press has been obsessed with burying Dems before one vote has been cast. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne asks the right question in his new column, “Must Democrats Get Crushed in 2022?”:
Democratic hope-mongers imagine better times soon. They see a world in which the coronavirus pandemic threat recedes, high levels of economic growth continue — for which President Biden, finally, gets some credit — and inflation comes down.
And, yes, they assume Democrats in Congress will reach some kind of deal on the president’s Build Back Better program while the Senate pushes aside the filibuster to enact two voting rights bills that would allow the elections to be held with some degree of fairness.
🏔 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Pinegrove, “Alaska”
Let’s kick off the new year with a rollicking new song from the nifty Americana band, Pinegrove. It’s from their upcoming fifth album, due out this month. The song clocks in at just 2:06, but it packs a memorable punch.
Last month in AlaskaThe pattern of my life laid outAnd I asked what I'd been asking youLike trees repeat, like numerals doLike a ladder to the atmosphereThe rungs each come again and again
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For anyone not convinced that the Beltway press is using a new double standard to cover Vice President Kamala Harris, and has subjected her to an unprecedented level of scrutiny, the proof is in the print.
Here are a sample of New York Times headlines from the daily’s coverage of white, male VPs, taken from their first year in office:
• “The Education of Dan Quayle”
• “Cheney Ever More Powerful As Crucial Link to Congress”
• “Speaking Freely, Biden Finds Influential Role”
• “Amid White House Tumult, Pence Offers Trump a Steady Hand”
And then there’s the Times’ recent Harris entry: “Kamala Harris’s Allies Express Concern: Is She an Afterthought?”
In the Times’ view, the white, male VP’s were “steady hands” with “influential” roles who were busy getting an “education” and “speaking freely.” Impressive, right? Harris, the first woman VP and first person of color in that historic role, might be an “afterthought” who, according to the Times article, is “falling short” and “struggling to define herself.”
There’s nothing subtle happening here, folks.
The Times’ recent take-down of Harris was the latest from the genre, as the press piles on. The Beltway media aggressively agrees there’s something wrong with the vice president, even though she’s fulfilling her duties exactly as she’s been asked to, and has represented the United States honorably on the global stage.
Still, there’s something not quite right, the media’s theater critics agree, as they put her vice presidency under the microscope in a way that’s never been done before. It all runs counter to how the press, and specifically the Times, covered previous VPs as they navigated their first year in office.
Just take a look.
“More than any vice president before him, Mr. Cheney has emerged as a supreme power broker within the Bush administration and between the White House and Capitol Hill,” was how the Times toasted Dick Cheney’s arrival as VP in May 2001, in a puff piece that read like it was written by his communications staff: “As President Bush's consigliere, Mr. Cheney helps connect the dots for the administration as he zigzags all day long from hot-button issue to high-level meeting, discreetly imparting advice whenever his boss asks or needs to know.”
The newspaper’s Mike Pence valentine from 2017 (co-written by Maggie Haberman) was just as effusive, as the Times tried to use Pence’s role in corralling votes for the GOP’s health care initiative at the time as the centerpiece of his administration involvement. But the White House lost that vote in spectacular fashion.
Can you imagine the Beltway coverage if Harris had served as a point-person for a crucial House vote and then lost it? I guarantee you the Times wouldn’t soon run a gentle piece describing her as “an effective wingman” the way the newspaper did with Pence after the White House’s botched health care vote.
According to the Times’ telling in 2017, Pence was practically running the West Wing, “sounding out lawmakers for inside information, providing the president with tactical counsel, quietly offering policy tweaks during negotiations.” That’s because Pence possesses “shrewd political intelligence,” according to the Times reporters, who made sure to harvest lots of glowing quotes from Pence’s pals for the piece — “He’s doing exactly what he should be doing.” This, while the newspaper today portrays Harris as a possible “afterthought.”
We’ve seen this trend for decades. Soon after Dan Quayle was sworn into office, the Times swooped in with a loving profile informing readers that the 42-year-old Republican was devouring serious biographies of historical figures. “The Vice President was particularly struck by the description of Napoleon's military technique in Charles de Gaulle's discourse on war,” the Times reported, stressing Quayle was “keen on self-improvement.” And this was after Quayle had blurted out as VP, “What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.''
For the record, the exception to the Times’ white, male VP rule was its relentlessly negative coverage of Al Gore, which began before he was even sworn into office.
Today, Harris continues to be hit with bad press — The Atlantic has dismissed her as “uninteresting” and “having a hard time making her mark on anything” — even though reporters can’t find substantive defects in her job performance. “Exasperation And Dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris' Frustrating Start as Vice President,” was the shrieking CNN headline for a recent 5,000-word hit piece that failed to detail meaningful exasperation or dysfunction.
Part of the eagerly negative coverage stems from the media’s beloved Dems in Disarray storyline, where the party has to be perpetually portrayed as being undone by internal strife. It’s also fueled by the media’s need to create drama so they can present current events with a dramatic arc, as a way to keep news consumers tuned in. Reporters are frustrated by the No Drama Biden approach to governance and have taken it upon themselves to create conflict.
Harris has become a favorite prop in a way that white, male VP’s were never used in the past.
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
From the Washington Post’s “A Local Newspaper Focused on the Black Community is Defying the Odds. It’s Growing”:
Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors, according to Margaret Sullivan, media critic for The Washington Post and author of the book “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” Since covid-19 struck, she says, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications.
And yet in the past five years, the Informer, which is focused primarily on the region’s Black community, has been undergoing an impressive expansion. Readership for the D.C.-based weekly has nearly doubled to roughly 50,000. Unlike some local newspapers, which have shrunk to the size of a supermarket supplement, the Informer has grown from an average 36 pages per issue to 56 pages.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, “High and Lonesome”
This unlikely duo have such a great vocal chemistry together, as Plant features his iconic Led Zeppelin roots, while Krauss shows off her distinct country twang.
Their latest “starts with a grooving little rumble, with some typically blues-rock lyrics and a shuffling undertone generated by sparse guitars,” notes NME. “The rise of Plant and Krauss’ vocal harmonic creates a subtle depth in texture.”
I have the song on repeat.
I shall not rest upon the highwayI will not tire nor despairI shall conspire, I will be thereI'll make a deal, I'll dance in hellI'll sing out loud and louder yellI will open every, every door, yeah
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So much for the empty shelves and delayed packages this shopping season.
After months of the media insisting consumers were terrified about the rising inflation rate, and that stores would be barren this season thanks to supply chain woes, shoppers snatched up everything in sight, sending holiday sales soaring to a 17-year high. Clothing sales jumped 47% compared to 2019 (pre-Covid), jewelry 32%, electronics 16%.
That runaway spending meant consumers had no problem finding products, despite months of dire media warnings and claims that it all meant terrible news for the White House.
Alternately hyped as a “problem,’ a “Christmas crisis,” and even a looming “nightmare” for President Joe Biden, the holiday season supply chain issue took on Herculean importance for the political press corps, which until this year had never cared about the global trade issue.
At an October White House press briefing, CBS’s Ed O’Keefe actually demanded to know if the White House would guarantee that every holiday package would arrive on time this year.
Itching to maintain the Dems in Disarray narrative, egged on by Fox News, and stretching common sense to the breaking point, the press claimed the president faced a debacle over something he does not control. When none of the doomsday predictions came to pass though, most of the press moved on, instantly losing interest in supply chain chatter.
The issue highlights what happens when the press joins forces with the GOP to hype a made-up Biden “crisis,” and how news outlets look away when the allegation proves to be a total bust.
“The holidays are just around the corner and shoppers are seeing something that they don't like, ‘Out Of Stock.’ You see it everywhere,” CNN announced on November 10. “Better start your shopping now. The shortages that could ruin your holiday plans,” the network warned on November 16.
Between November 1 and November 30, CNN mentioned “supply chain” 330 times, according to TVeyes.com. For the month of December, when supply chain news improved, that number fell to 130 mentions, a decrease of nearly 70 percent. (Fox News referenced “supply chain” a staggering 700 times in November; 400 times in December.)
The premise of the hand-wringing coverage never made any sense — why would the president of the United States be held responsible for the shipping and handling of private companies? Biden didn’t run for office on some kind of Kris Kringle platform, promising to deliver all Christmas gifts on time.
The press spent the last five months of the year so obsessed with touting an endless list of supposed Biden calamities (remember the White House’s Colonial Pipeline “crisis”?), that news outlets seamlessly added the supply chain to Biden’s To Do list.
Recently, the New York Times was among the few news outlets to double back and to report unequivocally that Christmas gifts were delivered on time, despite the media hype to the contrary. “The UPS and the Postal Service delivered about 99 percent of their packages on time by that measure between Nov. 14 and Dec. 11, and FedEx was close behind at 97 percent,” the newspaper reported.
But note how the Times suggested “people” had been expressing concern this season about gifts not arriving on time. (“A few months ago, people worried that a disrupted supply chain would ensnare Christmas gifts. It didn’t happen.”) In truth, it was the press and Republicans — not everyday consumers — who were ceaselessly beating that anxious drum.
There was also no mention of Biden in the Times’s good-news write-up about shipping. Back in the fall, the media constantly tied the president to the supply chain issue. “The [shipping] disruptions have also become a problem for President Biden, who has been vilified on Fox News as “the Grinch who stole Christmas,” the Timesreported in November. In December when the picture had improved dramatically, the Times made no reference to Biden, or suggested the update represented welcome political news for the White House.
That stems from the media’s fierce commitment to the Doomed Biden Economy narrative, even though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden's first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion,” wrote Matthew Winkler at Bloomberg, breaking from the media pack to tout positive news. “Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration's Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Today, Biden gets little credit. He currently nets the lowest economic rating from voters of any president at this point through their first term since Jimmy Carter in 1977, according to CNN.
Why the disconnect? A recent YouGov poll found that by an amazing 6-to-1 ratio, Americans had heard “mostly negative news stories about the economy,” including endless doomsday predictions about the supply chain, no doubt. Those polling results came in the wake of a new media study that showed Biden getting worse coverage from the Beltway press than Trump did one year ago, when the vaccine-less U.S. economy was being strangled by the pandemic.
It was strange watching the media root for a supply chain Christmas debacle this year. It was even stranger when they ignored the fact it never happened.
📰 GOOD STUFF:
Last week I wrote about how the news business is desperately trying to recreate the drama of the Trump years, in hopes it translates into ratings and clicks.
The Associated Press just detailed the 2021 decline in news attention. From, “Outlets Hurt by Dwindling Public Interest in News in 2021”:
The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44% in November compared to November 2020, and down 34% at the Times.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Billy Bragg, “Ten Mysterious Photos That Can’t Be Explained”
Who better to take a crack at explaining our age of online misinformation than England’s legendary singer-songwriter (and left-wing activist) Billy Bragg, who penned a surprisingly cheery, jangly rock song for the occasion. It’s anchored by his signature Cockney accent, which makes everything sound more jaunty.
I've been down rabbit holes, I've seen the rabid trollsCackling in the twilight of the Age of ReasonOne thing I've noticed as I get olderCommon sense, like art, is in the eye of the beholder
Now the new breed of know nothings are flooding my screenHow they scare me, they're so goddam sureThey look like reasonable folks but the next thing you knowIs they're screaming "I don't want your cure!"
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For the second day running, the New York Times on Tuesday ran a front-page piece about Sen. Joe Manchin’s announcement that he would vote against the landmark, $2 trillion education, healthcare and climate package known as Build Back Better, thereby sinking chances of the legislation passing through an evenly divided, 50-50 U.S. Senate.
Leaning heavily into the Dems in Disarray narrative, the Times depicted a Democratic Party beset by public disputes and a president whose domestic agenda was in shatters. But like virtually all of the coverage this week, the Times ignored the role that radical GOP obstruction has played in the Build Back Better story.
For the print edition, the Times headline read, “Biden Seeks to Save his Domestic Policy Agenda from a Defection.” Note the “a” in the headline, and how Manchin’s single ‘no’ meant “Democrats engaged in new bouts of infighting.” CNN also piled on the doom this week: “It's hard to dream up a worse scenario for Democrats.”
What’s been erased is the big picture — why did losing a single Democratic senator become tantamount to imploding the $2 trillion deal? Why in the U.S. Senate, which compared to the House is known for deal-making and at least occasionally working across the aisle, did one defection kill the sprawling bill, especially when the pending legislation is so popular with the public? In more normal times, if Biden lost Manchin’s support he’d be able to pick up one or two Republicans who would support Build Back Better.
He cannot though, because of the GOP’s unprecedented obstruction, in which the party stands united against Biden — no matter what.
The press in recent years has completely normalized the Republicans’ unheard of worldview, to the point where virtually all of the Build Back Better coverage ignores the fact it’s 50 Republicans who are dooming legislation that would create a universal prekindergarten program, subsidize child care costs, lower prescription-drug costs and offer tax credits for reducing carbon emissions.
For news consumers today awash in Manchin and Build Back Better coverage, Republicans simply do not exist. They’re depicted — if at all — as innocent bystanders whose actions play no role in any of this.
The Times gently noted in passing that, “With Republicans united in opposing the legislation, Democrats needed the votes of all 50 senators who caucus with their party for the measure to pass in an evenly divided Senate.”
Talk about whitewashing radical GOP behavior. Refusing to portray Republicans for the hardcore extremists they are, news outlets also fail to connect the dots between the entire GOP opposing Build Back Better after the entire GOP opposed Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill that sent $1,400 checks to most Americans and hundreds of billions more to help open schools, which Republicans then tried to take credit for.
Inside the Beltway last winter, the Covid bill was depicted as being divisive because no Republican members of Congress supported it, even though the legislation enjoyed massive public support, even among Republican voters. As is custom with the D.C. media, the entire onus of bipartisanship is placed on Democrats, who are responsible for breaking the Capitol fever. The fact that the Republican Party acts in a way that defies all historic norms is politely set aside.
We saw that on display this spring when the country was rocked yet again by a wave of uniquely American mass gun shootings. The plague continues because of Republicans and their blind allegiance to the NRA. They exacerbate the crisis by blocking gun reform laws while simultaneously loosening ownership restrictions and helping to flood the country with firearms. Yet how many headlines did we see that read "Republicans Still Oppose All Gun Reform In Wake of Mass Murders"? Instead, there was lots of coverage about how "Congress" can't pass gun laws, and how there's "gridlock.” In one CNN article from the spring about why gun laws don't get passed, the word "Republican" was never even mentioned.
By downplaying that fanatic obstruction, the press continues to give Republicans a pass. That’s why the strategy has worked so well for them since at least the Obama years — block everything in sight and then watch the press blame the Democratic president for Congressional “dysfunction.”
Again, we saw it with guns. When the Obama administration made a major push to pass a background check bill after 20 first graders were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. in late 2012, the GOP refused to pass the bill that garnered 90 percent public support. Incredibly, the pundit class then blamed Obama: If only he had acted sooner, or proposed other legislation, or talked more often to Republicans, or not held so many public events in support of new gun laws.
The GOP’s gun obstruction followed its sequester obstruction, which followed the Hurricane Sandy emergency relief obstruction, which followed consistent obstruction on judicial nominees.
Biden continues to struggle to find the 50th vote needed for the Build Back Better bill. Extremist Republican behavior plays a key role in that, but it gets waved off by the press.
GOOD STUFF:
The view of America’s economy looks very different from overseas, compared to the relentlessly negative view delivered here.
From the Wall Street Journal article, “Booming U.S. Economy Ripples World-Wide,” which was filed from Frankfurt:
A booming U.S. economy is rippling around the world, leaving global supply chains struggling to keep up and pushing up prices.
The force of the American expansion is also inducing overseas companies to invest in the U.S., betting that the growth is still accelerating and will outpace other major economies.
U.S. consumers, flush with trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus, are snapping up manufactured goods and scarce materials.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Darlene Love, “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)”
For nearly three decades it was one of the great holiday traditions on TV — the incomparable Love singing her legendary ‘60s Christmas plea on David Letterman’s show. Her final performance came in 2014, as the host prepared to step down from the late-night job.
Her annual appearance started back the 1980s when band leader Paul Shaffer took Letterman to see Love perform at the Bottom Line in New York City. “He said, “You know that song that girl sings? That Christmas song? That’s the greatest Christmas song I’ve ever heard. We need to get her on the show.” That was 1986, and so I’ve been doing it ever since,” Love once recalled.
I still get chills watching her final performance.
They're singing Deck The HallsBut it's not like Christmas at all'Cause I remember when you were hereAnd all the fun we had last year
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One year after Trump lost his re-election bid by seven million votes, the media hangover lingers.
“Last year’s cocktail of Donald Trump, a deadly pandemic, the US presidential election and historic racial protests drove a record interest in following the news — propelling cable TV channels, newspapers and other journalistic enterprises to soaring heights of viewership and revenue,” the Financial Times recently noted. “Now, these groups face an equally breathtaking fall back down to earth.”
Call it the Trump slump, which followed the Trump bump.
Between October 2020 and October 2021, according to Nielsen data, CNN ratings were down 73 percent, MSNBC was down 56 percent, and Fox News had fallen 53 percent, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The same grim statistics can be found for sagging news sites.
At one point in 2019, nearly all of the 50 most popular articles on the Washington Post’s home page were related to politics, vs today where just three of the top 10 are connected to politics, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.
Here’s the fundamental problem: Following Trump’s chaotic and radical presidency, news consumers have changed their behavior, but the press — addicted to the high of the Trump bump — has been slow to adjust. After Biden’s inauguration, many Americans decided they no longer have to monitor the news throughout the day, every day; they don’t have to doom scroll late at night because there is now an adult in the White House.
That has translated into fewer news clicks and viewers. And that’s a good thing. Large chunks of the population should not live in fear of what their out-of-control president will do, and forced to tune into the news out of a sense of daily panic.
The glitch has been that the press doesn’t want to go back to ‘normal’ because the press became addicted to that incessant sense of Trump theater. (Not to mention the lucrative book deals.) Rather than viewing the Trump bump as an anomaly that does not need to be repeated, the press longs for that era’s constant drama.
That’s been the hurdle — Biden is the anti-Trump. He’s a polite, professional, and effective politician. He doesn’t surround himself with sycophants, he doesn’t fire staff at a record pace, he doesn’t get impeached, and there aren’t nonstop leaks about the daily chaos unfolding inside the West Wing. The Beltway press though, suddenly has little patience for a “boring” president.
“Mr. Biden has a long history of being long-winded,” the New York Times mocked Biden over the summer. Around the same time, D.C. journalist Julia Ioffe interviewed elite journalists about covering Biden and compared him to Trump. “I loved covering Trump,” one prominent, anonymous White House said. “It was a great and fascinating story. It wasn’t just about him; it was about his movement and the institutions and America. The story was always so dramatic and had these larger than life characters. The stakes often felt very high. I like covering Biden, too, but it just doesn’t feel as dramatic.” [Emphasis added]
Then in August came Afghanistan and that’s when the press’ Biden coverage took a dramatic and sustained turn for the worse, as detailed recently by Dana Milbank’s piece in the Washington Post. Ending the Forever War was a big, important story but the press went over the top with weeks’ worth of often unhinged coverage.
The media seemed to like the drama of the Afghanistan story and having the news be center stage again. So they simply stayed in the same hyperactive mode with endless Inflation! Supply Chain! and Crisis! coverage, most of which has been relentlessly, and unnecessarily, negative.
The media desperately want to tell certain stories that they think will juice readers and viewers — Dems in Disarray! The Wall Street Journal recently scored a rare sit-down interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The subsequent article focused more on silly gossip surrounding who might be on the Democrats’ ticket in 2024 han it did on the substantive comments Harris made about key issues facing the country, such as immigration and voting reform.
Last week, when a CNN.com poll showed Biden with a solid 49 percent approval rating (essentially unchanged since the summer), the network made sure to bury that fact in the seventh paragraph, while stressing all the bad news in the poll about inflation. Days later, Fox News did CNN one better. When Biden’s approval climbed four points in the network’s poll, Fox News made no mention of it until the 13th paragraph in its online write-up.
This doesn’t happen by accident. If Biden had done poorly in both those polls, that fact would have been prominently placed in the headline and in the very first paragraph. This happens when the press becomes wed to a story — a story they think will generate clicks and draw eyeballs.
(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Why can’t they all just get along?
From the Daily Beast’s “Roger Stone Stirs Up Old Feud, Suggests Steve Bannon 'Gave The Order' To Breach Capitol On Jan 6”:
Stone, who has long been at odds with Bannon over the latter “testify[ing] falsely” against him during his criminal trial, took to the far-right messaging platform Telegram to suggest Bannon was behind the call to “breach” the Capitol building on Jan 6. “It is highly likely that [Steve] Bannon really gave the order to breach the capital [sic] and maneuvered patriots into dangerous positions,” he wrote. “A neophyte Steve Bannon was willing to try crazy things like this to curry favor with Trump who had a [sic] no interest in Bannon’s bullsh*t.”
For the record, I don’t believe much of anything Stone says. The infighting is amusing though.
EXTRA STUFF:
I appeared on Jonathan Capehart’s show yesterday to discuss the Manchin news.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kacey Musgraves, “Fix You”
The multi-talented Musgraves just released an intriguing cover of one of Coldplay’s most enduring hits, “Fix You.” The singer-songwriter strips the meditation down to its bare bones and delivers a beautiful, haunting rendition.
And high up above, or down belowWhen you're too in love to let it goBut if you never try, you'll never knowJust what you're worth
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Whatever happened to critical race theory?
Just one month ago, the media bombarded news consumers with CRT coverage, announcing it had been the defining issue in the GOP’s surprise Virginia governor victory, and was likely going to sink Democrats nationwide during the 2022 midterms. All year, the press couldn’t be bothered with pointing out that CRT isn’t actually taught in public schools, and that the GOP’s hysterical campaign — it’s an attempt to “indoctrinate the kids” — was based on lies.
Yet suddenly, the topic seems to have disappeared into the ether. “No one is talking about CRT now that the election is over,” tweeted journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the acclaimed 1619 Project. “That media stopped reporting this made-up controversy speaks to the complicity in the propaganda campaign.”
Using the Nexis database, I searched for articles, columns, or transcripts that mentioned “critical race theory” two or more times and were published or aired this year, and looked at how many of those were produced in December, after the GOP had successfully used its education scare campaign in the Virginia race. The matches confirm there was a massive media drop-off among national outlets. (Local coverage of CRT has remained more consistent.)
For instance, ABC News aired 31 reports on CRT between January and November, then 0 reports in December, according to Nexis. CNN produced 183 segments that mentioned the topic two times or more during the first eleven months of the year, but just one in December. At Politico, the before and after ratio was 48: 1. Dallas Morning News, 69: 2. The Los Angeles Times, 38:0. CNN’s newswire, 88:2.
It’s telling that the trend of turning away from CRT after the votes were counted in Virginia, and all that election punditry quieted down, has been even more pronounced among right-wing media outlets. Fox News aired a staggering 430 CRT segments the first eleven months of the year (or nearly 40 per-month), but just 7 in December.
The Daily Caller churned out 215 items between January and November, and 7 this month. The Washington Examiner has produced 280 CRT updates this year; none in December. The Washington Times: 130, compared to just three in December. And Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post published 60 CRT dispatches, then 0 since November.
It’s clear that following the election, conservatives and journalists came to the exact same conclusion at the exact same time about CRT. That’s because journalists spent most of this year simply regurgitating right-wing lies and refusing to highlight the obvious holes in the race-baiting allegations. (CRT is an academic framework taught at the college level that examines how systemic racism is ingrained in America’s history.)
This whole chapter represents a textbook example of how every Beltway news cycle starts with the very simple premise: What are Republicans angry about today?
Benghazi during the Obama presidency was a classic example of how Republicans hijacked the news for months and years on end, and the Beltway press happily playing along.
What’s different with the CRT media charade is that Benghazi actually happened — there was a terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate on Sept. 11, 2012, in Libya, and four Americans did die. By contrast, the CRT controversy was completely made up by Republicans — it’s not taught in schools K-12 — yet the press still peddled it without pause for most of 2021.
For the record, conservatives still care about critical race theory, in the sense that they’re trying to bully educators into not teaching students uncomfortable truths about American history and the role racism has played in it. Republicans across the country are busy today trying to ban books from public schools and outlaw topics teachers can teach.
It’s just that GOP politicians are not making lots of noise about the topic because there are no campaigns to slot the message into to generate phony outrage, like there was in Virginia this fall. That means the media aren’t interested either.
The press played a central, defining role all year in helping spread that phony outrage. Back in the spring, the Washington Post published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign. Yet the Post made no mention that the topic can’t be found public schools. The Post also made no effort to quote any Democrats about a Republican strategy to use the classroom wedge issue to defeat them next year. The Post though, did quote eight Republicans for the article, and marveled at the GOP’s success in creating the CRT controversy.
A lengthy October piece from the New York Times, “How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms,” was another classic of the genre. It wasn’t until the 13th paragraph that the Times acknowledged CRT isn’t taught in public schools. Incredibly, four paragraphs later the Times reported, “But Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms.”
That broken model was used all year by the press — CRT represents a political boon for Republicans, regardless of whether or not its classroom claims are built on lies. Instead of forcefully debunking, journalists remained overly impressed with how the GOP was able to turn CRT into a big news story, while journalists helped them turn CRT into a big news story.
In a rare bout of Republican truth-telling this year, when Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson allowed the state’s CRT classroom ban to become law without his signature, he conceded it “does not address any problem that exists.”
That should have been the media story all year.
GOOD STUFF:
From the Financial Times’ “Kathryn Murdoch Has a Plan (And $100M) To Fix American Politics”:
But while Murdoch-watchers obsessed over the fraternal succession conflicts between James and his older brother Lachlan, Kathryn has been establishing an identity independent of family dramas. In the past year, she’s signed a multimillion-dollar grant to fund climate change reporting at the Associated Press, given $5m to struggling local newsrooms and worked with Prince Harry on an Aspen Institute commission report on strategies for combating disinformation.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bing Crosby, “Christmas Is A-Comin’”
Crosby, of course, is synonymous with “White Christmas,” but in my house this is the holiday song from Bing. Recorded in 1956, it exudes a wonderful, old-timey holiday feel, complete with bells and an irresistible sing-along chorus crooned out by Crosby.
When I'm feeling blue and when I'm feeling lowThen I start to think about the happiest man I knowHe doesn't mind the snow, he doesn't mind the rainBut all December you will hear him at your window paneSinging again and again and again and again and again
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Forget about the homeless man who burned down Fox News’ metal Christmas tree last week. The network’s real troubles began Sunday morning when longtime host Chris Wallace announced his resignation on live TV, in order to jump to rival CNN. The network’s woes then exploded into full view Monday night when it was revealed a laundry list of Fox News hosts anxiously texted Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on January 6, begging Trump to stop the deadly mob that was laying siege to the U.S. Capitol.
“Please get him on TV,” the network’s Brian Kilmeade messaged. “Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Pleaded Laura Ingraham: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” And from Sean Hannity, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?”
For hours, Trump did nothing to stop the insurrection, before eventually issuing a bland, irrelevant statement on that very dark day.
The Sunday news flash about Wallace was a punch in the gut for Fox, mostly because it robs the network of its ability to point to the morning host as supposedly a ‘serious journalist’ when trying to knock down the obvious claim that the network is nothing more than a bigoted propaganda outlet.
“The abrupt departure of “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace stripped the network of its foremost fig leaf, and gave reality-based journalists clear license to stop the lame euphemisms and call Fox what it is: a propaganda and disinformation operation,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin.
The second, more serious newsflash about the text messages ripped away the Fox veneer that’s been constructed since January 6, that the insurrection was no big deal (i.e. a bunch of grandparents marching around with placards), and that any investigation today represents a partisan witch hunt. Just last week, Kilmeade, who was privately beseeching for action on January 6, mocked news outlets for spending too much time reporting on the revelations that keep tumbling out about Trump’s coup attempt last winter, and about the widespread obstruction of justice on display.
Since everyone at Fox News operates without a moral compass, none of the millionaire hosts will have trouble sleeping despite their insurrection hypocrisy making headlines this week. Still, the network privately hates episodes like this, because it puts them on the defensive and it chips away at the preferred fantasy they push on Madison Avenue and within the Beltway that Fox is merely a conservative media outlet and that it actually employs a “news” division.
It was an awful 36 hours for Fox, and Wallace definitely picked a prime time to leave. I wonder if he knew the release of the Insurrection Day texts from his colleagues was imminent, and if that sped up what appeared to be his hasty exit from his TV home for 18 years. Either way, his move was a stinger for the network, for lots of reasons.
The exit, and how it was choreographed, came with an unmistakable scent of F.U. directed to Wallace’s former bosses. According to reports, virtually nobody inside Fox’s Washington D.C. bureau knew about the departure before Wallace announced it live on television. Worse, he’s jumping straight to Fox News’ most hated rival — CNN. That’s a poke in the eye for the right-wing network, which hates the fact that CNN doggedly details Fox’s dishonest ways. It’s unheard of for a high-profile Fox player like Wallace to pack their bags and head directly to CNN.
When Rupert Morduch’s network on Sunday released a perfunctory statement about Wallace, it was clear the two did not leave on good terms, which is rather stunning considering he’s been among their most recognizable faces for nearly two decades.
That personnel headache was soon superseded by the insurrection controversy, when Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the vice chair of the House select committee investigating January 6, read the Fox News texts aloud Monday night during a primetime hearing. Of course Fox News stonewalled the insurrection text news for 24 hours, refusing to acknowledge that its horrified hosts desperately communicated with Trump’s top aide in real time on January 6, trying to get the president to stop the deranged coup attempt.
They ignored the blockbuster news because Fox employees today are paid to whitewash the insurrection. Last summer, Ingraham openly mocked Capitol Police officers who testified before Congress about the chaos and trauma of Insurrection Day, when law enforcement was attacked and many thought they would die.
And just last month, “Fox News host Tucker Carlson produced a documentary, “Patriot Purge,” for the Fox Nation streaming platform that included the baseless claim that the deadly attack was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives,” Huff Post notes. Carlson infamously told viewers in September that the Capitol rioters “don’t look like terrorists. They look like tourists.”
The lingering, pungent stench from episodes like this might be why Wallace walked away this week. His timing was impeccable.
(Photo: Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Marcy Wheeler has an excellent new piece up stressing what she’s been stressing for months, which is that obstruction of justice remains Trump’s most pressing criminal exposure.
From her new piece, “Finally, Everyone Is Talking about Trump’s Obstruction on January 6”:
The January 6 Committee has already collected evidence demonstrating many of these issues, for example, the efforts to sow the Big Lie, including coordination with Congress, reveling in the collecting mobs, directing Guard deployment in ways that would support the insurrection, the unbelievable pressure on Mike Pence to violate his oath to the Constitution. In the interim four months, the press and Committee have identified other potential means of obstruction, such as ordering Alex Jones to bring his mob to the Capitol.
This is not a guarantee that Trump will be prosecuted. But all three branches of government now agree on the framework with which he might be held accountable.
EXTRA STUFF:
I talked about the Fox News debacle last night on Chris Hayes’ show:
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Rod Stewart, “One More Time”
The fact that a 76-year-old is still having this much fun musically is really a testament to Stewart’s incorrigible spirit.
Not many septuagenarians make pop songs this contagious and yes, this cheesy. The whole thing is a hoot, which Stewart pulls off as he remains true to his self. And yes, his hallmark voice still sounds amazing.
It’s not the color of your hair, or the beauty in your eyes That I’ll be missing Or the sunshine in your smile, or those ruby red lips I’ve been kissing Now your family don’t like me, this I understand I don’t wanna settle down I am just a rambling man
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Twelve months after the press shied away from calling Trump’s coup attempt a “coup,” the Beltway media continue to go slow on the latest revelation about how deeply enmeshed the White House was in its blatant push to sabotage democracy following the Republican’s lopsided loss to Joe Biden.
The discovery of a pro-coup PowerPoint circulating within the White House last winter, designed to nullify millions of American votes, ought to be covered nonstop today, and used as proof that Trump is not suitable to hold office in this country. Instead, the PowerPoint has received mostly passing, disinterested coverage.
Titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” the 38-page presentation is a rocket ship ride into the Big Lie abyss. The proposed plan was for Trump to declare a national emergency and for all electronic voting to be rendered invalid, citing foreign “control” of electronic voting systems. The chilling PowerPoint came to light recently when Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, turned the electronic presentation over to investigators at the January 6 Committee. Days later, Meadows stopped cooperating with the panel.
The PowerPoint included plans for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred.” It also included a proposal in which the certification of Biden’s victory would be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops would help “secure” and count paper ballots in supposedly disputed states.
A criminal conspiracy to overthrow last year’s election, the PowerPoint is a heavy-handed plot twist that most Hollywood scriptwriters would dismiss as not being believable. Yet here we are, as Trump plans his re-election run and we learn more about the runaway criminal enterprise he oversaw as president.
We’re learning about it slowly though, and what seems to be reluctantly by the Beltway press, which instead of touting the PowerPoint as a smoking gun that reveals the GOP’s proudly anti-democratic ways, are treating the proposal timidly — an oddity that doesn’t demand much attention. Virtually none of the coverage I’ve seen has included key context, such as quotes from experts on authoritarianism regarding the stunning implications of a White House likely consulting a sabotage plan like that.
“PowerPoint Sent to Mark Meadows Is Examined by Jan. 6 Panel,” was the ho-hum headline the New York Times produced over the weekend. As of Sunday night, there had been no Times follow-up on the story, suggesting the paper does not see the PowerPoint as being overly important or worthy of ongoing coverage.
The coup blueprint still has not appeared on the front page of single major American newspaper, nor has any influential editorial page weighed in. Republican members of Congress have not been repeatedly pressed to explain the document and why, twelve months ago, the president’s chief of staff took a meeting with the author of the unhinged PowerPoint. Or why members of the author’s conspiracy team, just days before the deadly January 6 insurrection, spoke to a group of Republican senators and House members, briefing them on the bogus claims of foreign interference in the election.
As of Sunday afternoon, “PowerPoint” had been mentioned just 20 times on CNN in the previous week, 50 times on MSNBC, and to nobody’s surprise, 0 times on Fox News. There has not been a single network evening news mention, according to a search of Nexis.
The media’s shoulder shrug response has left Democrats perplexed and enraged. “Can someone explain to me why this isn’t the only thing in the news?” tweeted Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). “I deeply respect the fourth estate, but, holy s**t they had a plan to just end democracy, and is the press gonna just be like “are democrats using the wrong words again?”
There’s a long and disturbing history of the press sleepwalking through this coup story. The press embraced a timid storyline immediately following Trump's defeat as he unleashed a vicious campaign against free and fair elections in America.
Instead of detailing his treasonous, post-election behavior surrounding the would-be coup as a power-hungry authoritarian out to steal an election, news consumers received updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his legal “strategy” and “power play” while he was “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House.
One Politico dispatch at the time dismissed Trump’s anti-democratic behavior as merely “bad sportsmanship.”
Back in October 2020, when he was asked whether he would agree to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, Trump became the first president in American history to balk at the centerpiece of our democratic tradition. The Times placed the story inside the paper on page 15, gently noting that Trump had "declined an opportunity on Wednesday to endorse” the idea. "Trump Won't Commit to Peaceful Transfer of Power" should have been the headline on the front page of every major newspaper in America. It didn't appear on a single one.
Now they’re sleepwalking past the coup.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Friday addressed Trump’s power grab, and the reluctance among too many elites to admit that it was a coup plot, and that we’re still dealing with it.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kane Brown, “Good as You”
It’s a couple years old, but I just saw Brown perform this on national TV, and I’m hooked. A melodic two-stepper that you’ll be humming for weeks.
See the way you're takin' care of your mamaThe way you're takin' care of meThe way you light up any room, girlYou're what this world should be
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By a staggering ratio of six-to-one, Americans say they are seeing and hearing bad economic news more often than they are positive reports. The new polling results confirm the deep disconnect the media have constructed, as news outlets stress. discouraging news regarding the Biden economy, while often ignoring or downplaying the cascading positive developments.
Still committed to the GOP-friendly — and fictitious — storyline about a U.S. economy in decline, the press is damaging President Joe Biden’s approval rating by painting a false portrait of America. It’s doing the Republicans’ bidding — and the messaging is working.
Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.)
Those results are stunning, considering how many positive economic developments are being generated. Just in recent days we’ve learned that gas prices will soon be falling, wages are hitting record heights for workers, and that weekly jobless claims haven’t been this low since Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. Yet for most Americans, there’s only one economic story being told — a doomsday one.
The YouGov polling results come in the wake of a new media study that shows Biden is getting worse coverage than Trump did one year ago.
That nonstop stream of downbeat economic updates today has clearly influenced respondents in other ways. When asked “Which do you think is a more important problem facing the U.S. today,” just 9 percent said unemployment, where the news was been consistently good this year, but has often been underplayed by the press. By contrast, 42 percent said inflation was the most important problem, a topic that the media have hyped without pause for nearly two months echoing Republicans’ loud, doomsday attacks on the Biden economy. (Remember that weird CNN milk story?)
“The nonstop hype of “inflation, inflation, inflation” unsurprisingly leads many people to believe inflation is a really big problem, even if their own finances are pretty good, because they hear all those wise reporters at CNN, NPR, the NYT and elsewhere telling them it’s a really big problem,” notes economist Dean Baker.
A new Associated Press poll confirms Baker’s claim. The headline: “Income Is Up, But Americans Focus on Inflation.” Why is that? Probably because Americans are inundated with the media’s obsessive inflation coverage.
It’s a “political nightmare for Biden,” CNN recently stressed, while the New York Times published well over 100 articles and columns that mentioned “inflation” three or more times last month. The Washington Post announced inflation is the “defining” challenge of Biden’s presidency. Why inflation? Because the press decided.
The reason inflation has sprouted in the U.S. is because consumer demand is booming as the economy has recovered from Covid faster and stronger under Biden than most people ever thought possible. That silver lining rarely gets mentioned, though.
Contrast the inflation coverage with the unemployment coverage. In the YouGov poll, asked what today’s unemployment rate is, just 3-in-10 Americans could give an accurate response; approximately 4 percent. Nearly 4-in-10 thought the rate was above 6 percent. (17 percent thought the U.S. unemployment rate was 10 percent or more.) Just one-in-three knew that the rate decreased last month. Would more Americans have a better idea about today’s improving unemployment picture if the press more accurately covered it? Yes.
When the October blockbuster jobs report was released showing nearly 550,000 positions created that month, and that revised estimates for September and August confirmed an additional 235,000 jobs had been created, “NBC Nightly News” that night made no mention of that fact. But when the November jobs report came last week out and showed a “disappointing” 210,000 jobs added, “NBC Night News” slotted it in as the day’s third most important story.
Last Friday, National Public Radio announced the 210,000-jobs report was a “bust” even though the unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent in just 30 days. And prior to Biden passing the Covid relief bill last winter, the CBO predicted it would take until 2025 for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. For NPR listeners though, the economic news last week as a “bust.”
This was all before Pfizer and BioNTech announced that initial lab studies show that a third dose of their Covid-19 vaccine neutralizes the looming Omicron variant, which the press had been hyping as a possible grenade targeting the U.S. economy.
On Wednesday, the White House tweeted out an economic update: “The economy has added 5.9M new jobs since January — the most jobs added in the first 11 months of a year. Since January, unemployment has fallen from 6.3% to 4.2% — the fastest single year drop. 16M fewer people are receiving unemployment since POTUS took office.”
That’s not spin, those are the facts. We’re witnessing the Biden Boom. So why are news consumers being buried with bad news?
(Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images)
💴 GOOD STUFF:
For more on the Biden Boom, see Robert Shapiro’s excellent new piece in Washington Monthly:
Based on the data, President Biden and the Democratic Congress are set to preside over the strongest two-year performance on growth, jobs, and income in decades—so long as the current cycle of inflation eases, and the Omicron variant does not trigger another round of shutdowns. The future paths of inflation and the pandemic are large and important unknowns—but if they break right, everything else points to a Biden boom through 2022.
🎄 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”
The perfect jukebox song for the month of December. It’s classic Irish tale of Christmas in the drunk tank, as only Shane McGowan and the Pogues could tell. “It is by far the most complicated song that I have ever been involved in writing and performing,” McGowan once explained. “The beauty of it is it sounds really simple.”
They've got cars big as barsThey've got rivers of goldBut the wind goes right through youIt's no place for the oldWhen you first took my handOn a cold Christmas EveYou promised meBroadway was waiting for me
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Confirming what so many news consumers have suspected this year, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank revealed that President Joe Biden’s coverage since August has been more negative that Trump’s was twelve months ago. Using a data research firm that analyzed 200,000 articles and measured the tone of the coverage, Milbank’s piece blew up myth about how the Beltway press cozies up to Democrats and goes hard after Republican presidents.
In this case, not just any Republican, but Trump, a proud authoritarian who represents a direct threat to our democracy.
Despite the loud claims from journalists that news outlets were tough on Trump for four years, it’s not true. (See: Here, here, here, and here.) On the flip side, scribes reject the claim that they’ve been overly harsh covering Biden in recent months, but they have been. (See: Here, here, here, and here.)
Quick example: On the day that President Joe Biden triumphantly signed into law a bipartisan, $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will help rebuild bridges, roads and broadband nationwide as well as transform public transportation in this country, the Washington Post ran a front-page gotcha piece about how he isn’t pessimistic enough.
Another: In October, the White House press corps demanded to know if Biden would personally guarantee that every gift being shipped out for Christmas would arrive on time and not get waylaid by the global supply chain backup, as if the president runs Amazon’s shipping and handling out of the West Wing.
That’s not normal newsroom behavior. That’s the D.C. press corps married to a Biden Doomsday storyline.
Milbank’s damning column didn’t go over well among defensive Beltway journalists, especially those at Politico, which Milbank singled out as being a relentlessly negative Biden outpost.
“No respectable model of salvaging democratic norms would include badgering journalists to write only positive stories about the most powerful person in the world,” tweeted Ryan Lizza in response to Milbank. Of course, nobody’s suggesting Biden only receive positive coverage. They are suggesting a traditional, center-left president should get better coverage than the madman who preceded him.
When other journalists responded to Milbank’s piece by saying, ‘Yeah, but Dems were in disarray over the infrastructure bill, we covered it, and that’s why Biden got bad press,’ it completely misses the larger, more pressing point — Democrats struggling to pass a spending bill is not the same as Republicans trying to destroy free and fair elections in this country.
The context of the findings is also key — Biden has been getting worse coverage in recent months compared to Trump in 2020. This was after he’d been in office for three years, had been impeached once, and his unhinged behavior was inescapable to every working journalist. That’s after he urged Americans to inject bleach into their veins.
From Milbank:
Think about that. In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
Today, Trump and his followers are using lawsuits, legislation, and terroristic threats to curtail the right to vote. And Biden is getting worse treatment than Trump?
Too many news organizations view themselves primarily as witnesses in the unfolding drama today, paid to document the beating that democracy is taking at the hands of extremist Republicans. Journalists don’t see themselves as having a vested interest in America maintaining a functioning democracy.
It all goes back the cherished, safe model the D.C. press has used for at least 50 years in terms of covering politics in this country: Left-leaning Democrats square off against right-leaning Republicans, and all the key players fall within the broad definition of mainstream politics, and they’re all generally honest, decent people.
That blueprint no longer works because the Republican Party, including key leaders, have sprinted away from any traditional sense of fact or honor-based politics and now lie about everything. They lie about the economy, about Covid, about Trump, about the insurrection, about elections, about education, about 9/11. One side has become deeply radicalized while the other side is trying to save America from losing touch with the democratic foundations that have guided this country for more than 250 years.
Noted Dan Kennedy at Media Nation, “The media cling to both-sides-ism despite four years of a raging sociopath in the White House, an attempted insurrection by his supporters, and dangerous denialism about COVID-19.”
Yet Biden gets worse coverage than Trump.
(Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
For more on Milbank’s take on Biden press coverage, see media critic Dan Froomkin’s recent interview with the Post writer, “‘I think we need to rethink entirely how we do things,’ says Dana Milbank of the Washington Post”:
“I don’t think anything in our training or experience as journalists prepared us for a moment in which one of the two major political parties is no longer cooperating with the democratic process: promulgating the most outrageous lies, disenfranchising voters and giving state legislatures the ability to overturn unfavorable election results, openly embracing white nationalism,” Milbank said.
Not knowing any other way to write about politics, “they’re doing the normal thing,” he said.
But Milbank’s view is that “It can’t be said too many time that this is not normal… I think we need a rethink entirely how we do things.”
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bahamas “Louisiana 1927” (featuring Madison Cunningham)
Canadian singer-songwriter Afie Jurvanen, who goes by the stage name Bahamas, has a new EP out, which includes this nifty cover of the Randy Newman classic.
Leave it to Newman to write about an historic Mississippi flood and turn it into an iconic American lament, all of which is perfectly captured here.
President Coolidge came down in a railroad trainWith a little fat man with a note-pad in his handThe President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has doneTo this poor crackers land."
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Is adding more than 200,000 new jobs to the U.S. economy in a single month good news or bad news? At National Public Radio, the answer seems to change depending on who’s president.
On Friday, the Labor Department announced that as the economy emerges from the pandemic, 210,000 jobs were added in November, fewer than what analysts had expected. NPR immediately pounced on Twitter: “November hiring was a bust, with only 210,000 jobs created — and those numbers came in even before omicron was identified.”
NPR’s report was clear: Hiring was in the ditch and it was likely to get much worse with an “even more worrisome coronavirus variant” looming. (For the record, scientists don’t yet know if the Omicron variant will be worse than the Delta variant.) The political implications for the Biden White House were obvious, as well. The Beltway press for months has been stressing that the economy, and especially inflation, was a major political problem for Biden, and constantly listed it as one of his pressing “crises.” According to NPR on Friday, that crisis just got worse because the jobs report — 210,000 new positions — was an unequivocal “bust.”
What’s odd is how NPR previously covered similar jobs announcements under Trump. Back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. The year before that, an NPR headline read, “Job Market Surges As Employers Add 266,000 Jobs In November.” NPR made sure to include an excited quote from the White House in the third paragraph of that report: “It's a tremendous report. Obviously, it's something to be very happy about.”
Both of those recent cases during the Trump years make it sound like adding between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs in a month is a very good thing. But under Biden it’s a “bust” because “just 210,000 jobs” were created.
Note that according to Friday’s Labor report, unemployment last month dropped from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent, and is now down two entire points in twelve months, which is unprecedented in American history for a president’s first year in office. Prior to Biden passing the Covid relief bill last winter, the CBO predicted it would take until 2025 for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, which means we are four years ahead of schedule in terms of this historic economy.
After I tweeted about NPR’s recent coverage, network host Steven Inskeep responded to me and others asking about the double standard in play:
Thanks. Jan 2020 beat expectations. Nov 2021 fell short. Thus, 2020/2021 tweets differed. Here’s a fair critique: “Who cares if numbers beat expectations? They’re often revised later anyway.” I’d be with you if you said that! Instead you discover a pro-Trump conspiracy.
Inskeep’s referring to how on the eve of each month’s jobs report economists are polled to see what they think the jobs gain number will be. That is used to determine if the report exceeds expectations or not. And he’s right, the January 2020 jobs report under Trump did exceed expectations, in part because expectations were for a modest 150,000 jobs to be added.
But notice how when NPR on Twitter immediately labeled the November jobs report to be a “bust,” there was no reference to expectations. It was simply stated as fact.
Inskeeps then mentions that in recent months each jobs report has been revised upwards with massive additional gains being reported by the government. For instance, the initial August jobs report this summer claimed 235,000 jobs were added. But that was soon revised all the way up to 483,000, a development that received comparatively little press coverage.
But again, none of that was mentioned in the NPR report which claimed 210,000 jobs represented a clear failure for Biden.
Lastly, Inskeep suggested that by pointing out the network’s Biden double standard I’m claiming to have uncovered some kind of “pro-Trump conspiracy.” My hunch is he thinks that’s supposed to sound outlandish, the idea of NPR ever being pro-Trump. In truth, the network over the last few years has been guilty of every other Beltway media failure in terms of clinging to Both Sides journalism, refusing to call to Trump a liar in daily news reports, wildly overplaying the inflation story, and portraying Biden as being dogged by a failing economy.
The signature timidity from NPR’s political reporting likely spring from being intimidated by Republicans who have threatened to slash public broadcasting funding because of so-called liberal media bias. How do you prove you’re not in the tank for Democrats? You claim that a jobs report in which the unemployment rate tumbles to 4.2 percent is a flop.
NPR has not been alone in adjusting how it covers 200,000-plus monthly job gains under Biden (bad news!), compared to 200,000-plus monthly new job gains under Trump (great news!).
The solution for journalists is simple: Accurately report economic news without trying to fit it into a preferred storyline.
(Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
From the Washington Post’s “Marcus Lamb Died of Covid-19 After His Network Discouraged Vaccines. But Some Christian Leaders Don’t Want to Talk About It”:
When famed televangelist Marcus Lamb died this week at 64 after contracting covid-19, a who’s who of conservative Christian leaders sent out regrets. Evangelist Franklin Graham said Lamb is now “experiencing heaven.” National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference head Samuel Rodriguez called him a “faithful follower of Jesus ... with a heart for the lost and broken.”
Absent was a painful truth: Lamb had led his global Christian network, Daystar, for months in spreading inaccurate information about coronavirus vaccines and instead promoting treatments that are not proven remedies. The vaccines, a May segment on Daystar said, falsely, are “killing your immune system.”
📺 EXTRA STUFF:
I appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday to discuss the media’s doomsday coverage of the Biden economy.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Sting, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”
The new cover song you didn’t know you needed.
I left my home in GeorgiaHeaded for the Frisco Bay'Cause I've had nothin' to live forIt look like nothin's gonna come my waySo I'm just gon' sittin' on the dock of the bayWatchin' the tide roll away, oohI'm sittin' on the dock of the bay, wastin' time
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Waging war on the country’s well-being, the GOP, fueled by the right-wing media, has set its sights on Covid nihilism. And they’re doing it in the name of partisan warfare.
Republican members in the House and Senate were scheming to shut down the federal government to ensure that workers won’t have to comply with vaccination mandates put in place to help slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The plot came as health officials warn that the new Omicron Covid-19 variant could be highly be contagious and dangerous to Americans.
At least four red states — Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee — have begun extending unemployment benefits to workers who were fired or who quit over their employers’ requirement that everyone get vaccinated. (Typically, only workers are who laid off through no fault of their own are eligible for benefits.) It’s a way for the GOP to tighten its bond with anti-vaxxer voters and to show solidarity with those who are working hard to perpetuate the pandemic.
TV doctor Mehmet Oz made headlines this week when he declared his candidacy for next year’s Pennsylvania Senate race. (Oz has not lived in the Keystone State since the 1980’s.) He’s likely most infamous for his Fox News appearance at the outset of the pandemic when he urged schools be reopened immediately, even if that meant a mortality rate of 2 to 3 percent among students, or 3 million deaths nationwide. He also promoted useless hydroxychloroquine to fight the coronavirus.
All of this dangerous behavior and rhetoric comes while Fox News churns out nonstop lies about a free, safe, and effective vaccine designed to save lives. Just this week on Fox, the nation’s Covid point person, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was compared to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and deranged Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Here’s what’s painfully obvious, even if the political press doesn’t want to say so: Republicans aren’t merely anti-mask or anti-vaccine. They’re pro-Covid. Period. Republican politicians and commentators, who are fully vaccinated themselves, want the virus to spread and they want to extend the deadly pandemic so it inflicts political damage on Democrats next year. And yes, even if that means anti-science Republicans helping to spread the virus among their own voters, which ought to seem inconceivable, but is not. “Red America Has Seen the Highest Rates of Cases and Deaths, and the Lowest Rate of Vaccinations,” read a recent Washington Post headline.
Never in our nation’s history has a mainstream political party responded to a public health crisis by doing whatever it takes to keep the crisis alive, completely unconcerned about the rising death toll.
There’s a reason every single Republican member of the House and Senate voted against the historic, $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill earlier this year —they hated that it represented a popular win for President Joe Biden.
Despite the mounting evidence of the party’s nihilistic ways, the press remains too timid to call Republicans “pro-Covid,” just like they wouldn’t call Trump a “liar.” Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”
Republicans plan on shamelessly exploiting the Omicron variant. And the only way to exploit a Covid variant is to help spread it. This type of cynical and unpatriotic strategy isn’t new for Republicans — they spent eight years blocking President Barack Obama’s agenda and then blaming him for not getting his agenda passed.
Note that when Republicans ran the federal government and America was under siege from Covid, Trump and his team again aided the virus’ spread. Back then, it was done out of a panicked sense of denial, fearful of what the pandemic would mean to Trump’s re-election.
Trump all but issued a stand-down order for the virus invasion, then became the world’s most influential fountain of Covid misinformation, using his daily White House briefings to spread rampant virus lies. "When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away," he once predicted. Yet we never saw a parade of "Trump Lies about Pandemic" headlines, as the press remained intimidated by the GOP madman.
“The previous administration* gagged its own scientists, buried its own reports, bullied its own agencies, soft-pedaled its own data, and created its own reality to sell to the country, all at a crucial time when the pandemic could have been fought seriously and at least partly arrested,” notes Esquire’s Charles Pierce.
Just this week we learned that Trump likely showed up at the first presidential debate against Biden contagious with Covid, after Trump tested positive for the virus days earlier and refused to tell anyone.
The transformation from bumbling Covid enablers under Trump, to proud Covid supporters today happened when the GOP started shifting gears this spring and summer. At the time, the good news regarding America’s fight against Covid was cascading in, as cases and deaths plummeted in the U.S. The developments led Biden to announce, appropriately at the time, that the U.S stood poised to put the deadly pandemic in the past and fully reemerge to a normal way of life.
Then the Delta variant stormed our shores, sending cases upwards, creating renewed debates about mask-wearing and vaccine mandates. Sensing a political opening, the GOP made a decision to become the party that opposed vaccines, and to become pro-Covid — to do everything possible to extend the pandemic and block Biden’s efforts to save lives and restart the economy.
In other words, the GOP eagerly adopted its role as the fifth column within the United States, working unapologetically to damage the country’s health from within.
That’s the ugly truth that the press ought to be telling.
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
Why does the erosion of democracy continue despite the fact Democrats were victorious in 2020? The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon tackles that topic in, “We May Have Already Missed Our Last, Best Chance to Bolster American Democracy.” The short answer is that the GOP just gets more radical:
The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters may have embarrassed some Republicans, but it didn’t shift their political calculus. In fact, Republicans have gotten more radical since, having passed laws making it harder to vote while falsely arguing that Biden didn’t win the election fairly. They have tried to stop an investigation of the Jan 6 insurrection, defended GOP lawmakers who threaten colleagues and banned books that focus on racism. The Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, who often take actions that support the party’s goals, also haven’t changed direction, issuing an opinion limiting the Voting Rights Act that all but invites GOP officials to enact more restrictions.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Elvis Costello & The Imposters, “Magnificent Hurt”
Talk about time travel, this pounding new track from Costello’s upcoming 2022 album transports you straight back to the singer’s New Wave glory days with the Imposters, circa late 1970’s and 1980s.
Costello signature, urgent singing, the driving organ groove, and the glorious whack-whack back beat all reach back and capture some welcome magic.
I took a little walk, I took another stimulantI shed a single tear for my predicamentDon't act surprised or insolentIt's the way you make me feel, magnificent hurt
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Lining up at the cash register and spending like never before, eager American shoppers are mucking up the media’s preferred storyline about how rising inflation is crippling the U.S. economy. Leaning into the political implications of how higher prices are doing long-term damage to the Biden presidency, the media now seem befuddled as U.S. consumers are ignoring the press’ dire portrait of a 1970’s-style wave of economic malaise that’s supposedly gripping the country.
Having spent months breathlessly hyping GOP talking points about inflation and presenting it as the defining economic indicator in America — not huge job gains, record-setting GDP predictions, or raising wages — journalists now are forced to report on runaway consumer spending, as Americans gobble up a record number of electronics, jewelry, and luxury goods.
If the media were to be believed, spooked consumers scared off by rising prices should be home guarding their wallets. Instead, they’re emptying the contents at shops and online.
Retail sales jumped 1.7% in October, rising for the third month in a row. Adjusted for inflation, sales were up 0.7 percent from the previous month, and up 9.5 percent from a year earlier. Consumers overall spent a record $638 billion at stores and restaurants in October, according to the Commerce Department. That’s up 21 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
“After experiencing one of the most severe economic shocks of the past century in 2020, the U.S. economy has displayed one of the most rapid recoveries in modern history,” according to Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics.
But a feel-good story about a red-hot economy in recovery mode is not what the press wants to emphasize. So economic coverage now revolves mostly around inflation reporting, which seems purposely over the top and lacking key context. By constantly doling out sour economic updates in the form of breathless inflation coverage, the press continues to do the GOP’s bidding.
Also, today’s inflation is a global phenomenon, caused by a global pandemic, which warped supply and demand patterns, creating a mismatch that has driven prices higher. That key point often get ignored as the press eagerly depicts the situation as a Democratic problem.
Inflation is a “political nightmare for Biden,” CNN recently stressed. The Associated Press conceded last week that consumers spending is way up, but claimed inflation was “casting a pall” and that rising prices, not plummeting unemployment, would “likely be the chief economic indicator Americans discuss over Thanksgiving Day dinner.” (The AP can read minds, apparently.)
As one retail chain CEO recently told the New York Times, “People have money to spend, they’re excited to be back out in the world again, they’re excited to be back with their families this holiday season.”
More good news, right? Not so much.
The Times claimed Democrats’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections, 48 weeks away, were badly harmed because of grocery store inflation this year, and specifically because Thanksgiving dinners cost more to make. In truth, the cost of groceries is up five percent, which doesn’t seem like reason enough to convince voters to switch parties next year. Meanwhile, there are lots of great deals to be had, like at the California grocery chain which was selling two frozen pies for just $10 the week before Thanksgiving, and four dozen cans of soda for $12. Consuming hair-on-fire inflation coverage, you’d think shoppers need to take out loans in order to stock their pantries. They do not.
Relaying on anecdotal reporting, the press has spent months depicting U.S. shoppers as being steamrolled by stampeding inflation — it’s just not the case. The press keeps trying, though.
Note that when weekly jobless claims fell to a 52-year low last week, the Times ran yet another Biden Inflation! piece on the following day’s front page. News of the historic jobless numbers ran on page B3.
On Tuesday, the Times was back at it with another big inflation piece, this one about how Millennials have never experienced widespread inflation before. The story though, didn’t quote a single Millennial complaining about inflation.
In November alone, the New York Times published more than 130 articles and columns that mentioned “inflation” at least three times, according to Nexis. That’s an average of four inflation pieces every day for the entire month.
As part of its hysterical, ongoing inflation coverage, the Washington Post claimed rising Christmas tree prices this year means, “many families are unsure whether they will spend the holiday gathered around a majestic tower of greenery or something more reminiscent of Charlie Brown’s sad spectacle.” (According to an industry trade group, live Christmas tree prices this year are up 5-10 percent.)
The Post’s Dan Balz over the weekend insisted Biden was “slow to acknowledge” Americans’ inflationary pain, and presented rising costs as a defining crisis for the White House. Balz in passing did mention, “Some economic statistics continue to show positive signs,” but he refused to detail what those positive signs are: Roaring monthly job gains and an unemployment rate that’s expected to fall below four percent next year.
The press keeps rooting against the Biden economy. Consumers though, aren’t buying it.
(Photo: Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at CNN’s drive in 2021 to hype drama instead of simply reporting the news.
From CJR’s “CNN’s Tabloid Tendencies”:
Since last year, CNN ratings are down 73 percent. Without the daily spectacle of Donald Trump as president, cable news producers appear to be seeking other dramatic narratives. The network’s exaggerated tone and graphic content increasingly pushes it into the realm of tabloid-like material.
This trend emerged in September with the death of Gabby Petito, a young woman allegedly killed by her boyfriend. I’ve been told that producers justified that coverage due to the abundance of available Instagram material. But the accessibility of photographs doesn’t make a story newsworthy––it makes it convenient infotainment.
EXTRA STUFF:
My column Monday about Chris Christie’s book flop generated some media waves. Here’s MSNBC’s Chris Hayes covering a story:
🎄 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Irish Rovers, “Down Among the Bushes of Jerusalem”
Since it’s officially December, I’ll start sprinkling in some of my favorite holiday songs this month, ones that don’t traditionally pop up on seasonal Apple playlists.
This historical recounting of the Christmas story from Toronto’s Irish Rovers is a near-perfect folk gem.
Come listen gentle Christians, and you Jews and Gentiles tooAnd all denominations, a song I sing to youIt's all about a young man, a rebel through and throughDown among the bushes of Jerusalem
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Be kind.
It’s hard to recall a former politician who was showered with more free media attention than Chris Christie this month as he peddled his new book, “Republican Rescue.” Invited to appear on a carousel of shows, Christie was all-present as journalists lined up to interview him. CNN even dedicated an entire primetime hour to him, treating the in-your-face Republican as one of the most important political voices in the country.
Consumers aren’t buying it.
A senior publishing source with access to the industry’s BookScan tabulations tells me that “Republican Rescue” sold just 2,289 copies during its first week in stores, which constitutes a colossal publishing flop. That figure does not include digital copies of the book, but based on industry sales patterns, given Christie’s weak showing in stores he likely sold only a few hundred digital ones. (On Sunday, “Republican Rescue” was ranked 15,545th at Amazon’s Kindle Store.)
In comparison to Christie’s 2,000 copies debacle, Jonathan Karl’s new book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” sold 24,000 hardcover copies the same week as the Christie failure. How Christie was able to sell so few books after lining up so much national media attention during his marketing roll-out — “This Week” and “The View,” “Fox & Friends,” along with Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Show, HBO twice, and CNBC — represents an extraordinary disconnect.
It confirms that the deeply unpopular former New Jersey governor remains, first and foremost, a media creation. For years, he’s been propped up by the press as a populist Straight Shooter, but he left office with an approval rating in the teens, and failed spectacularly when he tried to run for president in 2016. That explains why CNN’s Christie special was a ratings disaster, coming in a distant third place among the three cable news channels that night. (During the show, CNN’s Dana Bash never once asked Christie about the BridgeGate scandal that ended his political career.)
“He left New Jersey as the most unpopular governor since the advent of polling. But he’s still catnip to the national media,” noted Politico’s Matt Friedman.
Part of the avalanche of eager Christie coverage represent a relentless sub-genre of Beltway journalism that clings to the fantasy that there’s still a functioning faction of the Republican Party that can and will stand up to Trump’s erratic and dangerous behavior.
According to yet another profile over the weekend by the Associated Press, “Christie appears to be reveling in the attention of being back in the political game after a hiatus.” Of course he’s reveling in it. The question is, why are the media providing the attention? “There has never been so much excitement over a book by a has-been politician who left office years ago with a 14% approval,” noted Salon’s Heather Digby Parton.
The larger point here isn’t that Christie’s book stiffed — lots of authors swing and miss, especially in an increasingly difficult media environment. What’s disturbing is how the media keep pretending Christie is somebody who matters in American politics. Not according to the new sales figures.
Despite the media’s reverential coverage of Christie over the years, the bully actually doesn’t stand for anything, which became obvious during his recent media tour. Out promoting his book, Christie made clear his incoherent politics revolve around his unending desire to be viewed as relevant. On that front, he’s fooled the press, but not most Americans.
Recall that last year, Christie, the self-anointed truth teller in 2021, did his best to get Trump re-elected. (He helped Trump prep for the debates, got Covid in the process, and was soon hospitalized.) After the deadly insurrection on January 6, Christie conceded that trying to overturn election results in America is a bad thing and wrote a book about how the Republican Party needs to reform itself and step away from Trump-era conspiracies and move beyond the 2020 election Big Lie.
So, he’s an unapologetic anti-Trumper, right? He views Fox News misinformation as a danger to our democracy, right? Nope and nope. Pressed during his media blitz, Christie said he might vote for Trump in 2024, and when appearing on MSNBC he refused to criticize Fox News, likely because he appeared on the network a few days later hawking his book by stressing to right-wing viewers how he supported Trump for so many years.
Americans see through Christie, yet the press worships him. They’ve been doing it for the better part of a decade, portraying him as an authentic Every Man, a master communicator, and that rare politician who cuts through the stagecraft and delivers hard truths.
"Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical," Time's Mark Halperin announced while appearing on “Meet The Press,” in 2013. And remember when ABC's Barbara Walters crowned Christie as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People, casting him as a “passionate and compassionate” politician who cannot lie?
Today, nobody cares about Chris Christie, except Beltway journalists.
(Photo: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
The struggling newspaper industry could use some good news, and the Biden White House is trying to deliver it.
From the New York Times’ “Local News Outlets Could Reap $1.7 Billion in Build Back Better Aid”:
If the $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate package makes it through the Senate, where it faces a stiff challenge, it will provide $1.67 billion over the next five years for newspapers, websites, radio and TV stations, and other outlets that primarily cover local news. If eligible, they could reap up to $25,000 for each locally focused journalist they employ in the first year and $15,000 in each of the next four.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kyle Kinane, “Drinking in the Shower”
For a change of pace, here’s one of my favorite stand-up comedians.
The pride of Chicago, the scruffy-voiced Kinane excels at recounting scenes that are ridiculous but feasible. He “delights in the unsophisticated, but underneath the lowbrow crudeness there’s considerable charm, technique and wit,” as the Guardian noted.
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By any traditional measure, Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a productive November:
• While President Biden went under anesthesia on Friday for the routine medical procedure, she became the first woman to assume the powers of commander in chief.
• She traveled to France and helped smooth over relations with a longtime U.S. ally.
• She took part in the public signing ceremony for the recently-passed infrastructure bill, a centerpiece of Biden’s agenda.
• She announced an historic $1.5 billion investment to help grow and diversify the nation’s health care workforce.
So why is she getting buried in bad press by the Beltway media, as they gleefully pile on? Unloading breathless, the gossip-heavy coverage is not only detached from reality, the press has gone sideways portraying Harris as lost and ineffective — in over her head.
It’s impossible to miss the increasingly condescending tone of the coverage, as Harris serves as the first woman vice president in U.S. history, and the first person of color to hold that position. The Atlantic has dismissed her as “uninteresting” and mocked her lack of political agility.
The recent frenzy of gotcha stories, which perfectly reflects petty, right-wing attacks on Harris, represents an entirely new way of covering a sitting vice president. None of the white men who previously served in that position were put under this kind of a microscope, and certainly not months into their first term. “News outlets didn’t have beat reporters who focused largely on covering Dick Cheney, Joe Biden or Mike Pence, but they do for Harris,” the Post’s Perry Bacon noted. “Her every utterance is analyzed, her exact role in the Biden White House scrutinized.”
Worse, the premises used to support the steady drumbeat of negative, nit-picky coverage revolve around dopey optics and pointless parlor gossip. (She’s now rivals with Pete Buttigieg!)
“The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically,” CNN breathlessly reported this month, using that as the centerpiece for a hollow and meandering 5,000-word hit piece. (“Exasperation,” “dysfunction,” “frustrating” — and that was just CNN’s doomsday headline.) But of course, every VP in American history has likely made the same observation about feeling constrained, so as to not overshadow the president— that’s been the defining characteristic of the vice president’s office since the birth of the nation. But in 2021, it’s used as some sort of blockbuster development with Harris.
Keep in mind, Trump’s VP is most famous for being chased by a mob that wanted to hang him during a deadly insurrection. But today, Harris supposedly feeling constrained is treated as breaking news.
Politico claimed Harris has been forced out of “the national spotlight” because she’s been given so much work to do by the administration. A) She most certainly has not been “drawn away from the national spotlight,” as compared to previous vice presidents and their visibility. B) If the administration hadn’t given her weighty issues to tackle, such as voting rights and immigration, Politico would be claiming she was being shunned.
Straining to paint her trip to France as a failure, the Washington Post pointed a single, uneventful question asked by a reporter during a press briefing as proof that her overseas foray had gone astray.
From the Associated Press: “When she delivered her speech on the infrastructure law, there was little sign of Democratic enthusiasm. The crowd of invited guests barely filled one-quarter of a local union hall.” So according to the AP, Harris gave an important policy speech but it was tagged a failure because the attendance was all wrong. The same AP report on Monday claimed, “Harris’ allies are especially frustrated that Biden seems to have limited the vice president to a low-profile role with a difficult policy portfolio.” Of course, not a single Harris ally was quoted making that claim.
Meanwhile, AP reporter Steve Peoples dinged Harris last week on Twitter, noting it had been 90 minutes since the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case had been announced and she still hadn’t issued a statement. As if the vice president is put on the clock every time a high-profile murder trial concludes.
The double standard for Harris has become impossible to ignore. “Media has been more critical of VP Harris for her image than of VP Pence for his propaganda OpEd claiming the COVID wave was a hoax as 600K+ Americans have since died,” tweeted author and attorney Qasim Rashid. “Not saying VP Harris is above criticism—but my God how low is the bar for rich white men who enable mass death?”
Part of the ceaseless critical coverage stems from the media’s beloved Dems in Disarray storyline, where the party has to be perpetually portrayed as being undone by internal strife. It’s also fueled by the media’s need to create drama so they can present current events with a dramatic arc, as a way to keep news consumers tuned in. During the Trump years there was no need to invent White House drama, since it erupted on an hourly basis on many days. But reporters are frustrated by the No Drama Biden approach to governance (the New York Times: He’s “boring”), and have taken it upon themselves to create conflict. Harris has become a favorite prop for that.
Also, note how the D.C. media career game is played. Back in June, The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a completely over-the-top hit piece on Harris, announcing her vice presidency was a failure (“She continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public”), even though she was just four months into her term. The takedown generated lots of Beltway buzz though, and Dovere was soon hired by CNN where this month he helped write … a completely over-the-top hit piece on Harris.
CNN’s coverage of Harris has been relentlessly negative all year. This spring the network attacked her “defensive” behavior, questioning her “political agility,” stressing her “political missteps,” mocking her “clumsy” and “tone deaf” media performance; her “shaky handling of the politics” surrounding immigration. All of that was to condemn her successful diplomatic trip to Mexico.
Kamala Harris made history this year, the best kind. The Beltway media seems determined to treat her achievement as an opportunity to rewrite to rules on how to cover the first woman VP in a new, hyper-critical way.
👍🏻 GOOD STUFF:
From Magdi Semrau’s excellent piece at AlterNet, “How the Press Distorts the Reality of Biden's Agenda”:
So there appears to be a disconnect between voters' perceptions of the president and his agenda. Is this entirely the media's fault? Of course not. But it's difficult to ignore the connections between reporting and public awareness. As the Columbia Journalism Review observed, there's been a demonstrable breakdown in media communication if 59 percent have heard about the cost of the Build Back Better bill and far fewer have heard of its popular provisions.
📺 EXTRA STUFF:
I joined Joy Reid Monday night to discuss Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes’ resignation from Fox News. Click on the tweet to see some of our discussion.
🎰 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
River Kittens, “Atlantic City”
The St. Louis-based folk duo of Allie Vogler and Mattie Schell deliver a glorious cover of this Springsteen classic. Leaning heavily on the mandolin, the two tap into the song’s timeless tale of corruption, personal turmoil, and yes, Atlantic City gambling.
Well now everything dies baby that's a factBut maybe everything that dies someday comes backPut your makeup on, fix your hair up prettyAnd meet me tonight in Atlantic City
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First, some good news.
The New York Times recently ran an important piece about the rising specter of violence within mainstream Republican Party circles. The article was noteworthy not only because it spotlighted the frightening instances of violent rhetoric and actions the conservative movement is eagerly unleashing in America, but because the Times used clear and concise language to tell the story.
Temporarily shedding the lazy Both Sides blanket that so many newsrooms use when forced to acknowledge how reckless today’s GOP has become, the Times piece didn’t waste time trying to camouflage the trend. “From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party,” the daily reported unequivocally. “The most animated Republican voters increasingly see themselves as participants in a struggle, if not a kind of holy war, to preserve their idea of American culture and their place in society.”
That’s the good news — some mainstream media outlets are using succinct language while addressing the most important political story in America today. Honestly, it’s one of the most crucial unfolding stories in the country’s history as the Trump-led GOP fuels an unprecedented, multi-pronged assault on U.S. democracy and gleefully flashes the threat of overt violence in the process.
That’s the bad news, and it’s spreading. “I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that’s happened now,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America told the Times.
Political hostility is not new to America. The country was rocked by violence clashes, for instance, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the anti-war movement fractured off into more militant factions. But never did leaders of the Democratic Party or members of Congress overtly endorse political violence the way today’s Republican Party does, as it continues to actively whitewash the deadly January insurrection, which is now glorified by Fox News.
Democrats never used their considerable political muscle to try to demolish free and fair elections in America. That’s not true for today’s Republican Party, as it actively mainstreams the looming menace of hostility by fanning the flames of civil unrest, including last week celebrating an underage vigilante killer, Kyle Rittenhouse.
After he was acquitted on murder charges, at least three House Republicans said they wanted the gunman to be their intern, including Rep. Madison Cawthorn who urged his followers to “be armed and dangerous,” while posting a message celebrating Rittenhouse’s acquittal.
“Hard to describe how chilling it is to see members of the GOP and open white supremacists come together to celebrate a vigilante killing two people and getting away with it,” Cassie Miller, an extremism researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, tweeted.
The flashpoints of Republicans and conservatives promoting political violence have become ceaseless, to the point of frightening normalization. After Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted an anime video altered to show him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and swinging two swords at President Joe Biden, virtually the entire Republican Party rallied to Gosar’s side when he faced a formal House rebuke for his violent, dehumanizing outburst.
Despite the GOP’s nearly universal support, Politico insisted the episode highlighted the “fringe” side of the party, while the Beltway media outlet Punch Bowl reduced the threatening, unnerving Gosar chapter to Democrats and Republicans just not trusting each other.
The violent virus is spreading to the grassroots level. Polls suggest that as many as 21 million Americans think that the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. In Kansas, anti-vaxxers showed up to municipal meetings wearing yellow stars, suggesting they had equal footing with Jewish victims of the Holocaust. White nationalist members of The Proud Boys are showing up at local school board meetings, to lend a menacing air to the proceedings.
At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man asked local leaders when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. When Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) voted in favor of the recent infrastructure bill to help rebuild roads across the country she was inundated with death threats. One man told her, “I pray to God that if you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”
The welcome Times piece last week on GOP violence stood in contrast to a wave of vague, worthless reporting we’ve seen this year about how “Americans” are angry, without pinpointing the obvious source of the unbridled, incoherent wrath.
“Americans are angry about ... everything. Is that bad?” read a recent Christian Science Monitor headline. The piece equated right-wing, anti-mask parents storming local school board meetings and issuing death threats with social justice activists taking to the streets to protest police brutality. Those two things aren’t remotely similar.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently bemoaned how “we’re all just so damn angry,” but could only find examples of far-right bullies lashing out in public.
Sanctioned, Republican political violence will be the most unnerving story the D.C. press faces in coming years.
(Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images)
📦 GOOD STUFF:
Given the media hysteria regarding supply chain woes, and how Biden was personally responsible for unclogging them, we’ll see if this turn in the story gets the same amount of coverage.
From the Wall Street Journal’s “Supply-Chain Problems Show Signs of Easing”:
Global supply-chain woes are beginning to recede, but shipping, manufacturing and retail executives say that they don’t expect a return to more-normal operations until next year and that cargo will continue to be delayed if Covid-19 outbreaks disrupt key distribution hubs.
In Asia, Covid-related factory closures, energy shortages and port-capacity limits have eased in recent weeks. In the U.S., major retailers say they have imported most of what they need for the holidays. Ocean freight rates have retreated from record levels.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Alan Jackson, “Racing the Dark”
Do you have a favorite singer who no matter what song they sing it just sounds prefect to your ears? Jackson is certainly one for me.
On his latest, the legendary Tennessee singer tells the simple, melancholy tale of lost love and looming redemption. He remains a master storyteller.
It's been two years now, she's just starting to seeHer life is hers again and who she's gonna beShe's so used to running, can't get nowhere sitting stillIn the silence of the morning, she feels his love and always will
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Want an unvarnished, unfiltered view of the U.S. economy, the kind that you’re not seeing from the Beltway press today, as they push panicked inflation updates?
It’s simple. Worker wages are up this year as employees enjoy unmatched leverage in the marketplace. Job gains are soaring. And companies are printing profits thanks to sky-high consumer demand —Target’s sales spiked 13 percent in the last quarter and the retail giant expects double-digit gains over the holiday shopping season. That's crucial because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the economy. All the while, mortgage interest rates hover around 2.5 percent.
The specifics:
• The government dramatically undercounted the number of new jobs from June through September, so we now know an additional 626,000 jobs were created those months, blowing away the idea of a stymied hiring pattern nationwide. Remember the “disappointing” jobs report from August, with 235,000 jobs? It was actually 483,000 new positions. It turns out there’s been a jobs explosion this entire year, and all indications are the trend will continue into 2022.
• Goldman Sachs predicts by the end of next year the U.S. unemployment rate will drop to a 50-year low, thanks to a "red-hot demand for workers.” Under Trump, the rate peaked at nearly 15 percent.
• Retail sales surged 1.7 percent in the month of October, as consumers flocked online and into stores, splurging on electronics and home-improvement projects. American consumers spent $638 billion in October, a 16 percent increase from last year.
• JP Morgan upgraded its growth expectations for the economy, raising its forecast for the U.S. gross domestic product to climb to 5 percent in the fourth quarter.
• Biden’s pandemic stimulus plan has worked: “Households are sitting on a collective $2.5 trillion in savings built up during the pandemic,” the New York Times reports.
It’s a royal flush of economic good news.
Yes, inflation is up and it’s a problem. Nobody likes spending $90 to fill up their SUV at the pump. That’s why consumers say their confidence is down, even as they spend at robust rates. Inflation today is a global phenomenon, created by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, not Democratic fiscal policy. (It’s also being driven by companies taking advantage of a chance to raise prices again and again in 2021.)
The reason inflation has sprouted in the U.S. is because consumer demand is booming as the economy has recovered from Covid faster and stronger under Biden than most people ever thought possible.
What’s revealing is how the Beltway media remain overly fixated on inflation, while often turning a blind eye to all the signs of a surging economy. In other words, if it’s bad news for Biden, then it’s treated as Big News.
By constantly doling out sour economic updates in the form of breathless inflation coverage, the press does the GOP’s handiwork. The Washington Post this week announced inflation is the “defining” challenge of Biden’s presidency. Why inflation? Because the press decided.
CNN insists inflation remains a “political nightmare for Biden” and claims persistent inflation “could make historically difficult midterm elections next November even harder for Democrats by overshadowing their legislative wins.” CNN doesn’t think that the millions of new jobs likely created next year and a plummeting unemployment rate will have any impact on the midterm election cycle — only inflation.
Here’s what’s happened: For weeks this fall, the Beltway press joined forces with the GOP to tell an hysterical tale about the state of the U.S. economy. It was an alternate version of reality, where the stagnant, faltering economy was being driven to the precipice by runaway inflation, which stood poised to demolish middle-class savings across the board. All while an ineffective president stood by and watched cash-strapped households suffer.
It was doomsday nonsense actively pushed by Republicans, who are gleefully rooting against America’s interests. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) this week told the Wall Street Journal that if inflation pushes up interest rates next year, that would be “a gold mine for us.”
The press wasn’t holding up a mirror to the U.S. economy. The press painted its own picture. Desperate for a dramatic angle to lure consumers back to TV news and websites, and weirdly anxious to bury Biden, the Beltway media have gone all in on the Doomsday narrative. Remember that corporate media owners benefit from tax breaks when Republicans are in office.
The panicked tale was never true. In recent days, the new data points paint a clearer picture of the economy — it’s a surging one that’s powering through a stunning pandemic recovery and stands poised to blast off in 2022. An unemployment rate all the way down to 3.5 percent? A stock market sitting at the once-unthinkable 45,000 mark? Both are entirely possible in the next calendar year.
Today’s press coverage suggests the economy is an albatross around Biden’s political neck. In reality, it’s booming.
(Photo: Nic Antaya/Getty Images)
📱GOOD STUFF:
Don’t acted surprised.
From ProPublica’s “Texts Show Kimberly Guilfoyle Bragged About Raising Millions for Rally That Fueled Capitol Riot”:
In a series of text messages sent on Jan. 4 to Katrina Pierson, the White House liaison to the event, Guilfoyle detailed her fundraising efforts and supported a push to get far-right speakers on the stage alongside Trump for the rally, which sought to overturn the election of President Joe Biden.
Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.
🔌 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bruce Springsteen, “Sherry Darling”
New live Bruce! Well, from 1979.
That was a year an all-star group of musicians (Bruce, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Carly Simon, Doobie Brothers etc), came together for the “No Nukes” protest concert at Madison Square Garden. If you’ve never seen the accompanying concert film, it’s a glorious musical document.
The crazy part is the A+ soundtrack is no longer available on CD or via Apple Music. Happily, Springsteen is now releasing his full performance as a new live album. He was in top fighting form at “No Nukes,” months before the release of his landmark double album, The River.
On “Sherry Darling,” he vents about his girlfriend’s meddlesome mom, in a signature barroom singalong.
Now there's girls melting on the beachAnd they're so fine, but so out of reach'Cause I'm stuck in traffic down here on 53rd StreetNow Sherry, my love for you is realBut I didn't count on this package dealAnd baby, this car just ain't big enough for her and me
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On the day that President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan, $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will help rebuild bridges, roads and broadband nationwide as well as transform public transportation in this country, the Washington Post opted to run a Biden gotcha piece on its front page. And a strange one, at that.
As Beltway journalists fan out each day in search of new angle for the Dems in Disarray narrative, the Post’s Tyler Pager decided the reason Biden’s approval ratings are down is because he’s not pessimistic enough. “A growing number of Democrats worry that the White House has repeatedly underestimated the scale of the challenges facing the country,” the Post reported. The article pointed to a July 6 comment Biden made about the Covid virus being “on the run,” as a key example of Biden presenting a too-rosy picture of current events to Americans.
Anyone who can read a graph knows that in July the virus clearly was on the run — the average number of cases over a seven-day span had fallen from 68,000 in April, to 12,000 by July. But Biden was out of line, according to the Post, for emphasizing the then-good news about the pandemic.
The Post basically hit Biden for not inciting general panic with his public comments regarding the challenges the U.S. faces today, as we come out of an unprecedented global pandemic, which has scrambled economies around the world.
Doesn’t this feel like a media trap? If Biden had spent his first year in office leaning into doom-and-gloom rhetoric, it’s almost certain outlets like the Post would criticize him for it and ask why can’t he be a more optimistic leader, like Ronald Reagan. Recall that in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter earnestly addressed the country about the crippling energy crisis, he was mocked by the media for his “malaise” speech.
Also, the president before Biden lied to the press and to the public almost every time he moved his lips, but Biden is too optimistic in his world view? It’s a Both Sides Olympics as the press trying to find fault with a Democrat in the wake of Trump’s insane reign.
Trump told America the pandemic would be over by Easter 2020, and that the virus would soon just “disappear.” Following that brand of delusional Oval Office behavior, it’s not possible to point to Biden’s straight-shooting rhetoric this year and pretend he’s dodged the hard truths.
As for the Post, it couldn’t actually find Democrats who agreed with the odd premise of the article — they “fear that the administration’s tendency to downplay the issues has only made things worse.”
The Post quoted several Democrat officials in the article. Not one of them came close to suggesting that Biden needs to become gloomier in order to be a more successful leader and president. Most of them commenting on messaging:
• “I am saying we have to break these issues down into simpler, more immediate terms.” (Rep. Connor Lamb)
• “There hasn’t been great communication about what these bills mean for people.” (Rep. Josh Gottheimer)
• “I don’t think Democrats brag enough.” (Steven Reed, mayor of Montgomery, Alabama)
• “I don’t know what the Republican record of accomplishment is. They’ve not done anything.” (Rep. Mike Doyle)
The only person in the piece who confirmed the Post’s premise was a Republican, former Ohio governor John Kasich.
The Post couldn’t find any Democrats who agreed that Biden is guilty of sugarcoating things, but that didn’t stop the daily from publishing the piece and its wildly misleading claim. It’s an example of the Beltway press deciding to push a certain Biden narrative and not letting the facts get in the way of the story.
The article also contained one of the strangest paragraphs of the year, as the Post desperately searched for Biden flaws (emphasis added):
The American Families Plan was rebranded over the summer as the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, a bill defined not by its content but by its price tag. It later became Build Back Better, more commonly referred to as BBB, an acronym with the unfortunate feature of lacking a vowel that allows for pronunciation.
The newspaper wasn’t alone in terms of working overtime on Monday searching out strange Biden gotcha angles. Politico suggested the infrastructure bill signing was less of a Biden win because a new poll shows fewer Republican voters support it.
For years, the Beltway press insisted that for all major legislation, Democratic presidents need bipartisan support for the bills to really count as legitimate accomplishments. Landing GOP support on the Hill is viewed as the most important step of passing any law.
Incredibly, Biden did that with the infrastructure bill, temporarily piercing the Republicans’ radical brand of obstructionism. Politico then decided to go one step better (or worse) and suggest the $1.2 trillion bill was tainted because not enough Republican voters like the bill.
I don’t remember this kind of hand-wringing coverage when Trump signed his highly partisan tax bill into law in 2017 and just four percent (!) of Democrats thought it would help the middle class.
There are lots of fair topics Biden could be criticized for. Not being pessimistic enough doesn’t seem like a worthwhile one.
(Photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
💰 GOOD STUFF:
I had been wondering about this angle of the ongoing inflation story and I’m glad the Wall Street Journal finally addressed it, “What Does Inflation Mean for American Businesses? For Some, Bigger Profits”:
Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses, after decades of grinding down costs and prices.
Mattress maker Sleep Number Corp. has pushed through three major price increases this year. So has Carrier Global Corp. , a manufacturer of heating and cooling equipment, which typically changes its prices once a year.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bedouine, “The Solitude”
Acclaimed LA folkie Azniv Korkejian, who performs as Bedouine, defines “angelic” with her lilting voice and soothing, ode-to-Joni-Mitchell guitar. Add to that a detective’s eye for songwriting detail that produce modern folks fables, and the singer-songwriter continues to delight.
Baby when you're gone the night's so quietDinner table it's one-sidedToo many pillows, too big a bedCan't decide where to lay my head
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Want to see one of the strange ways the media cover the Biden economy?
When the U.S. jobs report was released for the month of October, showing a surging economy adding 531,000 jobs, as well as revised estimates for September and August confirming that an additional 235,000 positions were created, “NBC Nightly News” did not cover the economic announcement. “ABC World News Tonight” buried the story, devoting just two sentence to it, and running the story seventh in the lineup that night. Neither network considered 766,000 new jobs to be among the most important developments of that day.
Contrast that to last Wednesday, when news broke that inflation had jumped 6.2 percent last month, fueling concerns about spiraling consumer costs. That evening, both “NBC Nightly News” and “ABC World News Tonight” slotted the inflation story as the second most important development of the news cycle.
Was it a coincidence that both ABC and NBC didn’t care much about massive job gains under President Joe Biden, but were intently focused on the upsetting inflationary news? It was the latest example of the press being eager to push bad news for Biden, while looking away from signs of economic hope.
The recent inflation data certainly gave the press a green light to lean into coverage that has bordered on the hysterical, which no doubt influences news consumers and foments a selffullfilling prophecy. The inflation news is troubling, which Biden acknowledged last week. But are the media —goaded on by Republicans — rushing past rational reporting and wallowing in theatrics, as they remain committed to their Biden Doomsday narrative?
Press skeptics can point to news outlets that have spent the last three months ceaselessly creating lists of endless “crises” Biden is facing, and time and again they’re been solved or melted away. (Remember the U.S-France diplomatic “crisis”? The Colonial Pipeline “crisis”?) Also, Biden White House “crises” compared to what? The previous pathological liar president who was clearly unstable and spent his final months in office waging war on free and fair elections in this country?
Just recently, the Beltway press went overboard with its Covid coverage and how the pandemic represented a political “nightmare” for Biden and for Democrats. Today, that hyperventilating seems absurd, as the number of U.S. Covid deaths continue to plummet, and the vaccination rate climbs, including among children. Politically, the pandemic won’t be a key issue in 2022 because it will likely be a memory.
Today, the inflation coverage seems purposely over the top and lacking key context. For instance, prices at grocery stores are up 5 percent this year, which has produced an avalanche of news coverage. Last year under Trump, grocery prices rose four percent and the media mostly shrugged.
Today’s inflation, a global phenomenon, is caused by the pandemic, which warped global supply and demand patterns, creating a mismatch that has driven prices higher. “Too much money is chasing too few goods,” is how New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman describes it.
Where’s all that money coming from? In America, a lot of it is coming from a spike in employee earnings. For leisure and hospitality workers, wages are up 11 percent this year. Traditionally, the end of stagnant wages would be viewed as a good news story, but not under Biden.
Meanwhile, many America families have more cash on hand thanks to extended unemployment benefits, courtesy of Democrats, which were paid out through much of this year. Also thanks to Biden and Democrats, $250 and $300 monthly child tax credits have helped ease economic hurdles this year for millions, but the press routinely ignores that crucial story.
When “ABC World News Tonight” reported on last week’s inflation news, it stressed that rising prices are “costing the average American household about $175 a month.” Left out of that report was the fact that for so many families that $175 per-month increase is being covered by the child tax credits they’re receiving.
When CNN decided to highlight inflation by reporting on a family that inexplicably buys 12 gallons of milk each week, the story left out all mention of the generous government support the family receives under Biden.
Meanwhile, those family tax credits will likely soon cut childhood poverty in half. And in October, lower-income Americans who receive food stamps saw a 27 percent spike in their government benefits, the largest increase in history, thanks to a new program under Biden. Most of that context has been flushed down the memory hole in recent days, replaced by breathless Biden Doomsday inflation reporting.
That coverage, and the image it creates of the U.S. economy on the verge of the abyss, is divorced from reality. Note that in the two days after the inflation numbers were released on Wednesday, the Dow Jones industrial average was down just 100 points, suggesting investors are far less worried about the state of the economy than are Beltway journalists. The market’s still up 2,000 points since June, when the press first started leaning into the excited inflation storyline. (And yes, Fox News went berserk all summer with its inflation coverage.)
Biden has created more jobs in eight months than Trump did in four years, as the unemployment rate continues to shrink and American workers get paid more. There’s a lot of economic news, it’s not all bad and it’s not all about inflation.
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
A fascinating workplace development, via the New York Times’ “Portugal Bars Companies From Contacting Employees Off Hours and Requires Other Protections For Remote Work’:
Portugal is barring employers from contacting their staff outside their contracted working hours under a new law and from remotely monitoring their work, in one of the world’s boldest efforts to regulate the remote work that the pandemic forced on many in the industrialized world.
And, at a time when a surge in natural gas prices has sent electricity costs soaring, the law requires employers to pay part of the electricity and internet bills of staff who work from home.
🧣FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Taylor Swift, “All Too Well”
It’s the most talked-about pop song on the planet right now, and it’s ten years old. Well kind of.
From the Washington Post:
After a contentious dispute with her former Nashville record label over the lucrative master recordings of her first six albums, Swift announced in 2019 that she would rerecord each album so she would fully own it. On Friday, Swift officially dropped the new “Red (Taylor’s Version).” The fifth track was still “All Too Well” — but in a twist, the final tune was “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” with previously unreleased lyrics that fans have been obsessing over for years.
The confessional tour de force is widely assumed to be about the singer’s relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal.
Well maybe we got lost in translationMaybe I asked for too muchBut maybe this thing was a masterpieceTil you tore it all upRunning scared, I was thereI remember it all too well
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I wonder what CNN host Don Lemon thinks about the network’s inexplicable decision to schedule a Chris Christie primetime special for Monday night. Christie still holds the dishonor of being the most unpopular governor in American history while he ran New Jersey, and he famously flamed out as a presidential candidate in 2016, surviving only one primary contest where he finished in sixth place. Despite his record as an established loser who voters now have an allergic reaction to, the mainstream media continue to love Christie and hold him up as an important voice in our political conversation.
So on Monday night, Dana Bash will host “Being Chris Christie.” The promotional clip shows Bash and Christie smiling while strolling down a boardwalk on the Jersey Shore, offering a behind the scenes look at the politician. It’s astonishing the lengths the network will go to try to appeal to GOP viewers, in this case handing over an hour of programming to a has-been politician.
I wonder about Don Lemon because last year the CNN host mocked Christie for his attempted image recovering campaign, which at the time took the form of an interview with the network’s Chris Cuomo. “He’s on reputation rehab right now,” said Lemon. “That’s what he’s doing. I didn’t believe a word that he said to you.” Will Lemon believe a single word Christie tells Bash when the Monday night special airs?
When the “Being” series was first introduced this summer, CNN announced, “Throughout the series, Bash spends time with individuals affecting American policy, politics, and culture to give viewers an understanding of the human being behind the public face.” Its first installment featured Rep Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), who’s among the most influential members of Congress. Christie though, currently has no national standing, he has no constituency, and he has no voice or vote in public policy. He does have a runaway ego, however.
“He is a person of irrepressible ambition, without limits or guard rails,” noted New Jersey political columnist Charles Stile. “And an essential component of that ambition is an obsessive quest to be relevant.” Now CNN wants to help.
Keep in mind, Christie wasn’t merely unpopular when he left office in New Jersey, he rewrote the book on being despised by local voters. Can you imagine CNN even caring about a failed Democratic governor who left office with an approval rating in the teens, let alone shining a spotlight on him or her for an hour? Traditionally, a politician who had been branded with an L like that would slink off into the shadows and be ignored by the press.
Today, Christie is promoting himself, with the help of CNN, as a brave truth-teller who’s standing up to Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election. CNN promo: “What’s it like being a high profile Trump supporter, turned sharp critic.”
But Christie may have had the longest delayed conversion to the anti-Trump crowd of any Republican in America. Just last year Christie helped Trump prep for a presidential debate. After watching Trump get impeached, Christie still jumped at the chance to be near the center of power to help the maniac get re-elected. Following the debate, Christie played the role of janitor, trying to clean up the mess Trump made when he famously told the white nationalist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Days after helping with Trump’s prep, where everyone was unvaccinated and unmasked, Christie was hospitalized with Covid.
For years, Christie’s obsequiousness around Trump, bordering on pathetic sycophancy, was well known. Trying to keep pace with Trump’s xenophobia during the 2016 campaign, Christie told a radio interviewer he’d refuse all Syrian refugees trying to enter the U.S., even a five-year-old orphan.
From Stile:
Christie’s position on the Coronavirus was absolutely shocking in terms of its indifference to human suffering. In May, 2020 he gave an interview with CNN in which he echoed the Trumpian position, pushing for the country to reopen despite several models forecasting that thousands of people could die daily from COVID-19.
But now, Christie’s supposedly seen the light and wants the world to know that he’s standing up to the Trump.
It’s so predictable. So is CNN stepping up to help the Republican rebrand himself, considering how the network seems intent in recent months on dinging President Joe Biden and boosting GOP talking points.
On Wednesday, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer tweeted out a picture of a Washington, D.C., gas station where customers were paying $4.29 per-gallon at the pump. That just happened to be the same line of attack Republicans are using this week against the administration — inflation! Worse, the gas station Blitzer featured is one of a few in the city that routinely sells gas at a wildly inflated rate. (The average price in D.C. today is $3.62.)
Last week, CNN embarrassed itself when it aired a breathless report on inflation that inexplicably featured a family that buys 12 gallons of milk each week.
Christie’s a failed, political has-been with no conceivable future in Trump’s GOP, and a bitter partisan who lacks the courage to stand up to the Republican Party’s authoritarian ways. CNN would do better illuminating other, more deserving players.
💉 GOOD STUFF
Here’s more evidence that the press’ constant attention to loud anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers creates a false impression of our country.
From Monmouth University’s “Steady Support for Vax Mandates”:
“The dramatic images of parents protesting at school board meetings has not shifted overall public opinion on mandates one way or the other since the beginning of the school year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dave Hause, “Hanalei”
I featured Hause’s “Surfboard” a few weeks ago and now I’m hooked on “Hanalei.”
Hause has been making music for 25 years, and for a long time it was more of a punk output. I just recently came across his new, acoustic and Americana album and I’m kind of blown away — the storytelling, the gritty vocals, the sing-alone vibes.
“I’m from Philadelphia and I don’t have much of a Southern take, but the roots of country are in rock’n’roll, and rock’n’roll is the closest thing to a religion that I have so I’m OK with it,” says Hause.
In Hanalei We could stayWe could sell anything that isn't nailed down In HanaleiWe could sayWe could say the hell with forever and be here together right now
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Within hours of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race, the political press began churning out analysis about how the GOP had seized upon education as a savvy “wedge issue” as the New York Times put it. Compounded with frustration over the pandemic, the press was sure that Republicans had taken hold of a potent issue, swiped it away from clueless Democrats, and produced a “roadmap” for 2022, according to CNN.
“School closures, not Critical Race Theory, paved the way for Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia,” Yahoo News announced. “And if Democrats don't grasp the deep reserves of anger parents feel over Zoom school, they face much more severe losses in 2022.” CNN breathlessly claimed that Youngkin’s win “raises questions about whether Democrats have taken seriously enough parents' concerns on a range of issues about education.”
But the storyline is a charade. Not only haven’t Republicans mapped out a new pro-education blueprint to win over suburban and swing voters nationwide, Republicans and conservatives have become even more proudly anti-education during the pandemic. They’ve voted against nutrition programs, universal pre-K, they’ve disrupted school board meetings, and this week Big Bird emerged as GOP Public Enemy No. 1.
As for frustration over “Zoom school,” that’s been over for most American students for months because classrooms coast-to-coast that had been closed under the Trump administration have reopened under the Biden administration.
The current analysis among the Beltway media makes no sense. That might be because it’s being crafted and told almost exclusively by Republican operatives, not educational professionals. Schools opened up under Democrats — they’ve returned to “normal” —but parents are mad at Democrats for last year’s school closures?
Note that the Yahoo article that hit Democrats for being out of touch with angry parents lead off with an anecdote of a screaming father at a school board meeting in Virginia berating members about pandemic-era Zoom classes. But that specific outburst took place ten months ago, back in January, before Virginia schools re-opened September and Zoom classes ended.
Yahoo insisted, “Even as schools stay open, a new round of closures remains an all-too-real possibility,” which is news to me. Are there any major public school systems seriously considering closing down in-person learning anytime soon, at a time when Covid cases in the U.S. are falling and children can now get vaccinated? There are just a handful of schools in the entire country today that have temporarily shifted to remote learning. (Context: There are nearly 100,000 public schools in the U.S.)
Still, the Beltway press has coalesced around the idea that Democrats paid a political price for school closures even though schools are no longer closed. When they were shuttered, Republicans ran the federal government most of that time and offered up an incompetent response to the public health crisis.
I think the press rallied around the “education” angle in Virginia, and specifically the issue of school closures, because journalists did not want to tell the truth about how Youngkin spent the entire campaign lying about critical race theory being taught in Commonwealth schools. The press certainly didn’t want to linger on the notion that his race-baiting tactics are why he won. (The campaign “wasn’t really about critical race theory,” The Atlantic assured readers.) Instead, the media narrative emerged that Democrats misread the mood of parents.
When CNN recently held Youngkin up as a new breed of Education Republican, aside from his made-up claims about critical race theory, they couldn’t point to a single serious education initiative he had championed during the campaign or would focus on as governor. For the record, a new CNN poll this week shows just 3 percent of Americans select education as the most important issue facing the country today. (The economy is first, at 36 percent.) Nationwide, there’s very little backlash to how schools handled Covid, according to a new Axios poll.
Still, the illogical coverage gets worse. The first legislative act Biden undertook as president was to sign into law the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, and he did so over the objection of every single Republican member of the House and the Senate. The Covid relief bill allocated $120 billion dollars for schools to help them reopen and to help students catch-up on lost learning. The new money came to nearly $2,500 per student nationwide and lots of it went to purchasing PPE, hiring additional school personnel like nurses, counselors, custodial staff, as well as improving ventilation and pay for small-group tutoring program. Republicans, now campaigning on school closures, opposed all of it. But that’s being left out of the current education coverage.
CNN’s pro-Youngkin report last week referenced the “flood of pandemic-related education funding from the Covid-related stimulus bills,” but failed to acknowledge that everyone from Youngkin’s party voted against the historic funding. When CNN interviewed four pro-Youngkin suburban moms who championed Republicans as being pro-education and who said the pandemic school closures had changed their views on politics, the fact that Republicans uniformly voted down the single largest federal outlay on education spending to help reopen schools was politely ignored.
Today, Biden is trying to shepherd into law the Build Back Better bill, which would pay for universal pre-K, contains billions to help families cover the costs of child care, and would transform early education in America — and every Republican member of the House and Senate opposes it.
So much for the GOP being the “education” party.
💺 GOOD STUFF:
Finally! Some explanatory journalism.
From the Washington Post’s “The Infrastructure Package Puts $66 Billion Into Rail. It Could Power The Biggest Expansion in Amtrak’s 50-Year History”:
The bill includes $66 billion in new funding for rail to address Amtrak’s repair backlog, improve stations, replace old trains and create a path to modernize the Washington-to-Boston corridor, the nation’s busiest. It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago.
“It’s transformative,” Amtrak chief executive William J. Flynn said in an interview Monday. Money set aside for Amtrak, he said, “represents more funds than have been cumulatively invested in Amtrak over the first 50 years of our history.”
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Adele, “Easy on Me”
It’s the latest from the British singer and it’s most popular song in the world, according to Apple’s global charts.
From Pitchfork: “The stirring ballad relies on little more than piano and that divine voice of hers; she extends the syllables in her words, gliding easily between the notes within them: “Go e-e-e-e-easy on me, baby.””
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Be kind.
Less than 48 hours after the political press unleashed collective convulsions about the apocalyptic prospects facing the Democratic Party in the wake of two statewide elections last week, a wave of good news has scrambled the media’s preferred storyline.
Addicted to “Biden crisis” reporting since August, and often bending common sense in order to adhere to the Dems in Disarray narrative, the Beltway media now face a conundrum. Do they stick with their GOP-friendly script about an ineffectual president in free fall? Or do they follow the facts and report on Biden’s increasingly impressive list of accomplishments and a runaway U.S. economy that’s flourishing?
Three events unraveled the Biden Doomsday narrative on Friday. A white-hot jobs report not only counted more than 530,000 new jobs created in the month of October, but the Labor Department revised its estimates for September and August and confirmed an additional 235,000 positions were created — or 766,000 U.S. jobs we didn’t know about until Friday. That shocker naturally sent to the Dow Jones upward, ending the day at yet another all-time high under Biden, 36,327. Since he was elected last year, the stock market is up a jaw-dropping 40 percent, and has created $14 trillion in new wealth.
Then as the clock ticked down Friday night, Democrats passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, the largest transportation package in U.S. history. The sprawling and historic legislation will produce hundreds of thousands of union jobs, transform the nation’s transportation system and represents the largest passenger rail, roads and bridges investment in 70 years.
All of this while the number of U.S. Covid deaths continue to plummet, the vaccination rate climbs, including among children, and Pfizer just announced a new pill — Paxlovid — that cuts the risk of hospitalization or death for Covid patients by nearly 90 percent. “The end of the pandemic is now in clear view, and secure,” says Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner.
Combined, the three Friday wins produced the type of day most sitting presidents dream about. They also came amidst a premature funeral procession, eagerly sponsored by the media, which featured an avalanche of doomsday pronouncements following disappointing Democratic election showings in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
How reluctant was the press to sing Biden’s praise on Friday? Both “ABC World News Tonight” and “NBC Nightly News” ignored the stunning October jobs report. “Nightly News” though, did find time to report on Biden’s “plummeting” approval rating Friday night.
In the middle of the afternoon on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report. Ironically, at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy. Over at CNN.com, readers at the “US” homepage had to scroll past 70 stories before seeing the first jobs headline.
Saturday’s front page of the New York Times announced the passage of the infrastructure bill, but stressed in the headline that Democrats were still “haggling” over the Build Back Better social spending bill. Just in case readers didn’t pick up on the pessimistic framing, the Times ran an accompanying report about how America feels “gloomy” under Biden.
Sunday’s Washington Post reported on how Biden “finally” had some good news to tout. But most of the Post article retraced how difficult it had been for Biden to get the infrastructure bill passed, while detailing Biden’s “yelling has become more frequent and directed at a wider audience of staff.” Imagine what the Post coverage would have looked like if the infrastructure bill had been voted down.
This is what happens when the press becomes wed to a gotcha storyline. The doomsday narrative took hold in August when the U.S. troop pullout in Afghanistan exploded into a weeks-long story, and was covered almost universally as a cataclysmic failure, even though the Biden administration not only ended the Forever War for America, but oversaw the largest, most efficient wartime evacuation in history, spiriting 120,000 Afghans out of the country. Nonetheless, the press was sure it was the White House’s “summer from hell” and that Biden was in a political “free fall.”
The media’s obsession with dinging Biden has produced some truly regrettable journalism. CNN’s infamous milk report last week was among the worst.
Shining a light on the legitimate topic of inflation and how it’s hurting families at the grocery checkout, CNN for some reason decided to feature a very large family with seven children that buys an astonishing 12 gallons of milk a week to highlight how inflation hits the pocketbook. The piece was clearly framed as a Biden hit job and felt more like GOP propaganda than straight news reporting. When critics pointed out the absurdity of the premise (each family member drinks 1.5 gallons of milk each week?), the CNN reporter who did the piece went on Twitter to denounce “a**s” who questioned it.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) noted that if the family has seven children that means they’re likely receiving $2,100 per-month in child tax credits, which is helping with the milk purchases. CNN anchor Brianna Keilar confirmed that the family receives generous support from the government. Yet for some reason that information, which reflected well on the Biden administration, wasn’t included in the CNN report, which reflected poorly on the Biden administration.
The media love their Biden Doomsday narrative. But the facts on the ground are changing and the press needs to catch up.
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
This definitely isn’t “good,” but I want to highlight nonetheless, because it dovetails so closely with the oversized role the press plays in portraying Biden as a failure.
This was a Times front-page piece from yesterday about how the economy is by all accounts on fire, but consumers and voters think it’s floundering. What’s so astonishing is nowhere in the piece does the Times hint that the media’s misleading, doomsday coverage of the economy might be one reason why Americans have a skewed vision of the economy under Biden.
From “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful”:
The reasons seem to be tied to the psychology of inflation and the ways people assess their economic well-being — as well as the uneven effects that rising prices and shortages have on different families. It may well be shaped by the psychological scars of the pandemic, one manifestation of this being an era of exhaustion.
Regardless of the exact causes, after decades in which the availability of jobs (or lack thereof) drove economic sentiment, inflation now appears to have become the more powerful force.
⚖️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Willie Nile, “The Justice Bell (For John Lewis)”
It’s a beautiful new hymn and remembrance of a civil rights icon, from New York City troubadour Willie Nile.
He recently recalled the time he got to meet his hero, Lewis: “We had a moment together, I got to thank him in all sincerity for all that he's done for this country and for justice and for people, and he was very kind in response. Then, I got to see him speak for about 10 minutes and I was about five feet away. It was a mountain top of my life."
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After triumphant election cycles in 2018 and 2020, Democrats suffered stinging setbacks on Tuesday when they lost the Virginia’s governor’s race, and barely held on to win the same contest in New Jersey, a state Joe Biden won by 16 points last year.
Democrats have been down this rocky road before. In November, 2009, just one year after Barack Obama’s landslide victory, Democrats lost both the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races. But that didn’t end the Obama presidency. The following year he signed Obamacare into law and in 2012 he won re-election with relative ease.
One thing that has clearly changed since then though, is the caterwauling political press, which is treating Tuesday’s two-race results like a political earthquake that has all but destroyed Biden’s four-year term. Rushing to use every conceivable, hysterical adjective to describe a three point-loss in Virginia as the equivalent of the Democratic Party’s permanent demise, the press has eagerly lost all perspective and seems to relish the assignment of burying Biden. (WashingtonPost.com Wednesday night posted no less than 15 articles and columns about the Democratic loss.)
“Why Democrats Should Start Panicking About 2022” was a typically frenetic CNN headline. Or the networks’ claim that Tuesday’s two regional votes proved that Democrats had “misjudged the nation’s mood.” It’s funny because when Republicans lost the White House last year by 7 million votes, lost Arizona, Georgia, and the U.S. Senate, I don’t recall lots of pearl-clutching media commentary about how the GOP had “misjudged the nation’s mood.”
Compare that to how CNN calmly and rationally, in this dispatch, treated GOP wins in Virginia and New Jersey in November 2009. Back then, Republicans were hoping the wins would “fuel a national resurgence,” while Democrats downplayed the larger significance. That was it. There was no manufactured drama, no elaborate story arc, about how the Obama presidency was doomed to the trash heap of history.
The other enormous hurdle that’s been erected since 2009 is that the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement now successfully traffic in uncontrollable lies, misinformation, and deranged conspiracies as part of their daily diet. They do it through a billion-dollar media machine that doubles as the propaganda arm of the GOP. And the press has shown little interest in confronting the trend.
“One of the strategic advantages that Republicans have is they’re able to feed their base propaganda and misinformation directly through their news outlets,” David Turner, senior strategist at the Democratic Governors Association, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out ways to more actively court its base voters on a regular basis.”
The monumental challenge facing Democrats is how to counter a party and a movement that lies about everything, and a press corps that’s not willing to try to stop it. Or worse, a press corps that gladly helps spread the lies during a heated campaign season. The media’s critical race theory charade during the Virginia campaign was a perfect, and chilling, example. Republican Glenn Youngkin built his entire campaign around a pledge to ban CRT from Commonwealth schools, even though it’s not taught in Commonwealth schools. Instead of relentlessly detailing that lie, the campaign press toasted Younkgin for his savvy, race-baiting strategy.
That’s when the press wasn’t turning a blind eye to the Youngkin campaign ad that blamed Democrat Terry McAuliffe for “covering up rape and sexual assault in our schools,” at a time when McAuliffe held no public office in Virginia. Beltway journalists also couldn’t have cared less about Youngkin’s claim that he wasn’t sure if humans were responsible for climate change, and never treated that quip as a damaging “gaffe.”
For weeks, it was clear the press viewed the Virginia race as a way to confirm its preferred narrative about a stumbling White House — that storyline determined coverage in all kinds of ways.
Here’s one small example. On Monday morning, the Dow Jones for the first time in history passed the 36,000 mark, as the stock market continues a robust one-year expansion. In fact, the Dow is up 10,000 points since Biden was elected. Typically, the press pays close attention to historic gains like that, and often uses the Dow to judge the strength of the economy and particularly uses it for political analysis to grade sitting presidents. But on Monday, the history-making 36,000 marker was not mentioned once on cable news, according to TVeyes. Nor was it mentioned on the network evening newscasts Monday night. (When the Dow closed above 36,000 on Tuesday, CNN referenced it three times the following day.)
Was it a coincidence that the milestone was ignored by the media at the same time they remain so committed to the storyline of a floundering Biden presidency, and that he’s spent the last three months dogged by “crises”? It’s certainly possible. There’s also likely a connection between the fact that Biden’s public approval for handling the economy is declining at a time when the press ignores his economic accomplishments.
Democrats are facing a mountain of challenges, including two intransigent senators who are blocking a legislative agenda that 99 percent of elected Democrats want passed and signed into law. They’re battling a GOP that long ago walked away from governing, and they’re facing off against an openly antagonistic press corps.
GOOD STUFF :
My hunch is Democrats paid a price in Virginia and New Jersey because Americans are so exhausted by the pandemic and yes, lots of people are looking for someone to blame.
That tide may now be turning, From Gallup’s “Americans More Optimistic About Pandemic's Trajectory”:
Americans' outlook for the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. has improved, as the summer surge brought on by the delta variant has waned in most parts of the country. The percentage of Americans who now say the U.S. COVID-19 situation is improving has more than doubled between September and October, to 51%.
Over the same period, worry about contracting the virus has edged down four percentage points, to 36%, and concern about the availability of hospital supplies, treatment and services has tumbled 10 points, to 33%. Although the public is more optimistic about the current state of the pandemic, a majority thinks the disruption to life will continue throughout 2022 or longer than that.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK :
Sting, “If It’s Love”
Oh, this is nifty. The latest from the former Police front man is a sunny, catchy ode to devotion. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis chips in, and the hand-clapping chorus will be stuck in your head for days.
And yes, Sting’s 70.
Call the doctor with my symptomsShould I spend all day in bed?Can you explain what's ailing me?And this is what my doctor said
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In a clearly choreographed move designed to recuse Republican Ron DeSantis’ reputation as he eyes a possible White House run in 2024, the right-wing media have launched an aggressive campaign to portray him as a Covid hero because the pandemic caseload in Florida is on the decline.
Even for an industry that operates in a factual parallel universe, the idea that DeSantis, who has overseen 60,000 pandemic deaths in the Sunshine State, should be championed as a Covid leader and that the “liberal” media are denying him his rightful victory lap, represents a lopsided wrestling match with reality.
Fact: All summer long Florida was the epicenter for a deadly Covid outbreak caused by the Delta variant, while the governor loudly railed against mask and vaccine mandates. Between the months of July and October, at least 21,000 Floridians died at a time when a safe, free, and effective vaccine was available. (During those same four months, 8,600 Covid patients died in California, a similarly large warm-weather state.) At one point Florida recorded more coronavirus cases in a week than California, Texas, New York and Illinois combined.
Now DeSantis wants a parade and Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets are leading the phony charge. “He’s not getting credit for the low numbers we are seeing of Covid infections in Florida,” “Fox & Friends Saturday” announced over the weekend. “I think Governor DeSantis is looking quite good now,” added Fox News doctor Marc Siegel, who early on in the pandemic insisted the “virus should be compared to the flu" because "worst case scenario it could be the flu."
Murdoch’s dailies have quickly pitched in: “The Country Needs a Dose of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to Battle COVID-19” (New York Post), “Media Ignore Florida Covid Recovery” (Wall Street Journal). Fox’s Brit Hume used the recent Journal piece to troll reporters. “Media have made Florida’s DeSantis a bete noire on Covid. So how do they cover his state’s sharp decline in Covid cases? They don’t,” he tweeted.
Let’s be clear, the mainstream media was not hard on DeSantis for his handling of Covid this year. In fact, they foolishly lionized him. It was Politico that announced, “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic.” This, after governor placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump. “Vindication for Ron DeSantis,” the Wall Street Journal announced. And The New York Times cheered, “In a country just coming out of the morose grip of coronavirus lockdowns, Florida feels unmistakably hot.”
The right-wing argument today is that because Covid cases are down in Florida, DeSantis gets all the credit. But cases are down everywhere in part because the Biden administration has overseen a wildly successful vaccination roll-out, where 75 percent of eligible adults have received at least one shot. Because of that, the potency of the Delta variant has subsided.
In other words, if DeSantis did absolutely nothing to help with the pandemic the caseload would be falling in Florida, and it is. Instead of doing nothing though, he rolled out executive orders, dubious legal actions, and bullying threats in order to undermine local school boards that implemented mask mandates. He did the same in order to slow momentum among private employers who began instituting vaccine mandates for workers when the Delta surge was running wild.
DeSantis also started taking advice from the far-right Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a Harvard-educated physician with no expertise in public health, who has questioned the effectiveness of vaccines while promoting hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, which the FDA has said is not effective.
Meanwhile, those on the ground in Florida continue to eviscerate the governor’s aggressively incompetent, and borderline criminal, Covid oversight.
“The do-nothing governor is trying to claim credit for this surge coming to an end,” noted the Orlando Sentinel. “It is DeSantis’ final and most essential command — to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. How Orwellian.”
“We thought things couldn’t get much worse in DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic, but we were wrong — then we were wrong again,” lamented a recent Miami Herald editorial. “Just when you think he’s done enough to undermine our chances of exiting a pandemic that has killed nearly 60,000 Floridians, he has a new trick up his sleeve.”
DeSantis’ most recent move is to call a special legislative session to undermine federal requirements that some workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Among the laws he wants passed is one making businesses liable for medical harm that results from mandatory vaccinations, even though tens of millions of vaccines have safely been administered in the U.S.
Local Republicans are onboard and say they’re considering legislation to withdraw Florida from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of carrying out President Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate.
So no, DeSantis does not deserve a Covid reward.
📺 GOOD STUFF:
The Virginia governor’s race was clearly a disappointment for Democrats, and the odious race ought to set off alarms in terms of how candidates communicate.
From Greg Sargent’s excellent piece in the Washington Post, “Glenn Youngkin’s Repulsive Final Push Reveals a Dark Truth for Democrats”:
It’s a repulsively cynical finale, after a campaign built heavily around stoking white grievance with attacks on phantom critical race theory in schools and torquing up the base by feeding Donald Trump’s lies about our election system.
But this duplicity has benefited from a hidden assist. For months, Youngkin and his allies have pumped that raw right-wing sewage directly into the minds of the GOP base, behind the backs of moderate swing voters, via a right-wing media network that has no rival on the Democratic side.
Democrats will have to reckon with this. Whether Democrat Terry McAuliffe wins or loses — it will be very close either way — this race highlights this lopsided communications imbalance with unique clarity.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Seth Walker, “All I Need To Know”
Every now and then I put my entire iPod library on shuffle (40,000-plus songs) and inevitably stumble onto something that’s been criminally overlooked by me for years.
My latest find is Walker’s 2019 effort, “All I Need To Know.” Bouncy, infectious and packed with a melodic reggae feel, it’s a ray of sunshine.
here we are in the darkno need to speak no needcause your eyes are telling meall i need to know all i need
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Even though he’s paid to be a straight-ahead news reporter, ABC’s Terry Moran had no problem editorializing about President Joe Biden last week, and what a “devastating” failure he’s been as a leader. Moran’s public put-down was in reference to a new poll that shows only 1 in 5 Americans have heard “a lot” about the Democrats sprawling investment bill, dubbed Build Back Better.
As with other recent surveys, the poll showed that when voters are specifically told what’s in the bill, a clear majority support it. It’s just that most Americans aren’t hearing about the legislation’s sweeping proposals, including the fact that the current framework includes $200 billion in funding to cover free preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. Build Back Better also contains billions to help families cover the costs of child care. Together, it amounts to the largest expansion of public education in 100 years.
Focusing instead on the bill’s cost and obsessively documenting the vote-counting process, the press has walked away from its job of explaining legislation.
People don’t know what’s in Build Back Better, and for ABC’s Moran that’s a failure of Biden, not the press, even though ABC News has done a poor job explaining the legislation, which has been in the news for most of 2021. Just five ABC reports for this entire year have mentioned “Build Back Better,” “Biden,” and “universal pre-K,” according to a Nexis transcripts search.
Here’s a devastating indictment of the press, from a new ABC poll: “Although a majority (55%) of the public is following news about the negotiations at least somewhat closely, about 7 in 10 (69%) Americans said they know just some or little to nothing about what's in both bills.”
Yes, Americans are paying attention to Build Back Better coverage. And no, they’re not being told what’s in the bill.
Still, journalists play defense. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman recently made the same bogus claim that Moran did, insisting the media have done a sterling job covering the contents of Build Back Better.
When news broke that family paid leave was being dropped from the negotiated bill last week, Haberman tweeted, “Why hadn’t the press educated the public about what’s in the bill,” a mocking reference to liberal complaints that the press hasn’t done that. When a former New York Times reporter pressed her on the issue (“yes, why didn't they”), she doubled down, insisting, “They did. But I realize that criticizing your colleagues is your thing.” (Note how Haberman thinks “criticizing your colleagues” is out-of-bounds behavior for journalists.)
Was Haberman right? Had the press and the Times educated the public about Build Back Better, and specifically in this case about the family paid leave proposal? The answer is no. According to Nexis, there have been nearly 300 Times articles and columns this year that contained references to both “Build Back Better” and “Biden.” Exactly 9 of those also included reference to “family paid leave.”
As for the Times’ focus on the bill’s transformative preschool proposal, of those nearly 300 pieces, only 7 contained a reference to “universal pre-K.”
That’s why elite journalists like Haberman and Moran are so busy trying to rewrite history — the media’s coverage of the Democrats’ legislation has been a sweeping failure. Focused on process and cost, the news media have simply echoed Republican talking points for months and portrayed the bill as a bloated behemoth, instead of an historic investment.
Over and over, news outlets have reported on polling that shows Americans aren’t informed about Build Back Better. Yet the press pretends that has nothing to do with the fact they’re not adequately explaining what’s in play.
“The survey's findings reflect how the White House believes its economic agenda is widely popular with voters, but it has been difficult to streamline the massive spending package into a clear and concise message,” The Hill recently noted.
ABC on Sunday stressed that, “Democrats are failing to sell the legislation to the public, who are broadly unaware of what is in the spending packages or skeptical they would help people like themselves, or the economy, if signed into law.”
The press is in heated agreement that Biden is to blame for Americans not knowing about the contents of Build Back Better. There’s zero self-reflection involved.
For much of the year, the price tag attached to the bill was $3.5 trillion, and that was a constant point of reference for the press. According to Nexis, here’s how many times news outlets mentioned “Build Back Better” and “$3.5 trillion”: ABC (8), CBS (36), NBC ( 8), and the New York Times (58). How many times they mentioned “Build Back Better,” “$3.5 trillion” and “universal pre-K” or “preschool” in those same reports? ABC (4), CBS (5), NBC (1), and New York Times (5).
Here’s a perfect example of the misguided coverage. Last week, after the White House released the framework for the final Build Back Better bill and Biden went to the Hill to rally Democrats in favor of the legislation, CNN posted a long piece all about the vote-counting maneuvering. (Dems in Disarray!) It wasn’t until the 43rd paragraph that CNN got around to explaining what was in the historic bill. The report was 1,900 words long. Just 27 words were set aside from universal pre-K.
Hyper-focused on the price tag, which is precisely where Republicans want the public attention to be, the press has paid lip service to the contents of the bill. The process by which the bill might pass, and how much the legislation costs, far exceeds the importance of what’s in the bill itself, including universal pre-K, which would change American education forever.
GOOD STUFF:
We had never had a Capitol Hill insurrection before this year, so it’s not surprising that law enforcement missed lots of early signals.
From the Post’s ambitious, multi-media investigation, “Red Flags”:
This investigation is based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings. Some of those who were interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions or sensitive information.
While the public may have been surprised by what happened on Jan. 6, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other. The red flags were everywhere.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
American Aquarium, “Look at Miss Ohio”
North Carolina’s American Aquarium just released a gorgeous new cover of “Look at Miss Ohio,” originally written and recorded by beloved singer-songwriter Gillian Welch.
The shuffling Americana beat and the non-judgemental tone of BJ Barham’s soothing voice set the stage for a musical portrait of a life contestant facing big decisions.
Oh me oh my oh, look at Miss OhioShe's a-running around with her rag-top downShe says I want to do right but not right now
Gonna drive to Atlanta and live out this fantasyRunning around with the ragtop downYeah, I wanna do right, but not right now
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Trying to pull off an upset in the Virginia governor’s race next week, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin continues his push with an unlikely pledge at the center of his campaign: If elected he would immediately ban the teaching of critical race theory in Commonwealth classrooms.
His promise to voters has produced nonstop media coverage, as the political press eagerly hypes the possibility of a Democratic loss.
What the media have uniformly failed to do in Virginia, and nationwide as deep-pocketed, right-wing activists march on with their manufactured outrage over CRT, is forcefully point out that it’s not taught in schools. Period. When pressed, most Republican parents, politicians and activists aren’t able to explain what CRT is. (It’s an academic framework taught at the college level that examines how systemic racism is ingrained in America’s history.)
Claiming it’s an attempt to “indoctrinate the kids,” Republicans are using CRT as a battering ram to not only take over local school boards, but to try to win the Virginia governorship in what is clearly a GOP dress rehearsal for the 2022 midterms. The media remain widely impressed by the strategy, while refusing to note that the entire enterprise is a con.
The whole thing represents a stunning failure of American journalism as news outlets defy common sense. It’s the latest example of the media working hand-in-hand with Republicans to spread nonstop misinformation.
What’s happening is that right-wing dark money groups are pumping millions into creating an army of activists who rally around lies about public education in hopes that that hysteria will get people out to vote more Republicans into office, who in turn then will vote to keep the tax rate low for corporations and the wealthy. CRT is being used as a Trojan Horse by big-money donors with Koch ties who likely couldn’t care less about the state of public education in America. Instead, they’re fueling the made-up controversy about teaching race in the classroom in order to build a Republican majority in Congress.
And the press is playing an essential role in this dangerous propaganda roll-out. As Republicans weaponize school boards across the country as part of their political campaigns, the media are legitimizing the attacks. Think about the media malpractice on display this year — the press has showered attention on right-wing attacks about CRT being taught while consistently refusing to point out that CRT is not being taught.
Why are the media covering for the GOP?
They’re terrified of labeling conservatives as cheats and cons. Especially the ones who present themselves as ‘concerned parents.’ The CRT lie is so brazen that it works. In order for any of this CRT news coverage to sustain itself the press must ignore the fact that the topic isn’t being taught. It’s either that, or call out conservatives as obvious liars, which the press is too scared to do.
Afraid of the Liberal Media Bias charge, journalists have programmed themselves to look past obvious right-wing lies and instead focus on the controversy they create. If school board shouting matches break out over CRT, that’s the news. If CRT might help Republicans get out the vote, that’s the news. The fact that the whole thing is built around a transparent lie? That’s definitely not the news.
This lengthy, October 21, piece from the New York Times, “How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms,” was a classic of the genre, as the paper leaned into the political benefits of the GOP’s attacks while all but ignoring the falsehoods it’s built around. “The issue has become a major rallying point for Republicans from Florida to Idaho, where state lawmakers have moved to ban it,” the Times reported.
It wasn’t until the 13th paragraph that the Times acknowledged CRT isn’t taught in public schools. Incredibly, four paragraphs later the Times reported, “But Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms.”
Showtime’s “The Circus” recently featured a sit-down interview with a conservative activist in Virginia campaigning against CRT. When host Alex Wagner asked for some proof of CRT being hoisted on students, the activist pointed to a single rap song whose lyrics were once discussed in a nameless school somewhere. Instead of the entire interview being about how CRT actually isn’t part of any curriculum, the activist was given a national platform to push more misinformation.
The Washington Post published a 1,500-word piece all about the Virginia race and how “Republicans are seizing on CRT as an opportunity to connect with voters,” even though, as the Post quietly conceded, it’s “not part of classroom teaching.” Shouldn’t that be the story?
The Associated Press this week published a whitewashing report about how school board members nationwide are stepping down from their positions after being terrorized by political activists. The article “never even hints that the chaos and hostility at board meetings is mostly whipped up by the right wing and entirely related to its fantasy wars against mask tyranny and race theory,” noted NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. “That’s malpractice.”
Media malpractice has defined CRT coverage all year.
📺 GOOD STUFF:
Helping advertisers know when their brands end up sponsoring right-wing misinformation is the goal of a worthy new site, CheckMyAds.org:
You would think advertisers are in charge around here. At least that's what we thought when we first began the Sleeping Giants campaign to alert advertisers their ads were inadvertently sponsoring Breitbart.
But what we've learned is that they're not the ones in control. The advertising supply chain has become so large and bloated that no one — not even the biggest advertisers in the world — has any idea where their money ends up. One study found that 15% of advertising dollars simply disappeared into thin air. They call it the "unknown delta."
We've also learned that adtech companies intentionally designed it that way. Over time, they've made it easier for advertisers to spend millions of dollars across the open web and harder to check their ads. And they've made it really easy for bad guys to sneak into the supply chain through sketchy middlemen and dark pools.
🏔 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Milky Chance, “Colorado”
NME said it best about this sneakily catchy ditty: “Adding a tasteful hint of electropop to the German duo’s formula of summery, groove-oriented indie-rock, ‘Colorado’ is a bonafide stoner’s anthem, with singer Clemens Rehbein declaring over a jangly lead guitar line: “I get high like Colorado”.”
So I get high like ColoradoWe had it all but what do I know?I try to push away the sorrowBut today, it's too late, I try tomorrow
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Be kind
Sticking close to the media’s preferred script, Axios this week reported that the walls were caving in on Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who’s caught in a surprisingly close race in Virginia’s governor’s race. “It was clear the McAuliffe campaign has taken on an air of tension — bordering on panic,” Axios announced.
Proof of the “panic” attack? “McAuliffe cut off one television interview last week,” the outlet claimed. That seems like thin confirmation, considering candidates juggle media interviews all the time. Plus, the Democratic did no such thing — he agreed to a 10-minute interview with a local Sinclair TV station and actually gave them 11 minutes.
Is McAuliffe’s campaign in a state of “panic”? Axios provided no tangible evidence that it is. But the press seems to be rooting for a Democratic loss in Virginia, so the “panic” claim gets widely aired. Eager to portray Joe Biden’s presidency as on the verge of collapse, the press is excitedly pushing the governor’s race across the Potomac as a potentially cataclysmic event for the entire Democratic Party.
“Virginia's gubernatorial election is more important than ever as a national barometer” a CNN headline announced this month. What CNN and everyone else covering the race means is that if Democrats lose, the Virginia race will function as a national barometer. If Republicans lose, it won’t mean a thing. Note there’s a governor’s race in New Jersey this year as well, and a Democrat is expected to win with ease. For some reason, that’s not a “barometer” of anything.
What’s happening in Virginia is the press is taking its beloved Dems in Disarray storyline out for a spin and ceaselessly stressing what a political disaster it would be if McAuliffe lost.
“It could trigger an all-out panic in the party” CNN warned. A Democratic loss would send “shockwaves that would rip through the White House.” It would “swell doubts about Biden's own political authority.”
Question: Do you remember this kind of breathless, what-if coverage in advance of the Georgia run-off elections in January, when Republicans faced the prospect of losing two U.S. Senate seats in a red state? I don’t. In fact, much of the Beltway media simply assumed Republicans would prevail. Right after the November election, journalists covered Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as if he were the 2021 Senate Majority Leader, because of course Republicans would win in Georgia.
"How a Biden Presidency and McConnell-Led Senate Might Actually Get Along," read a Politico headline last November, even though we had no idea if there would be a McConnell-led Senate this year.
Today, CNN insists “a Democratic defeat in what has become a reliably blue state over the last decade would be impossible to ignore and would cause political headaches for Democrats that reach beyond the Biden presidency.” But when Republicans lost not one but two races in a reliably red state in January, the press did not obsessively dissect the long-term implications for the GOP or Trump.
Note that we just saw this same type of premature, doomsday coverage with the California governor’s recall vote. For months, the press insisted the polls were closer than they should be for a blue state, and then mapped out what all the catastrophic effects would be for the Democratic Party if Gavin Newsom were defeated. (Basically, it would mean the end of the Biden presidency, according to lots of pundits.) In the end though, the recall vote was an embarrassment for the GOP, which lost by 30 points.
Faced with that reality, the press quickly moved on to the Virginia contest, never acknowledging it had misread the California race for months. Even after Newsom’s landslide win, CNN’s Kasie Hunt went on Twitter and claimed the contest represented a loss for Democrats.
Caveat: I have no idea who’s going to win in Virginia next Tuesday, and neither does a single reporter, editor, or producer covering the race. My point isn’t about the eventual winner or loser. It’s how the press is gleefully putting its thumb on the scale and producing hysterical, sky-is-falling coverage that would be more fitting for a Democratic trailing by 15 points, not one who is leading or tied in 23 of the last 24 polls, as McAuliffe is.
In Virginia, the press remains committed to presenting the campaign through a specific, Republican prism. Politico recently announced McAuliffe is “losing ground,” when the polls have been remarkably consistent for months. In a recent page-one report from Virginia, the Times quoted five Republicans and just one Democrat. Days later, the Times published another front-page Virginia dispatch, claiming Democratic voters are apathetic about the race. Left out of the article was any mention of a CBS News poll at the time which found early voters favored McAuliffe by 24 points.
The Wall Street Journal also tried to lean into the idea of apathy, stressing that early voting in the Commonwealth is down dramatically from the 2020 election, causing “heartburn” among Democrats. But 2020 was a presidential campaign when turn-out was high. The last time there was an off-year governor’s race in Virginia was 2017, and early voting this year is up dramatically over 2017 — so much for the “apathy” narrative.
What’s receiving a fraction of the coverage is the fact that the leader of the GOP basically isn’t allowed within the borders of Virginia before Tuesday’s vote because party strategists understand that a public appearance by Trump, and especially one of his incoherent rallies, would likely end the GOP’s chances in a state with a large population of educated suburban voters.
It’s an astonishing state of affairs — imagine if Democrats were terrified about Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris campaigning in Virginia. Yet Trump’s toxicity is politely overlooked in the campaign coverage. Of course, if Republicans do pull off a Virginia win, the press will rush to credit Trump.
For Democrats, it’s head you lose, tails you lose.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
⛳️ GOOD STUFF:
I’m not sure why, considering the mountain of financial scandals Trump has amassed over the years, but I’ve always been fascinated by his controversial $60 million purchase of Scotland’s Turnberry golf resort in 2014. The huge, all-cash deal never made any sense, since the Trump Organization was facing financial peril at the time, nor did it make sense that he then spent more than $150 million on the money-losing property.
The whole thing smells like money laundering. And the question has always been whose money was Trump cleaning?
Now, the Scottish government might demand answers. From the Daily Beast’s “A Scottish Judge Could Expose Donald Trump’s Shady Golf Finances”:
As The New Yorker and Mother Jones have pointed out in the past, Trump’s sudden foray into Scotland—during which he allegedly shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars—makes little sense.
Trump is a real estate tycoon who’s called himself the “king of debt” for a reason: It’s always safer to play with someone else’s money. He’s famous for being able to secure financing, particularly from Deutsche Bank, when he’s in a rut and no one else will trust him. And yet, when it came to build these golf courses in Scotland, the story was that Trump came up with hundreds of millions of dollars.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Brandi Carlile, “You and Me on the Rock”
From one of her generation’s most consistently talented singer-songwriters, Carlile’s latest release is reason to celebrate. “You and Me on the Rock” comes with an unmistakable, breezy Joni Mitchell feel. Put this one on repeat.
Me out in my garden and you out on your walkIs all the distance this old girl can takeWithout listenin' to you talkI don't need their money, babyJust you and me on the rock
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Wringing its hands at the sight of workers walking away from jobs when faced with simple vaccine mandates, the Wall Street Journal over the weekend became the latest national news outlet to shower attention on the topic.
The sympathetic, 2,000-word Journal piece focused on a minuscule portion of the workforce that has irrationally decided not to take a free, safe, and effective vaccine. Instead of presenting these actions as delusional, the press often frames the quitting as being principled or even heroic. (The “resistance” is “unwavering,” the New York Times announced.)
The continued, hand-holding coverage — “brainwashing” is virtually never used — represents the latest example of the press helping to normalize irrational, nihilistic behavior by Trump followers.
As we watch a parade of unreasonable people needlessly blow up their careers and walk away from good paying jobs with excellent benefits, the questions that linger are, should we care, and should this trend be breathlessly treated as Big News by the media? Should we care that a tiny percentage is embracing rabbit-hole conspiracies about a vaccine that nearly 200 million Americans have safely taken? Should we care that they’ve decided to believe non-stop lies to the point where they’ll likely be unemployable for months, and maybe years to come?
It’s true that Covid dead-enders affect us all because epidemiologists estimate that 85 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated before the virus is truly under control.
But the media’s specific fixation on anti-vaxxers quitting their jobs seems misguided and out of place. And the coverage clearly feeds off a lack of context. That Journal’s weekend report looked at anti-vaccine nurses who once worked at Virginia and West Virginia-based Valley Health System. But nearly 6,000 of the company’s 6,200 employees have complied with the vaccine mandate.
The New York Times on Sunday published a long, 2,000-word story about anti-vaxxers quitting their jobs, focusing on public school employees in New York City, where 96 percent of workers have complied with the vaccine mandate. 96 percent — shouldn’t that be the story?
The Washington Post last week shined a spotlight on journalists who have refused to get vaccinated and how their dismissals have created lots of media attention. But the article could barely find a dozen examples of that happening nationwide.
USA Today excitedly reported that 1,887 Washington state employees had quit positions after Gov. Jay Inslee’s vaccine mandate went into effect — that’s out of a pool of 63,000 employees.
Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade recently claimed that every company implementing a vaccine mandate will lose “10 to 15% of your workforce,” which is categorically false. The national average appears to be less than 5 percent.
When “dozens” of South Carolina workers protested outside a local General Electric plant in Greenville to complain about the company’s vaccine policy, the plot generated lots of local coverage, even though the vast majority of GE’s 3,200 employees at the site are abiding by the mandate.
This imprudent fixation represents Both Sides journalism taken to an absurd extreme where the radical, barely-there minority is held up as being equally important and newsworthy as the vast majority.
It’s true that the irrational quitting is news in that the trend is novel and quite unusual. Often in the past when these types of jobs (police, firefighters, etc.) made news it was because groups of people went to court to sue because they were denied access to the payrolls based on race and gender. Now anti-vaxxers are giving up these previously coveted jobs.
The problem is that the constant coverage allows anti-vaxxers a platform to spread more misinformation, as they relay their unsupported reasons for refusing to get inoculated. From the Journal’s nurse article: “Some believe the vaccine’s development was too rushed and are worried about the possible unknown long-term effects on their health.” One nurse insisted, “The government shouldn’t be telling us what to do.”
The Journal made no mention that the government for nearly a century has “told us” to follow speed limits and to vaccinate our children for mumps and measles if they want to attend public school. Yet today’s newfound anti-government radicals never objected.
Some reporting includes caveats that none of the anti-vax rationales are supported by science. (For example, getting vaccinated has no impact on the ability of women to get pregnant.) But more often than not the relentless attention presents the job-quitters as common-sense, thoughtful people.
Question: If there were an unhinged far-left movement where grown men and women walked out on their careers because they refused to wear shoes and shirts to work, would they receive sympathetic press coverage? Or would their mental health be rightfully questioned?
The anti-vaxxer coverage also creates the false picture that Americans are deeply divided over vaccines, and that the inoculation push under President Joe Biden has been a failure. Neither are true. Yet the press can’t stop framing the issue that way. And they can’t stop pushing vaccine critics to the front of the line.
When a new poll showed Americans by nearly 20 points approve of the vaccine mandates that Biden has put into place, the first person quoted in an Associated Press story about the poll was an anti-vaxer Republican who denounced the policy.
Brainwashed Covid zombies will continue to walk away from good paying jobs and put their families at risk, economically. But that doesn’t mean we have to care. And that doesn’t mean it’s news.
(Photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
💉 GOOD STUFF:
Susan Demas cuts through the Covid clutter in her piece from Michigan Advance, “The Soul-Crushing Fight of Parents Battling Right-Wing COVID Nihilism”:
The pandemic seems to have scrambled some people’s brains and destroyed their basic parental instinct, because raging against masks in schools and COVID-19 vaccine mandates (which aren’t in Michigan schools and shots aren’t yet available for those under 12 anyway) is now a great way to get on your local teevee news broadcast. (Those wearing “I don’t co-parent with the government” T-shirts are unironically touting the deadbeat dad anthem).
Let’s be clear: Most of these efforts are being organized and bankrolled by national right-wing groups whose wealthy donors are cynically willing to run up the body count during the pandemic if that means they can get more Republicans elected next year who will keep their taxes low.
🎟 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Elton John & Eddie Vedder, “E-Ticket”
Elton + Eddie? Why yes, thank you very much.
This new song takes off like a rocket, and hurls listeners back to John’s “Crocodile Rock” days, when he sometimes rocked with pure, giddy abandon. It’s John going back to his piano-banging basics, and Vedder providing one helluva vocal assist.
““E-Ticket” is the sound of two artists embracing their legend status while simultaneously throwing their egos out the door,” Consequence Sound perfectly noted.
In between moments, questions and quotientsSolved, yet still not clearLooking for answers, we make up new dancesAin't that enough, if that's all there is?
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When Republicans launched a frontal assault on American workers earlier this year, the press was right there to help them echo their bogus claims. Both should now apologize for smearing the U.S. workforce.
Belittling would-be employees for being “lazy” and living off the government dole as generous unemployment payments swelled during the pandemic, conservatives invented a bogus economic theory that President Joe Biden had created a nationwide worker shortage. (Some members of Congress are still making the hollow claim.)
Then Republican governors in 25 states acted on the hunch by prematurely cutting off benefits for residents over the summer. The insulting storyline was started by the same anti-worker conservative voices in the media who always complain that the country’s social safety net creates a slothful workforce.
The GOP’s Dickensian move to cut off benefits, which costs the states nothing, was supposed to solve the workplace shortage, and send Americans dashing out of their homes and back to work when government checks stopped arriving.
Turns out that cutting off extended benefits has done nothing to boost labor force participation. Will the media hold to account Republican governors who slashed much-needed aid for no reason? And will the media re-examine how they gladly aired GOP attacks on workers and helped legitimize the bogus theory by treating it as authentic?
Because conservatives were braying loudly and making the absurd anti-Biden claims, the press automatically treated the allegations as news, and seemed uninterested if the shaming charges were accurate or not. The press also boosted the Fox News storyline by constantly interviewing employers about the worker shortage, without giving voice to workers, which produced a one-sided view of the conflict.
As I noted at the time, the pro-business talking points were constantly echoed in local news coverage. When WKNB in Youngstown, Ohio, reported on the Republican governor cutting off employment benefits, only business owners who supported the move were quoted, no workers. Same with a local report from the Albany Times Union in New York, which quoted a restaurant manager blaming the worker shortage on the government for “giving them all the money to stay home.” No workers were interviewed.
The larger press problem though, was how mainstream news outlets propped up the phony GOP claims. Last month, the New York Times announced, “Federal Unemployment Aid Is Now a Political Lightning Rod.” After noting that economists dismissed the GOP claim, the Times reported, “The particular complaints that government benefits are sapping the desire to work have, nonetheless, struck a chord among Republican political leaders,” as if that made it all legitimate.
Last spring USA Today took a Both Sides approach, claiming a “debate” was raging over benefits and a worker shortage: Republicans blame benefits, economists disagree. In other words, partisan Republicans, pointing to zero empirical evidence, were throwing out a wild, unproven economic theory, while experts in the field debunked it. That was the “debate,” as Bloomberg called it.
Writing in the Washington Post, Megan McArdle announced unequivocally that emergency unemployment benefits were “holding back the economic recovery,” by giving people a strong disincentive to work. McArdle’s proof? “Anecdotally,” so she was sure it was true. The business columnist confidently predicted that when the remaining $300 federal payments expired in September, the worker shortage would evaporate. (McArdle also spent years predicting that Obamacare would implode.)
She was wrong. In September, eight million Americans had their federal pandemic unemployment payments stopped, yet just 194,000 jobs were created that month. According to the rhetoric that the GOP spewed in the spring — and which the press gladly amplified — once unemployment checks stopped arriving in bank accounts, employers would have their pick of workers.
That’s clearly not happening as the workforce participation rate remains at a historic low.
Every indicator confirms that the “lazy worker” claim was nonsense. In fact, today there are more job openings even as the extended benefits have expired. A record number of Americans, 4.3 million, quit their jobs in August. And nearly 800,000 quit without having a new job lined up.
“In almost every sector tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers are quitting at or near the highest levels on record, going back to when tracking began in 2001,” the Washington Post reports.
What’s unfolding is “The Revolt of the American Worker,” as a recent Paul Krugman column in the New York Times put it. “Long-suffering American workers, who have been underpaid and overworked for years, may have hit their breaking point,” the economist wrote.
There’s no question that priorities and lifestyles changed during the pandemic. The disruption prompted millions of U.S. workers to rethink their lives and ask whether it was worth staying in the lousy jobs. We’re witnessing a historical labor and cultural shift underway as Americans reassess their role in the workplace, and it has nothing to do with $300 unemployment benefits.
Hurdles that remain in terms of returning to work include a lack of child care due to an unprecedented shortage of (underpaid) child care workers, a mismatch between the skills employers want, and would-be employees who have lingering fear of contracting the virus. “Between mid-June and mid-September, the number of people who said they couldn’t work because they were sick with Covid or were caring for someone who had the virus rose by 2.5 million,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Trying to ding Biden with a made-up claim about today’s employee shortage, Republicans set out to smear American workers. And the press never should have helped.
(Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Speaking of the Journal, the paper has never been the same since Rupert Murdoch massively overpaid for the famed daily. While it was always tarnished by its ridiculous right-wing editorial page, the Journal newsroom was often one of the best in the country.
Today, it seems to be a shadow of its former self. Adam Piore details the internal wrangling for the Columbia Journalism Review in “Breaking Right: The Wall Street Journal’s stubborn conservatism”:
But recently, as I spoke with about fifty current and former staffers—most on background, fearing retribution—many expressed frustrations that extended beyond the opinion page. Ultimately, what troubles them is the conservatism of the newspaper as a whole, and how that shapes coverage. Editors modulate the tone of political stories, set limits on subject matter, and insist on catering to the Journal’s traditional audience at the expense of growth.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Driver 8”
If you’re a certain age and were listening to college radio during a certain decade, this faithful, new Isbell cover of REM’s “Driver 8” will bring back lots of memories, capturing the haunting, Southern gothic feel of the band’s first few albums.
I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farmThe power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snaggedThe bells are ringing through the town againThe children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing
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Be kind.
Colin Powell’s passing this week prompted lots of media coverage about his historic and star-studded military and diplomatic career. His resume also included the large blemish that was the Iraq War, which he helped sell as President George Bush’s Secretary of State. And specifically, Powell sold it during an infamous presentation to the United Nations’ Security Council just weeks before the doomed invasion.
More than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the pointless conflict, and Powell played a key role in all of it. What has received little or no attention this week though, was the oversized role the press played in 2003 as it cheered Powell’s deeply flawed U.N. presentation, and helped march the country to war. Especially the Washington Post, which became rapturous of Powell that winter.
Over the years, lots of attention has been focused on the New York Times and the central, historic role it played in marketing Bush’s disastrous war. (See: Judith Miller.) As the Times' then-public editor, Margaret Sullivan, reminded readers in 2014, “The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not The Times's finest hour.”
But the Washington Post’s behavior, especially from its editorial page and columnists, was equally awful and detrimental to the U.S. At times exhibiting a bloodlust for war, the Post transformed itself into a proud pro-war platform that eagerly echoed every misguided claim the Bush administration was putting forward for its doomed, pre-emptive invasion.
Between September 2002 and March 2003, the Post published nearly 30 editorials and columns urging war. And because the newspaper came with a supposed “liberal” reputation, its relentless war cheering was a godsend for the White House, which could turn around and say, ‘Even the Washington Post supports the military incursion.’
It turns out the Post’s pro-war cheering section was wrong about everything. And that’s where Powell comes in.
In the summer of 2002 Powell, clearly not supportive of a possible Iraq invasion, convinced Bush that the U.S. should make its case at the United Nations via the Security Council. Bush agreed and Powell was the point person for that sales job, which sputtered for months. Then on February 3, 2003, Powell, acting as a loyal team player, addressed the Security Council for 90 minutes, complete with with easel-mounted maps, and detailed the U.S.’s rationale for war. Relying almost entirely on faulty intelligence, Powell sold the war with gusto, portraying Saddam Hussein as a clear and present danger to a post-9/11 America.
The Beltway pundit class could barely contain its glee as it accepted Powell’s version of events. “It is impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the vast majority of the media bought what Powell was selling,” Media Matters’ Jamison Foser once noted.
As Greg Mitchell detailed at the time, “The San Francisco Chronicle called the speech "impressive in its breadth and eloquence." The Denver Post likened Powell to "Marshal Dillon facing down a gunslinger in Dodge City," adding that he had presented "not just one 'smoking gun' but a battery of them." The Tampa Tribune called Powell's case "overwhelming.””
The Post especially though, seemed to lose touch with reality following Powell’s address. The next day, the daily published a high-fiving editorial, “Irrefutable,” which mocked anti-war activists for daring to question the path to war [emphasis added.]:
After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Powell left no room to argue seriously that Iraq has accepted the Security Council's offer of a "final opportunity" to disarm.
Soon a cavalcade of Post writers rushed their Powell tributes into print, declaring the debate about the war to be officially over.
The paper’s George Will compared invasion skeptics to conspiracy theorists still dreaming up wild tales about President John Kennedy’s assassination. Will’s column was dedicated to mocking the non-believers: “What are people denying who still deny the need for force? That Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?”
Of course, those weapons never existed.
The Post’s Jim Hoagland pointed to Powell and claimed there could no longer be any skepticism about the unprecedented invasion. “To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence,” he stressed. “I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."
In one of the more famous pundit lines from the run-up to the war, the Post’s Mary McGrory quipped that Powell "persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince." The extended valentine continued: “Powell took his seat in the United Nations and put his shoulder to the wheel. He was to talk for almost an hour and a half. His voice was strong and unwavering. He made his case without histrionics of any kind, with no verbal embellishments.”
In the end, very little of what Powell said that day at the U.N. was true.
Meanwhile, the Post’s Richard Cohen announced that Powell's testimony "had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise.”
War skeptics were fools, conspiracy buffs, and generally unserious people — that was the taunting message from the Post weeks before the U.S. launched arguably its most failed military action in the last century.
The Iraq War and the media's lapdog, obedient performance during the run-up should have demolished all claims of liberal media bias, simply because so many journalists teamed up with the Republican White House to help sponsor the disastrous war. At a time of heightened patriotic fervor, the national press played a central role in helping to sell a war to the public.
And the Washington Post proudly led the imprudent parade.
(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism has produced a fascinating, and disturbing, deep dive into the role white newspaper publishers played in stoking violence against Blacks in 19th and 20th century America.
From the online “Printing Hate” project:
For decades, hundreds of white-owned newspapers across the country incited the racist terror lynchings and massacres of thousands of Black Americans. In their headlines, these newspapers often promoted the brutality of white lynch mobs and chronicled the gruesome details of the lynchings. Many white reporters stood on the sidelines of Jim Crow lynchings as Black men, women, teenagers and children were hanged from trees and burned alive. White mobs often posed on courthouse lawns, grinning for photos that ran on front pages of mainstream newspapers.
“Printing Hate,” a yearlong investigation by students working with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland, examines the scope, depth and breadth of newspaper coverage of hundreds of those public-spectacle lynchings and massacres.
🐂 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Asleep at the Wheel (featuring George Strait, Willie Nelson), “Take Me Back to Tulsa”
There are certain kinds of music that when you listen it’s almost impossible to be a sour mood — ragtime and reggae come to mind. And so does Western swing.
Celebrating 50 years of honoring Bob Willis’ distinct brand of 1940’s country dance music, Asleep at the Wheel’s latest take on “Tulsa” is brimming with an irresistible two-step beat, popping fiddles and swirling steel guitar. As well as a couple Hall of Fame cameo appearances from George and Willie.
(Interesting to note that this version does not include the song’s traditional verse about “Black man raises the cotton, white man gets the money.”)
Where's that gal with the red dress on? Some folks called her DinahStole my heart away from me, way down in LouisianaTake me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marryTake me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry
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CNN faced a predicament recently when its new poll showed President Joe Biden with a healthy 50% approval rating. The high-profile survey was certainly good news for the White House, which has been battered with negative news coverage since August, with the Beltway press circling, eagerly predicting the Democrat’s demise just nine months into office.
The CNN poll represented an internal problem because it punctured the preferred media narrative about Biden being caught in a slow-motion spiral. Plus, the 50% poll followed on the heels of a Fox News poll, which also showed Biden at the respectable 50% mark — a public approval plateau that Trump never once reached while in office.
So what did CNN do? Did it buck the Beltway groupthink and report that Biden’s popularity was on the upswing? It did not. Instead, the network did its best to bury, or downplay, its own polling so it wouldn’t have to upset the beloved storyline of Biden being locked in a constant state of crisis. (A White House “under siege.”) Still itching for the daily drama of the Trump years, CNN continues to uncork breathless, perilous coverage that often does not match reality — even the reality of its own polling.
Writing up the survey’s results, CNN’s dispatch didn’t mention Biden’s strong 50% approval rating until the sixth paragraph, stressing that Americans were “divided.” That’s an extraordinary take, since CNN in August led the media charge in claiming the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan represented a cataclysmic event within the Biden presidency, and dedicated hundreds of hours to the story. It was CNN’s Clarissa Ward who was famously wrong when she declared that the United States’ effort to evacuate thousands of Afghans was doomed to failure.
Yet eight weeks later, and despite the avalanche of negative coverage, Biden’s approval rating hadn’t budged. Instead of acknowledging that political reality and marveling at Biden’s staying power, CNN played dumb.
Days after CNN’s poll was published, White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins told anchor Wolf Blitzer, “If you look at the combination of all the major polls, the president's approval rating right now is at 45 percent. That is, of course, lower than when he entered office and had that initial burst of positivity. Some polls, and, Wolf, it's at 38 percent.”
“Some polls” had Biden as low as 38%, Collins emphasized. The fact that her own network had Biden at 50% was of little interest, as she stuck to the accepted script.
“This is Bad News for Joe Biden,” read the headline for a Chris Cillizza column, which focused on a recent Gallup survey. Cillizza made no reference to CNN’s good-news-for-Biden poll. We’ve seen this kind of cherry picking before. When an NPR/PBS survey in early September showed Biden’s standing at 43 percent, Cillizza pounced: “This Poll Number Will Send Democrats Into a Panic.” A week later though, Cillizza was silent when CNN’s own poll found Biden’s approval climbing to 52 percent.
Last week, the network’s Stephen Collinson, in a comically over-the-top doomsday piece of analysis, insisted the president’s approval rating was “slipping fast.” Collinson never mentioned that, according to CNN, Biden’s approval is holding steady at 50%.
It’s almost like the network was embarrassed by its own polling data.
CNN’s John Harwood claimed a pile-up of problems “has eroded the President's public standing.” Yet two paragraphs later he conceded, “Biden's public approval ratings [is] back to the 50% mark he had consistently exceeded during his early months in office.”
In his piece, “Biden's 'Tough Month' Looms Over Democratic Campaigns in 2021,” CNN’s Dan Merica suggested the president might doom two key gubernatorial races in November, one in Virginia and one in New Jersey. Except the Democrat in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, is currently ahead up by 13 points. As for CNN’s 50% poll? Merica flushed that down the memory poll, instead pointing to a mix of recent polls that had Biden at 45%.
Elsewhere last week, CNN dinged Biden for being “stale” and claiming his “laid-back style” doesn’t work. The attack was really just theater criticism masquerading as political analysis. (He’s not emotional enough!) It was especially jarring that after watching a marauding narcissist, liar, madman in the White House for four years, CNN’s take on Biden is that he’s too congenial for the times. As for CNN’s 50% Biden poll? That information was included in the 26th, and final, paragraph of the article.
CNN’s doomsday drumbeat has become relentless: “The coronavirus pandemic Biden thought he had tamed this spring continues to deny Americans a return to normal life,” one piece recently claimed. Americans haven’t returned to a more normal life under Biden? 50 million school children aren’t back in classrooms? Football stadiums on campuses coast-to-coast aren’t packed with fans? Tens of millions of employees haven’t returned to their workplace? 190 million Americans haven’t been fully vaccinated?
Last month, I recounted how CNN seemed to traffic a made-up GOP story about how a bipartisan group of lawmakers “stormed out” of a classified briefing session regarding Afghanistan. It was all part of the network’s urgent attempt to paint the Biden White House as besieged and floundering. According to CNN’s own polling, voters aren’t buying it.
(Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
When I first saw this piece fly past me on Twitter, I thought, ‘Oh my God, someone at the New York Times told the truth about political journalism?’ But then I quickly realized it was a writer for the Los Angeles Times, which made more sense because this kind of truth-telling simply isn’t allowed at NYT.
From Jackie Calmes’ excellent piece, “Why Journalists Are Failing the Public in Political Coverage”:
For years it was easy to cover “both sides” — Republicans and Democrats — as equally worthy, and blameworthy, partners in democracy. While we reporters had come of age as witnesses to the unprecedented resignation of a Republican president who’d tried to corrupt the institutions of government to affect an election — imagine! — what remained was a Republican Party still capable of a creditable role in a healthy two-party system. After all, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign when congressional leaders of his party began abandoning him. Again, imagine that, Kevin McCarthy.
Now, when reporters or pundits use the words “both sides” in regard to some political problem, I stop reading or listening.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Foo Fighters, “Making a Fire” (Mark Ronson Remx)
This one was from the summertime but I keep listening over and over. Teaming with famed pop producer Ronson (Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga), the Foo’s produce a bouncier, cleaner version of “Making a Fire.”
The redo also features members of Antibalas, the Budos Band, the Dap-Kings, El Michels Affair, La Buya, Menahan Street Band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band and Tuatara, as well as Grohl’s daughter, Violet, on vocals.
But if this is our last timeMake up your mindI've waited a lifetime to liveIt's time to igniteI'm making a fire
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The political press found something new to blame on President Joe Biden. Itching to maintain the Dems in Disarray narrative, being egged on by Fox News, and stretching common sense to the breaking point, the press is claiming the Democrat faces a “Christmas crisis” of confidence over something he has no control — clogged supply chains.
“Holiday delays could prove politically problematic for the president,” ABC News claimed. “With global supply chain bottlenecks threatening the Christmas shopping season, President Joe Biden will…try to stave off the potentially politically explosive headaches Americans may face as delays threaten holiday gift-giving.”
According to ABC News, if Americans encounter gift-giving delays because retailers are not able to supply purchases in time, it’s going to cause “explosive headaches” because, apparently, voters will blame the West Wing if store shelves aren’t stocked with Barbies.
This twisted logic continues to spread. “White House Scrambles to Address Looming Christmas Crisis,” an ominous Politico headline announced. At Wednesday’s White House press briefing, CBS’s Ed O’Keefe demanded to know if the White House could guarantee that holiday packages will arrive on time.
“If you think President Biden's approval ratings are bad now, just watch what happens if Christmas turns out to be a huge national bummer,” warned The Week. Pointing to “supply chain snarls,” the outlet warned that, “If Americans find themselves unable to celebrate the holidays in the manner to which they've become accustomed they're probably going to be angry. And they're probably going to blame the president.”
Talk about torturous logic. If private suppliers cannot produce on-time goods this gift-giving season because of a Covid-fueled shipping backup, Americans are going to blame the president. “That means Biden must do everything in his limited power to save Christmas — if only to save his still-young presidency,” according to The Week. Now Biden’s entire presidency hangs in the balance.
When did the U.S. stop being a capitalist country? When did the press start assuming the White House controls private industries, including the shipping and handling operations for retailers and suppliers?
For the record, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says she isn’t that concerned. “There may be isolated shortages of goods and services in the coming months," Yellen told CBS News "But there is an ample supply of goods. I think there's no reason for consumers to panic about the absence of goods that they're going to want to acquire at Christmas.”
This is an almost comical example of the absurd double standard the Beltway press uses to grade Republican and Democratic presidents. The previous guy had a hard time stringing together three coherent sentences. But the same press corps looks at Biden and says, ‘Of course he’s responsible for unclogging the global shipping lanes, including U.S. ports and rail yards, so Christmas gifts can arrive on time.’
Are there things the federal government can do to ease the historic port congestion? Short of mobilizing the military, not really. But the White House has been leaning on private players to move aggressively try to relieve the bottleneck — the Port of Los Angeles will now operate around the clock and major companies such as Walmart, UPS and FedEx will expand their working hours.
Just from a common-sense perspective, why would it matter to Biden’s presidency if store shelves this December were not stocked with toys? Where is the tangible connection between those two things? It’s only become a media thing because journalists are trying to find something else to ding Biden with, even though nobody in the shipping business thinks the White House will ultimately be responsible for untangling this problem.
“The commercial pipeline that each year brings $1 trillion worth of toys, clothing, electronics and furniture from Asia to the United States is clogged and no one knows how to unclog it,” the Washington Post reported. (Still, the paper stressed the disruption means Biden “has a Christmas problem.”)
The entire global shipping industry isn’t sure how to unclog the Asia-to-America pipeline, but Biden has to fix it or else? Are writers at the Post really claiming that because Biden promised “in 2020 was that he would be a steady hand, singularly focused on smothering the pandemic and reviving the economy,” that means he has a solve a once-in-a-lifetime supply backlog that’s bedeviling the global economy?
The story of today’s broken supply chain is a fascinating one and some business journalists have done excellent work explaining it. From Yahoo! Finance’s Brian Cheung:
Fallout from the once-in-a-century health crisis is the chief culprit behind soaring freight bills and delivery delays. Americans trapped at home slashed spending at restaurants, movie theaters and sporting events and splurged on goods such as laptops and bicycles, triggering an import avalanche that has overwhelmed freight channels.
Meanwhile, factories and ports in Asia have had to close due to Covid-19 outbreaks, extreme weather, and electricity outages, which are all contributing to the delays.
The problem is, Beltway pundits and reporters have now glommed onto the story and decided it’s also a political one, and It’s All Biden’s Fault. It’s not.
(Photo: Joe Giddens/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
From Jonh Stoehr’s insightful piece at The Editorial Board newsletter, “Whatever Joe Biden And the Democrats Decide Will be the Best Outcome Democracy Can Produce While Bein Sabotaged”:
All is not yet lost, as Robison said, and in any case, I think we should cut these Democrats some slack. Yes, they can be maddening. Yes, there’s so much at stake. (Yes, no one knows what Kyrsten Sinema wants!) But let’s be clear. The Republicans are doing everything they can to take power in the next election without being responsible for having done anything to justify taking power in the next election. The GOP represents the full range of illegitimate politics. They don’t want anything to do with governing. Frankly, that’s how it ought to be.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Paul Simon, “Hearts and Bones”
I almost crashed the car yesterday when I heard on the radio it was Simon’s 80th birthday.
My only Simon story: A million years ago I was walking up Central Park West on a very cold January night when up the block, coming the other way, walked Simon and his then-wife Carrie Fisher, wrapped in each other’s arms and battling the elements.
Simon and Fisher’s marriage was a brief one, but Simon did write an extraordinary song about their time together, “Hearts and Bones.”
She burned like a brideThese events may have had some effectOn the man with the girl by his sideThe arc of a love affairHis hands rolling down her hair
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Leaning into the doomsday narrative that President Joe Biden’s agenda and presidency is slipping away as Democrats work to pass both a huge infrastructure bill and even bigger social spending bill, dubbed Build Back Better, the Beltway press continues to do a great job ignoring the contents of the historic effort. Focusing instead on its cost and obsessively documenting the vote-counting process, the press has walked away from its job of explaining legislation.
A new CBS poll confirms how little information voters are getting about the Democrats’ hallmark domestic bill, which has been in the news for most of this year. “The public is more likely to have heard about what it would cost than about the specific policies that would be in it,” according to the network. Worse for Democrats, “some of the very popular [programs] —expanded Medicare coverage, family leave, lowered prescription costs — are among the least heard about.”
The specifics from the poll: Only 10% of Americans say they know a lot about what's in the Build Back Better plan, while a majority admit to either not knowing any specifics or anything at all about the bill. When respondents were asked specifically about potential elements of the bill, it was the $3.5 trillion price tag that most Americans had heard about. Not surprisingly, the overall bill is a lot more popular among people who know about the admired elements within Build Back Better.
Democrats are trying to pass a bill over GOP objections that contains hugely popular initiatives, but most voters don’t know that the good stuff might soon be voted on. Instead, all they keep hearing about is the cost. Because of that disconnect, there is not currently a majority of people who think Build Back Better would help them and their family or help the economy, according to the survey.
The irony is that CBS reported the polling results without ever acknowledging that Americans likely don’t know what’s in Build Back Better because news outlets like CBS have done such a poor job explaining it. Hyper-focused on the price tag, which is precisely where Republicans want the public attention to be, the press pays lip service to the historic contents of the bill.
CNN actually claimed there are too many popular items in the bill, thereby causing voter confusion: “None of those programs are dominant enough to create a clear public image that focuses popular and legislative support.” And yes, that pronouncement was made within a CNN piece that focused mostly on the cost.
On Monday afternoon, these were the top six news headlines Google retrieved when searching “Democrats spending bill”:
• “Budget Gimmicks Will Define Democrats’ Next Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill” (Washington Examiner)
• “Democrats Have a Numbers Problem” (CNN)
• “Democrats Begin to Narrow Their Differences on Biden’s Social Spending Bill” (Washington Post)
• “Dems Will Use These Tricks to Make the $3.5T Spending Bill Seem Smaller” (New York Post)
• “Democrats Aim to Pass Infrastructure, Social Spending Bills By the End of October, Schumer Says” (CNBC)
• “Biden, Lawmakers Work to Trim Budget Bill as GOP, Democrats Still at Odds Over Debt Ceiling” (USA Today)
All of the pieces skimmed over the contents of Build Back Better.
That’s not to say Democrats are blameless in all of this, especially the messaging. As E.J. Dionne noted in the Washington Post column, “Wanted: A Better Build Back Better Campaign,” the inter-party division over the cost of the bill, and the media coverage that split has created, “has left most Americans clueless about what Biden wants to do.”
Yet for the Beltway press, the process by which the bill might pass, and how much the legislation costs, far and away exceeds the importance of what’s in the bill itself. Even if the legislation is historic and potentially transforming:
• Creating a universal Pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds.
• Making sure low- and middle-income households pay no more than 7 percent of their annual income on child care for kids up to age 5.
• Funding the construction and remodeling of child care facilities as well as raising the wages of child care workers.
• Making community college tuition-free for two years.
• Providing federal paid and medical leave benefit for up to 12 weeks.
• Allowing families to receive a child tax credit totaling $3,600 for each child under the age of 6, and $3,000 for each one under age 18.
• Allocating $35 billion for child nutrition programs, which would allow nearly 9 million more children to receive free school meals.
• Adding dental, vision and hearing benefits to Medicare.
By turning away from the popular Build Back Better programs, the press continues to do Republicans a favor and focus overwhelmingly on the cost, leaving Americans in the dark.
(Photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
👍🏻 Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop yesterday covered similar ground as my column today, with his excellent piece, “The Siloed Media Narratives Around Biden and Trump”:
In recent weeks, media chatter about Democrats’ policy priorities has, to my mind, reinforced the latter critique: President Biden is working to push through an ambitious agenda, much of which, when disaggregated, is highly popular, and yet the policy detail has largely gotten lost as day-to-day coverage has focused on poorly contextualized topline price tags and supposed infighting among Congressional Democrats. A narrative has crystallized in some quarters that Biden is failing to sell his agenda to the public.
🪕 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Della Mae, “The Way It Was Before”
The all-women bluegrass band that first formed in Boston a decade ago returns with a winning new song collection, Family Reunion.
Tapping into a progressive spirit of worker empowerment, “The Way It Was Before” shines a light on inequalities, carried along by a warm, toe-tapping mandolin beat.
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As Fox News celebrates its 25th anniversary this week as the unapologetic arm of the Republican Party, it’s worth recalling the time that Democrats organized a revolt against the network, called it out as not being a “legitimate news organization,” and the Beltway press sprinted to defend Rupert Murdoch’s misinformation machine.
Today, Fox News has killed untold thousands during the pandemic. It spent 2020 telling viewers the Covid-19 virus was a “hoax,” and then this year urged them not to give into government “tyranny” by getting a free, safe, and life-saving vaccine. Think about all the damage and death that could have been avoided over the years if the mainstream media had moved swiftly to marginalize Fox News. Instead, anxious to beat down cries of “liberal media bias,” the Beltway press played nice with Murdoch’s network, pretended it was staffed with hard working, serious journalists, and refused to condemn Fox News for what it is — a cancer on this country.
The standoff, and missed opportunity, began in 2009 as the new Obama administration announced it had had enough with a network devoted to destroying the Democratic president, all while masquerading as a news outlet and enjoying the institutional perks of being one.
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” senior White House advisor Anita Dunn told the New York Times in October, 2009. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
It’s hard to describe, 12 years removed, just how on the mark Dunn was with her analysis, as well as with the White House strategy to knock Fox News down a peg; to begin to de-legitimize the outlet in the eyes of mainstream America. The Obama White House clearly understood not only the danger Fox News posed to the administration, with its 24/7 cycle of lies, but understood the dangers an irresponsible propaganda outlet posed to the country.
Its hardball strategy was the right approach to take. And of course, Fox News shrieked in response. They’re “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington,” complained Chris Wallace. But that was to be expected. In terms of the larger debate, it didn’t really matter that they objected to the White House freezing out Fox News. What changed the dynamic was when high-profile Beltway journalists raced to defend Fox News, despite its rampant record of aggressive dishonesty.
Instead of finding fault with Murdoch’s serial mendacity, the press gleefully chided the Obama team, portraying it as thin skinned.
"It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian feel,” the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus scolded. “By brazenly declaring war on a member of the Fourth Estate, the Obama administration is making a first-rate error in judgment,” the San Diego Times-Union announced, adding it was for better for Obama, “to just ignore whatever bothers you.” Yahoo News claimed that calling out Fox News was a “loser strategy,” because it generated unsightly “public barbs.”
Keep in mind that by 2009, the cable channel had clearly morphed into the Opposition Party in America, having long ago left the realm of journalism. But the Beltway press looked away.
The media response was so overwhelmingly in favor of Fox News, that Howard Kurtz, then working at CNN, asked if “the war on Fox had backfired on Obama and company?”
There was a key exchange between Jake Tapper, then with ABC News, and Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary [emphasis added]:
TAPPER: It's escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –
GIBBS: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.
TAPPER: But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are “not a news organization.” How are they any different from, say –
GIBBS: ABC -
TAPPER: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?... I'm not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a “news organization” -- why is that appropriate for the White House to say?
At the time, Tapper had no idea how Fox News was different than ABC News, and he worked there. Keep in mind that in 2009, Fox News was sponsoring Tea Party rallies all across the country — the network was literally marketing, staging, and airing anti-Obama rallies coast-to-coast, but Tapper was stumped as to what made Fox News different from ABC.
And this was after Glenn Beck called Obama a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred of white people.” After Beck had devoted endless time to attacking then-White House advisor Van Jones, calling him a “communist-anarchist radical.” And after the network had launched a hysterical and homophobic, weeks-long smear campaign, falsely painting an openly gay member of the Obama administration as a "pervert."
When the Democratic White House called out Fox News for not being a “legitimate news organization,” Beltway journalists, in total denial about a dangerous propaganda outlet, looked at Obama’s team like they had two heads.
Twelve years later, we continue to pay a steep price.
(Photo: Cahrles Ommeanney/Getty Images)
GOOD NEWS:
Speaking of Fox News, I’m glad Chris Hayes is hammering this point lately — everyone who works there is vaccinated. Everyone.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kacey Musgraves, “Justified”
Following the similar musical path Taylor Swift took from Nashville mandolins to smart adult pop, Musgraves’ new album leaves little doubt where the super-talented singer is heading.
““Justified” is self-talk turned into an engaging tale with complementary percussions and acoustics that further hold our attention to create a beautifully tragic song about acceptance and mindfulness,” notes The Nash News.
Here’s her “SNL” performance from last weekend.
If I cry just a littleAnd then laugh in the middleIf I hate you then I love youThen I change my mind
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The clarion calls of democratic doom are out there, but are newsrooms listening? Trump Republicans are methodically and unapologetically out to derail American democracy, yet there remains a working media assumption that it can’t happen here.
“I'm astonished that more people don't see, or can't face, America's existential crisis,” Hillary Clinton warned this week. She fears “our democracy will [soon] be broken and taken over and minority rule will be what we live under. The norm.”
Appearing on MSNBC, Republican Trump critic Stuart Stevens pleaded his succinct case: “My plea to Democrats would be to just understand what is at stake here. The problem King George had was he couldn’t imagine the creation of an American democracy, and we suffer from the same problem. We can`t imagine the ending of American democracy, but it can happen.”
And writing in the Washington Post, foreign affairs author Robert Kagan warned, “The amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020.”
That’s the key — in the weeks following Trump’s defeat, he and his crooked allies utilized an ad hoc, Hail Mary approach to try to steal back the White House. After he failed, instead of the Republican Party recoiling from the idea of trying to throw out millions of legitimate votes, the GOP set out to create a backstop in states around the country that would codify the next attempt by Republicans to throw out millions of legitimate votes.
Today, Trump and his followers are using lawsuits, legislation, and terroristic threats to curtail the right to vote. It’s all being done in plain sight, yet there remains a stubborn newsroom assumption that American democracy cannot be systematically steamrolled.
This was Kagan’s essential warning: “As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.”
America isn’t guaranteed a happy ending, although most of us grew up with the shared assumption that it was. After more than two-and-a-half centuries as one of the world’s thriving democracies, the United States truly does face an existential crisis, as conservatives, fueled by Trump’s GOP, walk away from democratic rule and embrace the chaos of authoritarianism.
• 7 in 10 Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
• 66% of red state Republicans want to secede from the United States.
• Despite the fact that right-wing fraud “audit” in Arizona found no proof of ballot wrongdoing, Republicans are eagerly sponsoring similar assaults on election integrity across the country.
• A day after results from Arizona confirmed Biden won the Copper State, Trump announced at a rally that the ballot review proved he had won.
• The Travis County Democratic Party headquarters in Texas was firebombed last week by a domestic terrorist.
• In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold has accused a local county clerk of “sneaking someone into the county elections offices to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines. Those copies later surfaced online and in the hands of election deniers.”
• Across the country, Trump supporters are hanging black American flags out in front of their homes signifying “no quarter will be given,” and that if necessary they will kill America’s enemies — Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated.
• GOP Covid zombies continue to attack communities nationwide, with one deranged speakerat a local school board meeting recently warning, "I'd rather see this school in ashes” than see students wearing masks.
Still, the press keeps its distance. “As Trump looks and sounds increasingly like he intends to mount a presidential campaign rerun, Democrats and democracy experts are grappling with what such a campaign — and a potential second Trump presidency — would mean for the country,” the Washington Post reported. Noticeably absent from the short list of parties preparing for the worst (i.e. “democracy advocates”) are journalists.
This country has been facing a looming and open threat for a year now, ever since Trump signaled in September 2020, that he would not abide by the election results and assure a peaceful transfer of power – then everything unraveled from there. But news organizations still see themselves primarily as witnesses in the drama, paid to document the beating that democracy is taking at the hands of radical Republicans who try to dismantle the concept of free and fair elections in America.
It's almost 2022 and outlets like Washington Post are still pointlessly, and sheepishly, referring to incessant Trump lies about the election as “baseless claims” and “false allegations.”
Too many journalists don’t see themselves as having a vested interest in America maintaining a functioning democracy. They’re afraid that’s seen as picking sides so they remain reluctant to call out the party that’s purposely threatening it.
America’s centuries-old grand experiment is being threatened like never before. It’s a defining crisis our Founding Fathers never could have imagined. It’s how democracy dies. And yes, it can happen here.
(Photo: Atta Kenare/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
From Chauncey DeVega’s excellent Salon piece, “Will the Mainstream Media Ever Face Its Failure to Tell The Truth About Jan. 6?”:
How have many of the gatekeepers of approved public discourse in America responded to the events of Jan. 6 and the continuing attacks on American democracy? For the most part, by throwing their huge mistake down the memory hole. The boldest among them now present themselves as full-throated defenders of American democracy, claiming that they actually warned the country and the world about Trump's imminent coup attempt.
They simply hope that the public is not paying attention. To watch this public rewrite of American history in real time is something like seeing a TV series recast a prominent character with a new actor in the middle of a season, while pretending that nothing has changed. Given the limited attention span of the American people at large, this ploy may work.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
James Maddock, “Another Chance”
For me, this The New York City singer-songwriter (via Leicester, England) can do no wrong. He remains a sterling storyteller with an uncanny knack for melody and warmth.
With his newest, he takes a forlorn look at love, but does with his signature wink and nod, which makes it impossible not to sing along.
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Clutching their pearls with extra force in recent days, the Beltway media have cranked up the drama, announcing that a missed deadline to vote on the massive infrastructure bill now before Congress represented a defining calamity for the Biden White House. It also marks the ongoing obsession with process journalism, which Beltway reporters love, as they focus on the theatrics of lawmaking at the expense of the substance.
The hyperventilating was widespread. “Chaos” had erupted among “feuding” and “warring factions” of the Democratic Party, and the no-vote last week represented a “humiliating blow to Mr. Biden and Democrats,” the New York Times shrieked. A “civil war” has engulfed the party, The New Yorker announced, which was especially lazy and misguided since there are exactly two Democratic senators standing in the way of Biden, and 48 who support him on infrastructure.
Caught up in the gotcha vibe, a Washington Post reporter on Sunday mocked the president by tweeting, “Biden goes to church and walks through a graveyard in Wilmington as his legislative agenda is dying in Washington.” (She later deleted the post.)
Feeling déjà vu? Back in March there was a similar bout of gotcha stories: Biden travels during the pandemic! Biden rides an expensive exercise bike! Biden wears a Rolex! Biden hasn't given a press conference! Biden hasn't credited Trump for the vaccine! Biden hasn't "united" the nation!
Set aside the fact that the missed deadline for the Congressional vote last week was for an artificial, self-imposed calendar goal, and the only result of not having the vote is that negotiations surrounding the bill will continue for days to come. It wasn’t like the bill was defeated or that President Joe Biden still can’t sign it into law this year. It means that the extraordinarily complex piece of legislation is going to require even further consultation between Democrats as they try to reach an agreement on one of the most sweeping, transformative legislative efforts in decades.
Sure, there’s a chance that the bill ultimately fails and at that point Biden will have to face the political consequences. That’s not what’s in play right now, yet the D.C. media seems anxious to bury the Democratic president with over-the-top hyperbole. “The president has staked his reputation as a deal-maker on the success of both the public works package and a far more ambitious social policy bill, whose fates are now uncertain in a Congress buffeted by partisan divides and internal Democratic strife,” the Times stressed, ignoring the fact that Biden may still bolster his reputation as a deal-maker by getting the bills passed.
The ball’s on the 20 yard-line with two minutes remaining and the press is acting like the clock just ran out.
There have also been clear examples of journalists simply not understanding what’s unfolding — or pretending not to understand. Analyzing a particularly wrongheaded Times piece, which cast the missed deadline as a “humiliating” setback from Biden and basically the Democratic Party imploding, Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo noted:
The author of the Times piece seems to have the idea that the President is trying to mediate between his party’s ‘moderates’ and ‘progressives’ and things got off track because the ‘progressives’ rebelled. As we’ve discussed a hundred times, that’s not what’s happening. Virtually the entire party is united on a plan and a couple senators and a handful of reps are holding out.
Over at Axios, they published one of the strangest articles of the year, a source-free, quote-free profile of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who, along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is famously holding up final action in the Senate. The gushing piece — “She doesn’t play by Washington’s rules”; “She's unconventional and a force to be reckoned with”; “Sinema believes in the power of government to help lift people from poverty” —read more like an adoring press release than it did a work of journalism.
Of course, the GOP signature obstructionism has been disappeared. One reason it’s proving so hard to get the bill to Biden’s desk is that Republicans have largely walked away from previous bipartisan support to build roads and bridges. Here was a lengthy CNN update on the state of infrastructure negotiations last week and the word “Republican” was never used — the press now gives them a total pass.
By obsessing over the drama of the negotiations and reporting breathlessly on the jockeying that’s going on, the press all but ignores the contents of the pending legislation; contents which are truly extraordinary, as Biden works to expand what infrastructure means in America. The bill is all about investing in human welfare.
It proposes to spend $350 billion a year for a decade on initiatives like universal pre-K, free community college tuition, extended child tax credit, Medicare expansion, paid leave, and huge investments in reducing carbon emissions.
According to a recent Politico-Harvard poll, when showed a list of provisions that might be included in the infrastructure and social spending packages now before Congress, most voters picked allowing the government to directly negotiate drug prices with manufacturers as being the most important. That was followed by “increased federal spending to prepare for pandemics, more resources for long-term and home-based care and expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing care.”
But most news consumers have no idea those provisions are part of the negotiated legislation, since there’s virtually no coverage of the contents.
And that’s a win for the GOP.
(Photo Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
If you missed the Facebook whistleblower on “60 Minutes” last night:
📺 EXTRA STUFF:
I appeared on Joy Reid’s show Friday to discuss how the press was covering the negotiations, and giving the GOP a pass.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Courtney Barnett, “Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”
The talented Australian singer-songwriter is readying the release of her latest album. Here, she delivers an amiable indie-rocker; a melodic love letter to friendship with some bleakly self-aware lyrics.
It’s “deliciously cool.”
Sit beside meWatch the world burnWe'll never learn we don't deserve nice thingsAnd we'll screamSelf-righteouslyWe did our best, but what does that really mean?
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The United States during Trump’s final year in office posted the largest year-to-date increase in murders since the FBI first began tabulating the statistics more than six decade ago. The nation suffered a stunning 30% jump last year, the Bureau recently confirmed. There were an additional 4,901 homicides in 2020 compared with the year before. The crime spree story received lots of media coverage this week, most of which politely disappeared Trump.
That’s convenient for the GOP and for Trump, who’s eyeing a re-election run in 2024.
Republicans controlled the federal government while the United States suffered an historic, unheard-of one-year murder rate increase, yet much of the coverage in terms of who was to blame focused on Democratic allies on the left, and specifically the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Researchers said a range of factors contribute to annual variations, and the turmoil of 2020 — including the coronavirus pandemic and the fallout from George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis by police — likely played a role,” NPR reported. Meanwhile, CBS News listed “the COVID-19 pandemic, nationwide shutdowns and debate over police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing in police custody” as key causes.
Left untouched by the mainstream media coverage was addressing who was president while the nation battled a once-in-a-lifetime spike in murders. What is the long-term political fallout for Trump? What did the Trump administration do, if anything, last year as the killings mounted across the country?
The only reason Trump’s name came up with regards to the murder surge this week was because his former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, foolishly claimed on Twitter that the homicide surge was Biden’s fault. When it was pointed out her boss was in office during the 30% spike, she quickly deleted her Tweet.
For the most part, the press whitewashed Trump from the story, which was telling given the assumption that he will run again in 2024. Journalists seem to have no interest in holding him accountable for his policy failures. Instead, they’re busy trying to normalize him, by suggesting Biden acts a lot like Trump.
We saw the press give Trump a policy pass in August as the media gorged on Afghanistan “crisis” coverage, which fixated solely on Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops. Glossed over was the fact that Trump left Biden with an awful deal when in 2020 the Republican negotiated a one-sided surrender/troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which emboldened the Taliban because Trump both sidelined the Afghanistan government in the process, and promised the U.S. presence would be gone by May.
In the avalanche of press coverage Trump receives while out of office, and specifically the media attention that focuses on his future political aspirations, his policy failures are never addressed.
The historic homicide surge was fueled by an unabated stockpiling of guns in the U.S. — nearly 80% of reported homicides in 2020 were committed with a gun, the highest share ever reported. And Trump did nothing.
There’s also no question that Covid played a large role in the violent spike. The lockdown and loss of jobs added to a sense of despair and panic for lots of people, while police departments often struggled with staffing.
Trump’s criminally negligent Covid relief response left the country vulnerable to the pandemic and let fear and uncertainty fester all last year. Trump’s relentless barrage of falsehoods caused public health confusion. His planned chaos extended to the daily Covid briefings where he lied without pause about a public health crisis. The low point came when Trump suggested Americans inject bleach into their bodies. Trump gave a stand-down order for the virus invasion, but the press doesn’t dwell on that, even while covering the pandemic-fueled rise in violence.
Not surprisingly, the right-wing media this week tried to blame the 2020 murder surge on Democrats, claiming the spike was confined to blue states and blue cities. “Liberals in power have allowed the endangerment of their citizens to get worse by refusing to revert to law enforcement solutions proven to work,” Fox News claimed this week.
False. “Killings were more widespread, occurring in all regions of the United States and not limited to major cities,” as the New York Times reported. The paper noted, “In 1990, New York City and Los Angeles accounted for 13.8 percent of the country’s homicides, compared with 3.8 percent in 2020.” The Times pointed that even tiny (red) towns like Haskell, Okla., population 2,000, suffered badly during the killing year.
“Overall, murder was up at least 20% in counties carried by President Joe Biden as well as by former President Donald Trump in 2020,” the Orlando Sentinel noted. Just look at the FBI numbers — killings last year in deeply red states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi far surpassed the homicide rate for the rest of the country.
The U.S., from coast to coast, just endured a homicide calendar year unlike any other. There’s no way Trump gets a pass on that.
(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
📕 GOOD STUFF:
From Frank Bruni’s latest column in the Times, “Sorry, Stephanie Grisham, You Are Not Redeemed”:
I wish that Grisham had possessed the courage to call out Kushner in real time, when it mattered much more.
But no. She was too busy savoring her perks, relishing her access, enjoying the roller coaster ride. She was in crowded company that way, and the size and tenacity of that crowd are what has always bothered me more than the reckless actions and rancid character of the president — I’ll spare you his name — whom that crowd was serving. After all, the world is full of bad apples, some of whom are bound to wind up at the summit of government, their ascent in fact served by their wormy foulness. I’ve always been aware of that.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
John Mellencamp (featuring Bruce Springsteen), “Wasted Days”
Collectively, they’ve been making music for nearly 100 years, gulp. And collectively , they’ve sold more than 100 million albums. Another gulp. For the first time here, the two American icons finally join forces in the studio.
The results is a winning shuffle, accentuated by an accordion and brush drums. It’s an unhurried meditation by two road-tested warriors who ponder life’s fourth quarter. Note: The song was definitely written by Mellencamp; he’s brutally honest about mortality.
How much sorrow is there left to climbHow many promises are worth the timeAnd who on earth is worth our timeIs there a heart here that I can call mine?
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Apparently Howard Kurtz never got the memo.
On his weekly Fox News show, “Media Buzz,” Kurtz invited a panel of guests to discuss the results of the so-called Arizona audit, which had dragged on all year in an effort by MAGA’s to prove somehow that Trump had won the Copper State last November.
Instead of finding a treasure trove of uncounted Trump ballots, as conspirators had predicted, the pointless review of two million ballots in Maricopa County found that President Joe Biden defeated Trump by slightly more votes than the official count. This, after his crew of misfits inspected ballots for traces of bamboo to determine if they were snuck into to the U.S. from Asia. It made sense that Kurtz would cover the results. It also made sense that Fox viewers would hate him for it.
"A little sad that when the GOP-commissioned and Trump-ally-funded Arizona audit found Biden got 99 more votes, people attack me & the media," Kurtz tweeted Sunday afternoon, after being bombarded by right-wing criticism online. "Raising questions about possible errors & fraud is not the same as proving them, and was reported. This is our tribal politics today."
The memo that Kurtz apparently missed was the one announcing the entire network had decided to ignore the Arizona story, even though Fox News for months had cheered the bogus ballot review, providing fawning coverage. In the week since the Arizona results were released and the story has continued to roil U.S. politics, Kurtz’s segment was the only substantial effort by Fox to address it. (The day the Arizona news broke on Sept. 24, the network’s Bret Baier briefly addressed the topic.)
Forget about the ethical shortcomings of the current blackout — the gaslighting — since those kinds of failures represent the network’s hallmark. What I’m struck by is the sheer cowardice displayed by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Watters, Maria Bartiromo and others who, when faced with a bad outcome in Arizona, couldn’t even summon the courage to acknowledge the story. Instead, they turned and ran like scared school children.
This represents North Korea-level of propaganda. Fox News didn’t try to spin the Arizona results, which confirmed Biden’s victory again. Instead, the network made a wholesale decision not to cover a story which the network had covered all year long.
In truth, Fox News created the Arizona ‘audit’ story because it was Rupert Murdoch’s network that first called the state for Biden on Election Night, sending Trump and his acolytes into a frenzy. Their hysteria soon led loyalists in Arizona to launch an absurd review, over the objections of local Republicans in Maricopa County, who insist there was no fraud, ever.
The Arizona election results were so consuming for Fox News that this spring they purged two key news executives who were responsible for the Election Night call, senior vice president and D.C. managing editor Bill Sammon, and politics editor Chris Stirewalt. And of course, in the weeks directly following Trump’s 8-million vote loss last year, Fox News did everything in its power to fuel right-wing lies about the election being “stolen.”
Yet when the crucial ‘audit’ tabulations were released, Fox News ordered a blackout, one that persists to this day.
I’ve been a close student of Fox News for many years. While Murdoch’s dishonest network has a long, proud history of ignoring stories that don’t fit its preferred, GOP propaganda storyline, I cannot recall an instance where the network breathlessly covered a partisan story for months, eagerly hyping its every twist, and then turned on a dime and cast the entire storyline into the wilderness.
If you watched Fox News over the last seven days you simply would not know there had been an Arizona ballot review, despite the fact Fox News covered the story on February 26, March 29, April 5, April 23, April 26, April 27, May 7, May 16, May 26, June 12, July 11, July 15, July 16, July 19, July 25, July 26, August 1, August 8, August 22, etc.
It’s true that Fox News got outflanked on the ‘audit’ story by far-far-right outlets such as OAN, which essentially co-sponsored the charade. But Fox made sure to give the proceedings plenty of positive coverage.
During Baier’s July 26 program, he set aside 10 minutes to dive into what he called a “a fair and balanced” look at the Arizona “audit.” One week earlier, when reporting on a statement Trump released about the ballot review, Baier noted, “He actually pointed to the reporting on this show on Friday.” On July 15, Sean Hannity told viewers that “shocking results” were being turned up in Arizona.
Back on August 22, when the Fox News team had high hopes about the laughable Arizona ballot exercise, host Bartiromo was indignant about how little attention the event was receiving. “How come there's no discussion about the audit going on in Arizona right now?” she demanded.
Since the bad-news-for-Trump “audit” results were released, Bartiromo hasn’t mentioned them once.
(Photo: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
A revealing Twitter thread this week that went viral captures the deep concerns some journalists have about abiding by the Both Sides model of reporting.
To read all the installments of the thread, click on this tweet:
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Cold War Kids, “What You Say”
This electric, SoCal alt-rock band has been together nearly 20 years, and they keep getting better. Their latest tuneful winner boasts an almost disco-funk groove, driven by lead singer Matthew Schwartz’s soulful, kinetic performance.
It’s a 3-minute jolt of joy.
I've been working my whole life to coverAfraid to speak my mind, from judgementSo let's shake it up this time, be honest'Bout to save the world I love in the darkness
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Embracing their ever-expanding nihilist streak, Republicans remain committed to forcing the U.S. government to default on key payments by refusing to join with Democrats in lifting the debt ceiling this week. Walking away from what had been a long-standing tradition of bipartisan votes in order to ensure a functioning government, regardless of which party was in power, the GOP is purposely creating a looming economic crisis for the Biden administration, and for America.
And the press, led by the New York Times, is helping the GOP get away with it.
The party’s unanimous vote on Monday against raising the ceiling signaled its obstructionist strategy. The government’s funding is now set to expire 12:01 a.m. on Friday.
The United States could plunge into an immediate recession thanks to Republicans’ refusal, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who warns that 6 million jobs could be wiped out, sending the unemployment rate surging to 9 percent.
If the limit is not raised the government won’t be able to borrow more money, forcing officials to choose between missing payments on military salaries for more than one million troops, Social Security benefits for 50 million recipients, and the interest it owes to investors. (Trump’s massive 2017 tax cut means the government has fewer funds today, and therefore needs to borrow more.)
Republicans also filibustered the debt ceiling vote, which meant Democrats needed to meet a 60-vote threshold. “It’s sort of fun to watch their chaos,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said of the Democrats.
Starting from the assumption that of course the party out of power is in favor of creating a financial collapse, the press continues to normalize radical, internal attacks on U.S. security.
“Mainstream media outlets have been treating the potential U.S. debt default as “good news” or an “opportunity” for the very Republicans who are provoking the fight — or chalking it up to “congressional dysfunction” and a problem for the Biden administration to solve,” Media Matters recently noted.
Retreating to its preferred Both Sides starting point, the Beltway press coverage often makes sure not to single out the GOP and its radical behavior. Refusing to publish accurate headlines such as, “Republicans Vote to Derail U.S. Economy,” news outlets prefer to dance around the disturbing truth by spreading the blame around and claiming the looming debt crisis is really “legislative gamesmanship,” as the New York Times recently stressed.
That newspaper has also covered the crisis as simply “a stalemate,” suggesting that “Congress” needs to act. The paper even claimed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been “thrust into a political role,” when she, along with business leaders, have simply beseeched Republicans not to create an unnecessary crisis this week. The whole spectacle was, “a standoff between Democrats and Republicans,” the Times assured readers, while uncritically quoting Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), who claimed Democrats were the ones “playing a dangerous political game with our economy and it’s absolutely unnecessary.”
A Monday Times headline suggested the threat of defaulting on the debt represented a “political game,” and that the showdown was about “partisan stubbornness,” not, apparently, the Republican Party unanimously refusing to avoid a possible debt calamity.
In an opinion piece, the Times’ Michelle Cottle insisted “Getting the bill through the Senate should be a relatively simple matter. Neither party wants a shutdown in the midst of a pandemic.”
That’s categorically false. Today’s GOP is emphatically in favor of defaulting on the debt during a pandemic — members have said so over and over. The headline of Cottle’s piece, “Democrats Face a Reckoning With Themselves,” clearly implied Democrats were to blame for the debt ceiling showdown.
The Times has hardly been alone. As media critic James Fallows notes, Reuters framed the debt vote as “a partisan standoff” and a “partisan fight.” Following Monday night’s vote, Reuters’ misguided, Both Sides headline read, “U.S. Senate Fails to Advance Debt Ceiling, Government Funding Measure.”
CBS News days ago framed the story as “Republicans and Democrats facing off” over “partisan claims” about the debt. In a long piece about the possible default, the Washington Post waited until the 15th paragraph to point out it’s “extraordinary” what the GOP is doing by blocking the vote. That key fact should have been in the first paragraph.
Note that on three occasions when Trump was president and Republicans controlled spending for the entire federal government, Democrats joined with the GOP and voted to lift the debt ceiling. Democrats could have sabotaged the economy in order to score partisan points, but they didn’t because they’re more interested in governing than they are trolling.
The press ought to make that distinction.
(Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
👍🏻 GOOD STUFF:
I mentioned James Fallows above. He recently launched a media newsletter of his own, Breaking the News. It’s excellent and insightful. You can read it here.
From his column on debt ceiling coverage:
A “showdown” over this issue is like a showdown over one party saying that if it doesn’t get its way, it will blow up the Grand Coulee Dam.
And the test for the press is whether it conveys that blunt fact—or whether, by contrast, it portrays this threat as one more “both sides have a point!” disagreement.
I’ll update this post day-by-day, with reportage that is conveying, or obscuring, these realities.
🎤 FUN STUFF: BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Diane Warren and Maren Morris, “I Save Me”
Blockbuster songwriter Warren, who has penned hits for a kaleidoscope of stars including Cher, Toni Braxton, and Aerosmith, decided to curate an entire album using an all-star lineup of singers interpreting her latest songs.
A clear highlight is this moving ode to self-reliance from Nashville’s Morris, who’s voice always bridges the gap between vulnerability and tough as nails.
I don't need no hero, don't waste 'em on meI'll rescue my own self, I'll set myself free'Cause in my story, I save meIn my story, I save me
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American democracy is teetering increasingly close to the abyss as the Republican Party embraces cult-like conspiracies and races to shred the electoral process, now in the form of undemocratic ballot “audits.” Against that dark backdrop, the press continues to play a treacherous game by refusing to acknowledge the danger in play, and insisting that its job is to merely record Trump’s game of demolition.
Even in the wake of the newest revelations of how Trump and his team aggressively tried to engineer a coup by invalidating millions of votes last year, he’s still being normalized in the day-to-day coverage, as the press eagerly awaits his return to the campaign trail. (“When Will Trump Answer the Big 2024 Question?” the New York Times asked.)
There’s nothing Trump could do at this point that would invalidate him in the eyes of the political press, and that includes him shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
Annoyed by President Joe Biden’s “boring” administration, journalists seem eager for the chaos and clicks that Trump creates — no defeated candidate has ever been showered with as much attention as he has.
Recall that it was Trump’s deliberate failure to protect the public from Covid-19 that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths — according to a study this year, which was ignored by the news media. All of that has been flushed down the memory hole. That deadly baggage simply isn’t part of the Trump political coverage today.
He remains a captivating topic who provides endless angles of intrigue and who is treated as a looming star of American politics. Forget about that coup stuff; Trump’s lawless, violent mob that rampaged inside the U.S. Capitol for hours, knocking officers unconscious and destroying offices of Democratic members. Whatever shock Trump’s deadly insurrection initially generated among Beltway journalists has since worn off.
We saw that last week with the emergence of the Trump White House’s coup memo and much of the shoulder-shrugging coverage.
“The ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news broadcasts have all ignored the revelation that one of then-President Donald Trump’s lawyers authored a memo laying out how Trump could effectively pull off a coup,” noted Matt Gertz at Media Matters. (The Times also refused to cover the stunning memo.)
A smoking gun document represented a chilling blueprint that provided step-by-step instructions to overthrow an election. Richard Nixon resigned from office for doing far less than was outlined in the memo. Yet leading news outlets gave the Trump story a pass — some of the same news outlets that spent the summer weirdly fixated on how many trips to his Delaware home Biden was taking as president.
It’s easier to hype Trump’s likely 2024 run if you don’t dwell on the fact he’s a proud authoritarian and committed liar. The press has deliberately learned no lessons over the last twelve months.
One year ago when Trump was first asked at a press briefing if he’d agree to a peaceful transfer of power following the election, regardless of the results, he refused to do so. “We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that,” he said. “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster.”
It was arguably the most undemocratic thing any sitting U.S. president had ever said in public (“Get rid of the ballots”). The Times covered the shocking story not with a front-page, banner headline, but with a ho-hum dispatch on page 15, gently noting Trump "declined an opportunity on Wednesday to endorse a peaceful transfer of power."
Trump’s initial threat to not abide by the election results wasn’t treated as big news. Just like last week’s coup memo wasn’t big news. (CNN and the Washington Post proved to be the strong exceptions on that story.)
The implications are terrifying. “The United States is not unique” in its democratic decline, Staffan Lindberg, a political scientist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg told the Washington Post last year. "Everything we see in terms of decline on these indicators is exactly the pattern of decline” seen in other nations sliding into autocracy.
While in office, Trump demanded the DOJ investigate his political enemies, fired government whistleblowers, and enriched himself by billing the U.S. government millions of dollars, while getting impeached twice. During the run-up to last year’s campaign he sabotaged the U.S. Postal Service; wrecked the census, and undermined the legitimacy of the electoral process itself.
Today, the D.C. press can barely contain its excitement at the idea of the 2020 loser running again, and possibly returning to the White House. And they have signaled they’ll make no changes in how they cover him. That glee stands in sharp contrast to the same press corps that told Hillary Clinton to “go away” after she lost in 2016.
We know news outlets miss Trump because everyone knows if he wins a second term, every minute of every White House press briefing would be carried live and in full, just as they were for his first term. For Biden’s White House though, the live coverage was curtailed just weeks into the Democrat’s presidency.
A dangerous autocrat who’s devoted to wrecking the American election process is waiting in the wings to become the GOP nominee in 2024, and the Beltway press can’t wait.
GOOD STUFF:
🇦🇫 From the Washington Post’s “To Help U.S. Allies Flee Afghanistan, These Advocates Turned to Iran”:
Then, earlier this month, Amed Khan, a New-York based philanthropist who was part of a group of NGO workers and private citizens trying to help the lawmakers, was sitting in a car in Uzbekistan staring at Google Maps when he had a radical idea.
“How can we get the Iranians to save the day with regard to U.S. allies stuck in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a text message to a colleague with contacts in Iran’s government — setting off a complex, weeks-long effort to get the women and their families to safety, aided by Afghans who faced significant risk, advocates around the world and Iran, one of America’s most committed adversaries.
🏄 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dave Hause, “Surfboard”
The pride of Philadelphia, Hause’s new Americana rock album is filled with all kinds of catchy and endearing wisdoms. Here, he ponders the Lord above, and wonders if he/she is willing to cut a guy some slack.
Like Dear LordI need a surfboardCause I can't figure out how to not drown in these wavesDear LordI saw your billboardAbout hell and fire and how I need to be savedSo I'm praying straight away
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In a stunning rebuke of the Biden administration, and proof that legislators are still fuming over the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, a bipartisan group of lawmakers “stormed out” of a classified briefing session because “officials failed to answer their basic questions.”
At least that’s the story CNN and Republicans told this week. But there’s little proof that bipartisan outburst actually happened, and plenty to indicate it did not. The episode seems to be the latest, heavy-handed example of the Beltway press pumping up administration critics in an effort to boost controversy surrounding Afghanistan — to keep treating hollow GOP claims as breaking news, while portraying President Joe Biden as being constantly under siege.
If Republicans and Democrats did collectively storm out of a closed-door intelligence briefing from top Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security officials, it would have represented a truly extraordinary news event. That kind of across-the-board protocol breach simply does not happen when high ranking players give national security briefings on Capitol Hill. It would be unprecedented.
There’s no indication the walkout actually occurred though, in part because CNN remains the only news outlet to report on the alleged bipartisan act of Congressional disobedience. If lawmakers had angrily marched out because questions weren’t being answered, news would have spread like wildfire across the Beltway and journalists would have easily confirmed the event.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, it appears nameless Republican sources spun a “stormed out” tale and CNN’s Kylie Atwood reported it as fact [emphasis added]:
Multiple lawmakers angrily stormed out of a classified briefing with members of the Biden administration on Afghanistan on Wednesday morning, according to three sources familiar with the briefing.
The Republican and Democratic lawmakers grew frustrated after State Department, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Security officials failed to answer their basic questions during the briefing for members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the sources told CNN.
The report was quite clear — Republicans and Democrats furiously headed for the exits. And that’s what made the report so explosive, since Republicans complaining about the Biden administration barely qualifies as news anymore.
Atwood told CNN’s Jake Tapper the same story on Wednesday afternoon: “Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, we should note, Jake, stormed out of the room because they felt like they weren't getting the detailed information that they needed to really understand what else needs to be done here with regard to the U.S. evacuation efforts from Afghanistan.”
Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, then told Tapper that "everybody walked out." The entire briefing room just emptied, according to the GOP tale told on CNN. (It’s quite likely McCaul, or his aides, served as sources for CNN’s dispatch about the walk-out.)
The truth is, CNN’s own report badly undercuts the idea that Democrats bolted the briefing because their Afghan queries were not being addressed.
From the eighth paragraph of the CNN story. [emphasis added]:
A Democratic aide told CNN that some of the members left Wednesday's classified briefing because there were Republican members who were not wearing masks in accordance with Covid-19 protocols. The aide added that many members are satisfied with the engagement from the State Department.
Who were the unnamed Democrats who stormed out?
Following the briefing, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the Chairwoman of the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, issued a joint statement thanking her colleagues for participating and looking forward to “conducting bipartisan oversight of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”
If “everybody” had “stormed” out of the briefing — if Democrats were as angry as Republicans — wouldn’t Maloney and Lynch have mentioned that?
On Wednesday, CNN’s John King repeated the briefing story, but reported “angry lawmakers” had marched out — suddenly all references to Democrats had been eliminated.
As for any questions that were not directly answered at the briefing, which supposedly sparked the bipartisan furor, on Tuesday when U.S. senators received their own, similar briefing from top military leaders, lots of the questions posed were best answered by others. As Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. told the Navy Times, “a number of the questions in there applied to the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, and they were not there to answer them.”
It’s fitting that it was CNN caught juicing the Afghanistan story because the network for weeks tried to turn the troop withdrawal story into something that it’s not — a presidency-defining failure.
It was CNN’s Clarissa Ward who famously declared that the United States’ effort to evacuate thousands of Afghans was doomed to failure. “I'm sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven't seen a single US plane take off,” she reported from Kabul on August 20. “How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”
In the end, the U.S. evacuated more than 120,000 people.
At one point, CNN claimed the U.S. was inflicting “moral injury” by “abandoning” its allies, even as America continued to airlift tens of thousands of allies in the one of the largest, most successful post-war evacuations in history.
Simultaneously, CNN claimed Biden’s long-expected troop withdrawal meant the U.S. was “walking away from the world stage” and “leaving Europe exposed,” even though most European troops left Afghanistan seven years ago.
Bottom line: It’s highly unlikely that Democrats joined forces with Republicans this week to snub high-ranking administration officials and “stormed out” of an Afghanistan briefing.
GOOD STUFF:
Media critic Dan Froomkin returns to his excellent site, Press Watch, with a new call to arms, “Press Watch Mission Statement: Political Journalism Needs a Reset”:
The uncontrolled spread of lies is anathema to everything American journalism stands for. Fighting it is the calling of our time.
But so far, all we’ve seen is baby steps. Yes, toward the end of the Trump presidency, political reporters finally started being a bit more assertive about describing some of what Trump and his enablers were saying as “lacking evidence,” as false, or even as lies. But as we have seen, for instance during the George W. Bush presidency, when a lie is repeated over and over again, calling it out once or twice doesn’t prevent it from gaining currency.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Barenaked Ladies, “Here Together”
I first saw BNL a million years ago at the beloved Bottom Line in New York City. The Scarborough, Ontario band was filled with kids who wore shorts in the winter and ended their high-energy, sing and laugh-along shows with a grand, acoustic version of Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power.”
The band is populated by mellower dads now, but they still have a knack for clever, thoughtful acoustic pop, as their new album reminds us.
Oxygen was gettin' thinMade it from the bottom of the oceanYou said, Don't miss me muchBut I could never hold on to you long enough
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National Public Radio relayed more shocking Covid news on Monday: “In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, more people died in Alabama than were born in the state.” The pandemic has shrunk the red state. Yet local Republican leaders still oppose mask and vaccine mandates, leaving the Trump outpost exposed to more fatalities.
But like so many news outlets, NPR missed the real story. The pile of Alabama deaths continue to mount not simply because of Covid. But because so many people in the Trump-friendly state have been brainwashed by bad-faith partisan actors and they refuse to get inoculated. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.
Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”
The number of Americans who are dying every 36 hours from Covid now surpasses the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely preventable crisis, yet it rages because we have people like the red state restaurant owner who is kicking out patrons if they refuse to take off their masks. It’s pure nihilism.
The mindless behavior is hard to describe, and the rest of the world must be looking on in slack-jawed astonishment as Trump voters lead a mad movement powered by Fox News. The network is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of television news — it’s deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.
From PizzaGate, to QAnon, to the current anti-vaccine and anti-mask hysteria, the GOP has been brainwashed. It’s no secret — lots of victims openly admit it. Still, the press shies away, nervous about offending conservatives by portraying them as mindless zombies being easily duped about a miraculously safe and effective vaccine. (It’s the same reason news outlets refused to call Trump a “liar.”)
Instead of calling out the Covid zombies, the press coddles them, especially white, Southern ones, depicting them as merely “vaccine hesitant,” “vaccine-reluctant,” or “vaccine skeptics.”
A recent Wall Street Journal report on a deadly Covid surge in West Virginia driven entirely by the unvaccinated noted, “Early on, the state excelled at vaccinating people in nursing homes and others who were eager to get the shot, but then it ran into a roadblock of hesitant people, state officials say.” [Emphasis added.]
West Virginia “ran into a roadbloack of hesitant people,” the newspaper reported, and that was it; the Journal delved no further into the how or the why. Fact: The unvaccinated phenomenon in America represents the story of Covid today. But the press tip-toes around it, pretending it’s normal for millions of Americans to risk death by refusing to take a vaccine that’s been administered billions of times worldwide.
Within the media, there’s lots of tsk-tsking commentary about vaccine “misinformation.” But the press continues to look away from the consequences of mass brainwashing —millions of Americans believe the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. And they’re lashing out in public, staging deranged acts of civil disobedience, often inside restaurants and at local school board meetings, where the white-rage screaming and name-calling commences.
On Monday, the New York Times reported on the deadly surge in yet another red state, Tennessee, and how the governor there is fighting vaccine mandates even as Tennessee reports more new coronavirus cases, relative to its population, than any other state in the country. “Officials said that Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, was politically constrained by a deeply conservative legislature and a political base that became more uncompromising during the pandemic,” the Times reported.
That’s the weird, passive language the paper used for describing brainwashing — for the people in Tennessee who have developed an irrational opposition to the vaccine.
Reporting on the surge of monoclonal antibody treatments for MAGA Covid patients, the Times recently announced, “Vaccine-resistant Americans are turning to the treatment with a zeal that has, at times, mystified their doctors,”
That description is a joke because it suggests there’s thoughtful, fact-based analysis involved. It also ignores the fact virtually none of these people opposed prior vaccines, including the many shots all their young children need in order to enroll in public school. They didn’t oppose vaccines until a Democratic president urged them to take the Covid inoculation. (Twenty years ago, Republicans were more likely to believe in the safety of vaccines than Democrats were.)
Idiocy, of course, now defines the brainwash movement on the right. At Breitbart, John Nolte announced that pro-vaccine leaders like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Dr. Anthony Fauci actually don’t want conservatives to get vaccinated because they want conservatives to die off. So how do Biden, Pelosi, and Fauci make sure Republicans remain unvaccinated? By pleading with everyone to get inoculated.
“The push for mandates is another ploy to get us to dig in and not do what’s best for ourselves because no one wants to feel like they’re caving to a mandate,” wrote Nolte. “Nothing else makes sense to me,” he noted, without an ounce of self-awareness.
Brainwashing itsn’t typically a topic that’s covered when dissecting mainstream American politics. Sadly, it needs to be. And fast.
(Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
When it comes to journalism, more is usually better.
After years of watching the newspaper industry get demolished on the business side and newsrooms eviscerated, here’s some welcome news: “The Washington Post Announces the Addition of 41 Editing Roles, Including 2 Masthead Positions”:
We are delighted to announce a major expansion to accelerate our transformation into a fully 24/7 news organization and strengthen the leadership of the newsroom. The addition of 41 editing positions will grow our capacity to produce timely breaking news, revelatory enterprise and definitive investigative work; create visually rich stories that our audiences find compelling; cover topics that resonate with younger, more diverse readers; and develop innovations that will define a new era of digital journalism. The expansion will allow us to create a greater number of career paths across the newsroom and increase the number of journalists of color in editing roles.
🌒 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
DJ Noiz featuring Brooks & Dunn, “Neon Moon”
It’s the remix that’s launched a million (or so) Tik Tok clips this summer. Featuring a ‘90’s Nashville barroom classic by Brooks & Dunn, updated with a sly calypso beat from DJ Noiz, people of all shapes and sizes love dancing to this.
When the sun goes down on my side of townThat lonesome feeling comes to my doorAnd the whole world turns blueThere's a rundown bar 'cross the railroad tracksI got a table for two way in the backWhere I sit alone and think of losing you
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If you ever need proof that the Beltway media often functions on the level of a high school cafeteria, where weird cliques are formed and the cool kids use their power to keep others in place, look no further than the odd spectacle that unfolded when Politico recently published an absurd gotcha piece targeting Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.
The paper-thin premise was that the White House is a fan of Rubin’s writing, which often includes calling out misguided coverage of President Joe Biden, and staffers often promote her work online. The relationship is newsworthy, Politico claimed, because years ago Rubin was a conservative. (She bailed on the GOP when Trump arrived.)
Politico also referenced three nameless Post staffers who had unflattering things to say about Rubin’s work. One indignant, and anonymous, colleague insisted, “Jen Rubin is not a good representation of the news coverage of the Washington Post.”
The dopey Politico piece was headlined, “The Jennifer Rubin <--> WH Symbiosis,” suggesting there was something fishy going on between Rubin’s work and the White House; that she functions as a cog in the White House’s p.r. machine.
The gotcha attack also featured Politico’s decision to print an email response Rubin had sent to its reporters, which she indicated was off the record. That move created lots of online chatter about what the guidelines surrounding “off the record” are and if the outlet went out of its way to try to burn Rubin.
For me though, the clear take-away was that a Beltway columnist who writes unapologetically about how the political press often produces awful journalism while covering Biden — the way it hugs the Both Sides narrative and gets played by the GOP — she was thrown a high-and-tight brush-back pitch. Politico sent a message to Beltway insiders that it’s not okay to question the collective Biden coverage. It’s not okay, as Rubin has done, to call out the media’s completely over-the-top and borderline hysterical Afghanistan coverage. And it’s not okay to deride Politico’s brand of click bait journalism, as Rubin likes to do.
Forget about the silly “symbiosis” nonsense that Politico was pushing, since it’s quite normal for an administration to try to boost its advocates in the press when engaging in public debate. The point of the attack piece was to diminish an important voice who has been making Beltway insiders look bad by highlighting media malpractice during Biden’s first eight months in office.
In short, Rubin’s guilty of breaking a DC cardinal rule for the press: Don’t hold each other accountable. And certainly don’t hold journalists accountable when doing it from the left. There’s a reason why there was so little self-reflection after the 2016 election, when the male-dominated political press created an ugly double standard for the first woman nominee.
A long-standing Beltway tradition is that the elite media do not have to answer to progressive critics, and certainly do not have to concede mistakes. Instead, a defensive posture is struck and newsrooms defend their own, even when they come under fire for obvious blunders. But that’s harder to do when voices from inside, like Rubin’s, are the ones calling for accountability. If a columnist for the Washington Post can so clearly find fault with the Biden coverage, that makes it difficult for the Beltway press to claim its coverage is fine and that only fringe voices are being critical.
Which brings us to Politico’s misguided gotcha attempt. Note that Politico didn’t question Rubin’s published work; it didn’t uncover any errors or examples of misinformation. Instead, the premise was Rubin is too cozy with a Democratic White House and that she’s accused of “parroting the administration's critiques of the media.”
For the record, there’s an entire billion-dollar, right-wing media infrastructure that spent the previous four years parroting the Trump administration’s critique of the media. Did Politico ever go after any of those players for their “symbiosis”?
The telltale sign of how Politico was trying to undermine Rubin was the reporters’ decision to publish an email statement she sent them after being contacted about this pending story, which she labeled “OFF THE RECORD.” Politico ignored that and published it anyway, insisting “Since we never agreed to conduct such an off-the-record conversation, we are publishing it below in full.”
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman rushed in to defend Politico on Twitter, claiming it was common practice to ignore “off the record” requests, such as Rubin’s, if both the reporter and the subject hadn’t agreed to the terms up front.
Anyone want to bet that while covering the Trump White House, sources sent “off the record” quotes to Haberman without setting up the terms first and then she did absolutely nothing with the information, let alone publish it in full with the source’s name attached, because she did not want to burn any Trump sources. Because that’s how Beltway journalism works.
If Rubin’s email were studied in a journalism seminar, participants might conclude Politico acted ethically publishing it. In the real world though, the kind of stunt the news site pulled is only used when engineering a hit piece, which is exactly what Politico published, targeting a columnist who calls out crummy Biden coverage.
The attack sent a clear message — the cool kids in the cafeteria do not approve.
(Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
🧮 GOOD STUFF:
Following up to Friday’s column on how the press is badly overplaying the “Biden Collapse” narrative, take a look at how the good-news-for-Biden poll got played over the weekend:
🎙 EXTRA STUFF:
Had a great time discussing all things media with The Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast. Click on the tweet below for the link to the podcast.
🎧 FUN STUFF:
Eddie Vedder, “Long Way”
Pearl Jam’s lead singer previews his new solo album with this first single, which to my ears sounds like the best Tom Petty song in a decade.
By that, I mean Vedder on “Long Way” seems to be locked in to channeling the late, great rock singer. From the croon, to the catchy mid-tempo highway groove, to Vedder’s backing band which sounds like a note-for-note recreation of The Heartbreakers.
I’m enthralled with all of it.
She was his all and everythingBut her strength it needed spaceHer love was but a hauntingShe left but never went away
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Amid breathless reports of a political “free fall” and reeling from the White House’s “summer from hell,” the Beltway press has leaned into the idea that Joe Biden’s presidency is unraveling — that his approval rating is in a state of collapse.
Except it’s not true. Instead, it’s the media falling in love with their favorite Dems In Disarray storyline. The same media that shrugged at Trump’s chronically awful approval rating.
In a typical, overheated dispatch, a CNBC report recently announced, “Biden's Approval Ratings Have Plummeted, and That Could Spell trouble for Democrats in Congress.” First off, the idea that Biden’s approval rating in September 2021, is going to impact the outcome of November 2022, midterms makes no sense. Secondly, Biden’s approval rating has fallen a grand total of four points in the past month, according to the polling average tabulated at FiveThirtyEight. So much for the “plummet.”
Is Biden's’ approval rating down this summer? It is, to 46 percent. Is he in some sort of manic freefall as the press suggests, fueled by the troop pullout from Afghanistan and the Delta surge? He is not.
A true ratings collapse would be like when President Ronald Reagan’s approval dropped nine points in five days when the Iran Contra scandal broke. Or when George W. Bush’s cratered 16 points in three months following the launch of the disastrous Iraq War.
Here are the Biden approval ratings from last 15 polls posted at FiveThirtyEight, minus the Rasmussen surveys, which are notoriously pro-Republican: 46, 44, 47, 47, 49, 47, 48, 42, 48, 49, 47, 44, 47, 50, 48.
If you take out the high (50) and the low (42) data points, the results have been markedly consistent this month. Where’s the plummet?
When a recent Quinnipiac poll showed Biden’s approval at 42%, Newsweek announced, “Joe Biden's Approval Rating Continues to Sink, Shows No Signs of Improving.” Newsweek then ignored the fact that the next seven polls released after Quinnipiac all showed him improving.
The cherry picking seems intentional. When a NPR/PBS voter survey in early September showed Biden’s approval at 43 percent, CNN’s Chris Cillizza pounced: “This Poll Number Will Send Democrats Into a Panic.” A week later though, Cillizza was silent when CNN’s own poll found Biden’s approval climbing to 52 percent.
CNN seemed to struggle with how to cover its good-news-for-Biden poll when the Beltway’s preferred narrative was his “summer from hell.” This was CNN’s online headline for a story that showed Biden with a strong approval rating: “Americans Turn Pessimistic Amid Concerns Over Economy and Coronavirus.” Later in a news segment, when a CNN anchor suggested the network’s latest showing had Biden’s rating at 43 percent, she had to be corrected by a guest who pointed out CNN’s survey showed a 52 percent mark.
Biden’s summertime slide has been fueled by Afghanistan and Covid, two unique and pressing challenges. But it also represents a natural progression for first term presidents as the so-called “honeymoon” with voters slowly wears off. Between being sworn in January 2009, and September 1 of that year, President Barack Obama, a successful two-term president, lost seven points on his approval rating, which is exactly how many points Biden has dipped since his inauguration.
Note that as with Biden, the press often obsessed over minor downward movements in Obama’s approval in order to concoct a narrative about a president “sinking” and “plunging.” At one point, a New York Times editorial was so anxious to push a narrative about Obama's supposedly broken presidency, it fabricated his approval rating, claiming it was 40 percent in a new poll, when it was actually 50 percent in that new survey.
The contrast with how the press has treated the popularity of the last two Democratic presidents with how they treated Trump’s unpopularity couldn’t be more startling.
When Biden’s approval rating first fell below 50 percent this summer, it was considered newsworthy, as pundits weigh in on the approval “slide” and wondered if the Afghanistan story was going to doom his presidency. Rarely included in that heavy-handed analysis was the fact that at the same point in his presidency, Trump was sitting at a woeful 37 percent approval rating.
While Trump wallowed in abysmal ratings for most of his presidency (he never cracked 50%), the press mostly looked away, treating his poor standing as being usual. It was normalized.
Here’s a quick example. In October, 2018 Politico published a piece about Trump’s fire hose, “new media strategy,” where he appeared on TV without pause and constantly answered reporters’ shouted questions at the White House. In the eyes of Politico, it was a novel and winning strategy — it “worked” for Trump. And Politico even singled out Trump’s top aide who was responsible for the approach.
Of course, what Politico never mentioned, and what the D.C. press didn’t really think mattered in October 2018, was that Trump’s approval stood at a lowly 41 percent.
Can you imagine today if Biden’s approval fell five more points, to 41 percent, and the Beltway press started writing stories about how smart his communications strategy was? It’s inconceivable because Democrats are held to a tougher media standard.
👍🏻 GOOD STUFF:
It’s so important to keep in context just what the far-right media are doing to this country.
From Greg Sargent’s Washington Post piece, “The Right-Wing Media is Helping Trump Destroy Democracy. A New Poll Shows How”:
The poll’s big finding is that people who rely heavily on Fox News and other right-wing media are overwhelmingly more likely to believe the election was stolen from Trump — and are overwhelmingly less likely to blame Trump for the insurrection — than those who do not.
In one sense, that’s a no-brainer. But taken together, those views add up to something truly toxic: The “belief” that the election was stolen, and the simultaneous refusal to assign accountability for an effort to violently overthrow our constitutional order, suggest right-wing propaganda may be softening the ground for a more concerted abandonment of democracy going forward.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Mavis Staples, “One More Change” (ALA.NI Remix)
Originally written and produced by the mult-talented Ben Harper, this luscious 2021 remix from London’s ALA.NI represents a stirring depiction of hope, as only a civil rights icon like Staples can deliver.
“Upbeat and with a certain spring in its step, the song is reminiscent of a classic soulful do[o]-op, and help uplift the song and allude to a positive future, one in reach if we’re willing to take those next steps forward,” Grimy Goods noted this year.
Note: For Staples fans who live in the Washington, D.C. area, she, along with Amy Helm, will performing a benefit concert for JusticeAid, which promotes justice through the arts, on October 19. For more informaiton, click here.
I've worried so long I'm not worried nowThis heavy load Helped me set it downSome things take a lifetimeSome things can't waitNow I've got one moreOne more change to make
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Here’s the collection of words and phrases the New York Times recently used in a California dispatch as part of the paper’s attempt not to employ “lies” when describing pre-emptive and baseless Republican lies about the state’s gubernatorial recall vote:
• “false election claims”
• “baseless allegations”
• “election denialism”
• “baseless allegations”
• “false allegations”
• “relentless falsehoods”
• “false claims”
• “conspiracy theories”
• “baseless claim”
• “claimed without evidence”
For the California race, Trump (“I predict it’s a rigged election”), Fox News' Tomi Lahren and the leading Republican candidate to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, AM radio talker Larry Elder, all suggested voter fraud was going to allow the Democrat escape being recalled. (He did, easily.) Piggy-backing on Trump’s Big Lie, the recall fraud campaign signaled that the Republican Party increasingly won’t accept election results when they lose.
Yet news outlets like the Times played word games in order to avoid honest and blunt descriptions — the Times never used “lie” in an article that was all about GOP election lies.
The stilted language the Times used in order to avoid telling the truth represents the kind of unnatural word choices journalists make when they want to whitewash deeply disturbing Republican behavior. (Who, in everyday life, uses “false claims” when they’re talking about obvious lies?)
We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election defeat and major news outlets are still peddling “falsehood” gibberish in the face of the Republican Party’s increasingly undemocratic behavior?
Journalists stubbornly refuse to learn a crucial lesson from their Trump era failure — call GOP lies “lies.” By soft pedaling right-wing claims that the California recall vote might be stolen or rigged, reporters made the same mistake they made after Trump lost re-election by 8 million votes — they played nice. And they gave the GOP a pass in its attempt to normalize its attacks on election confidence in this country.
Last winter, even as Trump actively tried to engineer the open theft of a presidential contest, and held White House discussions with deranged, conspiracy-peddling advisers, news outlets kept producing ho-hum updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his “quixotic” legal “strategy,” and how he was “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House. One Politico dispatch even dismissed Trump’s erratic post-election behavior as little more than “bad sportsmanship."
Except that “chicanery” and “bad sportsmanship” soon led to a deadly coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol, as violent Trump fanatics tried to overturn the election results.
The Times California recall article last week was a textbook example in how not to cover obvious blatant lies, but at least the report addressed them. Days later, in its California recall election page-one finale, the paper made no mention of the fact that the leading Republican candidate in the race was actively spreading doubt about the election results being trustworthy. Somehow that did not garner a single mention.
The Times has hardly been alone in falling down on this story. The Washington Post recently announced, “California’s Recall Becomes the New Epicenter of Unfounded Fraud Claims,” and refused to call the lies “lies.” CNN highlighted “voter fraud fabrications” in California, “baseless election fraud claims,” and “debunked claims.”
This media malfeasance — the downplaying —unfolds as stunned scholars warn us that Republicans are putting American democracy at risk with their unprecedented and brazen attacks on free and fair elections.
What’s discouraging is that months ago the Times signaled it was going to accurately describe Trump’s 2020 election “lies.” (Headline: "In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies") So why when covering the exact types of lies being laundered about the California recall vote did the daily revert to nonsense language like “false claims” and “baseless allegations”?
The good news is we have seen examples of news outlets learning from Trump era mistakes and adjusting the way they cover GOP misinformation. Earlier this year as a clown-show ballot review unfolded in Arizona, most news outlets played along and treated the charade as an “audit” without including qualifiers, such as “so-called,” “alleged,” or “absurd.” In the process, the press lent an undeserved air of legitimacy to the joke proceedings.
Today however, very few national outlets call what happened in Arizona an “audit,” as the staged events now spread to other states, such as Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently explained to readers that the paper “is not currently referring to attempts by Pennsylvania Republicans to investigate the 2020 presidential election as an audit because there's no indication it would follow the best practices or the common understanding of an audit among nonpartisan experts.”
That’s progress in terms of standing up to GOP misinformation and not letting bad-faith actors hijack our language. But it made the wholesale failure regarding California recall “lies” all the more distressing.
Memo to media: Words matter.
(Photo: Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan took a close look at the Inquirer’s decision to not use “audit” in its news coverage of GOP ballot reviews.
From the Post’s “Words Matter. So These Journalists Refuse to Call GOP Election Meddling an ‘Audit’”:
“We think it is critical to speak plain truths about efforts to make it harder to vote and about efforts to sow doubts about the electoral process,” Dan Hirschhorn, senior politics editor at the Inquirer, told me. “These are not ‘he said/she said’ stories — there is clear, objective truth here.”
More plain truths from the Inquirer: In the story carrying this explainer box, the paper uses the term “forensic investigation” — which is what the GOP wants to call it — in quotation marks. A sub-headline makes it clear that this effort is “modeled off the months-long partisan review in Arizona,” widely regarded as irrevocably flawed and unnecessary to begin with, initiated by Republican lawmakers carrying water for Trump and placed in the hands of dubious private firms. (“Fraudit” may be a more accurate term.)
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dierks Bentley (featuring Breland and Hardy), “Beers on Me”
A late entry for Song of the Summer among a certain music-loving demographic, “Beers on Me” is a feel-good, laid-back gem wtih a unapologetic vibe of inclusion.
Bentley’s been one of Nashville’s most reliable stars for more than a decade. But it’s the young bucks, Breland and Hardy, who steal the show here with their sly vocal delivery.
Everybody's got a problem, so do IBut we ain't gonna solve 'em on a Saturday nightI just put a paycheck in the bankAnd I ain't hit the town in a minute to drinkYou had one of them, one of those weeksStuck on repeat, I'll save you a seat
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Busy extending the list of “crises” that President Joe Biden must face, the Beltway media are busy adding Covid vaccinations as a looming failure for the Democrat, as the nation readies a national mandate for the inoculations.
By putting the onus on Biden for the millions of defiant Trump voters who refuse to take the free, safe, and effective shot even as their neighbors become sick and die around them, the press is boosting the GOP — and missing a huge story.
We’re witnessing one of the great mass brainwashings in American political history, as millions of Fox News Covid zombies eagerly swallow an ocean of lies, distortions, and misinformation. Yet the press blames Biden for not being able to convince them otherwise. Worse, the press blames the president without ever acknowledging the large-scale brainwashing that is happening.
Uncomfortable with reporting on a conservative movement that has lost touch with reality, the Beltway media are much more comfortable treating the vaccine story as one about a Democratic president who’s failing to properly communicate and persuade. And one who’s being outmaneuvered by Republicans.
Incredibly, the Washington Post recently cited as a "political win" for the GOP the fact that "Republican governors in several states have also had success in undermining Biden’s efforts to require masks for schoolchildren and others in an effort to limit Covid-19 spread."
In a headline that was later changed, the Associated Press claimed that with his mandate announcement last week Biden had declared “war on the unvaccinated.”
The New York Times announced, “Delta’s rise has been fueled in part by the inability of Mr. Biden and his administration to persuade millions of vaccine-refusing Americans to inoculate themselves against the virus,” in a type of dispatch that has been repeated nonstop by news outlets in recent weeks.
Virtually every reporter is working from the same script: Covid is surging and deaths are up because of Biden’s “inability” to persuade vaccine “skeptics.” What the Times report never addressed, and virtually none of them ever do, is that the reason millions of Americans still won’t get vaccinated is because there is a choreographed, deep-pocketed political and media campaign designed to make sure millions of people don’t get vaccinated. Period.
The press wants us to believe this is all just happening, by chance. It’s not. Biden is battling powerful forces that reject science and are committed to prolonging the pandemic. That’s essential to understand our continued health crisis, yet the press refuses to address it. Holding vaccine dead enders responsible for their actions is just not something they want to do.
Following Biden’s Covid address to the nation on Thursday, CNN’s Jake Tapper not only deducted points for the president’s supposed “scolding tone,” but the CNN anchor suggested Trump voters should not be singled out for extending the deadly pandemic. By Tapper’s telling, because Trump voters are being lied to about the vaccine by far-right players, it’s the liars who are to blame — who are the “villains” — not the millions of people who willingly embrace the falsehoods.
Last month, the Times posted a seven-minute, narrated report about an Arkansas community in the Ozarks with a ridiculously low vaccination/high Covid rate. “Rhetoric on freedom and choice is dissuading people from getting the shot, at a terrible cost,” the Times tweeted, while promoting the clip. But who was responsible for the rhetoric that was creating a“terrible cost”? The seven-minute Times report never mentioned Fox News and never addressed who was pumping out all the Covid lies. But the report did capture lots of Arkansas locals spouting virus untruths: “We’re talking about an unproven, untested vaccine.”
Eight months after the vaccine arrived we know millions of Trump voters won’t take it. That’s not the news, although it remains a simple story to tell — and to blame Biden. Instead, journalists ought to be telling the harder truths and fixating on the why, and specifically calling out the forces at play.
The Times’ Arkansas report did acknowledge “misinformation certainly exists here,” but that single sentence represented the entirety of the coverage of that topic. The report also never mentioned “Republican,” and instead referenced “leaders” who have politicized the vaccine.
Just yesterday, the Times published a piece, “How Outrage Over Vaccine Mandates Became a Mainstream GOP Stance,” and failed to reference Fox News, which has aired hysterical, non-stop attacks on the federal mandate since it was announced. Fact: That’s how outrage over common-sense mandates became mainstreamed within the GOP. Also on Sunday, the Times produced, “The U.S. is Falling to the Lowest Vaccination Rates of the World’s Wealthiest Democracies,” which included not one sentence addressing the why.
More recently, CNN produced its own 10-minute video about another poorly vaccinated Ozarks community, in Carter County Missouri. CNN spent days interviewing locals who regurgitated anti-virus rhetoric: “I ain’t takin’ that s**t.” “There’s not enough research on it.” “I believe if the good Lord wants me right now it doesn’t matter if I take a vaccine or if I don’t.”
CNN omitted all references to Fox News or the Republican Party, and other bad-faith actors who have brainwashed so many people into thinking the Covid vaccine is evil despite the fact that inoculations have been part of everyday American life for decades — school children all across the country are not allowed to attend classes without vaccines for measles, mumps and many other diseases.
As with the Times report, the CNN segment was exceedingly gracious while interviewing Trump voters as they spewed nonstop misinformation about the vaccine and prolonged the pandemic.
🖥 GOOD STUFF:
I certainly would not want to be in the business of trying to recruit tech executives to move to Texas these days.
From the Washington Post’s “Texas Wanted to be the Tech Haven of the U.S. Its New Abortion Bill and Other Measures are Causing Workers to Rethink Their Move”:
For the past several years, Texas has been selling itself as a tech haven attracting start-ups and tech companies such as Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, and even Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire co-founder and CEO, who has moved to the state. Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Apple all have grown their presence in the state, opening new warehouses, data centers, and production facilities.
But Texas’s recent swerve to the right on abortion, voting restrictions as well as a ban on coronavirus vaccine mandates has many workers and industry leaders like Bhaskaran worried about retaining workers and recruiting top tech talent to the state. In August, Texas had 33,843 tech job openings — the second highest in the U.S. after California — according to a report from the Computing Technology Industry Association. That’s up 56% from a year earlier.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bob Schneider, “In a Roomful of Blood with a Sleeping Tiger”
A beloved staple of the Austin, TX. music scene, Schneider’s newest is a near-perfect blend of blues and acoustic rock. Right from the first notes, his welcoming honey voice, the shuffle of the brush drums and the mellow harmonica hook you in for a smooth ride.
In the morning hours of foreverI’m running down your streetPulling rainbows out my feetFlames cover all your kissesI'm a psychedelic freakAlone here on the moonHolding a spoonful of wishes just for you
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Willfully risking death by refusing to take the miraculously safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine, Trump voters nationwide have embarked on one of the deadliest and most illogical movements in American history — they’ve morphed into QAnon-fueled, brainwashed, Covid zombies, immune to rational thought.
Fresh off of backing a deadly insurrection and trying to overturn free and fair elections, they have set their sights on extinguishing American norms.
President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday in hopes of creating a path forward out of the pandemic entirely because Covid zombies, a radical menace, refuse to get vaccinated. They, along with local Republican officials, help fuel the Delta surge, which has shuttered school districts nationwide and set off local mayhem as Trump voters wage war on mask mandates. “Fights broke out and at least one person was handcuffed after a Missouri school board voted unanimously to mandate masking in schools amid a surge of coronavirus cases in the area,” read a recent dispatch.
The zombies are part of a deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going, and gladly risking infections by embracing anti-science demagoguery.
What’s telling is that while Trump was in the White House and the Beltway press glowingly profiled his supporters, preferably in red state diners, that’s not the story the media were telling. Anxious to brush off claims of liberal media bias, reporters fanned out to Trump bastions to eagerly record every utterance from his supporters. We witnessed a conveyor belt of stories about blue-collar voters in virtually all-white counties inside red states announcing that they really, really like Trump. (“Hitting it out of the ballpark”; “I think he’s doing a great job.”)
Yet virtually none of that gentle coverage hinted at a radical, conspiratorial dark side at play. Routinely depicted as hard-working folks in search of a political path, and thankful for Trump leadership, the Trump voter coverage deliberately failed to pull back the curtain and reveal even small glimpses of today’s manic, anti-mask and anti-vaccine mobs. Instead, the press presented a gauzy fantasy about what was going on in conservative America.
Committed to the idea that Trump's white voters were the most important, and most authentic, voices in American politics, the media spent years celebrating them, marveling at their loyalty in the face of Trump's erratic behavior.
It was relentless. Over the span of just four days in early 2017, the New York Times published a long profile on women who voted for Trump, a piece on Trump fans who traveled to the inauguration, and an adoring profile of a Trump voter who lied about Hillary Clinton during the campaign and profited from his fake news business. Later, even a Trump supporter who had nice things to say about Nazis received a gentle Times profile. (Actual Trump voter Times headlines: "These Guys Really Like Trump"; “Trump’s Fights Are Their Fights. They Have His Back Unapologetically")
Today, those Trump voters have mobilized as Covid zombies and gone from insisting the pandemic was a hoax in 2020, to embracing every illogical anti-vaccine trope that Tucker Carlson regurgitates. And they still think the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus.
Trump voters have collectively lost their minds as the virus runs wild in red states. Even as some prominent anti-vaccine zealots kill themselves off, the close-minded hysteria intensifies as fanatics now physically assault local school board members, lodge countless death threats, and cause chaos for teachers and students. This is a kind of cult-like mania rarely seen in modern American history.
There have been unhinged right-wing political mobs before — think back to the Tea Party movement, which flourished as soon as America elected its first Black president. That however, was fueled by a willful misreading of Obama’s economic policy and bailout strategy. The current day right-wing madness is more akin to the Salem witch trials, where hysterical, organized mobs conjure up imaginary demons and then set out to administer vigilante justice.
“Community groups within our conservative stronghold thought they could buck the Fox News narrative and persuade reluctant Republicans to get vaccinated,” explained Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency room physician in western Michigan. “They recruited local Republican leaders to encourage their supporters to get their shots. But instead of getting more people vaccinated, these public servants got death threats.”
Yet the press is still normalizing the insanity. After documenting several instances of Trump voters storming school board meetings and comparing mask mandates to sex trafficking and to Hitler’s rise to power (“This is what Hitler wants. Hitler wants everybody divided. If we all stay divided, who wins? Hitler wins”), the New York Times’ Michelle Cottle insisted that what the Covid Zombies are doing “is nothing new.” In reality, it’s unprecedented.
In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig tsk-tsked liberals for “shaming” Trump voters who are bypassing an FDA-approved vaccine in order to ingest horse paste.
Five years ago, the press made excuses for Trump’s bigoted base during the campaign by claiming they were motivated by “economic anxiety.” Then news outlets spent four years courting Trump voters in cozy diners and presenting them as authentic voices from the heartland. Now they’re Covid zombies, and the press missed the story.
(Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images)
🎤 EXTRA STUFF:
Thanks to Bob Cesca for having me on his excellent podcast this week. We discussed all things media, including Afghanistan coverage and Covid. Click on tweet below to listen.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
They Might Be Giants, “I Can’t Remember the Dream”
I first saw TMBG a million years ago at the original Iron Horse Cafe in Northampton, MA, when it fit 90 people, max. I sat on the stairs and reviewed the show for my college newspaper. At the time, the two-man Brooklyn band was riding high on its iconic nerd-rock hit, “Don’t Let’s Start.”
The insanely prolific John Flansburgh and John Linnell still sound great today. With a heavy guitar riff nod to The Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the new single is from the group’s 23rd album.
When I'm awake, i note all that I seeAnd remember it with photographic accuracyMost of my memories tend to be badAnd I'm sad i can't remember the dream that I had
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Delivering this Sunday’s morning update like a disappointed dad, Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd conveyed distressing news about how America is split down the middle over Covid, causing cultural and political fissures.
“The U.S. enters this Labor Day weekend suffering from two viruses: Covid and polarization,” the host lamented. “Covid has become an MRI of America's soul. Who would have imagined that masks -- wearing or refusing them -- would become such a political statement?”
This week’s MTP episode was built around the “divided” theme, with Covid being a prism used to view it. “It is not an exaggeration to say that we are more divided than at any time perhaps since the 1960s, and frankly, maybe since the Civil War,” Todd announced.
Except that premise is false and it reflects a misguided brand of Both Sides journalism. Instead of the country being “divided” over Covid, including whether to get vaccinated and wear masks, 75 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one shot, and 70 percent support mask mandates in schools. Just “17 percent of adults say they probably or definitely will not get vaccinated,” according to a recent ABC-Washington Post survey.
Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans support requiring proof of vaccination to travel by airplane, according to Gallup. (39 percent oppose.) And the percentage of parents who plan on vaccinating their kids has climbed to nearly 70 percent.
If there’s an actual Covid divide, it’s among conservatives themselves — 45 percent of Republicans support a universal vaccine mandate. Roughly the same percentage oppose.
Make no mistake, there is a loud and dangerous right-wing minority in this country building roadblocks and creating havoc as we try to put the pandemic behind us. They often stage noisy and demented protests at local school board meetings, leveling unhinged attacks on local officials who are trying to keep children and teachers safe. (In Tucson, police were called when protesters threatened to make a citizen's arrest on a school principal and zip tie her.) The media’s constant desire to portray them as representing half the country is lazy and inaccurate.
Instead of portraying the dangerous zealots accurately, the media downplay the threat by presenting anti-vaccine and anti-mask fanatics as being the mirror opposite of Democrats and progressives who embrace science and common sense. If there’s a “divide,” that means there are two equal, opposing forces, right? The press much prefers to tell the tale of Both Sides facing off over Covid, instead of detailing a deranged and radical minority waging war on mainstream America.
The country as a whole is not divided over Covid in any traditional sense, so how and why does the press keep pushing that narrative? One way journalists pull it off is by using fuzzy math. They do it by pointing to polling data that shows Democrats and Republicans on polar opposite ends of the issue and loudly announcing that America suffers from an incurable political and cultural rift.
“Seventy-nine percent of Democrats favor a vaccine requirement,” Todd reported on Sunday. “Seventy-five percent of Republicans oppose it.”
In reality though, there are three self-identifying political parties in America — Democratic, Republican and Independent, with Independents siding with Democrats on key issues. Independents though, tend to get erased by the media, so journalists can hyperventilate about American being “divided,” pretending we’re a 50-50 nation.
We are not. The recent ABC-Washington Post poll found that, “9 in 10 Democrats and more than 6 in 10 independents support school mask requirements, while nearly 6 in 10 Republicans oppose them.” There’s no way those results suggest a large “divide” on the issue — it’s basically two-against-one.
Not only are there three major parties, but the number of voters who identify as Republican has been steadily shrinking for years. The ABC-Washington Post poll, in order to get what it considered to be an accurate reflection of the U.S. electorate, conducted its survey where the makeup of respondents was 30 percent Democratic, 24 percent Republican, and 36 percent Independent.
So when the media breathlessly hypes polls that show 70 percent of Republicans oppose mask mandates, that doesn’t mean 70 percent of one half of the country opposes the rule. It means 70 percent of a shrinking minority party in this country stand opposed. (i.e. Roughly 20 percent of the total U.S. population contests mask requirements for schools today.)
We’re only truly “divided” when it comes to the Covid carnage in this country. In blue states in the Northeast the pandemic remains essentially over. That’s where low case, death, and hospitalization numbers remain the norm. In Florida and Texas, the virus is claiming victims at will, as Republican governors do everything in their power to put citizens at risk. Soon, the number of Covid deaths in both Florida and Texas could surpass the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.
The press ought to focus on that divide, and detail how the Republican Party and its leaders have made a conscious decision to prolong a deadly pandemic, even though a free and effective vaccine is available to stop it. It represents a stunning chapter in American history. Instead of focusing its attention on a conservative movement that is quite clearly killing its own, the press wallows in the shallow confines of its Divided narrative.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon weighs in with a interesting look at Politico’s legacy. (I think it’s only going to get worse.)
From “How the Rise of Politico Shifted Political Journalism Off Course”:
Trump becoming president only exacerbated these media problems. The constant infighting in his administration and Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation were two stories that provided constant fodder for juicy insider stories. It seemed like the perfect match: a press corps of politicos had the ultimate Politico story. But the Trump story really wasn’t a Politico story. Looking back on Trump’s four years, the defining quality of his administration was not how it changed as various staffers got hired or fired but how it didn’t change: Trump pushed White identity politics with anti-democratic tactics from the moment he entered office to the moment he left.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lucy Dacus, “Brando”
I’m such a Dacus fan — she becomes the first artist that I’ve featured three separate times at PRESS RUN. She’s a brilliant songwriter, especially when she’s excavating relationships, and her songs are all powered by a simmering Brooklyn vibe.
“Brando” comes from her new album, the irresistible Home Video, and it features one of my favorite lyrics of the year:
You called me "cerebral"I didn't know what you meantBut now I do, would it have killed youTo call me pretty instead?
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
By joining his fellow conservatives on the Supreme Court in declining to block one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws, a Texas statute that bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made good on his unspoken pledge to demolish Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh’s actions could change the fabric of this country for decades, and empower radicals within the Republican Party to strip away more rights of Americans.
Against that dystopian backdrop let’s not forget two crucial historic facts. Kavanaugh lied his way through his confirmation hearings. Facing multiple and credible allegations of sexual assault, Kavanaugh lied about witnesses; he lied about corroboration; he lied about friendships; he lied about parties. He also lied about an array of other topics, including state drinking ages, vomiting, his yearbook, and his accusers. Kavanaugh lied about his grandfather, federal judges, warrantless wiretaps, and stolen emails.
Second, some deep-pocketed patron, or patrons, over the years have clearly covered Kavanaugh’s personal finances. Someone erased all of the many financial pitfalls he faced, including tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, while setting up him for a luxurious lifestyle well beyond what he could afford on the salary of a federal judge. We still don’t know which benefactors paid for Kavanaugh’s $92,000 country club initiation fee in 2016 for the Chevy Chase Club while he was making $225,000 a year, had two children in private school, and was saddled with the most debt of his life, approximately $100,000.
The staggering country club fee, which Kavanaugh plainly could not cover himself, represented the most egregious hole in Kavanaugh’s make-no-sense financial disclosure made during his nomination. For instance, in 2006, he bought a $1.2 million home in a tony suburb of Washington, D.C. and made tens of thousands of dollars of upgrades while earning $175,000 and sitting on a modest savings account.
The disclosures should have been a huge red flag for the press. “The personal finances of Supreme Court nominees regularly come under scrutiny during the congressional vetting process,” the Washington Post reported in 2018. And Kavanaugh’s finances were by far the most befuddling of any Supreme Court nominee in modern history. But the press mostly yawned through the story.
The Post actually published one of the most detailed examinations of his finances during the time of Kavanaugh’s nomination. The report though, raised no serious questions of wrongdoing, and was at times openly sympathetic towards Kavanaugh: “He has in many ways stayed true to his intent, following the Jesuit mantra of service above self instilled in him by the elite Catholic high school he attended in suburban Washington.”
The Post piece also made sure only to quote friends of Kavanaugh, as they ran interference for the nominee. (“He’s not the type of guy who does things to keep up with the Joneses.”) One buddy told the Post that Kavanaugh joined the extravagantly expensive Chevy Chase Club because it was conveniently located near his home. Not a single Democrat or independent financial analyst was quoted questioning the obvious inconsistencies in Kavanaugh’s filings.
Why didn’t the Beltway press go all Whitewater on Kavanaugh? For years the D.C. media, amplifying GOP attacks, couldn’t sleep at night knowing Bill and Hillary Clinton may have made money on a land deal that had crooked local ties. (Fact: They lost money on Whitewater.) Breathlessly covering every hearing, every allegation, every Republican leak, the hyperactive Beltway media treated the story as Watergate-meets-Iran Contra; the very idea that a Democratic politician may have benefited financially from some inside chicanery was presented as one of the most important and compelling news stories of the decade.
Suffice to say that if Bill Clinton had joined an exclusive country club while governor of Arkansas, which he clearly did not pay for, journalists would have camped out on the story for months and excavated it without pause.
A middling jurist who immediately embarrassed himself when nominated by Trump by claiming no president had ever “consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination,” Kavanaugh has always had the earmarks of a willing suck-up; someone who was cultivated and advanced by right-wing forces not for his judicial intellect, but because he’s willing to do what he’s told. Like help overturn Roe v. Wade.
With so little media attention paid to Kavanaugh’s massive expenditures over the years, we still don’t have any answers. We don’t know if he’s operating on the Supreme Court under a constant conflict-of-interest cloud, because we don’t know which wealthy forces have aided and abetted his rise.
One possible, unconfirmed explanation for how Kavanaugh’s debt magically evaporated, how he bought a house he could not afford, and joined one of the most exclusive and expensive country clubs on the East Coast while living on the salary of a federal employee? Kavanaugh’s rich father secretly gifted him lots of money over the years. (Kavanaugh’s father drew a large salary working for a cosmetics trade group and walked away with a $13 million payout in 2005.)
Kavanaugh and the White House likely wanted to avoid that Daddy Warbucks storyline during the confirmation hearing though, since the jurist was presented as a hard-working, aw-shucks Everyman who worked his way up to the highest echelons of the American judiciary.
And guess what? As Kavanaugh does his best to outlaw choice, the press has never tried to confirm any key facts surrounding the endless unanswered questions of Kavanaugh’s finances and his miracle $92,000 country club fee.
🏌🏻♂️ GOOD STUFF:
Back in 2018, Mother Jones offered up the most in-depth look at Kavanaugh’s illogical financial disclosures.
From, “The Many Mysteries of Brett Kavanaugh’s Finances”:
His financial disclosure forms have raised more questions than they’ve answered, leading to speculation about whether he’s had a private benefactor and what sorts of conflicts that relationship might entail. No other recent Supreme Court nominee has come before the Senate with so many unanswered questions regarding finances.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Amos Lee, “Worry No More”
Arriving at just the right time with some finger-snapping optimism, the beloved singer-songwriter’s latest is the type of laid back, soulful groove we’ve come to love from Lee.
Even if it don't come true Dreaming is what dreamers do Evan's keys on green to blue Are never gray Even if it all goes bust Your pretty pearls all fade to rust Angel wings to angel dust Every day
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Wednesday morning’s Politico Playbook, the AM round-up of Beltway news, led off with a “BREAKING NEWS” update: “The Supreme Court allowed a controversial Texas law banning abortion after six weeks to go into effect just months before it hears a more direct challenge to Roe v. Wade this fall.”
“Controversial” is putting it mildly. The Texas law, passed in May, bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which is well before most women even know they are pregnant. The Supreme Court on Tuesday night, without comment, refused to block the bill from becoming law, despite the fact it runs counter to Court precedents, which prohibit states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, usually between 22 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. If the Texas law remains, it would block the vast majority of abortion patients from obtaining services in the state.
In short, the law represents a legal and political earthquake, as Republicans march closer toward overturning Roe v. Wade. Yet loyal Politico readers were excused Wednesday morning if they were caught unaware, because in the weeks leading up to its midnight trigger, Politico didn’t publish a single stand-alone article about the historic GOP attempt to deny women choice. That, according to a search of Politico’s online archives. (The site then published three articles on the topic yesterday.)
Politico wasn’t alone. Across the national media spectrum, outlets in the last 24 hours scrambled to play catch-up with the story, which could alter nearly fifty years of choice in America. The stunning lack of coverage plays into the hands of conservatives who likely don’t want a loud debate about overturning Roe v. Wade, since a clear majority of Americans support the right to choose.
“I literally watch the news for a living, and I had little to no knowledge of this abortion ban in Texas until late last night,” tweeted Media Matters’ Lisa Power. “It's a huge indictment of cable news that something this impactful can occur with practically no cable news coverage until after it's too late.”
During the week prior to the bill becoming law, “Texas” and “abortion” were not mentioned in any Fox News segments over that seven-day stretch, according to TVeyes.com. For all three news channels, “Texas” and “abortion” were referenced together less than 10 times. During that same stretch, “Afghanistan” was mentioned nearly 4,000 times.
It’s impossible to miss the fact that the media’s virtual Texas abortion blackout occurred while the press gorged itself on Afghanistan “optics” coverage for weeks. For most of August, the Beltway press presented nonstop, 24/7 “crisis” coverage, condemning President Joe Biden for a “disaster” and “debacle” — as he oversaw the successful evacuation of 120,000 people from the Kabul airport.
The U.S. troop withdrawal was obviously a big story and required lots of attention. And within that coverage, the Taliban’s inhumane treatment of women represented a pressing news story, and the media were right to focus on the fears that surround Afghanistan’s future. But the GOP’s appalling treatment of women in the United States also represents an urgent news story that deserves constant attention. Instead, it’s being ignored.
And it’s not just cable news viewers largely left in the dark.
Prior to the bill being enacted, both the Washington Post and New York Times ran a couple of perfunctory news updates about the unfolding legal challenges. Readers had to visit the papers’ opinion sections though, for in-depth analysis of what the Texas bill meant and how radical and dangerous it was. Meanwhile, CNN.com during the month of August published just one news article about the history-making bill.
Most of the thin national coverage glossed over stunning aspects of the Texas law. Aside from effectively banning choice, the law’s enforcement is head spinning and dangerous. From the Texas Tribune, which has been excellent on the story [emphasis added]: “The state wouldn’t enforce the law. SB 8 instead provides enforcement only by private citizens who would sue abortion providers and anyone involved in aiding or abetting an abortion after a “heartbeat” is detected.”
Texas Republicans have basically created a taxpayer-funded system for snitching on abortions and anyone associated, where an Uber driver who takes a woman to a health clinic to get a procedure could be targeted under the law.
The media’s lack of coverage is especially galling considering the one area of the abortion story over the years that the press normally focuses on are the various legal and legislative tracks, as Republicans ceaselessly try to overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, the topic is usually treated as a political football, and not a pressing healthcare issue.
Media analysis from 2019 sponsored by the pro-choice group NARAL found “that more than 77 percent of articles about abortion were written by political, legal, breaking news or general assignment writers—rather than health reporters,” Ms. magazine reported. “Just 13.5 percent of articles analyzed quoted a physician, and only 8 percent referenced the lived experience of someone who has had an abortion.”
A separate media study from 2019 confirmed that, “The personal experiences of people who get abortions are present in only 4% of the sample, and language personifying the fetus appears more often than women’s abortion stories. State abortion restrictions are newsworthy, yet basic facts on the commonality and safety of abortion are virtually absent.”
In their radical attempts to outlaw choice, Republicans don’t want a lot of attention lavished on their actions. This week they got their wish.
(Photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
👩🏻⚕️ GOOD STUFF:
For a deeper dive into the Texas law, NPR’s “What The Texas Abortion Ban Does — And What It Means For Other States”:
Anyone who successfully sues an abortion provider under this law could be awarded at least $10,000. And to prepare for that, Texas Right to Life has set up what it calls a "whistleblower" website where people can submit anonymous tips about anyone they believe to be violating the law.
In a federal lawsuit challenging this, a coalition of abortion providers and reproductive rights groups said the law "places a bounty on people who provide or aid abortions, inviting random strangers to sue them."
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, “Can’t Let Go”
Fourteen years, the unlikely duo of Plant (former lead singer of Led Zeppelin) and Krauss (the former queen of bluegrass) made music magic when they collaborated on the Raising Sand album, best known for the glorious version of the plaintive “Please Read the Letter.”
The two are back again with producer T-Bone Burnett and the first single is “Can’t Let Go,” which fans of Lucinda Williams will instantly recognize.
As NPR notes, “The duo's mellifluous harmonies return, filled with the longing (or pleading) of two lovers who face the inevitability of lost love, anchored by the shuffling grooves of drummer Jay Bellerose. It seems like time hasn't passed at all.”
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Is Politico jumping out the frying pan and into the fire?
The influential bible for savvy-obsessed Beltway insiders, Politico already has a strong tendency to disappoint by viewing the world through a Republican prism. Eagerly propping up Dems in Disarray storylines, Politico remains committed to portraying Republicans as being forever shrewd, and stands at the ready to amplify whatever phony outrage the GOP is pushing.
It was Politico that that famously detailed, “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic” this year, after 30,000 Floridians had already died from the virus. Today, the Sunshine State remains a global epicenter of the raging virus. The “won” coverage was part of Politico’s larger, and wildly misguided, DeSantis charm offensive:
• “Covid wars launch DeSantis into GOP ‘top tier’
• “Ron DeSantis Is Very Pleased With Himself”
“I consistently remind you that Politico is terrible,” journalist Soledad O’Brien recently reminded her Twitter followers.
Politico’s hallmark, clickbait failures are likely to become more pronounced because the publication was just sold for $1 billion to an openly conservative media giant based in Germany, Axel Springer. Named after the company’s founder who has been referred to as Germany’s Rupert Murdoch, all Springer employees must pledge their allegiance to the company’s “Essentials”:
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We stand up for freedom, the rule of law, democracy and a united Europe.
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We support the Jewish people and the right of existence of the State of Israel.
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We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States of America and Europe.
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We uphold the principles of a free market economy and its social responsibility.
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We reject political and religious extremism and all forms of racism and sexual discrimination.
Politico employees will not have to sign the pledge, according to the New York Times. Still, they will understand what the clear political leanings of their German owners are and that they demand fealty, which could lead American journalists to pander to their bosses. (News reporters signing any kind of worldview “pledge” is a bad idea.)
In a strange, collective oversight though, virtually none of the mainstream media coverage about the blockbuster, $1 billion deal has mentioned the proud conservative preferences of Politico’s new owner. That salient fact regarding the purchase of a powerful political media outlet in Washington, D.C., has been conveniently ignored. Reuters, CNN, CNBC, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal all covered the Politico sale without mentioning the buyer’s politics.
If an unabashedly liberal, international publisher that demanded its employees sign an oath supporting socialism had swooped in to buy a mainstay of American political journalism, do you think its partisan DNA would be mentioned in the news coverage? I certainly do. In fact, it would be mentioned in every headline.
The deafening media silence is curious since over the years Axel Springer’s rightward lurch has not been a secret. Two years ago, The Guardian profiled the “German company founded in 1945 by the rightwing publisher of the same name.” When the founder died back in 1985 the Los Angeles Times was straightforward. “Axel Springer, Conservative W. German Publisher, Dies,” read the headline. The Times noted that all of Springer’s media properties “served as staunch supporters of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union.”
As The Tablet observed recently, “Springer was the closest thing that the Germans had to a Rupert Murdoch. Springer’s politics were decidedly conservative: capitalist (though comfortable with the German consensus on a “social market economy”); traditionalist; ferociously anti-communist, and pro-American. And much as Murdoch has come to embody everything that bien pensant liberals loathe, Springer was hated by the West German left.”
In 1952, Springer founded Bild, a national tabloid daily that soon became the most-read newspaper in Europe, with a circulation that peaked at 6 million. Der Spiegel once characterized the paper as “serv[ing] up tripe, trash, tits and, almost as an afterthought, a healthy dose of hard news seven days a week.” It added that Bild, “has taken on the role of a right-wing populist party, which does not yet exist in Germany."
Over the years “Bild decried long hair on men and the marriage of its top models to foreigners. It genuflected before South African apartheid, Greek dictatorship, Bavarian sedans and American Pershing missiles,” The Guardian noted. Today, “Bild’s main attack targets remain Germany’s “Gutmenschen” – the do-gooders, vegetarians, Greens and 1968ers who are treated as parasites and irritants to Germany’s robust economy and middle class.”
Added the Columbia Journalism Review, “Some aspects of Bild’s conservatism would be familiar to any weary observer of the US culture wars.”
The daily recently launched its own TV station, which the Irish Times dubbed “a milder, German equivalent of Fox News.”
That’s who now owns Politico, which is only going to get worse.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
David Rothkopf has been an important voice in recent weeks, providing clarity to the ongoing Afghanistan debate, and the media mob that set its sights on Biden.
From his new piece in The Atlantic, “Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan”:
Despite the criticism, Biden, who had argued unsuccessfully when he was Barack Obama’s vice president to seriously reduce America’s presence in Afghanistan, remained resolute. Rather than view the heartbreaking scenes in Afghanistan in a political light as his opponents did, Biden effectively said, “Politics be damned—we’re going to do what’s right” and ordered his team to stick with the deadline and find a way to make the best of the difficult situation in Kabul.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Richard Thompson, “Tinker’s Rhapsody”
One of England’s most accomplished singer-songwriters and guitar players, Thompson’s musical curiosity after five decades in the music business remains admirable and deeply welcome.
His latest EP, Serpent’s Tears, features six new songs. “Tinker’s Rhapsody” won me over instantly, with its lilting acoustic aura and lyrics that conjure up rural scenes from centuries past.
Zara Phillip’s accompanying vocals are also a work of beauty.
Oh, the Winter time it is tough now And the living is rough now The firewood is rotten And I shiver all day Oh, nothing in life can beat A June morning so sweet All hardships are forgotten On a fine Summer's day
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Within the span of 24 hours, the New York Times provided more evidence that the paper treats the two political parties differently, especially when it comes to Democratic and Republican leaders facing crisis. In this case, it’s President Joe Biden grappling with the U.S. troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, versus Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state became a global epicenter for Covid this summer.
The Times showed how it’s willing to normalize atrocious behavior by Republicans while holding Democrats to unfair standards.
On Sunday, the paper published a striking whitewash of DeSantis’ nearly criminal actions regarding Covid this year. Eying a White House run in 2024, and hoping to tap into the GOP’s anti-science base, DeSantis has played politics with public health. He’s tried to bar schools from mandating masks, stood in the way of hospital vaccine mandates, and demanded cruise lines allow unvaccinated passengers to set sail. He even placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump. And now the state is paying a steep price for his cavalier governance.
“The viral load in Florida is so high right now, there are only two places on the planet where it’s higher,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner recently told CNN. “It’s so high in Florida that I think that if Florida were another country, we would have to consider banning travel from Florida to the United States.”
Yet reading the Times’ Sunday article you’d think DeSantis, who is referenced just four times in the lengthy piece, was a bit player in this man-made drama. You’d think the Sunshine State’s descent into mass Covid death was some kind of unavoidable, twist of fate. “Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit remains an elusive question,” the Times reported, naively throwing up its hands.
The daily also engaged in misinformation when it claimed Florida under DeSantis “emphasized vaccinations” and “made a strong push” to innoculate people. “Florida State Representative, here. This is ridiculous,” tweeted Democrat Omarji Hardy, responding to the Times. “There was not anything resembling a "strong push" for vaccinations in Florida.”
The Times piece didn’t bother quoting a single DeSantis critic, even though just days earlier Miami Mayor Dan Gelber had announced unequivocally that DeSantis’ policies “are literally killing people.”
Compare that brand of kid-glove analysis to the Times page-one piece by White House correspondent Peter Baker on Saturday, who suggested the Afghanistan troop withdrawal was entirely Biden’s doing, the president used questionable judgement, and Biden’s responsible for U.S. loss of life.
Unlike the DeSantis piece, the Time’s Biden article was overflowing with quotes from his critics, eager to second guess. In fact, the first person Baker quoted was someone who worked on President George W. Bush’s Iraq War team; the war that doomed U.S. to failure in Afghanistan. One week earlier, Baker had been on the front page with another Afghanistan piece, implying Biden was incompetent and lacked empathy, two descriptions the paper won’t apply to DeSantis.
Over this weekend, the Times also published a nasty opinion piece, which called the evacuation of 120,000 people from the Kabul airport “incompetent,” and suggested Biden, whose late son served in the Iraq War, does not “value” men and women who serve our country.
The Times POV couldn’t be clearer: DeSantis is trying his best, Biden’s in over his head.
The Times’ Sunday DeSantis whitewash, which was widely criticized online, represents a larger pattern by the newspaper to run interference for the Republican governor this year. Three weeks ago, the Times again tried to normalize DeSantis’ dangerous behavior, suggesting that outlawing mask mandates and threatening to withhold pay from teachers during a pandemic might be the new normal [emphasis added]:
If, however, Florida comes through another virus peak with both its hospital system and economy intact, Mr. DeSantis’s game of chicken with the deadly pandemic could become a model for how to coexist with a virus that is unlikely to ever fully vanish.
Amazing — if DeSantis’ policies don’t obliterate Florida’s healthcare system and its economy, then maybe he’s creating a new model. That Times article also failed to quote a single DeSantis critic, in a look at how the controversial Republican was managing the pandemic.
The newspaper actually began covering for DeSantis back in April when the Times published a front-page valentine, typing up his press office spin about how Florida was “booming” and he had somehow figured out how to carve out a Covid-free region for the Sunshine State. “In a country just coming out of the morose grip of coronavirus lockdowns, Florida feels unmistakably hot,” the Times gushed.
All three DeSantis stories were written by the paper’s Miami bureau chief Patricia Mazzei. Why would she seemingly go out of her way to provide cover for DeSantis as he eyes a likely presidential run? My guess is it has to do with access and maintaining cordial relations with DeSantis’ communications team, which I guarantee was thrilled with the latest Times dispatch from Florida.
If and when DeSantis runs for president, journalists who are covering him now likely want to be assigned to his campaign, which would then serve as their ticket out of Florida. That’s how the Beltway media game is played — scores of reporters who covered George W. Bush in Texas were rewarded with campaign assignments and then re-assigned to cover him in Washington, D.C.
Fact: It’s not too late for the Times to fix its Florida coverage.
📺 EXTRA STUFF:
I joined CNN’s “Reliable Sources” yesterday to discuss the media’s coverage of Afghanistan:
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Killers, “Quiet Town”
I know I just highlighted the band’s new album last week, but I spent the whole weekend listening to this glorious, churning new rock track, so I’m back to sing the praise of The Killers, the pride of Las Vegas, where the band members met and formed.
But the quiet town in this song is Nephi Utah, population 7,000, the hometown of lead singer Brandon Flowers. Here, he looks back lovingly (community compassion), while also detailing the town’s deep bruises (opioids). The whole guitar-driven chapter is wrapped in a Springsteen storytelling vibe that takes flight.
The first crop of hay is up School let out and the sun beats down Smoke billows from a Sunday train That cries away from a quiet town
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Six days ago, as she prepared her airlifted exit from Kabul, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward declared that the United States’ effort to evacuate thousands of Afghans was doomed to failure. “I'm sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven't seen a single US plane take off,” she reported. “How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.”
Ward seemed to speak for most journalists who lined up for days to condemn President Joe Biden and to predict a perilous future for the Afghanistan capitol. (Talk of “mass murders” and U.S. embassy employees being taken hostage were in the media mix.) Wildly eager to portray the U.S. troop withdrawal as a “humiliating” and “disastrous” “fiasco,” the media were sure the story was going to get much worse.
And they were wrong.
“In fact, it didn’t take 2 weeks to evacuate 50,000. It took 10 days,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted in response to Ward. “Lots of work still to do, but it might be time for a bit of a reassessment by the media of this operation given the actual results.”
Don’t hold your breath waiting for journalists to acknowledge that their assessments of Kabul have been badly undercut by the stunning evacuation success.
For the first 10 days of the refugee crisis, the media obsessed over "optics" and how they were "disaster" for Biden. Suddenly though, the press shows little interest dwelling on the optics of successfully extricating nearly 100,000 people without a single U.S. casualty. Instead, the press remains married to its narrative.
That early media emphasis on optics was all consuming. “President Biden's Reassurances on Afghanistan Contradict Chaotic Images on the Ground, Capping Week of Bad Optics For His Administration,” CNN announced.
According to the New York Times, the optics were so bad they threatened to doom Biden’s entire presidency. “The chaotic endgame of the American withdrawal has undercut some of the most fundamental premises of President Biden’s presidency,” the paper claimed, in a page-one piece that implied the Democrat was incompetent, void of empathy, and “struggling to assert command over world events.”
Those turned out to be hollow claims, given the U.S.’s commitment to evacuating so many people this month, and nearly 20,000 on Tuesday alone.
Over the weekend, the Times published a sprawling overview of the U.S. troop withdrawal. Written by six staffers, it was relentlessly negative in its portrayal. Headline: “This Is How the U.S.'s Afghanistan Exit Plan Unraveled.”
In light of the miraculous evacuation success, when is the newspaper going to assign six reporters to produce a tick tock retelling of how the Biden team pulled off what many insisted was impossible? Or is good news no news when it comes to Biden?
Eventually addressing the historic evacuation campaign, the Times seemed to downplay the success, framing the airlift as a “public relations” tool being used by a White House “eager to shift the narrative.”
Buried in the article’s final paragraph was the revelation that during the collapse of Saigon in 1975, the U.S. evacuated just 7,000 people, as the South Vietnamese capitol famously fell. That’s telling because at the beginning of the Kabul story 13 days ago, news outlets were obsessed with making the historical connection with Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Turns out the U.S. has evacuated 100,000 more people from Kabul than the U.S. did in 1975. Suddenly, those Saigon comparisons don’t make sense.
Downplaying the evacuation became the media norm this week. A recent Times headline declared “Chaos at Airport as Taliban Work on Creating State.” It wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that readers learned 8,000 people had been evacuated the day before.
A Washington Post piece held off until the 13th paragraph to spell out the feel-good news about 21,000 evacuations on Monday. This, after emphasizing the Biden administration had “stoked a new round of outrage,” “there was looming uncertainty,” “intensifying anger,” and that “West Wing officials scrambled,” but could do “little to quell the frustration.”
On Tuesday, Politico went all in with a doomsday account of Kabul, accusing the White House of being “increasingly disconnected from reality” and not able to curb sprawling violence. Barely mentioned was the evacuation triumph.
The next day, even as exit numbers hit the 100,000 plateau, Politico insisted the Beltway media still viewed Afghanistan as a disaster: “The view in the dominant media, where highbrow foreign policy coverage is deeply influenced by the so-called Blob’s view of the world, is that Biden’s evacuation is an unmitigated disaster, that his every statement is at odds with the reality on the ground and that the botched pullout will have long-term political damage in 2022 and 2024.”
Politico also implied, without evidence, that the administration was cooking the books on the evacuation numbers. That’s how badly the press doesn’t want to acknowledge the success story that has unfolded.
CNN published yet another doomsday update about the airport on Monday: “Kabul's Airport is the Epicenter of a Desperate and Deadly Scramble to Escape the Taliban.” The article stressed the situation was “increasingly desperate” and “becoming increasingly perilous.” The report made just passing reference to the tens of thousands of people being flown out of Kabul. And the video report that accompanied the online article, featuring CNN’s Sam Kiley, did not depict an “increasingly perilous” situation. Instead, it showed orderly lines of Afghans waiting to board U.S. planes.
Two days later, Kiley confirmed to CNN viewers, “We arrived midafternoon on a Qatari flight and I was pleased and relieved to see quite large, well-ordered queues of people already being loaded onto aircraft from around the world.”
That’s just not the storyline the network wants to emphasize.
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
From Law and Crime’s “‘This Case Was Never About Fraud’: Federal Judge Refers ‘Kraken’ Attorneys, Including Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, for ‘Possible Suspension or Disbarment’”
“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” [U.S. District Judge Linda] Parker wrote in her opinion and order. “It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”
“Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters,” Parker wrote. “This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.”
“The People have spoken,” she added.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Killers, “In Another Life”
Isolation, desperation, and ruminations are at the heart of The Killers’ new album, which focuses on the small Utah town where lead singer Brandon Flowers grew up in. “In Another Life” we hear the voices of regret, wondering if they should have left a long time ago.
The topic is heavy and a bit dark, but the song ignites like a firecracker, as The Killers deliver a melodic, hard-charging rock ode to our shifting and blurry American dream.
(And just FYI, the song begins with a taped spoken intro.)
When will I make it home?When I damn well feel like drivingDown these empty streetsThat burn though our birthright
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Biden administration officials fanned out across the White House, State Department, and Pentagon in recent days, answering hundreds of media inquiries about Afghanistan and the U.S. troop withdrawal. Unlike the previous administration, which lied to the press nonstop about every conceivable topic, Biden’s senior team has been offering serious, specific, and factual responses to the same endless questions.
Fact checkers at CNN and the Washington Post are not forced to churn out updates to detail all the “falsehoods” pouring out of the Biden White House. The president has been consistently factual throughout and has taken responsibility for the outcome. He’s also trying to do the right thing by evacuating as many people as possible, while still ending U.S. involvement in a lost military cause.
In that sense, Biden is the anti-Trump, he’s a straight shooter, whether you agree with him or not —and the press is trying to hang him for it.
For four years, Trump lied to the press every day of the week. He also insulted reporters to their face and did so with relish. (They tried to wave off the nasty barbs.) So why in recent days does the press seem personally more upset with Biden over a logistics failure in Afghanistan ,than they ever were with Trump for being a pathological liar and an offensive name caller?
As Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer observed, “Journalists who bragged of their objectivity during four twisted years of Trump are taking it personally and going off the deep end over Biden and the end of the war in Afghanistan. The truth is a casualty.”
Put another way, “Beltway press is like a child of divorce,” blogger Susie Madrak tweeted. “They save all their anger for Mom (Dems) because they're afraid if they display anger toward Dad (GOP), he'll stomp off and they'll never see him again.“
The press continues to sponsor a one-sided feeding frenzy that’s now well into its second week of doomsday coverage, even though encouraging developments emerge each day — 70,000 people now having been evacuated from Kabul. But that’s not the story the press wants to tell because they don’t want to abandon their preferred, “disaster” narrative. For instance, this doomsday Los Angeles Times write-up about Afghanistan does not include a single sentence about the tens of thousands of people who have been airlifted out of Kabul.
This isn’t just about comparing Biden’s press treatment to Trump’s. It’s about a long-running pattern where Republican liars not only aren’t punished by the press, they’re celebrated.
George W. Bush’s administration famously lied for years about WMD’s being stockpiled inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the press actually helped spread that lie. Between September 2002 and February 2003, the Washington Post editorialized twenty-six times in favor of the war, while the editor of the New York Times was accused by his own reporters of pushing pro-war coverage in order to disprove the claim of liberal media bias at the paper. Today, the Times is out front leading the Beltway media’s over-the-top Afghanistan coverage.
Never forget that the media eagerly hyped a Republican war based on lies after the same Beltway press corps lost its collective mind trying to bury a Democratic president for lying about an extramarital affair.
The Iraq War was a perfect example of the press penalizing Democrats for telling the truth and rewarding Republican liars.
Here’s another. During Trump’s four years in office, cable news outlets religiously aired the daily White House press briefings, live and in full. That had never been done before because previously, every utterance from the press secretary was not considered to be newsworthy. But the day Trump was inaugurated, news outlets immediately and collectively decided none of the old rules applied and proceeded to shower the Trump team with unprecedented, and unfiltered, time and attention. Then when Trump left office, news outlets immediately and collectively decided the old, pre-Trump rules ought to apply, and the plug was pulled on daily briefings.
Keep in mind that reporters at the Trump White House briefings were lied to without apology.
One memorable briefing moment of shame came in April of last year when Trump hosted one of the most bizarre televised performances by a sitting president. His choreographed rant featured a campaign-style commercial that aired in the briefing room and attacked the media as well as Trump's critics. Immediately following the meltdown, CNN anchor John King admitted, "That was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room."
So why did CNN keep airing the briefings? Why the shoulder shrugging, that’s-Trump-being-Trump media response from journalists who today are cuing up to crucify Biden?
Trump’s relentless barrage of falsehoods then extended to the daily Covid-19 briefings he held where he lied without pause about a public health crisis. The low point came when Trump suggested Americans inject bleach into their bodies to fight off Covid-19. Common sense should have dictated that the press stop airing him because he was putting people’s health in jeopardy.
Instead, the press rewarded Trump’s lies for four years, then turned off their cameras when Biden’s truth-telling team arrived.
☀️ GOOD STUFF:
Months after the media crowned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the Covid ‘winner,’ his political standing continues to fray.
From WFTS, Tampa’s “Poll: Majority of Floridians Oppose Gov. DeSantis on Masks”:
As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to fight school districts across the state over mask mandates, new polling from Quinnipiac University shows most Floridians think the governor is on the wrong side of the issue.
The Q-Poll found that nearly 70% (68-29) of Floridians said that local officials should be able to require masks in indoor public spaces if they deem it necessary. Almost 60 percent of Floridians (59-39) said everyone should be required to wear masks while in indoor public spaces.
That spelled bad news for Governor DeSantis as 41 percent of those polled said he was helping efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 while 46% said he is hurting efforts; 12% did not have an opinion.
🥁 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Rolling Stones, “Honky Tonk Women”
In honor of Charlie Watts’ passing, here’s a nod to one of the drummer’s signature moments, the opening beats of “Honky Tonk Women.”
“The unmistakable sound of THAT cowbell intro meant that the Stones' classic tale of sleazy bars was upon us. It's probably Charlie's laziest ever groove, which suits the late-night, downbeat atmosphere of the lyrics perfectly,” as RadioX notes.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
One day after the New York Times in a page-one piece implied that President Joe Biden is an incompetent who lacks empathy, the State Department announced the U.S. had successfully evacuated 30,000 people from Afghanistan since the end of July, and that 8,000 people departed on Saturday alone, as they filled 60 departing flights from Kabul airport. So much for incompetence.
A thinly veiled opinion column that ran under the banner of “news analysis,” the Times piece was written by White House correspondent Peter Baker. Pounding the daily’s preferred downer troop withdrawal narrative, Baker went out of his way to suggest Biden, whose administration is overseeing a massive Afghanistan airlift and troop withdrawal, is similarly incompetent to Trump, who oversaw the death of 600,000 Americans to Covid-19 last year. It was a stunning bout of failed, Both Sides journalism by Baker.
Led by the New York Times’ and CNN’s frenzied reporting and analysis, the media have gone all in with the narrative that Biden’s presidency sits on the precipice of ruin in the wake of U.S.’s long-expected troop departure from Afghanistan. (Fact: It does not.)
Deliberately falling down a deep well of optics reporting (Biden is “defiant and defensive”) and launching sweeping, and often hysterical, conclusions that are not based in fact, the press gathered up its forces days ago and set off on a one-sided feeding frenzy excursion, where week-old “chaotic images” are still treated as breaking news by CNN. Let’s be honest, if the State Departement announced it had evacuated 100,000 people from Kabul, it wouldn’t change the media’s predetermined coverage.
Eager to injure Biden, Beltway scribes gleefully engage in groupthink, echo GOP talking points without pause, and set their sights on the leader of the Democratic Party.
Sound familiar? Does this conjure up disturbing images of the 2016 campaign, when the same invested journalists unleashed a feeding frenzy on the country’s top Democrat, feasted on “optics” analysis, badly overplayed the facts of the story, excitedly amplified Republican lawmakers, obsessed over process, and repeatedly demanded apologies from Hillary Clinton for how she handled her private email correspondence?
It’s not possible to watch much of the misguided Afghanistan coverage and not see the clear similarities between that and the media’s woeful But Her Emails brand of coverage that helped elect Trump.
Reminder: ABC, CBS, and NBC’s network evening newscasts in 2016 aired just 32 minutes of in-depth campaign policy coverage. That same year they devoted 100 minutes to the Clinton email stories. Virtually all of the attention was negative.
Both Afghanistan and But Her Emails coverage strictly adheres to a (fantasy) storyline of the media’s making, and one that features a floundering Democrat unable to put off raging political fires.
On Sunday, CNN claimed the U.S. was inflicting “moral injury” by “abandoning” allies. This, as America continue to evacuate tens of thousands of allies. That same day CNN claimed that Biden’s long-expected troop withdrawal meant the U.S. was “walking away from the world stage” and “leaving Europe exposed.” Fact: Most European troops left Afghanistan seven years ago. Not sure how that now means Biden’s move in Afghanistan is leaving that continent “exposed.”
Despite days of wildly excited media analysis about how Afghanistan could destroy Biden’s entire presidency, the press still can’t find any evidence the story is registering with voters. It’s also impossible to recall a week of nonstop military “crisis” coverage when not a single shot was fired at U.S. troops. But for Afghanistan, the media gladly make an exception.
A Times column recently counseled how Biden could “save his presidency” in the wake of the Afghanistan controversy. Biden’s ending an extremely unpopular war and is bringing the troops home without a single U.S. casualty in the process, but he has to “save his presidency”?
That makes no sense.
On Friday, NBC’s indignant Richard Engel tweeted his upset over the fact that American officials were negotiating with the Tablian in order to allow for a transfer of power that’s as peaceful as possible. Keep in mind, Engel has covered the Afghanistan conflict for years, but on Friday he feigned shock that after losing a 20-year war, the U.S. would be negotiating its exit with the victors of the war. The purposeful naïveté was remarkable — but essential in order to bash Biden. For the record, it was because of those U.S.-Taliban negotiations that U.S. troops have not come under fire in the last week.
Sometimes it was just easier to make stuff up in order to attack Biden. The Times’ Frank Bruni accused Biden of “arrogance” because he “thought leaving Afghanistan would be simple,” even though Biden never once suggested that leaving Afghanistan would be “simple.”
Also on Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran a Biden gotcha “exclusive” on page one, which was widely picked up by other news outlets: “Internal State Department Cable Warned of Kabul Collapse.” The smoking gun, right? Biden’s team was warned that the Taliban would quickly take over Afghanistan in early August when U.S. troops were withdrawing, but the Biden team ignored the counsel.
Wrong.
The State Department cable warned of an Afghanistan government collapse after the troops withdrawal deadline of August 31. Also, halfway through the article, the Journal conceded the cable was received by top State Department officials who welcomed the on-the-ground-analysis, and who folded the information into the contingency plans. So much for that gotcha. But all day, journalists were buzzing about a confidential cable that Biden’s team supposedly ignored. “A WSJ scoop that casts perhaps the harshest light yet on the administration’s performance,” Politico exclaimed, completely misrepresenting the Journal story.
When the press eagerly signs off on a crisis narrative involving a Democrat, almost no new facts on the ground will change their committed view. We saw that in 2016 when the press played a key role in tearing down Clinton, and we’re seeing it this month with unrestrained Afghanistan coverage.
GOOD STUFF:
From Raw Story’s “CNN Scolded on Live TV For 'Over-The-Top' Afghanistan Coverage: '5,000 People Died of Covid In This Country”:
"While this was going on, 5,000 people died of Covid in this country," [Matthew] Dowd pointed out. "500 people died of gun violence in the last week in this country. And not a single American has died in the midst of this chaotic situation in a political hurricane."
"I don't think the press fully understands what the context is for the American public," he remarked. "And so when you understand the context, not only of Afghanistan, but the context of what's going on in our country, there's far worse crisis situations, including the assault on our democracy, that get forgotten about in the midst of this."
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Michael Franti & Spearhead, “Good Day for a Good Day:
Spreading his infectious island-flavored cheer and good will, Franti arrives with a new, and much needed, meditation on what can be.
Why does everybody in the world seem so divided? Why does everybody gotta hate each other, who decided? If I took all the world's pride, and all the world's moneyand wrapped it in a blanket and put it in a buggy,could you see that maybe that baby was just the same as you are?
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Feigning shock that the final chapter to a 20-year lost war in Afghanistan did not go as planned for the U.S. military, the media remain in overdrive, breathlessly presenting the U.S. troop withdrawal as a presidency-defining failure for Joe Biden.
Thankfully, the dire picture that the press painted over the weekend of the widespread death and destruction that the Taliban would soon unleash on Kabul has not materialized. Instead, the controversial U.S. evacuation has become more orderly and efficient, which is why cable news has pulled back on the story — CNN mentioned “Afghanistan” 30 percent fewer times on Wednesday as compared to Monday, according to TVeyes.com.
Commenting on Biden’s Monday address to the nation and the cultural disconnect between the public and the press, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace observed, “"95% of the American people will agree with everything [President Biden] just said. 95% of the press covering this White House will disagree."
The question is, why? Why is there such a chasm between the public and the press. (Prior to the withdrawal, Americans overwhelmingly supported Biden’s plan to bring U.S. troops home.) Why has the Beltway media covered the Afghanistan story with an unrestrained frenzy that so far outweighs the facts in play?
Laser focused on blaming Biden for a military defeat two decades in the making, while wildly overplaying the evacuation story in terms of historical context, the press seems genuinely eager to echo GOP spin and denounce the White House, as well as demand weird public acts of contrition.
Anxious to prove they’re not part of the “liberal media bias” problem, the media are always on the lookout for ways to make that case. “The media will never admit it, but they've been waiting for an opportunity to harshly go after Biden to prove anew how "balanced" they are. "See, it's not just Trump!"” observed author Larry Sabato. (Yes, Politico called Biden’s Afghan speech on Monday “Trumpian.”)
Writer Dave Roberts concurred: “Looking around, I gotta say the US political press seems practically tumescent over the opportunity to scold Biden for something, thus reestablishing its both-sides cred. It's a frenzy out there.”
Also in play has been the D.C.’s media’s simmering, and oddly personal, distaste for Biden’s “boring,” No Drama approach, and the lack of entertainment value his administration provides. There seems to be an unmistakable media desire to knock the Democrat down a few pegs.
“Kudos to them, they’re very happy with themselves” one anonymous Beltway journalist recently told Julia Ioffe for a piece she did on how D.C. journalists are adjusting to covering Biden, compared to the Trump circus. “You can see it, the coverage across the board from everyone is very, very lame. You never get inside the room and hear how this s**t’s going down. Like, how are they managing this elderly man?” Jabbed another journalist, “There’s a sense that Biden’s position is fragile and that he has to be protected, that any unkind gaze might knock him over.”
The press should absolutely hold public officials accountable. But it’s not possible to watch the last several days and suggest the administration has refused to explain and detail what’s unfolding in Afghanistan. Unlike the previous administration, which lied to the press nonstop about every conceivable topic, the Biden White House has been offering serious, specific, and factual responses to all inquiries. It’s just that the press, just like the GOP, doesn’t like the answers.
Many in the media remain utterly convinced they know exactly what the military withdrawal from a largely government-less country where the U.S. has been waging a losing war for 20 years should have looked like.
CNN’s Jake Tapper suggested Biden “didn't listen to military leaders who talked about how quickly, and intelligence officials, who talked about how quickly the Taliban might take over the country, how quickly everything could collapse.” According to that CNN storyline, Biden dismissed the Pentagon and somehow came up with the withdrawal plan all by himself.
The Washington Post stressed it was Biden’s personal incompetence that was to blame for the misguided troop withdrawal. Politico also insisted it was Biden’s “foreign policy expertise” that had failed. (Apparently military planners do not exist.)
In a dopey attempt at gotcha journalism, the New York Times’ Peter Baker posted a 19-year-old Biden quote about Afghanistan and juxtaposed it with a comment he made this week. A Wall Street Journal news headline about Kabul insisted “Biden Now Facing a Long Crisis.” Question: How is Biden “facing a long crisis” now that the U.S. involvement is ending? The Journal headline seemed to reflect more media wishful thinking than it did reality.
“Biden Was Barreling Toward Perilous Political Waters. Then Afghanistan Happened,” read a frenetic Politico headline. And in case readers didn’t get the heavy-handed point, Politico laid it on even thicker in the article: “The cataclysmic series of events over the last several days marked the most devastating period of the Biden presidency.” CNN was in heated agreement: “August Turns Into a Month of Crises as Biden Stares Down a Pivotal Moment in His Presidency.” Incredibly, CNN pointed to the looming passage of a massive, bipartisan infrastructure spending bill as proof that Biden’s August is filled with peril.
This is the exact same “crisis” language the press was using back in May, when scribes were sure Biden stood on the precipice of political disaster, just four months into his presidency.
This is also the same press corps that two weeks ago largely looked away when the U.S. economy shocked analysts by posting nearly one million new jobs. Two of the three network evening newscasts didn’t even bother covering the blockbuster jobs report.
Good news for Biden is often treated as no news by the press, which is far more interested in pushing “crisis” stories. It’s a key reason why they leaned so hard into the Afghanistan story.
(Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
⌨️ GOOD STUFF:
Offering some much-needed perspective this week is Heather Digby Parton at Salon and her piece, "No, George W. Bush doesn't deserve a pass on Afghanistan”:
But it's George W. Bush who bears the most responsibility for the mess in Afghanistan. He was the man who started that war to fulfill America's hunger to hit back and set the U.S. and Afghanistan on the road to two long decades of losses in blood and treasure that accomplished almost nothing in the end.
Beyond reportedly saying "that was weird" at Trump's inauguration, Bush was very, very quiet when the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban the timeline for withdrawal last year. He had to know that meant that the U.S. had ceded power to them and was assuming they would be back in power sooner or later. Yet he is now very concerned once again with the plight of women in Afghanistan.
✌🏻 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Los Lobos, “For What It’s Worth”
Once again, I’m double dipping on a new album, this time by Los Lobos, whose latest I highlighted a couple weeks ago. I've since uncovered a new nugget, this hypnotic cover of Buffalo Springfield’s icon 1966 protest song. (“What's that sound?/Everybody look, what's going down”)
I’m hooked probably because the lyrics hit so close to home more than five decades later, as well as the warm, smooth, layered sound that Los Lobos guitars and vocals always produce.
Paranoia strikes deepInto your life it will creepIt starts when you're always afraidStep out of line, the men come and take you away
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A media chorus of excited critics have been relentless this week, denouncing President Joe Biden for the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and warning that his entire presidency is now “stained.” Tightly adhering to Republican talking points, the pundit class is sure Biden has stumbled into a historic crisis as the Taliban seizes Kabul.
The U.S. has spent trillions in Afghanistan stretching back 20 years, yet Biden, who has been in office for seven months and who campaigned on bringing the troops home, is being tagged as an architect for the Taliban’s inevitable rise to power there.
A convenient, gaping hole in the coverage and commentary? The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was unalterably damaged when President George W. Bush hijacked that post-9/11 military mission and foolishly turned the Pentagon’s time, attention, and resources to a doomed invasion of Iraq.
Much of the mainstream media cheered that utterly failed war. Battered by accusations of a liberal bias and determined to prove their conservative critics wrong, the press during the run-up to the war -- timid, deferential, unsure, cautious, and often intentionally unthinking -- came as close as possible to abdicating its reason for existing in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest.
Today the media’s role in marketing the Iraq War has been flushed down the memory hole, even though Iraq should be central to any discussion about the U.S.’s running failure in Afghanistan. “Remarkably, the word “Bush” was not mentioned once on any of the›Sunday shows” this weekend as they focused nonstop on Afghanistan, noted Jon Allsop, at the Columbia Journalism Review.
You cannot discuss the rise of the Taliban in 2021 without talking about the U.S.’s doomed Iraq War in 2003. But the press today wants to try.
It’s another example of how pro-Iraq War cheerleaders in the media not only have paid no price for being spectacularly wrong, but they’re still allowed to dictate the parameters of our foreign policy discussion.
“For those of us who remember well how the mainstream media enthusiasm for war helped fuel not just this ill-advised war in Afghanistan twenty years ago, but the even bigger debacle in Iraq, the current media narrative is both bewildering and exhausting,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon. “This larger media outrage over the withdrawal is a dark reminder of the pro-war bias in the press that helped create this mess in the first place: luring the American public into thinking a war in Afghanistan could ever end in any other way.”
It’s especially jarring to see the Washington Post and the New York Times lead the way this week with finger-pointing Afghanistan coverage, considering those two outlets played essential roles in supporting the Iraq invasion, which became a turning point for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
Why a turning point? Bush drained U.S. resources by launching an unprecedented, preemptive invasion based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Overnight, Afghanistan lost its focus as the U.S.’s military response to the terrorist attack on 9/11. (Under Bush, the U.S. had 10,000-20,000 troops in Afghanistan, compared to roughly 150,000 troops in Iraq during his second term. )
In truth, Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq -- never could have sold the idea at home -- if it weren't for the help he received from the mainstream media, and particularly the stamp of approval he received from so-called liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, which in February of 2003 alone, editorialized in favor of war nine times.
As the Post’s independent ombudsman Michael Getler later wrote, the media’s performance in 2002 and 2003 likely represented their most crucial newsroom failing in nearly half a century. "How did a country on the leading edge of the information age get this so wrong and express so little skepticism and challenge?" asked Getler.
Against that backdrop of helping stage the Iraq War, it was the Post that recently admonished Biden regarding Afghanistan, claiming his “precipitous withdrawal, as well as his refusal to offer more meaningful assistance to Afghanistan’s government, risks disaster.”
The New York Times also raced ahead of the pack in 2002 and 2003 to cheerlead Bush’s war.
"According to half a dozen sources within the Times, [executive editor Howell] Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs," wrote Seth Mnookin in his 2004 Times expose, "Hard News." Mnookin quoted Doug Frantz, the former investigative editor of the Times, who recalled how "Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington. He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaida."
The New York Observer later reported, "One senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing. 'Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story,' the staffer said. 'It became the plan of attack.'"
The United States’ two-decade failure in Afghanistan is inexorably tied to Bush’s catastrophic Iraq invasion. Not surprisingly, news outlets that promoted the failed war aren’t anxious to address it today.
🇦🇫 GOOD STUFF:
Here’s another reason why Biden wants out of Afghanistan. From the AP’s “Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban”:
Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jackson Browne, “Until Justice is Real”
I mentioned this a few weeks ago, this new Jackson Browne album really does represent some of his best new music in decades. Muscular, melodic, confident and topical, his record arrives as an unexpected gift.
On “Until Justice is Real,” the California singer-songwriter returns to one of his most consistent topics — equality.
What is democracy?What is the deal?What would it look like?How would it feel?Putting your shoulder to the wheelAnd staying with it until justiceUntil justice is real
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Treating the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan’s capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOP’s bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago.
Turning over their platforms to partisan Republicans and pro-war military experts, the media seemed eager to portray President Joe Biden as one being swallowed up in “crisis,” even as his call to withdraw troops has drawn overwhelming, bipartisan support at home.
Axios laid it on thick. Doubling as a GOP springboard, the news outlet made sweeping factual declarations in its news coverage: “Rarely has an American president's predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as Biden on Afghanistan.”
Raise your hand if you remember the predictions President George W. Bush made about invading Iraq, long before the U.S. spent $2 trillion and more than 500,000 people died.
A reporter for ABC News typed up GOP talking points on Twitter when he posted a photo of Taliban leaders seizing control of Kabul: “The Biden White House will have to contend with images like this every single day for the foreseeable future.”
CNN sounded identical to Fox News when it announced the troop withdrawal threatened to “stain” Biden’s entire “legacy,” while Time was sure the Afghanistan event “could alter his presidency.”
“Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy,” The Atlantic’s George Packer declared, without detailing what steps could have been taken to stop the Taliban from retaking control of the country.
The Washington Post editorial board, which in 2002 and 2003 published nearly 30 endorsements advocating for the invasion of Iraq, howled that the troop withdrawal had been “precipitous.”
That drew a sharp rebuke from Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at the Powell School, City College of New York:
Precipitous? Is this really an accurate characterization of a military campaign that has lasted close to 20 years and that cost close to $90 billion just to train the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces — and almost $2.3 trillion if all other costs are added in, including $815.7 billion in war-related and reconstruction expenses?
A large chunk of Sunday’s coverage simply consisted of journalists recording Republicans’ completely predictable attacks on Biden. “Republican lawmakers are denouncing President Biden's admin. for the Taliban's aggressive takeover of Afghanistan,” NBC News excitedly announced on Twitter. What Biden’s Republican critics would do in Afghanistan in terms of ending the United States’ presence was never addressed, nor was any historical context offered.
In truth, the Republican policy is to leave U.S. troops there forever and spend untold billions in the process. Yet the only Republican perspective journalists focused on in recent days was that Republicans were very mad at Biden. (Yes, many of them were stalwart supporters of the Iraq War and stood by Bush’s botched handling of the war for years.)
When Biden announced earlier this year that all U.S. troops were coming home from Afghanistan, 70 percent of Americans supported the move, including 56 percent support from Republicans.
Would those polling results be different today, given the collapse of Kabul and the Taliban’s newfound control of Afghanistan? It’s possible. But after the U.S. fought a losing war there for two decades, my guess is that most Americans will not swing their positions and urgently demand that U.S. forces return to mountainous fighting.
The images coming out of Afghanistan are disturbing and there’s plenty of blame to go around. “Biden fumbled the exit. Trump put him in this situation. Obama doubled down when we should have left a decade ago. Bush neglected the narrow mission to focus on Iraq,” tweeted Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan and who later served in the Obama administration. “Afghanistan has been a string of predictable failures. Blaming Biden for the outcome is patently absurd.”
The public badly wants to end the Forever War and Biden’s in the process of doing that. Nobody thought the exit would be orderly or easy. And there’s no question Afghanistan’s security collapse, which unfolded with lightning speed, caught the administration unprepared. But it’s likely that the breakdown was going to happen regardless of when the withdrawal took place. Meaning, Biden faced a clear choice: Withdraw the troops and watch the Taliban eventually take over, or become the fourth U.S. president to commit to keeping our troops there forever.
Note that Trump left Biden with an awful deal when in 2020 he negotiated a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which emboldened the Taliban; a complete U.S. troop withdrawal that was set to happen in May. Biden could have essentially ignored Trump’s plan. But it’s not as if keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan would have guaranteed peace and stability.
Here’s what Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst with International Crisis Group, told Bloomberg in May: “If the Biden administration ignores the deadline set down in the U.S.-Taliban agreement without discussing and clearing a delay with the insurgents, the Taliban will almost certainly respond by escalating their use of force -- either via attacks on population centers, facilities housing international troops or both.”
In essence, Biden came to view Afghanistan as a lost cause militarily, and decided it was time to withdraw. Biden didn’t start the war or shepherd it for two decades. And what’s unfolding in Afghanistan today is not his doing alone.
(Photo: Getty Images)
🥙 GOOD STUFF:
From the Times’ “Biden Administration Prompts Largest Permanent Increase in Food Stamps”:
The Biden administration has revised the nutrition standards of the food stamp program and prompted the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history, a move that will give poor people more power to fill their grocery carts but add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans.
Under rules to be announced on Monday and put in place in October, average benefits will rise more than 25 percent from prepandemic levels. All 42 million people in the program will receive additional aid. The move does not require congressional approval, and unlike the large pandemic-era expansions, which are starting to expire, the changes are intended to last.
❤️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Nanci Griffith, “Love At The Five and Dime”
Sad news arrived on Friday with the passing of Griffith, a beloved Texas singer-songwriter who helped define a generation of folk and country singers. (Read the Times’ excellent obit, here.)
An extraordinarily gifted storyteller with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a twangy voice that took a little getting used to, Griffith stands among my ten most favorite artists of all time.
I don’t know why, but over the last three decades I’ve probably recited this lyric from “Love at the Five and Dime” to myself a thousand times, usually at the most random instances and for no real reason. It’s just lived on a loop, rattling around my brain — and I couldn’t be happier.
Rita was sixteen yearsHazel eyes and chestnut hairShe made the Woolworth counter shine
Take a few minutes and let Griffith transport you to a lunch counter courtship.
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We’re really still doing this?
Five months after White House reporters began raising the specter that there was something unusual or hypocritical about President Joe Biden traveling to his home in nearby Delaware, press secretary Jen Psaki is still fielding the misguided gotcha questions.
The latest came on Wednesday when CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe pressed her about why Biden’s upcoming itinerary showed him traveling from Wilmington, to Camp David, then to Wilmington.
O’KEEFE: This whole going back to Wilmington then to camp David then back to Wilmington. Is there something to that?
PSAKI: Certainly not. It’s just his travel logistic plans.
O’KEEFE: There’s no reason to go Wilmington then go to Camp David instead? Why not just stay in Wilmington?
PSAKI: He likes Camp David.
This weird line of questioning has been a regular theme at White House press briefings all year, dating back to February.
“The moment was telling because in an era devoid of bleach injection recommendations and open warfare on the press, reporters are becoming increasingly desperate for ways to make their jobs interesting,” Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher noted last winter following one of the first Delaware media inquiries. The fact that Psaki still gets peppered with these questions in August defies common sense.
The pointless media demand carries with it an unmistakable scent of Both Sides baggage. Because Trump abused his power in office by visiting a Trump Organization property on 428 days of his presidency, or one visit every 3.4 days, the press seems to feel the need to needle the Biden White House about the president’s short, innocuous trips to Delaware.
This is the Beltway press returning to normalcy after four years of deliberate chaos. And normalcy for the D.C. media means poking Democrats with stories about optics and how something the president has done doesn't look right, as determined by journalists. It’s the press in search of drama.
“I loved covering Trump,” one prominent, albeit anonymous, White House reporter recently confided. “It was a great and fascinating story. It wasn’t just about him; it was about his movement and the institutions and America. The story was always so dramatic and had these larger than life characters. The stakes often felt very high. I like covering Biden, too, but it just doesn’t feel as dramatic.”
As a recent rule of history, there is no brazen corruption or bouts of government lawbreaking when Democratic presidents serve in office, so the press has to lean into optics in order to create storylines. That’s why the White House press corps doggedly keeps trying to turn Biden’s Delaware trips into a thing.
Here’s a look at the baffling timeline.
The Associated Press first hatched the Biden/Delaware travel narrative, just weeks into his presidency when on February 4, it published, “Biden to Head to Delaware as CDC Recommends Avoiding Travel.” FoxNews.com immediately followed that up with a sharper attack, “Biden Flying to Delaware Despite CDC Warnings to Avoid Travel.” In the Fox telling — note how “despite” was added to the headline — Biden was portrayed as flaunting pandemic guidelines.
The following day, the AP’s Zeke Miller pressed Psaki about the Delaware visit in light of the CDC guidelines. “Why is the president going to Delaware this weekend?” he demanded. “Is there an exception to that [CDC] policy?”
The obvious fault in the media pursuit was that the CDC in February was urging Americans — most of whom were unvaccinated at that time — not to travel because the CDC wanted people to avoid crowded airports and stuffed airplanes, which was not something Biden had to encounter as the President of the United States. The idea that the fully vaccinated leader of the free world could not safely travel one year into a pandemic made no sense. Biden’s trips in no way ran counter to CDC guidelines. It was a complete non-issue.
End of story, right? No way.
Four weeks later on March 4, during a White House briefing, Psaki was again forced to defend a Biden trip to Delaware and whether the president should be doing “more to set an example about personal travel during a pandemic.” Psaki patiently explained, “The president lives in Wilmington. It's his home.” She continued, "That's where he's lived for many, many years. And as you know, as any president of the United States does, he takes a private airplane called Air Force One, to travel there. That is, of course, unique from most Americans.”
Nine days later on March 13, the Associated Press circled back to raise the Delaware non-issue. “The White House defends those visits at a time when the administration is urging the public to avoid unnecessary travel,” the AP tweeted.
More? On April 26, a CNN reporter asked if special rules applied to Biden for a planned international trip at a time when most Americans were discouraged from traveling because of the pandemic. Psaki’s polite, short answer? Yes, different rules do apply for the President of the United States while he makes diplomatic trips overseas.
Fast forward to last week when McClatchy reporter Francesca Chambers again brought up the issue of Biden’s unremarkable weekend trips to Delaware:
CHAMBERS: And while the President may not be taking a vacation, he is in Delaware, and it’s a place that he goes often on the weekends. Why is it important for the President to visit his Delaware residence so frequently?
PSAKI: Because it’s his home. You like going home, right? So, does the President. He’s human too.
Then on August 11 came CBS’s O’Keefe’s pressing query about Biden’s Wilmington-to-Camp David travel plans.
Biden has eagerly embraced a no-drama approach to White House leadership. The press ought to stop trying to invent commotions.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)GOOD STUFF:
📖 GOOD STUFF:
Mary Trump has a gripping and engaging new piece in The New Republic, on the party of insurrection, “Donald Trump’s Plot Against America”:
That night [January 6th], after I was finally able to turn off the news, the only two things I knew with absolute certainty were: one, that for the first time in our nation’s history there had not been a peaceful transfer of power, because my uncle, who could not accept his resounding defeat and the humiliation that came with it, had attempted to inspire a coup; and two, the next two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration would be the most dangerous this country had ever lived through.
🏝 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Paula Fuga & Jack Johnson (featuring Ben Harper), “If Ever”
A pair of Hawaii’s finest, Fuga and Johnson join forces for a beautiful island meditation. A bittersweet but life-affirming duet, the song also features the subtle steel guitar of Ben Harper. It’s pure delight.
know you're in between now and I know you can't stayGive me one more rising sun, just one more setting momentIt felt so bright, I had to turn away
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
America is swimming in purposeful pandemic distortions:
•The Covid-19 vaccine doesn’t work.
•It’s dangerous and the government is lying about the pandemic.
• Public schools should be defunded if they offer virtual teaching.
• The CDC is run by “tyrants” and health experts are “exaggerating” the pandemic.
• Superintendents could have their pay withheld if they try to initiate a protective mask policies.
• Low vaccination rates are encouraged and cheered.
These aren’t the disturbed ravings of fringe Facebook groups, or Fox News trolls in search of outrage clicks. It’s the rhetoric coming from prominent members of the Republican Party, which has shown itself to be the eager fifth column in the U.S.’s battle against the pandemic — plotting against America from the inside.
Waging war on the country’s well-being and embracing the chaotic goals of its enemies, the GOP, fueled by the right-wing media, has set its sights on anarchy. They’re doing it in the name of partisan warfare, and they’re doing it after Trump lied nonstop about the pandemic all last year.
With GOP-run states like Florida and Texas consumed with tens of thousands of new Covid cases each day, and facing a “public health catastrophe” while their Republican governors double down on wrongheaded policies, America grapples with a very real crisis: What if one of our two major political parties wants America to fail? What if the GOP is willing to drag down the entire country by launching an internal, guerilla war? In other words, what if Republicans want the pandemic to continue without pause, no matter how high the death toll climbs?
“If we work together, unify as a country, vaccinate everyone who is interested and unvaccinated, and put our masks on to prevent disease, we could really control this in a matter of weeks,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CNN last week. And yes, that’s the common sense view, urging a collective, positive response when a country faces a crisis.
But that’s not possible today because the Republican Party, either directly or indirectly, is sabotaging the Covid recovery by fearmongering about a miraculously safe vaccine and equating mask-wearing with tyranny. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.
“It creeps people out when government is almost forcing something down somebody’s throat,” claimed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who recently urged his Twitter community to follow a prominent Covid denier. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared Biden’s vaccine push to Nazi-era 'brown shirts' and suggested vaccine ambassadors going door-to-door ought to be shot.
“Responsible Republicans should be all over right-wing media denouncing MAGA personalities spreading vaccine skepticism,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin recently stressed. But of course, they are not. They’re too afraid of Fox News’ anti-vaccine mob, so their acquiescence doubles as an endorsement.
Nearly half of House Republicans still won’t even say whether they are vaccinated against Covid-19, which sends a damaging message to the public. When Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) was recently asked the simple question of whether he was vaccinated, the conservative awkwardly ended the TV interview by saying “I don’t like to get into taking sides.” (I can virtually guarantee that Grothman, who’s 66, is fully vaccinated.) In the Senate, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, when asked if he was concerned about so many people not getting vaccinated, insisted, “Nah, I don’t. You know me, I haven’t been worried about this since the beginning.”
When a handful of Republican members of the House held a press conference to ostensibly urge people to get vaccinated, the strange event quickly devolved into a partisan rally, as Republicans attacked Democrats for supposedly hiding the origin of the Covid-19 virus. Rather than confronting nonstop right-wing lies about the vaccine at the press conference, Rep. Steven Scalise (R-La.) claimed he hadn’t heard “any conservatives raising doubts,” about the shot.
The question is, why? Virtually none of these elected officials were stridently anti-vaccine before this year. They didn’t use their platforms to warn against the evils of inoculating oneself against the flu or the measles. “In fact, during the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans were more likely to believe in the safety of certain vaccines, such as for smallpox, than Democrats were,” The Atlantic noted.
Today’s hysterical, and effective, anti-vaccine crusade is specific to the extraordinary and trustworthy Covid shot and the vaccination rollout overseen by a Democratic president, which quickly became the envy of the world this spring. This nihilist movement, driven by a coronavirus “infodemic,” is being embraced by the Republican Party.
GOP governors, who tout themselves as “pro-life,” are now doing what Trump did last year — giving the stand down order for a virus invasion and not caring how many people die. Politically, it might work in the short term, as the Beltway press tends to blame the Biden administration for so many (right-wing) Americans refusing to get vaccinated.
Long term, are Republicans and Fox News committed to being the entrenched opposition to America’s war on Covid?
🇭🇺 GOOD STUFF:
From Poynter’s, “Blame More Than Just Tucker Carlson For His Bizarre Trip to Hungary”:
While, yes, it’s troubling to see Carlson’s trip to Hungary, let’s not forget this: Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is signing off on this. Fox Corp. CEO and executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch is signing off on this. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott is signing off on this.
Don’t blame just Carlson. His bosses are perfectly OK with letting Carlson say and do whatever he wants, including going all the way to Hungary to hand a microphone to a deplorable world leader.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Leon Bridges, “Steam”
The pride of Fort Worth, Bridges keeps expanding his R&B sound in all kinds of alluring and sophisticated ways. “Steam,” from his new album, offers a shimmering, electro-funk taste of his emerging retro soul sound.
Shouldn't complain, but this function's dryDon't wanna small-talk or socializeWhat are you doin' tonight?Are you alone by yourself?What are you doin' tonight?Come on over
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Friday’s job numbers released by the Department of Labor were shockingly good. Easily beating analysts’ expectations, the U.S. economy posted 943,000 new positions in the month of July, as the unemployment rate fell to 5.4%, delivering one of the strongest reports of the last decade. It was welcome news not only for President Joe Biden, since presidents are routinely graded on the strength of the job market, but for the U.S. economy as it tries to free itself from the year-and-a-half constraints of the pandemic.
Friday’s red-hot accounting also went off like a firecracker on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring to new heights, setting its 44th record-high close of 2021. That benefits 60 million Americans who participate in 401K accounts and whose retirement funds balloon every time the Dow soars.
So, the fantastic jobs news and record-setting Dow climb were treated as a huge deal by the press, right? Recall that back in May, when a disappointing jobs report badly missed expectations, the press hovered over the story for days, suggesting Biden faced an economic crisis, while Republican critics condemned his handling of the economy. So to be fair and to be consistent, the media ought to have treated the July numbers just as intensely as it did the May findings, right?
Turns out lots of news outlets weren’t that interested in the breakthrough job news. As has become custom, good news under Biden is often treated as no news by the press, which is far more enthusiastic pushing Biden “crisis” stories. (Remember this April headline from Politico? "How Good News Could Complicate the Biden Agenda”)
Three days before the sterling jobs report, CNN’s Chris Cillizza announced Biden was suffering through “the worst week of his presidency.” What was the evidence of that? In part, Cillizza pointed to the fact that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had tested positive for Covid.
Wait, what? Addicted to the Dems in Disarray storyline, journalists have trouble properly focusing on good news for Democrats, like last week’s economic home run.
For the blockbuster jobs report, lots of news sites greeted the development with a shrug. At 4 p.m. on Friday, roughly seven hours after the job numbers were released, the story was highlighted in the 37th headline as you scrolled down the NBC News homepage, and ran behind such pressing reports as “Scientists Unveil Extinct Ice Age Lion Cubs Pulled From Russian Permafrost,” and “What to Buy in August and What Can Wait.”
Truly stunning fact: Friday’s “NBC Nightly News” did not mention the jobs report.
At the CBS News homepage on Friday afternoon, none of the top 50 headlines at that time addressed the jackpot economic report. CBS News did find space of this headline, though: “How to Watch Team USA Men's Basketball Compete For Gold Medal.”
Another stunning fact: Friday’s “CBS Evening News” did not mention the jobs report.
Online at ABC News, the jobs report was shut out in the afternoon, making room for stories about a Buffalo stopping traffic at Yellowstone National Park, the US women’s volleyball Olympic victory, and a movie review of “Green Knight.”
When readers clicked on the “U.S.” section at ABC News’ homepage, none of the top 13 headlines listed were about jobs. If they scrolled down further, at the bottom right corner they’d finally catch a glimpse of the headline for a video report, “Biden Touts Jobs Report Numbers, But Says There Is More Work Left to be Done.”
To its credit, Friday’s “ABC World News Tonight” did mention the jobs report, but not until the end of the broadcast.
The Washington Post slotted the blockbuster workplace numbers as its 11th most important headline on its website, behind an article about Sen. Joe Manchin’s houseboat.
At CNN? By Friday afternoon the jobs report had been blacked out, as the network’s homepage made way for “This Underrated Form of Exercise is So Good for You,” and “Lucy Lawless Reunites With 'Xena' Costar.”
Visiting the “CNN Biz” homepage, readers did find “The US Added 943,000 Jobs, The Biggest Gain Since August 2020.” But that was immediately followed by a pessimistic reported headlined, “The Big Picture On Jobs is Still Grim.” There, CNN stressed that employers were still struggling to find workers, thanks in part to the runaway jobs market.
The press has been slightly obsessed with that economic narrative all year. Eagerly echoing complaints from Republicans and the business community that workers had become lazy because of the federal assistance paid out during the pandemic, news outlets have hammered that point and been portraying it was bad news for Biden. Worse, the coverage often only focused on the viewpoint of business owners, not on employees.
But when there was great news for workers — and for Biden — in the form of nearly one million new jobs posted in July, the press was far less interested.
For the record, some news organizations got the story right. Late Friday afternoon, the New York Times’ jobs report update was still prominently displayed as the second headline on the paper’s homepage. And at the Wall Street Journal, its jobs story was the top headline all day long.
Proving once again that good journalism isn’t really that hard.
📰 GOOD STUFF:
Last week, I admonished the press for not being transparent and acknowledging how badly they screwed up its coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the spring, when so many news outlets positioned him as a Covid star. I stressed that journalists often don’t like to concede shortfalls when they’re pointed out by liberals.
Over the weekend though, there was a good example of a newspaper quickly admitting its mistake, and it was regarding its Trump coverage.
Last Thursday, Trump attended a GOP fundraiser in Briarcliff, N.Y. and the Westchester County Gannett daily botched the story, which local progressives pointed out.
The Journal News then conceded its many failings:
We were wrong not to provide context of the groups in attendance, including the Proud Boys, one of the far-right extremist groups that law enforcement has determined had a presence at the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion.
And we were wrong to include visuals that amplified hate speech, verbal and nonverbal. Those images have been removed. There are instances when it makes journalistic sense to publish such images, but this was not one of them.
☀️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Keb Mo’, “Sunny and Warm”
Compton’s Keb Mo’ has been making alluring, blues-based pop for more than three decades, and he shows no signs of slowing. His latest is a breezy, lighthearted ode that evokes the carefree, adolescent spirit of summer.
Sunny and warm I’m gonna tell all my friends about her Have a picnic party on the Fourth of July I wouldn’t want to go anywhere without her
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Rushing in to inform readers that in the wake of damning investigation into his history of sexual harassment, New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is no longer suited for office, the New York Times editorial page waited barely 24 hours to reach its sweeping conclusion — “Governor Cuomo, You Should Resign.”
“Regardless of what may happen in a court of law, the governor has only one conscionable option left: He should resign,” the Times announced. “If Mr. Cuomo cares for the well-being of the state and its citizens as much as he has said he does over the years, he needs to do the right thing and step down.”
The Times was unequivocal. What made the clarion call so jarring was it came from the same editorial page that refused for four years to demand Trump resign from office — to conclude, as they did regarding Cuomo, that stepping down remained Trump’s “only conscionable option left,” and urging him to do the “right thing.”
Trump ran a criminal enterprise out of the White House, which everyone at the Times understood, and still the paper could not summon the courage to call for his resignation. Yet the Times sprinted into action in order to insist a Democrat step down? The contrast is stunning even if you agree, as so many Democrats do, that Cuomo should leave office.
What explains the radically different standards the Times uses for announcing sitting Republican and Democratic office holders are no longer fit to serve? How does the Times, after refusing to weigh in on Trump’s fitness for office for four years, announce Cuomo must resign less than a day after the results of the New York investigation was announced?
Here’s the larger context: The media love to call for the resignation of Democrats. Republicans though, not so much.
In the 1990’s, dozens of major newspapers loudly demanded a Democratic president step down for the good of the country. That president's sin? He lied about an extramarital affair.
"He should resign because he has resolutely failed — and continues to fail — the most fundamental test of any president: to put his nation's interests first," USA Today announced unequivocally of Bill Clinton in September 1998. "Bill Clinton should resign,'“ echoed the Philadelphia Inquirer. "He should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair."
When Republicans tried to drive a Democratic president from office for lying about his personal life, media elites couldn't wait to tell Clinton to get lost. (None of those same papers told Trump to do the same thing.)
To be clear, the Times was not one of the dailies that demanded Clinton resign, so they managed to avoid that glaring hypocrisy. Still, we see a clear pattern in terms of media resignation calls made for Clinton and Cuomo, and crickets for Trump.
It’s not like the Times didn’t have endless, obvious opportunities to demand Trump step down. Most recently, it would have been for the blood-thirsty mob he incited on January 6th after trying to use all levers of the government to overthrow a free and fair election last November. For trying to engineer a coup, plain and simple.
Or last year, when Trump refused to protect America from the Covid-19 virus invasion, and then made America’s pandemic response worse everyday by constantly lying to the public about science.
"Any CEO who was deemed responsible for allowing a massive tragedy to unfold would be immediately called upon to resign or be fired, even if he or she were six months from retirement," noted former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart in a CNN column last summer, shaming newspapers for remaining silent regarding Trump's much-needed departure.
Or in 2019, when Trump openly colluded with a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political opponent, while offering up the assistance of the Department of Justice. He hid transcripts of presidential calls on secret servers in hopes of covering up the collusion, and publicly threatened to expose the crucial whistleblower, insinuating that he or she should be executed. He's also urged that a Democratic member of Congress be arrested for treason.
Or the Times should have insisted Trump leave office based on his chronically deranged behavior, which made him categorically unfit to serve, such as being a habitual liar who shredded our public discourse. Trump also lined his pockets while serving. He coddled murderous dictators. Spent his day wallowing in racist attacks, lobbed vicious, personal attacks against the press, and regularly inspired white nationalist gunmen to unleash murderous attacks.
By not taking a public stand, newspaper leaders like those at the Times sent a loud, collective message that what Trump was doing to America did not represent a looming crisis; that the country could easily weather the storm and no drastic action was needed. Note that in 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said he didn’t really view Trump as being an unprecedented figure in American history, and likened him to Edwin Edwards, a controversial Louisiana Democratic governor from the 1970s and 1980s. (The two men have almost nothing in common.)
It's true that calls for resignation certainly would not have forced Trump from office. They would however, have helped change the national debate and more accurately reflect the crisis our country faced with a tyrannical liar at the helm. And quite simply, the calls would been the right thing to do.
The Times is right, Cuomo should resign. Too bad the paper of record failed to make that same obvious demand while Trump was shaming the Oval Office.
💉 GOOD STUFF:
One of the many frustrating aspects of the unfolding vaccine “debate” is how conservatives are allowed in the press to make blanket claims about the supposed evils of forced shots, as if inoculations haven’t been a thing in this country for a very long time.
A helpful new piece arrives via Governing.com, “The Long History of Mandated Vaccines in the United States”:
To this day, most schools and universities require a series of vaccines for students to enroll. For example, for a child to enter kindergarten, the Florida Department of Health requires four doses of Diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), four doses of polio (IPV), two doses of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), two doses of chickenpox, Hepatitis B, and pneumococcal conjugate (PCV13), and haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). When attending college, I had to show proof of vaccination for the same vaccines. Similarly, health-care and child-care workers are often required to show proof of vaccination for Hepatitis B, influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, pneumococcal disease and varicella.
⛵️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Old Dominion, “I Was on a Boat That Day”
Happy Friday — that’s it.
Is she gone for the summer, gone for the night?Gone for the weekend or the rest of my life?Was she laughing, was she cryingAs she walked away?I can't sayI was on a boat that day
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As Covid rages on in Florida, turning the Sunshine State not only into a virus epicenter of the United States but of the entire world, news organizations aren’t being honest about the public health crisis under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. They’re not being transparent about how months ago they embraced GOP spin and portrayed the derelict governor as a pandemic star, regurgitating conservative rhetoric about how liberal critics had been proven wrong about DeSantis’ wrong-headed policy decisions, which have since propelled Florida into a grave health crisis.
The state recently broke its one-day record for new Covid cases, topping out at 21,000 which is as many new cases as the entire country of France tabulates each day. Florida now has more than 12,000 (unvaccinated) people occupying hospital beds battling Covid, another grim benchmark under DeSantis. It’s unthinkable that the state has been plunged into public health chaos when a safe vaccine is readily available to all Floridians over the age of 12.
At a time when states are supposed to be emerging from the year-and-a-half pandemic, Florida is shifting into reverse – it recently recorded more coronavirus cases this week than California, Texas, New York and Illinois combined. This all comes 15 months after DeSantis famously, and loudly, declared victory over the pandemic, back when the state was tallying 500 cases a day.
This debacle, and the media’s refusal to be transparent about how badly it managed the DeSantis story, says as much about the state of the Beltway media as it does about this burgeoning Covid chapter.
For an industry that demands transparency and accountability from public officials, the political press is terrible at conceding its mistakes, especially when those blunders are documented by liberals. Programmed to fear charges of liberal media bias, the Beltway press often scrambles to correct supposed failures highlighted by conservatives. Hyper-sensitive to bad-faith, right-wing critiques and eager to make nice with those accusers, journalists uniformly look away when confronted by the left with irrefutable evidence of failure. And boy, did they screw up the DeSantis story.
This spring, journalists eagerly touted DeSantis’ supposed virus leadership— it was Politico that announced, “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic.” This, after 30,000 Floridians had already died from the virus and after the governor foolishly placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump.
"After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight," CNN cheered, adding that DeSantis remained "defiant and combative.” CNN suggested he deserved a star turn because "Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics” — talk about a low bar.
“Vindication for Ron DeSantis,” the Wall Street Journal announced. The New York Times cheered, “In a country just coming out of the morose grip of coronavirus lockdowns, Florida feels unmistakably hot.”
Not one of those news outlets, that I’ve seen or heard, has addressed its glowing DeSantis coverage, or explained to news consumers how and why newsrooms rushed in to paint the Republican as a Covid savior, only to watch the state now grapple with a man-made crisis.
Incredibly, DeSantis is still getting the media’s benefit of doubt.
The New York Times on Tuesday published a column from Alex Azar, who served as was secretary of health and human services under Trump, praising DeSantis for helping spreading a pro-vaccine message to voters. That’s an absurd thing to be saying in August 2021. The truth is, DeSantis went AWOL for most of this year on the topic of vaccines.
Watching the Republican Party and Fox News embrace dangerous, anti-vaccine rhetoric, DeSantis didn’t want to be out of step as he eyes a possible presidential run in 2024. Instead of acting as the steward of a vulnerable local population, DeSantis abdicated his responsibilities for partisan reasons. Yet today, he receives praise in the pages of the Times.
And when the governor recently took the extraordinary irresponsible move of forbidding local school districts from mandating masks for students if needed to battle local virus surges, CNN ran a pro-GOP chyron while reporting the story: “DeSantis signs executive order giving parents power to choose whether to mask kids at school.”
The news outlet most in need of some DeSantis self-reflection is Politico, which essentially doubled as the governor’s communications shop last winter and spring, churning out three separate cheerleading pieces for the Florida Republican:
• “Covid wars launch DeSantis into GOP ‘top tier’
• “How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic”
• “Ron DeSantis Is Very Pleased With Himself”
That last piece clocked in at 8,000 words (!!), and read like it had been ghost-written by DeSantis’ spokesperson. “He was right,” read the first sentence, and the glowing profile continued for there, detailing how DeSantis had foiled his critics by producing some sort of miraculous Covid oasis in the Sunshine State. “He is basking in a moment of reassessment of what and how he has done—and also of what it might mean, not just for his and his state’s political future but that of the nation.”
Everybody makes mistakes. And holding DeSantis up as Republican Covid hero was a doozy. Now the press needs to address that failure.
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
There are so many right-wing media outlets that function as a cancer on this country, with Gateway Pundit being right near the top. A bastion of lies, smears, and Russian propaganda, the site continues to flourish in part because it has loyal readers like Trump, who wallow in its ugly conspiracies.
Gateway’s disturbing influence was recently highlighted when the DOJ released phone call notes in connection with Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election late last year.
From the Daily Beast’s “Website Run by ‘Dumbest Man on the Internet’ Helped Fuel Trump’s Effort to Cancel Democracy”:
The Gateway Pundit’s small role in Trump’s endeavor to weaponize the DOJ against the American electoral process underscores just how easily a discredited far-right media site established a pipeline to the decision-making of the then most powerful person on Earth. It also shows how this one website—founded by a guy repeatedly dubbed the “dumbest man on the internet”—managed to play a part in fueling the efforts that brought the country to the brink of democratic rupture.
🇮🇪 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Martin Garrix (featuring Bono & The Edge), “We Are The People”
It’s basically a new U2 song, in the form of an irresistible dance mix from Dutch DJ Martin Garrix.
Featuring Bono’s hallmark, uplifting vocals and The Edge’s tell-tale guitar scratch, “We Are the People” strikes an instant, anthemic note as Garrix transports it all to the dance floor.
We are the people we've been waiting forOut of the ruins of hate and warArmy of lovers never seen beforeWe are the people we've been waiting forWe are the people of the open handThe streets of Dublin to Notre-DameWe'll build it better than we did beforeWe are the people we've been waiting for
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Moving to curb the Covid-19 misinformation that’s flooding the media landscape, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp recently made the dramatic move of canceling a well-known conservative columnist. The move was made in Australia last week when the editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph notified Alan Jones, a staunch critic of lockdowns and vaccines who has claimed the Covid virus is no worse than the flu, that his column had been terminated.
The abrupt move comes as Australia struggles with another wave of lockdowns, and after Jones had lashed out at a top public health official, calling her a “dumb,” “out of touch,” “village idiot.” He’s also accused the government of ““embracing martial law”, entering “Stalinist territory” and “crushing business” with an extended lockdown and mandatory masks outdoors,” The Guardian reported.
The contrast with how Murdoch’s media empire is dealing with deliberate Covid-19 lies and misinformation in his own country, compared to the United States is startling. Tucker Carlson, who has staked his career on lying about the pandemic, and consequently is getting people killed, continues to enjoy free rein from News Corp. Carlson unapologetically claims the Covid vaccine is killing people and that the government and media are covering it up. Nobody can be trusted, he insists. Also, the vaccine poses a danger to pregnant women.
He also contradicts himself almost nightly while pushing his anti-vaccine crusade. Recently, he mocked health officials in Los Angeles County for reinstating mask guidelines by claiming there was no spike in Covid cases to justify the move — “It’s barely noticeable.” Days later, Carlson ominously warned viewers that “a huge number of vaccinated people are getting Covid. And some of them are getting very sick, even dying.”
On Friday night, the host appeared against a backdrop reading “Vaccine Coercion,” and suggested that looming and legal vaccine mandates would lead to violence. “The question is, really, how long are Americans going to put up with this? What happens when large groups of people start to resist these mandates?” Carlson said. “As inevitably they will, because they're too unreasonable, they're too irrational, they're not rooted in science. They are pushing us toward something awful.”
But Carlson still has a job, and News Corp’s full backing.
Too cowardly to pull back his top-rated U.S. host, Murdoch refuses to protect American news consumers from Fox News’ cult-like disinformation regarding a miraculously safe and effective vaccine. In Australia, Murdoch’s company operates under different rules and, at least in the case of Jones, is far more willing to stand up for common sense and decency when it comes to not pushing obvious Covid-19 lies.
Why the double standard? Australia is Murdoch’s home country, so perhaps there is more concern about its collective well being. Sydney, Darwin, Perth and Brisbane - all capital cities - are currently in lockdown. More than 20 million Australians, around 80 percent of the population, are living under restrictions, which is the highest number since a national lockdown at the start of the pandemic. Australia lags far behind most countries in terms of vaccination rate, just 15 percent to date. The country decided to rely on keeping most foreigners out of the country during the pandemic, and requiring strict quarantine protocols. With the Delta variant, more breakouts have occurred in recent weeks.
Another possible explanation is that News Corps has recently come under intense political scrutiny in Australia, and faces a growing backlash over how it uses its media dominance there to wield political power.
Recently, former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull — occupying different parts of the political spectrum — joined forces to denounce the Murdoch media cancer that’s eating the country. They urged the government to take steps to diversify media ownership and to break up the dangerous coalition that now exists between right-wing politicians and the Murdoch press, which serves as an unaccountable, but extremely powerful force. Parliament hearings were held after Rudd's petition to establish a royal commission into media diversity became Australia's largest-ever e-petition, and the country's third largest petition of any kind.
Rudd, a progressive, has labelled Murdoch's' empire a "cancer" on the country, while the center-right Turnbull branded it "an absolute threat to our democracy." Warned Rudd, “The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the Liberal party or the National party or the Labor party, it is News Corporation. We are drowning in lies.”
Murdoch’s News Corp control controls 70 percent of Australia's print media, most notably The Australian, the national daily newspaper with the largest circulation. That would be like if Murdoch not only owned the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the U.S. but also the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and used them all to pump out toxic, right-wing misinformation.
News Corp also owns the country's second-biggest news website news.com.au and 24-hour channel Sky News Australia. The country where Murdoch was born recently ranked third in the world for media concentration, behind only the state-owned media of China and Egypt.
If Murdoch were consistent about how he treats deliberate Covid misinformers, Tucker Carlson would be out of work.
🗳 GOOD STUFF:
Jane Meyer has a must-read in The New Yorker, as she digs deeper into the GOP’s embrace of authoritarianism, which is on display with the joke Arizona “audit.”
From Mayer’s “The Big Money Behind the Big Lie”:
Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Los Lobos, “Sail on, Sailor”
The pride of East L.A., Los Lobos is celebrating its 41st year in 2021 with the band’s 17th studio album, Native Sons. It’s this simple cover of the Beach Boys’ 1973, piano-based single that I keep coming back to from the new Los Lobos record.
Written by the iconic duo of Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson, “Sail on, Sailor” evokes a soulful optimism amidst times of turmoil.
Seldom stumble, never crumbleTry to tumble, life's a rumbleFeel the stinging I've been givenNever ending, unrelentingHeartbreak searing, always fearingNever caring, perseveringSail on, sail on, sailor
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On the same day that newly released phone call notes from the Department of Justice confirmed that Trump aggressively worked to overturn the results of an American election, demanding his DOJ cronies dub the November contest to have been “corrupt,” the Washington Post decided to look back fondly on the Trump years and to keep normalizing him.
Despite his dangerous, undemocratic and authoritarian ways, it’s clear the Post misses Trump and the media attention he generates. So, putting aside his ongoing and determined efforts to demolish free and fair elections in America, the Post rounded up ten writers who were willing to type up odes to all the things Trump “got right” while president. It was an exercise in bad judgement and only highlighted the Beltway media’s willingness to portray him as a savvy player who managed to surprise the experts.
“The bigger problem…is experts/scholars sitting around and analyzing what Trump got “right” as though he were a normal president; as though he got anything right through sober-minded judgement rather than chaotic happenstance,” author Shane Carrow noted on Twitter.
The angle of the Post package was that it featured experts who were generally critical of Trump in office now writing nice things about some of his policies. For balance, did the Post tap Trump supporters in the press who conceded and detailed his failings? The newspaper did not.
Why the Post dedicated so much time and resources (3,000 words) to lionize the most consistently unpopular U.S. president in history, and one who lost his re-election bid by 8 million votes, was never explained. I don’t recall the Post collecting policy experts in 2017 to catalog all the things President Barack Obama got “right” during his time in office. Yet the Post felt compelled to do that with Trump, as the specter of lawbreaking continues to engulf him. And as Trump spreads the Big Lies that the last election was “stolen,” and that the deadly January 6, insurrection never happened.
The released notes from the DOJ last week portray a White House in late 2020 that had categorically, and unapologetically, walked away from the rule of law as it obsessively pursued Trump’s scheme to nullify millions of legitimate votes. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” notes from one December 27 phone call between Trump and the acting attorney general read.
“The phone call by Mr. Trump was perhaps the most audacious moment in a monthslong pressure campaign aimed at enlisting the Justice Department in his crusade to overturn the election results,” the New York Times reported. "You guys may not be following the internet the way I do," Trump said, hyping the wild election conspiracy theories that were being promoted at the time.
Richard Nixon resigned from office for doing far less than that. Yet that was the same day last week that the Post opted to cast a glow around Trump with a contrarian look at his so-called successes.
Keep in mind that Trump ripped families apart at the border, colluded with a foreign power while in office, was impeached twice, did almost nothing to prevent 600,000 Covid-19 deaths, accused Obama of spying on his campaign, and spent months denigrating the integrity of American elections.
Trump long ago should have disqualified himself from receiving respectful news coverage. But as the Post showed, that milestone hasn’t yet been reached, as the paper eagerly wallowed in Trump revisionism. For the media, Trump remains a captivating topic who provides endless angles of intrigue and who is treated as a looming star of American politics. That, compared to the “boring” Joe Biden presidency.
What were some of the successes the Post hyped? Trump “didn’t start a war.” He was also given high marks for “diversifying” the Republican Party because Trump’s percent of the Black vote went from a paltry 8 percent in 2016 to equally paltry 12 percent in 2020. Context: That was the exact same increase George W. Bush recorded among Black voters between 2000 and 2004.
Also, Trump was credited with diminishing the White House Correspondents Dinner. It’s true that hokey and extremely chummy Beltway “nerd prom” was an embarrassment to journalism and it’s fine with it no longer existing. But the reason it got nixed under Trump was largely because he made it part of his vicious, authoritarian war against the media, a crusade that may have reached its bottom when he suggested a MSNBC host was involved in a murder plot. For four years, Trump did everything in his power to undercut the trust and effectiveness of news gathering, and that included making sure he did not have to face any barbs at the WHCA dinner. It’s hard to see how attacking the event, refusing to show up, and mercilessly belittling the free press was something he got “right”?
A dangerous autocrat who’s devoted to wrecking the American election process is waiting in the wings to become the GOP nominee in 2024, and the Beltway press seems just fine with that.
(Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Ten days ago at PRESS RUN I asked, “Remember when Politico said DeSantis had “won the pandemic?,” recalling the irresponsible way the press rushed in to proclaim the Florida Republican a Covid star this spring.
In recent days, the situation in the Sunshine State continues to deteriorate under DeSantis. From the Associated Press’ “Florida Breaks Record With More Than 21,000 New COVID Cases”:
Florida reported 21,683 new cases of COVID-19, the state’s highest one-day total since the start of the pandemic, according to federal health data released Saturday, as its theme park resorts again started asking visitors to wear masks indoors.
The state has become the new national epicenter for the virus, accounting for around a fifth of all new cases in the U.S. as the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus continues to spread.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Son Volt, “Living in the USA”
Looking over the U.S. landscape, Son Volt’s Jay Farrar sees lots of troubling signs for post-Trump America. Wrapping his meditations around a hypnotic acoustic tug that soon swells into a sturdy, Americana rocker, “Living in the USA” wonders if we’ve misplaced our collective soul.
And yes, with his deep, gravelly pipes, Farrar still has one of the most arresting and engaging voices in rock.
Where's the heart from days of old? Where's the empathy? Where's the soul? Livin' in the USA Livin' in the USA
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Be kind.
Surveying the media landscape and seeing a Beltway press corps that’s constantly on the run from Republican attacks, Meet The Press moderator Chuck Todd this week urged his colleagues to stand up to the right-wing bullies, who have spent decades demonizing journalists.
“We should have fought back better in the mainstream media. We shouldn’t [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended,” Todd told The Verge. “We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea that, ‘Oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias.’”
He added: “Where we did get lost in this, and this sort of happened to mainstream media in particular, is that we did let Republican critics get in our heads, right? The Republicans have been running on, “There’s a liberal bias in the media.” This has been a 45-year campaign.”
Technically, it’s been a 52-year campaign, with Vice President Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” attack on the press in 1969 often cited as the launching point of the choreographed crusade.
The good news is that every 12 or 24 months Todd emerges and makes these types of welcomed, clear-eyed pronouncements about the press, calling out right-wing lies, and urging his colleagues to do better in fighting against dishonest GOP attacks.
The bad news is Todd then goes back to work at NBC and rarely follows his own advice. He makes no structural changes to the programs he oversees to make sure they don’t fall prey to GOP tactics. It’s easy to view his pronouncements as performative, directed at those who are concerned about journalism and about the state of our democracy in the face of a Republican Party that broke its pact with common sense and instead now worships at the altar of a Mar-a-Lago retiree.
Todd refuses to follow his own lead and produce consistently clear, aggressive journalism, while not fretting about potential GOP pushback.
A quick example.
During Trump’s second impeachment trial, Todd introduced a Meet The Press segment in which voters from a toss-up district in Michigan were interviewed about the House proceedings. Touted as a way to take the temperature of everyday voters outside of the "Beltway," the sit-down with six voters from Kent County, Michigan, offered a chance to hear if heartland denizens "cared" about impeachment. Except there was a problem: Every voter interviewed was a Republican, and every voter interviewed opposed impeachment. ("I don’t even care. It's just noise.")
This makes no sense. If you wanted anecdotal evidence of the nation’s response to impeachment, you’d interview a wide cross-section of voters. Instead, Todd only talked to Republicans even though the Michigan district he focused on is evenly split among Democrats and Republicans. What would explain this type of illogical press behavior other than a fear of upsetting conservatives — of being tagged with the Liberal Media Bias charge?
Todd lamented to The Verge that the press has fallen into a “both sides trope,” where journalists strain to place blame on Republicans and Democrats even when it should not be distributed that way. Yet earlier this year, after another deadly gun rampage in America, and after the Republican Party once again categorically refused to support any possible gun safety legislation, Todd went on Meet the Press and blamed Congress — Both Sides — for not doing anything to stop the deadly plague.
In response to my media critiques, PRESS RUN readers often ask, why? Why does the press behave the way it does? Why does it engage in Both Sides nonsense in an effort to water down irresponsible GOP behavior? Why does it view so many news cycles through the prism of Republican talking points? Without question, the overriding cultural reason is the fear of being hit with the Liberal Media Bias label.
I don’t mean that’s what’s driving journalists on an hourly, granular level, or that before filing a story or going on the air they consciously think about GOP attacks. But it does remain the dominant ethos and it’s been ingrained in newsrooms for decades. (Being the target of right-wing smear campaigns is no fun and it can damage journalism careers.) Consequently, the press spends an inordinate amount of time trying to prove it’s not guilty of Liberal Media Bias.
That institutional fear helps explain the inexplicable, like why so many news organizations refused to call Trump a liar for four years, even as they documented his thousands of lies. That was a deliberate decision to turn away from the truth —and from accurate language — while covering the most dangerous president in American history. Afraid that calling Trump a "liar" in straight news reports would spark cries of Liberal Media Bias, the press capitulated. In the process, Trump used his avalanche of untruths to chip away at our democratic institutions.
Eric Alterman wrote an entire, must-read book in 2003 expertly debunking the bias myth, “What Liberal Media?” Conservatives “know mau-mauing the other side is just a good way to get their own ideas across–or perhaps prevent the other side from getting a fair hearing for theirs,” he wrote. I made a similar effort with my book, “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush,” where I focused on the media’s failure during the run-up to the Iraq War: “To oppose the invasion vocally was to be outside the media mainstream and to invite scorn. Like some nervous Democratic members of Congress right before the war, mainstream media journalists seemed to scramble for political cover so as to not subject themselves to conservative catcalls.”
Still, the Liberal Media Bias myth persists and remains a driving engine of the conservative movement. It’s arguably more potent today because Trump made it a centerpiece of his political appeal to hate the press. It would be helpful if journalists like Chuck Todd actually took their own advice and combated the fiction head on.
(Photo D Dipasupil/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has a must-read this week about the daunting task facing the Beltway media, “Our Democracy is Under Attack. Washington Journalists Must Stop Covering it Like Politics as Usual”:
The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bleachers, “Stop Making This Hurt”
Producer extraordinaire Jack Antonoff, who’s worked with Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey, returns with his solo project, Bleachers, for album number three.
As for “Stop Making This Hurt,” I heartily concur with Gig Goer:
The new song is a masterclass in alt-pop music, an adventurous cut filled with radio-ready pop hooks and sky-rocketing melodies. Touching upon the theme of mental health and dealing with a notion of inescapable darkness growing within, Stop Making This Hurt is sonically vibrant and lyrically moving, the perfect addition to our summer playlists.
My mamma's in the house tonightTryna break free of New JerseyWhile the kids are on the streetAnd they're cryin', "Let me live in my country"
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
One of the country’s most important Congressional inquiries begins Tuesday morning when the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is gaveled into session. Four police officers are set to provide the committee’s first public testimony as they recount the physical and verbal abuse they endured trying to defend members of Congress from raging Trump loyalists.
Tasked with determining how the insurrection was planned, why it unfolded, and who was to blame, the investigation will likely detail how Trump and Republicans eagerly fueled the deadly day.
But the press is doing its best to portray the investigation as a partisan event, featuring sniping from Both Sides. (A feud!) “Jan. 6 Select Committee to Open Investigation Amid Political Chaos and Controversy,” read a Washington Post headline on Sunday, insisting a “cloud” hung over the proceedings.
“What terrible, inaccurate framing,” tweeted Cornell University professor of American history Larry Glickman. “The story is not the supposed “cloud” but that the GOP has done everything possible to stonewall an investigation. Stop obfuscating GOP responsibility.”
So many media players will not accept the obvious fact that most Republicans don't want a faithful accounting of the insurrection and Trump's role in it. Republicans aren’t using smoke and mirrors to disguise their true intentions either. As usual, they’re being upfront in pushing their un-democratic agenda.
It’s just that journalists don’t want to acknowledge the disturbing reality, that the party they so desperately want to portray as being a mainstream, center-right entity is doing everything possible to make sure the facts surrounding the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol — a riot launched in an effort to stop the certification of an American election — remain clouded for reasons of self-preservation.
It’s much easier, and politically safer, to cover the Jan. 6 select committee as another case of partisan bickering and how Congress is dysfunctional:
• “Congress’ effort to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol has turned into another political battle.” (NBC News)
• “It was also the latest evidence of how poisonous relations have become between the two parties, especially in the House” (New York Times)
For the D.C. press, the story isn’t that the Republican Party for months has moved to block bipartisan investigations into political violence, it’s that Democrats and Republicans can’t get along.
That absurd framing exploded into view last week when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) canned two GOP choices — Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) — from serving on the committee because they had already publicly condemned any investigation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) then pulled his nominations of all other Republicans and declared none would serve.
When that news broke, reporters clutched their pearls, aghast at the idea that the investigation might go forward without Republicans. Beltway reporters explicitly embraced the right-wing’s performative outrage as their own, claiming Pelosi’s move had "stunned the Capitol,” and sent off “shock waves” as Politico announced, claiming the entire controversy was (surprise!) a “gift” for Republicans. Politico even got ahead of the story, reporting that Pelosi’s move was “guaranteed to spark major backlash” from Republicans. Why wait for the actual backlash when you can hype it beforehand?
CNN’s Chris Cillizza threw up his hands, announcing the House select committee’s final report was already useless because Pelosi wouldn’t allow two pro-insurrection Republicans to serve on the panel. (Should the 9/11 Commission have included 9/11 Truthers on the panel?)
In truth, the GOP pullout means the crucial inquiry will be free from internal attempts to derail, delay, and obfuscate by the members hand-picked by McCarthy to expressly prevent a clear accounting. If journalists cared about the investigation itself instead of they shallow optics surrounding it, they wouldn’t have been so distraught by the news Republicans wanted out.
They also wouldn’t have equated that GOP withdrawal with the investigation having “collapsed,” as ABC News reported. It was “in chaos” and “crumbling,” NBC News added. “Bipartisan House probe of Jan. 6 insurrection falls apart,” the Post declared.
Those statements were all categorically false. The panel was never in danger of not happening — of “collapsing” or “crumbling.” But in the eyes of the Beltway press, if Republicans were angry about the panel and were not part of the personnel, then the investigation didn’t really exist, which is a stunning supposition to make.
For the record, two Republicans, and Trump critics, will serve on the select committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). That means the media emphasis on the investigation not being bipartisan was a waste of time.
In an effort to push the Both Sides narrative and to give credence to the GOP’s phony outrage, the press also overlooked a key fact. In May, Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly not to support the creation of an elite, independent Jan. 6 commission, akin to the one that delved into the 9/11 attacks. In blocking the common-sense move by the Senate to sponsor a truly bipartisan investigation, Republicans knew that Pelosi and Democrats would then create a House select committee, and they knew Pelosi would have final say over which Republicans served. None of that was a surprise.
By ignoring that key context though, the press perpetuated GOP rhetoric that Pelosi had “stunned” members.
Republicans are trying to cover-up the origins and blame for some of the most dangerous political violence in this country’s history, and the media are helping.
(Photo Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
Writing at Just Security, Ryan Goodman, Barbara McQuade, and Joyce Vance compiled a thorough companion piece for Tuesday’s committee hearing, “Questions the January 6 Select Committee Should Ask Its Witnesses”:
One issue the select committee will have to consider is whether they will call President Trump to testify. He played a key role in the day’s events and, at a minimum, is a material fact witness. Committee members will have to weigh whether there is unique value in his potential testimony and if so, whether it is worth the spectacle Trump would undoubtedly create if he testified. If he is called, the questions posed to him would be best drafted after the committee develops the record. (We do not include questions for Trump in the list below.) Ultimately, the committee must take the path that best permits it to create a durable record of Jan. 6 that will serve as a history and a basis for preventing a recurrence of an unprecedented attack on our democracy.
🎙FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
HAIM, “Cherry Flavored Stomach Ache”
I love everything this adventurous California band of sisters does, including their latest contribution to soundtrack for the new Netflix movie, “The Last Letter From Your Lover.”
Tried to withdraw a guilty plea(Damn) you ain't gonna pin this one on meOne thing's for sure, I'm not sleeping here tonightAnd I'm not interested in what you think is right
She gets so lonely, she can't relate to anyoneShe turns on the television and slips into a dreamShe woke up in a screamTake it easy on her
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
As the United States careens towards its third Covid-19 surge, driven entirely by Americans who refuse to get vaccinated, the press continues to portray the selfish, partisan dead-enders as misguided and merely reluctant.
The coverage stems from a five-year media crusade to normalize Trump supporters and constantly extend “sympathy.” Today, that means coddling the offenders, especially white, Southern ones, who are infecting communities by refusing to take a miraculously safe and effective vaccine that’s been available for eight months.
The press needs to stop portraying those at the heart of anti-vaccine mania as regular folk who just need a friendly nudge. (80 percent say they’ll never get the shot.) Instead, they’re part of a selfish movement that threatens our national security.
And stop calling them “vaccine hesitant,” “vaccine-reluctant,” or “vaccine skeptics.” That implies logical thought processes, that these people can be convinced via soothing tones, and that there’s a lucid element at play. My hunch is 5-10 percent of Americans are “vaccine hesitant” in the traditional sense. The rest are conspiratorial Trump loyalists — the same ones who claim he beat Joe Biden in a landslide last year. They’re part of a deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going and gladly risking infections.
That’s not how they’re usually portrayed in the press.
“America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong,” The Atlantic lamented, urging renewed efforts to “persuade them.” A Washington Post headline announced, “The GOP’s Very Stubborn Vaccine Skepticism,” which offered a polite description — they’re just being “stubborn” and skeptical.
While coddling refusers, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat insists, “In a polarized landscape with widely distrusted institutions, a more patient approach seems much more civically healthy.” As if a patient and civic approach hasn’t been tried all this year by public health officials.
The conservative National Review recently complained that “Proponents of the vaccine are unwilling or unable to understand the thinking of vaccine skeptics.”
Worse, the dead-enders are sometimes disappeared by the media. On Sunday’s front page, the Post published a piece about how the resurging virus is “threatening to subsume President Biden’s agenda.” Barely mentioned in the story was the fact that Republicans nationwide are driving the surge by refusing to inoculate themselves.
And when Politico over the weekend reported that many Southerners “are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best,” the incomprehensible logic was treated matter-of-factly, like Politico was announcing conservatives oppose higher taxes.
Today’s babying of right-wingers comes after journalists recently mocked liberals for still wearing masks when the CDC said it was no longer necessary for those who were vaccinated, belittling progressives as "pandemic addicts," calling them "irrational" and "odd." The Atlantic ridiculed them as "The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown."
Meanwhile, the pandemic gains new potency.
“Folks [are] supposed to have common sense. But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks,” Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, told reporters in Birmingham, Ala.
How is it that a Republican governor is (belatedly) being more honest and direct than much of the mainstream media when discussing the state of vaccine dead-enders, and the extraordinary toll they’re taking on the pandemic-fatigued country?
This is a movement of people who number in the tens of millions who over the last year have loudly clamored that the virus was nothing to fear, but the vaccine today is. (Ponder that contrast.) For the vast majority, it’s likely a lost cause and for the simple reason that they’ve been brainwashed — not a word the Beltway media likes to use while describing Trump voters. (This excellent Financial Times piece does not shy away.)
Thanks to a burgeoning and profitable misinformation industry, the same one that lied about Hillary Clinton’s emails and the 2020 election being “stolen,” a huge swath of Trump followers believe the vaccine:
• Alters your DNA.
• Implants a microchip.
• Is deadly.
Then there’s the QAnon element, which lots of mainstream news outlets skim over with regard to the vaccine, reluctant to tie the GOP and conservatives to a manic cult movement.
But as HuffPost noted, it’s a driving force behind the vaccine stone wall:
As the coronavirus swept across the U.S., so did QAnon, with anti-vaccine hysteria emerging center stage in its extraordinary fear-mongering campaign. The far-right conspiracy theory movement hinges upon the belief that former President Donald Trump has quietly been at war against an omnipotent cabal of “deep-state” pedophiles who do all kinds of wicked things — from eating children to unleashing a highly infectious virus to manufacture a global need for a secretly deadly vaccine.
After the terror attacks of 9/11 when there developed a misguided movement among some on the left to deny the reality of the event — to claim President George W. Bush knew about the planned strikes and allowed them to happen for geo-political reasons — do you remember journalists rushing in to say how the country needed to hear the 9/11 Truthers out? Was there a media coddling movement designed to portray conspiracy peddlers as being slightly confused Americans?
Vaccine dead-enders are a cancer on this country, and the press ought to treat them that way.
(Photo David McNew/Getty Images)
💉 GOOD STUFF:
Meanwhile, the politics of vaccine refusers continues to bedevil Republicans, who in recent days appeared to want to change their message with more members openly touting pro-vaccine rhetoric.
But that Pandora’s box probably cannot be refitted, argues E.J. Dionne at the Post, with his latest piece, “Republicans Unleashed a Deadly Vaccine Skepticism. Can They Now Contain It?”:
[Whit] Ayres, the Republican pollster, said the growing willingness of leaders of his party to speak up for vaccinations is a response to dangers that can no longer be ignored. “The surge is in the red states and the red counties,” he said in an interview, “and there’s a real concern about protecting the health of people who are not yet vaccinated, many of whom are our people.”
Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux pointed to the unpopularity of the anti-vaccine position generally, and especially among “red state business communities” who fear new lockdowns.
🎯 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
James Maddock, “The Pride of Ashby De La Zouch”
One of my favorite artists is back with a new album. The immensely talented Maddock, whose gift for melody and lyrical storytelling never ceases to amaze me, manages to turn a story about pub darts into an irresistibly engaging new song, featuring an unforgettable leading man.
FTR, Ashby De La Zouch is a market town and civil parish in North West Leicestershire, England, Maddock’s hometown.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Florida has become a Covid-19 debacle, again.
Now accounting for one-in-every five new cases nationwide, the Sunshine State under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has emerged as a beacon of irresponsibility. Not that he seems to care.
Off visiting Texas recently to take part in more GOP photo-ops at the border, DeSantis often brushes off the pandemic bad news. “It’s a seasonal virus and this is the seasonal pattern it follows in the Sun Belt states,” he said this week. (He blamed “quote-unquote ‘experts’” for criticizing the unvaccinated.) The governor is busy though, selling anti-vaccine merchandise, like “Don’t Fauci My Florida” t-shirts.
Question: Does the Beltway press care about the state’s drastic Covid U-turn? This spring, journalists lionized DeSantis’ supposed virus leadership— it was Politico that announced, “How Ron DeSantis Won the Pandemic.” This, after 30,000 Floridians had already died from the virus.
This is the same DeSantis who spent last year trying to silence scientists, covering up data, rescinding mask ordinances, playing down the virus' threat, fighting with the Florida press, and portraying himself as a maverick under attack. He even foolishly placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump.
The irony is that DeSantis is now facing a Covid crisis specifically because his supporters — Republicans — aren’t getting vaccinated at the same rate as others in the state. If they were, Florida, and the rest of the country, would be approaching herd immunity. Instead, the proudly unvaccinated MAGA’s are driving the Florida meltdown, with some counties reporting that new cases are coming 100 percent from those who refused to get the shot. Still, DeSantis won’t act. He won’t lead.
The Orlando Sentinel editorial page recently read the governor the riot act over his dereliction of duty:
At the moment, it’s as if DeSantis has washed his hands of the matter and moved on to elections, borders, critical race theory, mocking Fauci or whatever else will get him a headline.
And every few days, nearly as many people are dying from COVID as died in the recent collapse of a condominium in South Florida.
Please, governor, we’re begging you, handle the COVID problem. Be a leader.
How bad is Florida?
• New Covid cases are up nearly 200% over the past two weeks.
• Florida is third in the nation in per capita increases, accounting for nearly 20% of the entire nation’s new infections.
•The rate of positive tests is now well above 10%.
• Florida now boasts the fourth-highest rate of hospitalizations and the nation’s highest average for daily deaths.
•The state’s vaccination rate, 57 percent, remains a mediocre embarrassment.
• The Sunshine State has the second lowest rate of vaccinated nursing home workers in the country.
All of this makes the media’s torrent of DeSantis valentines earlier this year look inexcusable. Beltway scribes lined up to tell the same story over and over: Democratic critics were wrong about DeSantis, Covid and Florida, and now he’s riding high within the GOP. They eagerly held him up as a rare Republican Covid star, pushing GOP talking points about how DeSantis had steered the Sunshine State into "boom” times.
"After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight," CNN cheered, adding that DeSantis remained "defiant and combative.”
“Vindication for Ron DeSantis,” the Wall Street Journal announced.
Politico applauded the "wonky" Florida governor and his Covid-fueled rise in Republican politics: "Conservatives are relishing the contrast and holding up DeSantis as an example of effective governance." In a report about Florida's supposed Covid success story, the New York Times quoted DeSantis bragging, “If you look at South Florida right now, this place is booming." (No Democratic officials were quoted in the Times piece to offer a counter perspective.)
I understand why DeSantis’ communications teams wanted to get those stories placed in the national press — he clearly has his eyes on a White House run. But why did Beltway journalists play along and type up a series of extended press releases, pretending that DeSantis alone had figured out how to defeat a global pandemic by battling health officials urging caution and common sense?
As the Delta variant runs wild, will journalists who lauded DeSantis in the spring admit they got the story wrong, and tell the truth about the Covid disaster that Florida has become?
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
The New York Times’ Charles Blow recently published a powerful piece, “As the Press Weakens, So Does Democracy”:
Democracies cannot survive without a common set of facts and a vibrant press to ferret them out and present them. Our democracy is in terrible danger. The only way that lies can flourish as they now do is because the press has been diminished in both scale and stature. Lies advance when truth is in retreat.
The founders understood the supreme value of the press, and that’s why they protected it in the Constitution. No other industry can claim the same.
But protection from abridgment is not protection from shrinkage or obsolescence.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Holly Humberstone, “The Walls Are Way Too Thin”
Last year I featured Humberstone’s breakout single, “Overkill,” which featured one of the best opening lines of the year: “A couple more tequilas / I’ll tell you how I’m feeling.”
The British, twentysomething singer-songwriter returns with a new album this year and the radiant “The Walls Are Way Too Thin” is the first single.
As Atwood magazine recently put it, “An intimate and intense confrontation with the self, “The Walls Are Way Too Thin” marries Humberstone’s charismatic dark pop with deep emotional layers of self-exploration and discovery. It’s a coming-of-age reclamation of the self, an impassioned act of resistance and defiance, and an intoxicatingly catchy song we’ll be playing on repeat all summer long.”
And we crossed paths by the bathroomBut I'd just rather be out of the pictureAnd I'll do my utmost to talk to youBut I just wanna be outI just wanna be out of the picture
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Sexist double standards don’t come any brighter, or more well defined, than the eager, nonstop coverage Trump continues to receive months after losing his White House election, compared to how the Beltway press gleefully tried to run Hillary Clinton out of town after her 2016 loss.
For the media, Trump the man remains a captivating topic who provides endless angles of intrigue and who is treated as a looming star of American politics. This, after becoming only the ninth president in U.S. history to lose a re-election bid. Clinton the woman though, was treated as an incompetent has-been who threw away a sure-fire win, and one who needed to get off the national stage immediately. Trump has receiving very little media second guessing.
“I was really struck by how people said that to me, 'Go away, go away,'" Clinton observed in 2019, "They never said that to any man who was not elected." Trump’s media treatment this year confirms her claim and that the tough coverage she received was tailor made for the first woman nominee.
Against the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s “boring” administration, journalists seem eager for the chaos and clicks that Trump creates. The coverage seems to swell with each passing day, as the press marvels at Trump’s lasting power. This was a breathless Business Insider headline this week, even though it would been more timely in 2017: “The Definitive Oral History of How Trump Took Over the GOP, as Told To Us By Cruz, Rubio, and 20 More Insiders.”
The premise to virtually all the coverage is, of course Trump will run again. By contrast, the first woman White House nominee was treated quite differently after her defeat as journalists angrily, and irrationally, demanded she “go away”:
• “Hillary Clinton Just Won't Go Away” (National Journal)
• “Why Won’t Hillary Clinton Just Go Away?” (Washington Examiner)
• “It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Go Away Forever” (Toronto Star)
• “Can Hillary Clinton Please Go Quietly into the Night?” (Vanity Fair)
• “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Hillary?” (Politico)
• “Hillary, I love you. But please go away” (Los Angeles Times)
The issue was so vexing, a New York Times column asked, “What’s to be done with Hillary Clinton, the woman who won’t go away?” Not long after, an annoyed Michelle Cottle at the Times published “Hillary Clinton’s Master Class in Distraction,” perturbed that the day’s most famous Democrat was giving media interviews and speaking out against Trump. Following the election came constant pundit hand wringing that Clinton, “doesn’t place enough blame on herself,” the Times stressed. Media men in particular focused on pressing Clinton to acknowledge her mistakes. Journalists today demand almost no self-reflection from Trump regarding his lopsided loss to Biden.
Clinton ran on one of the most decorated resumes in American history: First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State. But the post-election media message was simple: She was a poorly-advised, “bad” candidate who just didn’t get retail politics in America.
By contrast, how many in-depth reports have you read about how and why Trump lost Georgia and Arizona, two longtime Republicans bastions? “I've yet to see reporters from NY Times, WaPo, Politico etc chide Trump for not running a good campaign in Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia the way they spoke about Hillary and Wisconsin/Ohio/Etc,” Oliver Willis tweeted last week.
By piling on Clinton and her campaign, the press didn’t have to ask itself the hard questions about 2016 — about the obvious misogyny that fueled so much of the coverage, and whether America is a fundamentally racist country for having elected Trump.
There was also an unmistakable glee the media took in recounting Clinton’s loss. In late December, 2016, the Washington Post published a mocking piece after a journalist posted a candid photograph of Clinton sitting alone in a local restaurant near her home, looking “forlorn.”
Sadly, none of this is surprising. “Women candidates often inspire something more akin to paranoia,” Megan Garber noted in The Atlantic. “They are often treated as interlopers, their presence regarded, in ways both subtle and astoundingly obvious, as an encroachment.”
What we’re seeing today is the media embrace two extreme approaches for covering recent White House campaign losers. No defeated candidate has ever been showered with much attention as Trump has. And no defeated candidate has ever been showered with as much contempt as Clinton was. Note that she actually tallied two million more votes than Trump in 2016, and Trump lost 2020 by 8 million. Yet the double standard persists.
Sexism is a helluva drug.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
👊🏽 GOOD STUFF:
Lots of times the media fail to take the long view in terms of what Republicans are trying to accomplish with voter suppression laws and the disturbing lessons they learned from Trump’s failed attempt to overturn an election.
MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown recently did an excellent job detailing the anti-democratic moves with his piece, “Trump's 2020 Loss Gave the GOP the Last Key to 'Win' the Midterms”:
There was a time in the not too distant past when the Republican Party was known for its sneakiness, a product of the underhanded tricks of operatives like Lee Atwater and his protégés. These days, the GOP is more a fan of brute force tactics when it comes to winning elections, reworking the rules of the game to make it more winnable — potentially even when they haven't won the most votes.
Even as the media shine lights on the individual components of the GOP's strategy — from the slew of changes in election laws enacted or proposed in states like Georgia and Texas to the absolute circus that's taking place in Arizona's "audit" of the 2020 election — it can be easy to miss how they fit together. But when you take a step back, it becomes clear that they're all interconnected, with one overarching goal: Republicans' opposition to free and fair elections boils down to a three-step plan to reclaim power in Washington and cement their control at the state level.
🏖 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Steve Winwood, “Back in the High Life”
A summer story: A million years ago I spent a summer on Martha’s Vineyard with seven friends of mine, living in a four-person railroad apartment on Circuit Ave. in Oak Bluffs, back when O.B. was more of a honky tonk town. I mowed lawns all summer, mostly up-island, working for Arnie Fischer and making what was then the princely sum of $10 an hour.
That summer was punctuated by three defining songs that played on non-stop loops everywhere you turned: Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” and Winwood’s “Back in the High Life.” All three have gone onto achieve Hall of Fame status as perhaps the pinnacle moments in each singer’s long, illustrious career.
To this day, summer reminds me of the anthemic “Back in the High Life,” and its Vineyard connection of having James Taylor singing background vocals. Fun fact: That summer I saw J.T. unfold himself from an old Toyota while visiting his mom’s house in Chilmark, as our crew did yard work.
Musically, “High Life” continues to age well, and it still makes me smile every time.
It used to seem to me that my life ran on too fastAnd I had to take it slowly just to make the good parts lastBut when you're born to run it's so hard to just slow downSo don't be surprised to see me back in that bright part of town
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
There’s a renewed Covid crisis in this country because powerful forces, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, want there to be one.
The United States is the only country in the world that’s simultaneously trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic while battling a homegrown, deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going.
Call it the Murdoch variant. And it’s proving to be deadly.
While a staff of fully-vaccinated hosts rage against an extraordinarily safe and efficient vaccine, Fox News is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of cable news, or even broadcast television has done — it’s deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.
With the debate about masks now largely eliminated from the cultural war battlefield, as a majority of eligible Americans got vaccinated and no longer have to wear them, Fox News and the extreme-right media are left with only one target — the miraculous vaccine itself.
The same right-wing crew that this winter demanded Trump receive credit for helping develop the vaccines, has done a U-turn. They’re now urging loyalists not to get the vaccine, thereby prolonging the pandemic.
The anti-vaccine campaign follows the network’s strident anti-mask, and anti-social distancing crusade. Last year, Fox pumped poisonous, anti-science rhetoric onto the airwaves and worked hard to divide the country, making it impossible to have a common sense national conversation in a time of crisis. This NPR headline surprised nobody from May, 2020: “Study Finds More COVID-19 Cases Among Viewers Of Fox News Host Who Downplayed Pandemic.”
Today’s pro-Covid movement, which dresses itself up as being anti-vaccine, highlights the deliberate lunacy that has gripped the conservative movement. It’s shocking, but not surprising. It reflects the willing embrace of a dark, QAnon conspiracy view of the world where conservatives are the target of demonic Democratic scheming. And where a safe vaccine might kill you.
"This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said last week. There remain tens of millions of Americans who have no plans of ever getting vaccinated. For the most part, they’re not “vaccine hesitant.” Those “hesitant” people make up a much smaller portion of the population and for a variety of personal, historic, and religious reasons they lean against getting the shot. The defiant tens of millions though, are part of a larger movement that gladly risk infections and spreading the disease in order to own the Libs. Period.
Between June 28 and July 11, “Fox personalities and guests made a total of 216 claims undermining or downplaying vaccines in segments about coronavirus immunization,” Media Matters reported.
And this, since July 11:
• “Fox’s Jeanine Pirro claims door-to-door vaccine outreach is about confiscating guns.”
• “Tucker Calson on COVID vaccine: “Maybe none of this is really about COVID. Maybe’s it about social control.”
• “Fox contributor Lara Trump says the COVID vaccine has been about controlling people “from day one”
And it’s not just Fox. “Republicans are getting the same message of skepticism about the vaccines and the vaccination campaign from other parts of the right-wing media apparatus, from digital outlets to talk radio to podcast shows to Sinclair Broadcast stations to the new generation of social media influencers,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted.
In 2020, the crass political calculations were obvious — desperate to get Trump re-elected amidst a crippled economy and a once-in-a-century health crisis, Fox News knew the only chance was to downplay the virus and pretend Democrats were overreacting, even though Trump himself nearly died from the contagious disease.
But with Trump now out of office, and even making vague suggestions that people get vaccinated, what’s the political advantage of Fox News becoming a ghoulish hotbed of anti-vaccine hysteria? It’s pure nihilism.
Pretending that American school children haven’t been forced to get vaccinated for lots of serious ailments for the last century, Fox News has embraced a wholesale anti-vax conspiracy approach, portraying Covid jabs in the arms as signs of encroaching totalitarianism, condemning the shots in the most hysterical terms.
This was a Fox News host when Biden said there might be "door to door" outreach about the vaccine in certain communities: "Do you want someone knocking at your door that you don’t know, that’s a stranger?” Another host suggested the vaccine ambassadors would be shot for trespassing.
For decades, Democrats have had to deal with a billion-dollar propaganda outlet and have wrestled with how to communicate with the country when the largest cable ‘news’ channel lies to its viewers every day, around the clock. And for years, Beltway journalists rolled their eyes and claimed Fox News didn’t pose any real danger, that the network was simply spinning on behalf of the GOP, and if Democrats wanted to govern the country they had to figure out a way to make better arguments.
Now with the pandemic, Fox News’ deliberate sins are coming into clearer focus. No longer taking place against a partisan backdrop, the network is still lying nonstop. But instead of falsifying claims about Democrats or candidates or legislation, Fox News is lying without pause about a health emergency, and getting people killed in the process.
The Murdoch variant spreads.
(Photo: AFP Contributor/Getty Images)
🗳 GOOD STUFF:
Next year’s midterms are already looming large, given the extraordinary stakes in play.
From the New York Times, “Democrats See Edge in Early Senate Map as Trump Casts Big Shadow”:
Swing-state Democratic incumbents, like Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, restocked their war chests with multimillion-dollar sums ($7.2 million and $6 million, respectively), according to new financial filings this week. That gives them an early financial head start in two key states where Republicans’ disagreements over former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020 are threatening to distract and fracture the party.
🏖 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dirty Heads featuring Train, “Vacation”
If you’re lucky, you’re on vacation this week. If not, this ear worm wonder might help transport you temporarily.
Dirty Head’s syncopated, island-tinged ode to mindless R&R became a sensation this year after it went viral on Tik Tok, four years after the song was first released.
Float away on a Monday.
Illuminate, my future bright, so thankful for everythingRejuvenatin' my inner light as I work hard for all I needOpen arms, embracing life and all of which you gave to meHard work, it pays off, I'm happy now, it's paying me
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via a Spotify playlist.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Did you know the entire “country” is now “panicked” about critical race theory? That absurd claim was laundered in a New York Times headline this week, as the newspaper tried to unpack the current, manufactured outrage being fueled by conservatives in their never-ending bid to wage cultural wars.
The ginned-up moral crisis continues to rage because news outlets like the Times are doing a monumentally awful job framing the story and making nonsense claims like the “country” is “panicked” about an obscure, insightful academic pursuit, usually only taught in colleges and graduate schools. (Spoiler: Most of the country has no idea what critical race theory is, let alone “panicked” by it.)
Last month, I noted how the media were helping to fuel the critical race theory hysteria. Since then, the problem has become exacerbated as news outlets defy common sense and simple journalism standards by refusing to be clear about what the controversy is really about. It’s about deep-pocketed players on the right once again hijacking the national debate by pushing manufactured outrages, and watching the mainstream media relentlessly echo their claims. (The conservative Washington Examiner has published more than 40 critical race theory pieces — this month.)
Instead of forcefully debunking, journalists remain overly impressed with how the GOP has been able to turn critical race theory into a big news story — while journalists themselves help turn critical race theory into a big news story. The press has become part of the problem. When the right-wing freaks out over a narrative, the press instinctively asks how high should they jump.
Today the answer is, quite high as the media attention continues unabated. The nonstop reportage and commentary represent a red flag because the American media, and particularly the political press, typically couldn’t care less about what’s being taught in U.S. schools. But with Republicans and the entire right-wing media infrastructure obsessing over the made-up classroom dispute, suddenly the media are laser-focused on the academic issue.
It’s like journalists have entered some sort of Twilight Zone where they agree to relentlessly cover the GOP-fueled controversy, while simultaneously omitting the most important fact that would instantly deflate the hullabaloo — critical race theory isn’t taught in schools.
We’ve seen this play out countless times in recent years. The media-fueled critical race theory insanity is reminiscent of when Fox News and the GOP went berserk in the summer of 2010 condemning the so-called Gound Zero Mosque being built in New York City. Constructed around constant lies, the smear campaign was legitimized by weeks’ worth of intense mainstream media coverage, which often echoed right-wing misinformation.
Today, it’s the same thing all over again with critical race theory, which examines the history of institutional racism in America.
“We’re saying, ‘What is the fuss about?’” said Lynn Daniel, a ninth-grade English teacher in the Phoenix area. “We don’t get it. This objection is being pushed upon us, and it’s not even happening in our classes. I don’t understand it.”
Reminder: When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to ban critical race theory from classrooms in the Sunshine State, the Miami Herald reported, “Superintendents across the state have said they do not teach critical race theory in their schools. But that did not stop the State Board [of Education] from considering the rule” to ban it. (For the record, it would be perfectly fine if the theory were taught in classrooms.)
It’s the same all across the country — Republicans are taking draconian moves to protect students from the alleged sorcery that is critical race theory, yet Republicans can’t find examples of it actually being taught in schools. For journalists covering the made-up controversy, that’s the story — conservatives are feverishly pushing a concocted claim and the entire Republican Party is playing along, creating unnecessary chaos for educators across the country.
But that’s not how the story is being covered. Instead, most news accounts fail to mention that critical race theory isn’t taught in schools. Incredibly, the news coverage often looks past the gaping hole in this story and instead helps the GOP spread the madness as the media failures pile up:
• The Times’ 1,700-word “panicked” piece on critical race theory made no mention that the topic isn’t taught in schools.
•Yahoo! News this week posted a piece about how “Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is calling on "every governor" in the United States to "ban" the funding of critical race theory instruction in public schools.” Nowhere in the story was it pointed out critical race theory doesn’t exist in public classrooms.
- The Washington Post published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign, emphasizing how it was shaping up to be a major cultural issue for the 2022 midterm election cycle. The Post made no mention that the race topic isn’t taught in schools.
The simple truth is that if reporters point out the theory isn’t taught in schools, then there’s no GOP-manufactured controversy to cover. So journalists look the other way.
Education writer Alexander Russo recently offered up some timely advice for how to cover the critical race theory story: “Think carefully about how you frame the story, make sure to assess the extent of the problem, and give context to readers. Address the heated emotions without necessarily taking them at face value —or making them your central focus.”
Unfortunately, most of the wise counsel has been ignored as the media dutifully pumps up the hollow GOP smear campaign.
(Photo: Thibault Savary/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Last month, I wrote about the extraordinary, 35-page report produced by Republican legislators in Michigan utterly debunking Trump’s lies about a rigged election, and how the vote count in that state, and Joe Biden victory, were legitimate.
Against that backdrop comes this report from The Hill, “Michigan GOP Executive Director Quits Under Pressure From Trump Allies”:
The executive director of the Michigan Republican Party has quit his post just a few months after taking over the top job amid pressure from supporters of former President Trump.
Jason Cabel Roe, a longtime Republican operative who took over the state party in February, sparked anger among Trump acolytes after he acknowledged the former president lost Michigan’s electoral votes in 2020.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jonathan Edwards, “Drop and Roll”
If nothing else, Edwards is wonderfully consistent. 50 years (!) after his cult classic, “Shanty” became an acoustic stoner classic, he’s back with another from the exact same genre. “Drop and Roll,” complete with irresistible harmonica energy, would tempt anyone to take a puff.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
After feasting on four years of Trump chaos inside the White House where leaks, gossip and scandal were the norm, Beltway journalists are losing patience with President Joe Biden’s brand of efficient and professional governing. The frustration is now spilling out into the open.
This week, the New York Times mocked Biden’s speech-giving skills, calling him “boring” and unable to inspire. The article’s sub-headline read, “Even the president labeled a speech boring recently, an admission that highlights a tendency toward delivering minutiae-filled discourse over scaling oratorical heights.”
The Times specifically acknowledged that while Biden’s speeches are often drowning in detail and substance, they’re not satisfying (to journalists) because there’s no music behind them. They’re not entertaining.
From the Times:
• “What can seem like high-stakes drama to those inside the Washington Beltway often feels like the stuff of PBS documentaries to the rest of the country.”
• “The details in Mr. Biden’s speeches often trip him up as well, leading to mumbles, stumbles, pauses and real-time corrections as he struggles through the dense material on the teleprompter.”
• “Mr. Biden has a long history of being long-winded.”
This is theater criticism masquerading as journalism. It’s a complete waste of time, yet journalists love to indulge in it when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
The Times thinks Democrats are nerds, claiming Biden’s excessive substance continues a party tradition: “Presidents Barack Obama once delivered a 17-minute answer to a health care question, and Bill Clinton, who was forced to apologize to a late night comic for a dreadful convention speech.”
Six months after a moronic president left the White House, one who had trouble stitching together two coherent and truthful sentences, and on the same day Trump insisted the deadly January 6 insurrection was actually a “lovefest,” the Times went deep on the idea that Biden, Obama and Clinton aren’t good communicators. The newspaper used an 11-year-old health care answer Obama once gave, and a 33-year-old convention speech Clinton gave, to makes its point. (As for substance, under the Democratic presidents of Biden, Obama, and Clinton, America has created 37 million new jobs, and counting.)
Meanwhile, look at what the print headline was for that Times piece: "Lost in Rhetorical Weeds, Biden Struggles to Inspire." Omitted from the article was the fact that he enjoys a 95% approval rating among Democrats. Biden last year accumulated more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, but the Times isn’t sure he can “inspire.”
More proof of the media’s contempt for Biden, and their resentment for his No Drama approach, was found in a recent newsletter by D.C. journalist Julia Ioffe, who explored how journalists are reacting to the new Democratic administration, in the wake of the Trump media circus.
“People you’ve likely read or heard of or watched were concerned about what a Trump loss would mean for their career. That was the talk of the town,” she wrote.
The man who launched an unprecedented crusade to overthrow a verified American election was leaving office, and a key topic of discussion among journalists was how that would that affect their careers (“Would anyone buy Trump books anymore?”), and by extension, would “boring” Joe Biden be bad for business?
Talk about the Navel Gazing Olympics.
With a professional, gossip-free Democrat in the White House, journalists are lashing out. “They know how to push back and fight over headlines and parcel out dumb pre-approved scoops to people who will write about it the way they want,” one Beltway media insider said of the Biden White House, oblivious to the fact that the press typed up dumb Trump White House stories for four years, without complaint. Remember the spoon-fed media narrative that Trump was “distracted” and that’s why he ignored the Covid pandemic as it eviscerated the American economy and killed thousands in the spring of 2020?
Journalists are quietly seething at the Biden White House. “Kudos to them, they’re very happy with themselves” one anonymous journalist told Ioffe. “You can see it, the coverage across the board from everyone is very, very lame. You never get inside the room and hear how this s**t’s going down. Like, how are they managing this elderly man?”
Added another, “There’s a sense that Biden’s position is fragile and that he has to be protected, that any unkind gaze might knock him over—which plays into every right-wing stereotype.”
And a third: “I don’t know that there’s been a president who’s been so protected and wrapped in so many layers of wool to keep him away from anything remotely approaching an adversarial interview.” Another journalist belittled Biden as “an old man watching his dog.”
Oh, how they miss the Orange One.
“I loved covering Trump,” one prominent White House reporter said. “It was a great and fascinating story. It wasn’t just about him; it was about his movement and the institutions and America. The story was always so dramatic and had these larger than life characters. The stakes often felt very high. I like covering Biden, too, but it just doesn’t feel as dramatic.”
The media nostalgia is tangible, almost wistful. But never forget that Trump ripped families apart at the border. He colluded with a foreign power while in office. Got impeached twice. Called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” Made a public health emergency worse every day he was in office. Accused Obama of spying on his campaign. Shut down the government for one month because Congress wouldn’t fund his border wall to nowhere. He spent months denigrating the integrity of American elections.
Today, reporters can’t disguise their disdain for Biden, while missing Trump because he was “dramatic.” What an unflattering portrait journalists paint of themselves.
(Photo: Brandan Smialowski/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
Breaking 17 years of silence, Andrea Mackris details the sexual assault lawsuit she filed against Bill O’Reilly, and the $9 million settlement she signed, complete with a draconian gag order, which she’s now ignoring.
From The Daily Beast scoop:
Mackris, who was forced to give up her Fox News job as part of her lawsuit’s resolution, has lived a life mostly of quiet desperation, in which the settlement check has surely provided financial security and a degree of solace, but in the end hasn’t eased her struggle to obtain work in a profession she loved.
“I should have never lost that [Fox News] job,” Mackris said. “It’s not up to me. It’s not about reinventing myself or finding a second career path after all I ever wanted to do was this… I had a job I had wanted, that I had worked really hard for, that I had earned, that I was great at and loved.”
🚘 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood & Jason Isbell, “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac (Live)”
Nearly seven years ago, Isbell reunited onstage with former Drive-By Truckers bandmates Hood and Cooley for a special night of Southern music at the storied Shoals Theatre in Florence, Alabama. Just now released to the public, the live album is a testament to the DBT, one of the great American rock bands of the last 25 years.
In “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” they mine the rich heritage of Perkins, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Sam Phillips, and Sun Records, and do it with novel-like character details.
Mr. Phillips never blew enough hot airTo need a little gold plated paperweightHe promised him a Cadillac and put the wind in Carl's faceHe did just what he said he was gonna do and the money came in sacksNew contracts and Carl Perkins' Cadillac
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Embarking on a vast propaganda campaign designed to erase one of the deadliest bouts of domestic, political terrorism in this country, Trump media and their GOP acolytes are moving quickly to peddle the next Big Lie, claiming that the January 6 insurrection never happened.
At this point, there’s nothing too big for the right-wing noise machine to try to whitewash and gaslight — like the fact that a pro-Trump horde was responsible for breaking into the U.S. Capitol, attempted to disrupt the congressional vote certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory, and then chanted death threats against then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Yet leading the charge on Sunday, Trump during a Fox interview called the insurrection "a lovefest between the Capitol police and the people that walked down to the Capitol” that day. He insisted the protesters were “peaceful.”
Last week, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson referred to “the fake” January 6th insurrection, where "elderly people showed up with signs at the Capitol." Carlson previously suggested the Capitol insurrection was orchestrated by the FBI as a false flag in an effort to “suppress political dissent.” He’s also repeatedly insisting there was “no insurrection” and that it was nothing more than a “political protest that got out of hand.”
The Big Lie about the insurrection now rests alongside the GOP’s Big Lie about the election being stolen.
What’s unfolding now within the far-right fever swamp is a Kremlin-style indoctrination that aims to re-educate millions of Americans. It’s being done just as more police videos from the shockingly violent, mob-soaked day are released as part of court proceedings. (“You’re going to die tonight” one Trump thug screams at a Capitol cop.) Also, The New York Times recently created an extraordinarily detailed, minute-by-minute video chronology of the insurrection carnage.
Fact: Seven people died in connection with the January 6 violence, including two suicides in the following days. More than 535 rioters have since been charged with crimes. At least 70 defendants have been ordered to stay in jail. And nearly 150 police officers were assaulted that day.
The GOP’s increasingly brazen behavior is difficult to describe using the traditional language applied to mainstream American politics. This is far more cultish conduct where all semblance of reality is stripped away and the pursuit of the fever dream (the insurrection never happened!) becomes the ultimate prize. This more resembles a mass brainwashing exercise, that’s being fueled by dangerous and radical media players.
Since January, Republicans and the right-wing media have gone from downplaying the insurrection and denying their own involvement in the riot, to now denying it ever happened.
The problem for the GOP and Fox News is that politically, the insurrection remains a huge problem if Trump wants to run again in 2024. The challenge being that the insurrection was one of the most recorded current events in our lifetime, as the deadly riot unfolded live on national television and was captured on thousands of smart phone clips, which were soon plastered onto social media.
So now there’s a huge effort underway to try to neutralize the event. “By and large, it was peaceful protest, except for there were a number of people, basically agitators that whipped the crowd and breached the Capitol,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) recently insisted.
“Let’s be honest with the American people — it was not an insurrection, and we cannot call it that and be truthful,” claimed Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) earlier this year. He added that the rioters looked like they were on a “normal tourist visit.”
“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an "insurrection" are bad people who are harming the country,” claimed Trump journalist Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, who dismissed the protesters as nothing more than, “Mr. Buffalo Head or Grandma-in-the-Rotunda, or Mr. Feet on Desk.”
As for Fox News’ role, it’s always simple to predict where the network will land on a controversial topic — just assume the worst. Back in January when Fox News was doing its best to downplay the insurrection story, the smart money was not assuming that that strategy would remain static and they would be content to turn away from the most important and dangerous domestic uprising in modern American history. The smart money was to assume that over time Fox News would become aggressively more awful and irresponsible, which is where Carlson now resides — the bloody insurrection was just a bunch of senior citizens marching around with signs.
That detached-from-reality message has been widely amplified by Trump’s allies in the media. Former journalist and current conservative advocate Glenn Greenwald, who publishes a pro-Trump newsletter, has spent most of this year frantically trying to downplay the January 6 riot.
He recently mocked Vice for publishing a detailed piece about the emotional strains journalists who covered the insurrection violence up-close are still facing — Greenwald’s point being that the riot was no big deal and that reporters are being overly dramatic.
Trump cheerleaders have made it official: There’s a new Big Lie to tell.
(Photo: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
The New York Times’ Brent Staples had an interesting historic look at how the press covered Blacks in the 19th and early 20th century.
From “How the White Press Wrote Off Black America”:
As the historian Rayford Logan writes in his iconic study of this period, the white Northern press cemented the stereotype of the Negro barbarian by making Blackness synonymous with crime. Headlines included phrases like “Negro ruffian,” “colored cannibal,” “dissolute Negress” and “African Annie.” By portraying Black people as less than human, the white popular press justified the reign of terror that the South deployed, while stripping African Americans of the rights they had briefly enjoyed during the period just after the Civil War known as Reconstruction.
🥤FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Walker Hayes, “Fancy Like”
It’s the Tik Tok song of the summer, at least it is on my algorithm. This sly new song about splurging at Applebee’s has been adopted countless times by Tik Tok users in recent weeks, complete with a “Fancy Like” dance sensation.
And no wonder, the song’s a can’t-miss catchy ode to living the high life on a tight budget.
Yeah, we fancy like Applebee's on a date nightGot that Bourbon Street steak with the Oreo shakeGet some whipped cream on the top tooTwo straws, one check, girl, I got you
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Spinning his way through an incoherent, headline-grabbing allegation that the U.S. Intelligence Community has been “spying” on him and releasing his emails to journalists in an effort to get his show cancelled, Tucker Carlson detailed this week how “the Biden administration” had big plans to take him down.
Conceding that he’s been in contact with US-based Kremlin intermediaries while trying to secure an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Carlson on Wednesday claimed the National Security Agency found out about that, captured his emails and planned to leak them to journalists, “which they did.” But why would anybody care that Carlson was trying to secure a Putin interview? In Carlson’s telling, the government was going to try, “to paint me as a disloyal American” a Russian operative, “a stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor,” for seeking the interview.
Carlson presented this as the central plank of the Biden administration’s evil plan to undercut this career — to show the world that he was trying to land a Putin interview, which would be portrayed as being incredibly damaging.
Right, except in 2018 Carlson’s colleague Chris Wallace landed a Putin interview and nobody thought it was scandalous. In fact, the network earned a rare Emmy nomination for the Q&A. That same year Carlson’s former colleague Megyn Kelly also scored a Putin interview, and again it was no big deal. Nobody accused her of a being a “disloyal American.”
Ever since he made his entirely unsupported claim that the NSA targeted him specifically and has directly leaked his emails to reporters, Carlson has been trying to prop up the rickety tale, while soaking up the news attention. I doubt Carlson has any idea where he’s taking this illogical story that still lacks any evidentiary support. He’s just happy with the public notice, even if most staffers at his own network refuse to touch the soggy story.
Nothing about this caper makes sense, which is fitting since Carlson is a congenital liar. He refuses to provide any evidence that the emails were leaked, or name the so-called “journalists” who received the communications directly from the NSA. He claims to know which journalists have his emails (one of them called him to discuss it!), but he won’t come forward with that information. And neither will the journalists themselves. Carlson suggests reporters across the Beltway were given his emails directly from the NSA, yet as this controversy spreads, every single one of those reporters is remaining silent for no apparent reason.
What are the odds?
Meanwhile, Carlson plays the martyrdom card to the hilt, portraying himself as a crusading journalist: “I think more ominously they are using information they gather to put leverage, to threaten opposition journalists, people who criticize the Biden administration. It’s happening to me right now, and I think it’s shocking. I don’t think we should put up with it in a free country.”
People who criticize the Biden administration are being threatened. Except none of them are. Carlson works for a network that frantically condemns every sentence President Joe Biden utters, which means the administration must be monitoring hundreds of Fox employees, right? But for some reason, the only person on the Fox News payroll being spied on is Tucker?
And if Biden had declared war on conservative journalists, why isn’t Fox News championing Carlson’s claims? To date, the network has been extraordinarily quiet regarding the dopey saga, choosing largely to ignore it. “Fox is right to tread carefully because its biggest star is a huge liar and has historically proven particularly dishonest in describing his own supposed persecution,” noted Media Matters.
Here’s the Keystone Kops chronology of events. In the spring, the Fox host turned to intermediaries to open lines of communication with the Kremlin regarding an interview request, which is a very strange thing to do. I guarantee you when Wallace and Kelly scored their Putin Q&A’s they didn’t do it by emailing shady figures in Putin’s orbit. We can assume they did it by following traditional channels of communication via the State Department. Not surprisingly, Carlson likely ended up communicating with foreign agents close to Putin whom the NSA was monitoring. They probably knew they were being monitored, but never told Carlson his communications were being incidentally collected.
As for the dastardly leak? There’s still no proof it happened, other than Carlson’s untrustworthy word. He could easily provide evidence but he won’t. And specifically, he won’t provide proof that the emails were leaked to journalists directly by the NSA. That’s key because it’s possible Carlson’s email pals — Putin’s cronies — decided to share the contents of the emails with others inside the Beltway.
Note that when Carlson’s producer this week filed a Freedom of Information request, he demanded “any call records, texts, or emails the NSA has obtained from journalist Tucker Carlson's cell phone or email," going back to January of 2019. But if Carlson only reached out to Kremlin intermediaries “this spring,” and only for the purposes of trying to set up a Putin interview as the host claims, why is he looking for communications that may have been collected two years ago?
Or is there more to Carlson’s Kremlin conversations than he’s telling?
🩺 GOOD STUFF:
Is there anything conservatives ever get right?
From CNN’s “Coronavirus Almost Certainly Came From an Animal, Not a Lab Leak, Top Scientists Argue”:
“There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin. There is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in contrast to the clear epidemiological links to animal markets in Wuhan, nor evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology possessed or worked on a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic,” they added.
“The suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 might have a laboratory origin stems from the coincidence that it was first detected in a city that houses a major virological laboratory that studies coronaviruses.”
🌞 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lorde, “Solar Power”
The musically dazzling New Zealand singer-songwriter certainly has exquisite timing. Just as we emerge from the pandemic (thanks Biden!), and embrace summer at its finest, Lorde arrives with a sweet pop ditty extolling the redemptive virtues of beach life.
My cheeks in high color, overripe peachesNo shirt, no shoes, only my featuresMy boy behind me, he's taking picturesLead the boys and girls onto the beachesCome one, come all, I'll tell you my secretsI'm kinda like a prettier Jesus
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
In a surprise checkmate move, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones informed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that she would not be accepting its delayed offer to join its journalism school, and would instead become a tenured professor at Howard University.
The announcement came after the school stumbled through an extended public controversy over Hannah-Jones’ hiring, and revelations that a conservative mega-donor to the journalism school, Walter Hussman, had worked behind the scenes to make sure the overqualified Jones wasn’t initially offered a tenured position, unlike her white predecessors at the school.
UNC’s journalism school was renamed the Hussman School of Journalism and Media in 2019, after the wealthy media magnate and publisher of the anti-Clinton Arkansas Democrat-Gazette committed to donating $25 million to UNC, although most of the money from the gift has not yet been given. The school had recruited Hannah-Jones, a MacArthur “genius” and the driving force behind the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” an ambitious journalistic reexamination of American history that focused on the central role slavery had in shaping the nation and its institutions.
Hannah-Jones has since become the target of right-wing media wrath for discussing racism honestly and openly, and conservatives immediately began trying to scuttle her UNC hiring.
Hussman the ideologue joined that fray, contacting an array of senior university officials to express his objections, even though as a donor he had no say in the hiring of faculty. “I worry about the controversy of tying the UNC journalism school to the 1619 project,” Hussman wrote to several officials in late December.
The anti-Hannah-Jones pressure campaign ran counter to how universities are supposed to deal with mega-donors, as they protect academic freedoms. In fact, by so clearly using his privilege and overstepping his bounds by inserting himself directly into university hiring protocols, Hussman violated the journalistic ethics that he claims to support.
“He’s completely outside this process and he’s contacting the people who are involved with financial giving over his concerns about university hires,” one UNC board of trustees member told NC Policy Watch. “That’s throwing your weight around because you know you can exercise your influence, based on your gifts to the school. It is a threat. I don’t see how you can see that any other way.”
After an extended public outrage, led by UNC students and faculty, the university’s trustees last week finally voted, behind closed doors, to offer Hannah-Jones the position as the school’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, complete with tenure. The insulting way the hiring was handled though, made her acceptance impossible. Now the elite journalist is heading to a historically black university in Washington, D.C., where she will assume that same Knight-sponsored position.
“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans,” Hannah-Jones said in a stinging rebuke to UNC and Hussman published yesterday.
For the journalism school, the sad episode will leave a permanent stain. “Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the most prominent journalists in the United States, frankly in the world, today,” according to UNC journalism professor Daniel Kreiss. Yet bowing to right-wing pressure, the university shrank from its responsibilities. Across the campus, some acclaimed UNC professors are already heading for the exits in the wake of the controversy, which they say broke their trust in the university’s commitment to academic freedom.
You know who probably wasn’t surprised by Hussman’s meddling in the hiring of a prominent black journalist and consequently damaging the reputation of a journalism school? Bill and Hillary Clinton. For years they tangled with Hussman’s conservative Arkansas Democrat, which later took over a more liberal rival to become the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. (Hussman’s family bought the Arkansas Democrat in the 1970’s and he was installed as publisher at age 27, so that’s his journalism resume.)
According to Arkansas newsroom veteran Max Brantley, Hussman’s daily had been “incredibly critical of Bill Clinton.” Clinton himself agreed, once telling biographer Taylor Branch that the newspaper had been his "chief tormentor for decades,” concocting “Faulknerian plots” of intrigue about him and his family. And it was the paper’s editorial page editor who first dubbed Clinton “Slick Willy,” a moniker the right-wing media relished for years.
More recently, Douglas Blackmon, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who once worked for Hussman’s daily, called out the publisher for being a cog in the right-wing noise machine.
“Hussman’s family bought the dying Arkansas Democrat in the ’70s & installed him as boy-publisher, still in his 20s,” Blackmon tweeted. “He hired extremist conservative editors who made war on the truth, and in the 80s begin spinning bogus ‘Whitewater’ conspiracy tales about Bill & Hillary Clinton.”
Added Blackmon, “He’s been a mini-Rupert Murdoch for 40 yrs. Walter Hussman is a founding father of the fake news/Trump-lies era.”
Given all of that, it’s time for UNC to rename its journalism school.
(Photo: Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)
🧯GOOD STUFF:
A powerful new piece looks at the long-term physical and emotional impact the Jan. 6 insurrection had on journalists who covered the day-long violence up close.
From Vice’s “So, So Angry’: Reporters Who Survived the Capitol Riot Are Still Struggling”:
And the emotional scars are still there. Six months after their office was attacked, the Capitol Hill press corps is grappling with how to cover the insurrection’s fallout, as well as its impact on them personally and professionally.
Some reporters who were there won’t go back into the building. A number have sought therapy to deal with the trauma. One longtime Capitol Hill reporter opted for early retirement shortly after living through the riot. Many still aren’t sleeping well.
🚃 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
John Mayer, “Last Train Home”
Arriving with some new quintessential Dad Rock, Mayer’s latest release is everything lots of music dads love — a chill melody, mildly introspective lyrics, some nifty guitar work, and a hint of a gospel choir. It’s so comfortably familiar it sounds like you’ve been humming the song since the 1990s.
I’m out of luck and I'm out of timeIf you don't wanna love me, let me goI'm runnin' for the last trainI'm runnin' for the last train home
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Five years after the press helped hand Trump the White House by holding the first woman nominee to an entirely different standard, we see constant reminders that women, and particularly Democratic ones, get singled out for scrutiny.
Vice President Kamala Harris oversees an unhappy office of staffers! Interns at Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s office are discontented! Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sometimes verbally dressed down staffers who don’t meet her work standards!
The press loves to feature women when compiling lists of Beltway Bad Bosses. Yet hard-charging men in politics earn points for behaving exactly how the women do when they get singled out for running “dysfunctional” operations.
The creepy double standard recently exploded in full view when Politico set off days of frantic news coverage by claiming Harris’ office was an unhealthy one.
Here was the thrust of the Politico allegations:
Aides and allies said [chief of staff Tina] Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect Harris, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.
That’s it? That was the basis for a week’s worth of media heavy breathing about Harris’ supposedly “chaotic” office? Harris’ No. 2 has created an “insular environment,” people complain that decisions are dragged out, and higher-ups don’t shoulder the blame for poor decisions.
Congratulations Politico, you not only described how virtually every office on Capitol Hill is run, you described how every business office in America functions. (The scenario perfectly captured how the Rolling Stone office operated when I worked there many years ago!) The idea that poor communication and decision making — not claims of abuse or harassment — are suddenly being treated as big news regarding Harris’ office confirms the media’s obvious double standard when it comes powerful Democratic women.
It’s sexist because there’s simply no precedent for putting the Vice President’s office under a personnel microscope like this when men filled that position. “News outlets didn’t have beat reporters who focused largely on covering Dick Cheney, Joe Biden or Mike Pence, but they do for Harris,” Perry Bacon at the Washington Post recently noted. “Her every utterance is analyzed, her exact role in the Biden White House scrutinized.”
It’s curious that for generations, male politicians who ran demanding, hard-charging offices that featured staffers who were required to work nonstop, were seen as both being the norm as well as being the mark of savvy leadership. Men who lost their temper and constantly raised their voice were portrayed as ambitious, serious, and results oriented.
Worse, there was just no there there with the recent over-the-top coverage, which desperately tried to portray Harris’ office in turmoil. One of the anecdotes at the center of the Politico piece was about a friend of a major Democratic donor who tried to set up a meeting with Harris’ office but was stymied and had their calls ignored.
That’s it? That’s the entire tale? How on earth do reporters take a pedestrian event like that, which unfolds countless times every day inside the Beltway, and blow it up into a takedown piece about how Harris oversees an unprofessional operation? It’s a joke.
Comically, Axios pointed to this as proof that Harris’ office is dysfunctional: When Forbes requested an interview with the vice president, the magazine got no response until “the West Wing intervened to get an answer for Forbes.”
Stop the presses, indeed!
All week, not a single named person made a serious claim of wrongdoing against Harris, yet the press eagerly covered the non-story, culminated with a CNN piece, “White House Goes Into Damage Control Mode After Reports of Dysfunction in Kamala Harris' Office.” The framing highlighted the journalism game being played, as the network focused on the optics (“damage control”) regarding an amorphous, unproven claim (“reports of dysfunction”).
Recall that when she ran for president last year, Klobuchar was hounded by Bad Boss coverage, in a way that no other candidate in U.S. history had faced.
After the New York Times published an exhaustive report on complaints about Klobuchar, headlined “How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff,” Vox noted, “It’s the latest article in a series about how the senior Minnesotan senator is allegedly a bad boss. All of the pieces are based on accounts from anonymous former aides. No staffer has gone on the record.” Adding, “Notably, none of her critics question her intelligence or her mastery of policy or her commitment to Democratic positions. They don’t question that she’s done a good job as a US senator. In fact, none of them has called on her to resign.”
If former staffers want to go on the record and complain that a presidential candidate was a bad boss, that’s a legitimate news story. But think of how many hundreds of men have run for president in the modern American era, and how the press has virtually never cared if their staffers were happy, or if their offices ran on affirming vibes.
Over the years, did you ever read long Times articles headlined, “How Ted Cruz Treats His Staff,” “How Bernie Sanders Treats His Staff,” “How Marco Rubio Treats His Staff,” “How John Edwards Treats His Staff”?
Me neither. That seems only to be a news story if the boss is a woman, and a Democratic woman.
Just ask Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who was the subject of a recent 2,000-word Business Insider piece about what a bad boss she is. Specifically, the article hyped the claim that a former Sinema intern was sometimes reprimanded when she went off script while fielding calls from constituents. That was the lead anecdote the outlet used to highlight turmoil within the office of a Democratic woman.
Maybe it’s time for the media to turn the workplace spotlight on male Beltway bosses.
(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
This piece generated lots of buzz yesterday — a former Fox News executive confessing that the network, and Rupert Murdoch, are doing extraordinary damage to this country. I read stories like that and can’t help thinking about that famous “shocked” scene from Casablanca.
I also don’t have much patience for people who spent years working closely with Murdoch and then claim they were sure he’d finally do the right thing/see the light.
Gimme a break.
But if you’re interested, the piece is from The Daily Beast, “Former Murdoch Exec: Fox News Is Poison For America”:
Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed. I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course. I can only guess that the destructive editorial policy of Fox News is driven by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking in Rupert that, at age 90, is not going to change.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Lone Bellow, “Dried Up River”
Probably the only Americana group that was formed in a Park Slope, Brooklyn diner, Lone Bellow remains one of my favorite vocal trios. “Dried Up River,” is their latest.
“The upbeat song tackles the big idea of going through life trying to make something out of nothing when your well is dry, with singable melodies, storytelling lyrics and spot-on harmonies,” The Boot recently noted.
Also, the video’s a hoot.
We haven't talked in quite a while It's been so long since I've see that smile All that weight that you carry, it ain't necessary Maybe it's not for us to understand
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Concluding a months-long investigation into an avalanche of dubious voter fraud and tampering allegations, Michigan’s Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee released its findings this week. The report obliterates each and every “stolen” election claim that Trump and Fox News have been peddling about Michigan since last November. Not surprisingly, the right-wing cable network has made no mention of the GOP conclusions from Michigan’s state capitol, flushing the inconvenient, 35-page report down the memory hole.
Debunking claims with ease, the report announced, “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”
"Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan," the report concluded. “The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”
Additionally, “The report concludes there is no proof of dead voters or “fractional voting,” no evidence of a fraudulent “ballot dump” in Detroit and no proof any Michigan precincts had more than 100 percent voter turnout,” as Bridge Michigan reported.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee actually urge the state’s attorney general to investigate groups and individuals that spread wild conspiracies about Michigan voter tampering in order to fraudulently fundraise off claims that were “demonstrably false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions.”
The GOP-led committee took nearly 30 hours of testimony from 90 individuals over the course of nine committee hearings, and also subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents.
The withering Michigan rebuke is reminiscent of Arizona Republican election officials who have strenuously denounced the charade “audit” that Trump conspiracists have been conducting for months there with no end in sight. (Most recently, they transported Arizona voting system data to a secret hideout in Montana.)
"This is insane just from a competence standpoint,” Arizona Republican Stephen Richer recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. "I mean, there is no good reason for doing this.” Added former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R): “I think they should maybe just call it quits. I don’t think that it’s going to serve any purpose. It’s not going to change the election.”
The sweeping Michigan conclusions this week come as Trump loyalists there push for an Arizona-style ballot review.
Michigan became a hotbed of moronic, baseless elections claims just days after Trump lost the crucial state by more than 150,000 votes: Absentee ballots were sent out illegally! Dead people cast votes all over the state! Biden mysteriously won 100,000 votes the morning after the election! Poll watchers were blocked from watching absentee voter counting! Video proved absentee ballots were smuggled into the Detroit counting center!
All of those claims were quickly debunked and Trump never stood a chance of overturning Biden’s comfortable margin of victory. Yet Trump persisted, pressing the Michigan Republican Party to delay the state’s certification of Biden’s obvious win, simply as a way to muddy the waters and raise doubts about voter integrity nationwide. The destructive delay strategy almost worked. But then Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican serving on Michigan’s board of canvassers, refused to go along with the bullying and voted to certify Biden’s win. “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” Van Langevelde said.
Today, the last thing Fox News wants to report on are detailed findings from Republicans who dismiss the “stolen” election programming that Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda network has been churning out for months. In fact, “In the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubt on the results of the election at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters. “The network’s most prominent figures relentlessly attempted to subvert democracy by fueling conspiracy theories and spreading misinformation, rhetoric for which the network has refused to hold them accountable.”
And it continues to this day. Tucker Carlson recently insisted, “So many people are lying at such high volume about the 2020 election, it's hard to know exactly what happened.” Not surprisingly, nearly nine-in-ten Republicans who trust Fox News the most overwhelmingly support the stolen election conspiracy theory.
Don’t look for Michigan Oversight Committee Republicans to be invited on Tucker Carlson’s show anytime soon.
🪖GOOD STUFF:
From a Congressional hearing yesterday:
❤️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jackson Browne, “My Cleveland Heart”
49 years (!) after his debut album, Jackson releases a new album next month, and this wonderful, catchy rock sing-along is one of the first singles. It’s also one of Browne’s best in many years. And yes, it makes sense for a man his age to be singing about heart replacements. The whole thing is a hoot, complete with the music video featuring a cameo from Phoebe Bridgers, who’s been featured on PRESS RUN.
I'm going to make a few changes right awayThe way I leap and the way I fallThe way I need somebody else's eyes to see meThe way I need anyone at all
But I expect the real changes to startWhen I finally get my Cleveland HeartThey're made to take a bashingAnd never lose their passion
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
One of the more telling sentences published amidst an avalanche of recent coverage regarding critical race theory, or CRT, and how conservatives have turned the once-obscure area of study into a mindless Fox New faux controversy, appeared in a recent Miami Herald report. The piece detailed the push by Florida Republicans to banish CRT from Sunshine State classrooms — to save students from the “Marxist” indoctrination that teaches students to “hate their country,” according to Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The crucial sentence appeared in the 17th paragraph of the Herald article: “Superintendents across the state have said they do not teach critical race theory in their schools. But that did not stop the State Board [of Education] from considering the rule” to ban it.
Across the country, Republican legislators and officials in more than 20 states, who often have no grasp as to what CRT is, are forbidding educators from teaching it. And across the country educators are confirming CRT isn’t being taught. (The theory, often taught at the college and grad school level, details how racism and white supremacy are systemic in American society.) This year’s runaway, manufactured, red-state frenzy is reminiscent of the Red Scare that swept through the country during the Cold War.
Back then at least, the Soviet Union was an actual foe and represented a military threat to American security. By contrast, the mobs forming to make sure CRT isn’t taught in schools seem to have no idea — or don’t care — that CRT isn’t taught in schools. The whole controversy is fabricated, and it’s getting a ton of media attention. It’s the kind of media attention that plays right into the hands of conservatives.
For the press, it’s imperative that the colossal hole at the center of this right-wing misinformation campaign be emphasized, and that news coverage not go along with the GOP charade that insists CRT poses a pressing threat to students. Instead of it being in the 17th paragraph of the Herald article, it should have been mentioned in the third paragraph that Florida Republicans are scrambling to ban a topic that’s not part of any K-12 lesson plan. (When Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson recently allowed a CRT ban to become law without his signature, he conceded it “does not address any problem that exists.”)
Unfortunately, lots of critical race theory coverage omits that crucial information and leaves news consumers with the impression that the topic is being taught nationwide, and therefore conservative opposition makes sense.
The Washington Post recently published a 3,000-word look at the GOP’s critical race theory campaign, emphasizing how it was shaping up to be a major cultural issue for the 2022 midterm election cycle. Yet the Post made no mention that the race topic isn’t taught in public schools. The Post also made no effort to quote any Democrats about a Republican strategy to use the classroom wedge issue to defeat them next year. The Post though, did quote eight Republicans for the article, and marveled at the GOP’s success in creating the CRT controversy.
Coverage should also highlight the fact that today’s right-wing scare campaign isn’t an organic one stemming from genuine, hometown education concerns. Instead, the highly choreographed GOP freakout is AstroTurf’d, as NBC recently detailed. It’s an “increasingly coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets. The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students.”
As the witch hunt intensifies, it’s Fox News lighting the pyre, warning incessantly that CRT is the vanguard of a “cultural revolution.” (Newsmax is going with the “death camps” analogy.)
That’s why frantic parents in Washoe County, Nevada want teachers to wear body cameras to ensure they’re not indoctrinating students, including fifth graders. It’s why Cobb County School Board in Georgia recently approved a resolution that banned the “Marxist” teaching that’s not being taught. It’s why the Greenwich Public Schools district in Connecticut had to reassure the community that CRT is not taught by any teachers, after a group of parents began loudly protesting the non-existent lesson plan at Board of Education meetings.
The conservative ignorance surrounding CRT is overwhelming, and it’s purposeful. Journalists have a responsibility to ask every Republican fanning the flames of hysteria to explain, in their own words, what critical race theory is. And if they cannot, journalists need to walk away.
It was actually a local caller phoning into a Nebraska radio show who pressed Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts to define CRT, after he urged it be banned from state schools. His word-salad response made clear he had no idea what the academic and legal theory is:
So, the critical race theory — and I can’t think of the author right off the top of my head who wrote about this — really had a theory that, at the high level, is one that really starts creating those divisions between us about defining who we are based on race and that sort of thing and really not about how to bring us together as Americans rather than — and dividing us and also having a lot of very socialist-type ideas about how that would be implemented in our state.
the Republican Noise Machine is demanding critical race theory be banned, but has no idea what critical race theory is, or that it’s not taught in American schools. That’s the news story that requites attention.
GOOD STUFF:
Should television news deny a platform to GOP election deniers? The Associated Press takes a look:
Led by Trump, suspicion about the 2020 results has remained, despite elections officials calling it secure and the dismissal of court challenges. A Quinnipiac University poll taken six months after the election found 29% of Americans, and 66% of Republicans surveyed said Biden was not legitimately elected.
Confronting deniers is not a subject many in the business are eager to address publicly. No one on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week” or CBS’ “Face the Nation,” for example, would speak to The Associated Press about it.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Modest Mouse, “We Are Between”
The pride of Portland, Oregon, Modest Mouse is releasing its first album in six months, featuring the new, enigmatic single, “We Are Between.” The shimmering and determinedly optimistic song features leader Isaac Brock singing over a metallic rock bed of guitars and drums.
It’s a great summer driving song.
We are between, we are between, yeah, we areSomewhere between dust and the starsSo open, then snap shut, yeah, but here we areWe are between, we are between, yeah, here we are
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Five months after they smashed windows, hung nooses, brawled with cops, and desecrated the U.S. Capitol, CNN decided to portray a killed Trump insurrectionist from January 6 in a positive light. Leaning into interviews with the family of Ashli Babbitt, CNN did its best to present a pleasing picture of the mob member who was shot and killed by U.S. Capitol police as she and a lawbreaking Trump gang tried to force themselves into the Speaker’s Lobby as all hell broke loose that dreadful day.
It was a bewildering and misguided profile that whitewashed a deadly serious topic —radicals who wanted to invalidate an American election and use overwhelming physical force to make it happen. The lawless, violent mob rampaged inside the Capitol for hours, knocking officers unconscious and destroying offices of Democratic members.
CNN framed the report as a Both Sides one: Supporters see Babbitt as a patriot, while liberals see her as a terrorist. CNN then proceeded to completely ignore the liberal perspective for the entire Babbitt report. Readers were repeatedly told what a kind and conscientious person she was. But they were never given the other side of that Both Sides equation.
The CNN misfire was a classic example of what happens when journalists land sought-after interviews, in this case with members of Babbitt’s family, and then spin the story in their favor. They tell the tale just as the interview subjects would want it to be told.
“She was brave. She came out that way. Always was that way,” Babbitt’s mother told CNN. “Elizabeth Babbitt grew up a tomboy in a suburb of San Diego. She kept pace with four brothers and their friends, riding bikes, jumping them over ramps, skateboarding and “playing in the dirt,”” CNN gently reported. As for the deadly insurrection, “I feel like she went to the Capitol because she felt like her voice wasn’t being heard,” Babbitt’s brother told an understanding CNN.
It’s impossible to think that if Babbitt weren’t a white woman who grew up in suburban America that CNN would ever consider publishing a feel-good piece about a possible terrorist who’s been turned into a martyr by the radical right. The report, with its soft family lens, reflects a larger media obsession over the last five years to help humanize Trump’s extremist and dangerous white voter base.
Routinely depicted as hard-working folks in search of a political path, and thankful for Trump leadership, Trump voter coverage for years failed to pull back the curtain and reveal a small glimpse of the vicious mob that emerged in January. Even a Trump supporter who had nice things to say about Nazis received a gentle New York Times profile.
Last winter, as Trump supporters rallied around the deranged idea that the election had been stolen, too many journalists expressed empathy for them. In an interview with Vanity Fair, CNN's Jake Tapper said, “I feel sympathy for them, is the truth,” he said. “I feel bad. They’re outraged because they’re being told things that aren’t true.”
In terms of CNN’s Babbitt profile, there’s nothing wrong with providing context and detail about her life, particularly since she seems to be a textbook example of someone whose life, even before January 6, was swallowed whole by the cultist, far-right movement to worship Trump like an idol. Since her death, friends have expressed shock at the fanatical and anger-filled turn her politics took, as well as the rabid and often incoherent screeds she began posting online. (“They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours.”) If Babbitt wasn’t a full-on QAnon devotee at the time of her death, she was awfully close.
But that’s not the type of context CNN provided. Instead, the network worked overtime to play down Babbitt’s actions on January 6, as well as the actions of thousands of insurrectionists who did their best to overthrow democracy by pummeling police officers for hours on end. Not once in the 2,000-word piece did CNN mention the raging violence that Trump’s mob unleashed, as members of the Capitol police force battled in hand-to-hand combat with the remorseless, bloodthirsty gang.
One day before CNN published its insurrectionist valentine, the Department of Justice released additional head cam video from the riot, showing officers being mauled by the deranged mob. Specifically, it showed a retired NYPD officer charging through metal barricades and attacking police with a flagpole during the riot. "You communist motherfucker, f**k you!" the retired cop screamed, before pushing down the crowd-control barrier and swinging a flag pole. He then tackled and began beating an officer.
Multiply that by hundreds, if not thousands of times, to create the deranged bedlam of that day. More than 480 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. From a May report: “One video shows a rioter trying to rip off a police officer’s gas mask, then picking up a baton and hitting officers with it. Another video shows a rioter punching officers while wearing gloves with metal knuckles.”
But CNN’s report breezed right past those difficult truths in order to present Babbit as a slightly misunderstood “patriot,” in the eyes of her family. CNN made no effort to get a comment from any members of the Capitol police force, some of whom had to beg for their lives at the hands of the January 6 mob that Babbitt so proudly championed.
(Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
🧮 GOOD STUFF:
Two weeks ago I wrote about Arizona’s charade ballot review and urged news outlets to stop calling the sham an audit, because that term lends the event unnecessary legitimacy.
Since then, I’ve been happy to see some adjustments from the press. CNN in a recent headline put audit in quotes to indicate it might not be a real thing: “His Cybersecurity Firm is Working on the Arizona ‘audit’. But People Who Know Him Have Questions.”
The Washington Post took the same approach over the weekend [emphasis added]:
But the fight for democracy, or a version of it, is unfolding not just in Europe but also in the United States, and Biden’s message is complicated by the turmoil in the country he leads — the Jan. 6 attack, Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, the push to restrict voting, the ongoing “audits” of elections whose results have long been settled.
🎸FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Coldplay, “Higher Power” (Acoustic version)
The new Coldplay single sounds exactly like what you’d expect the new Coldplay single to sound like — and that’s a good thing. The British rock band brings its earnest good will, as front man Chris Martin demands optimism from all. The feel-good vibe is impossible to fight, even in this stripped down, acoustic take.
That you've got a higher powerGot me singing every second, dancing every hourOh yeah, you've got a higher powerAnd you're really someone I wanna know (oh oh)
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote and easier for the GOP to invalidate election results. That’s the distressing, historic truth as the party fully embraces an anti-democratic agenda.
Hiding behind Both Sides journalism, which portrays all political skirmishes as being the product of each party, the D.C. press continues to struggle to be honest about the GOP’s radical turn. Recently the New York Times, as if trying to create a Both Sides archetype, including flawless examples of everything that’s wrong and dangerous about the faulty form of journalism, published a painfully bad piece about GOP voter suppression. “Museum quality,” was how New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed the Times’ pitch-perfect Both Sides entry.
Strictly adhering to the he said/she said construct that the Times newsroom finds so comforting, the article made no effort to reach a logical conclusion in terms of which side in the voting ‘debate’ was being honest and accurate. Functioning as a clearing house for the Democratic and Republican quotes that were collected, the Times saw its job not as illuminating news consumers about a gravely important topic, but to simple type up competing quotes.
After reading the piece, former Seattle Times editor Mike Fancher tweeted it was, “an example of journalism that is accurate but not truthful. It is also harmful to democracy.” Addressing the Times’ executive editor he added, “Please, @deanbaquet, hire a public editor to help your newsroom become stewards of democracy.”
The car wreck began with the headline: “In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril.” Making clear that the article would view the topic through the eyes of the GOP, the headline stressed that Republicans were unconcerned about the issue at hand, which is exactly the message Republicans want to portray — it’s no big deal.
Then the sub-headline: “As G.O.P. legislatures move to curtail voting rules, congressional Democrats say authoritarianism looms, but Republicans dismiss the concerns as politics as usual.”
First, Republicans across the country are passing an unprecedented collection of voter suppression laws. But the Times won’t use that clear language, instead opting for the watered down, “curtail voting rules.” The word choice is important because if the Times had framed the article as one about “voter suppression” laws, it would make it much harder for Republicans to “shrug off” the allegations about putting democracy in peril.
Second, the Times places alongside each other the claims that voter suppression is a function of Republican authoritarianism, and that the GOP’s dismissal that it’s all “politics as usual.” In the eyes of the Times those are equally valid and important points for readers to know. Democrats are saying our democracy is in clear danger and Republican says it’s “politics as usual,” which makes no sense. It’s not “usual” for one of the two major political parties in this country to warn that America’s nearly two-and-a-half centuries of democratic rule faces a looming internal and deliberate danger. In fact, that’s the opposite of “usual” — it’s unheard of.
From the outset, the Times frames the article as an impossible-to-solve disagreement between both parties, with the implication being that Both Sides have a valid point. They do not.
The avalanche of current GOP bills aim to shorten the early voting period, reduce the number of hours that people can vote on Election Day, eliminate drive-through voting centers, create stricter deadlines for returning absentee ballots, block early voting on Sunday, limit ballot drop boxes, restrict mail-in voting —basically any possible initiative Republicans can think of that would suppress the vote.
“The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections,” Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America think tank recently told the Washington Post.
Still, the Times clings to Both Sides.
Specifically, the daily blamed Democrats for partly creating the voting controversy. “Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers,” the Times reported. “Some of them, including President Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.” The example the article pointed to was when Biden once mistakenly said the Georgia voter suppression law would end voting at 5 p.m.
Republicans are doing everything in their power to invalidate future elections by passing voter suppression laws and empowering state legislatures to refuse to certify state tallies. It all represents a massive attempt to roll back democracy.
One quick example: This spring, Arkansas’s Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed into law seven different voting bills. One prohibits people from going within 100 feet of a polling place except with the intention of entering or exiting it. That would effectively ban giving food and water to voters stuck in long lines. Another bill invalidates absentee ballots that arrive on Election Day.
Yet against that stark and historic backdrop, the Times claimed that by misstating a single provision contained within one of the dozens of the GOP’s voter suppression bills, Biden had “hand[ed] Republicans ammunition.”
If so, he’s not alone. The Times, with its shoddy Both Sides journalism, is also handing the GOP plenty of ammunition.
(Photo: Ramin Talaie/Getty Images)
🍔GOOD STUFF:
Twelve months ago this week I wrote about the bizarre news story out of New York City about how employees at a Shake Shack were accused of poisoning some NYPD cops via a milkshake. The police union claim, which turned out to be completely fabricated, generated headlines around the country from the pliant press, just as Fox News was attacking Black Lives Matters protesters, and their liberal supporters, for being anti-police.
This week, one of the Shake Shack employees, Marcus Gilliam, who was accused during the concocted scandal, filed a lawsuit against the police unions:
From the New York Daily News report:
“They treated him like he was a cop killer, basically,” his lawyer, Elliot Shields, told the Daily News Monday night. “They just jumped to this conclusion with no evidence. They tried to fit this episode into this false narrative of the police being under attack, and it was outrageous.”
The incident dominated headlines in the days following national protests against the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin.
🌈 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Poolside & Omar Velasco, “Shakedown Street”
What a perfect summer cover song.
Taking the Grateful Dead’s funkiest, four-on-the-floor effort ever (circa 1978), Jeffrey Paradise, also known as Poolside, teams up with singer Velasco to produce a shimmering, light disco version of of an all-time groove classic.
For Deadheads, the song’s music video is going to bring back lots of fond memories.
You think you've seen this town clear through (well, well, well, you can never tell) Nothin' here that could int'rest you (well, well, well, you can never tell) It's not because you missed out on the thing that we had to start
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Stay healthy.
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From the moment he descended the Trump Tower escalator six years ago this month to announce his candidacy for president, the political press has wasted an extraordinary amount of time and energy trying to normalize Trump. Shying away from the much-needed clarity that defines his hateful and anti-democratic ways, reporters have struggled to be forthright and to put his dark urges in the forefront.
Today as Trump plays the role of behind-the-scenes power broker from Mar-a-Lago, he continues to draw endless press attention, as journalists chronicle his every endorsement and petty political slight, as well as report on the Republican Party as it continues to embrace his harsh likeness. But the post-presidency Trump coverage regularly lacks the same element that defined his White House coverage — context.
Too often Trump is merely depicted as a slightly rogue pol, when in fact, with his ceaseless lies about a “stolen” contest, he’s done more to damage free and fair elections in this country than any other elected official in American history. He left behind a legacy of unmatched abuses, ranging from violations of longstanding norms to potentially criminal behavior.
Even in the wake of the newest revelations of how Trump aggressively corrupted the U.S. justice system and blatantly politicized the Department of Justice in a way that would make Richard Nixon cringe, he’s somehow still normalized in the day-to-day press coverage.
A recent Politico report about the role he might play in the 2022 midterm election cycle described Trump as “freewheeling.”
“Freewheeling”?
After Trump lost to Joe Biden by 8 million votes, he falsely claimed victory and demanded election officials in battleground states throw out millions of votes. Including the time he phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and demanded state officials "find" enough votes to nullify Biden's narrow victory in that state.
Then he incited a deadly mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the certification of Biden’s win.
While in office he told tens of thousands of lies and likely killed an untold number of Americans by downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic and urging people to inject bleach into their bodies. That’s when he wasn’t demanding the DOJ investigate his political enemies, firing government whistleblowers, and enriching himself by billing the U.S. government millions of dollars, including for Secret Service agents to stay at his properties while protecting him.
That’s freewheeling?!
This was the lede to that Politico article: “The former president is returning to the national spotlight with plans to play a central role in the GOP's push to reclaim power, huddling with members of the conservative Republican Study Committee at his New Jersey resort last week.”
Aside from a stray sentence or phrase, you’d think you were reading about former President Mitt Romney, or former President John McCain, or some other mainstream Republican politician. There was nothing in the Politico article that suggested Trump poses a danger to U.S. democracy. He was simply presented as another former president wielding power.
And when Politico did make a passing reference to Trump’s effort to undermine the 2020 election and overturn the legitimate results, it was politely phrased as Trump’s “repeated false claims.”
Another recent Politico piece detailed the political currency of Trump endorsements:
While candidates are calculating that they need voters to see them as Trump-approved, the former president is protective of his political brand and recognizes that his much-coveted endorsement — and the performance of the candidates who get it — is one of his primary means of maintaining relevance.
In theory, it was a straightforward report about the power of endorsements and how Trump “relishes” the attention. But that’s the problem — it’s based on the premise that Trump’s an ordinary politician with a conventional history of serving in office.
There was never a hint that there’s anything odd, newsworthy, or questionable about politicians lobbying for the endorsement of a pathological liar bent on destroying the U.S. ballot process, and someone who sicced the limitless power of the DOJ on reporters and members of Congress in order to secretly seize their phone and email records. That uncomfortable media conversation remains off the table.
Over at CNN, they published a piece last week dissecting the standing between Trump and his former vice president: “Six months after their relationship deteriorated in the midst of an insurrection at the US Capitol, Donald Trump and Mike Pence appear to be on the mend.”
The entire focus was the internal GOP politics of Pence needing to stay in Trump’s good graces. There was no mention of the fact that the two men oversaw a criminal enterprise while serving in the White House.
Then there was this amazingly passive and naïve portion:
To prepare for a scenario in which Trump doesn’t run, Pence has been crafting a pitch to voters that communicates his allegiance to the former president by underscoring their policy accomplishments and time in office together.
Trump’s policy accomplishments!
Did CNN mean when he obstructed the Mueller investigation? Abused the pardon power? Tried to recruit Ukraine into launching a bogus criminal investigation into Joe Biden, while withholding $400 million in U.S. aid in the process? Are those the policy accomplishments Pence plans on emphasizing if he runs for president in 2024?
Trump continues to rule the GOP. The press needs to treat him as the madman he is.
(Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
📰 GOOD STUFF:
The great Critical Race Theory scare continues unabated as the GOP and Fox News whip up hysteria over an academic theory that, that until recently, was rather obscure.
But it turns out lots of conservatives screaming about the dangers of CRT don’t know what it is.
From Kyle Whitmere at AL.com’s “Alabama lawmaker wants to ban critical race theory, so I asked him what it is”:
So what does his bill say?
“It’s pretty simple,” [Rep. Chris] Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”
That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?
🐎 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jamestown Revival, “Bound for El Paso”
What a gorgeous piece of Western storytelling here, by the ridiculously talented vocal duo of Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, who make up Jamestown Revival. Brandishing their proudly traditional sound with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, they instantly transport listeners to another century.
“Bound for El Paso” is a twisting tale of family, friendship and death, taken directly from the frontier short stories of American novelist Louis L’Amour.
In a quiet saloon Near Culberson county An argument led to the end of a gun From the bar stood a traveler Who did what he could To even the odds that were three against one
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Stunning new abuse-of-power revelations remind us of the Trump administration’s complete disregard for democratic principles. We now know that over a span of years it took extraordinary legal measures, including gag orders and secret tribunals, in pursuit of email records from reporters at CNN and the Washington Post. Team Trump also unleashed the courts on Democratic members of Congress and their families trying to obtain private phone records, as well as secretly targeting a key White House attorney, who possibly fell under suspicion for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump.
The disturbing portrait now in focus is one of a Republican White House that for four years worked in tandem with partisan prosecutors to systematically politicize the vast powers of the Justice Department, which often treated Trump’s allies leniently, and used unprecedented tools to target his foes. It was Trump recklessly using the executive branch to gather private information on members of the legislative branch, as well as members of the media.
The emerging scandal already eclipses Richard Nixon’s Watergate in terms of the benchmarks we use to gauge Washington, D.C. abuse of power. It’s “Nixon on stilts and steroids,” Nixon’s former White House Counsel John Dean recently told CNN. "Nixon didn't have that kind of Department of Justice.”
It’s worse than Watergate because the White House abuse of power was purposely powered by the Justice Department. This would have been if U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell had helped plot the Watergate break-in, instead of a band of rogue Nixon sycophants. This is worse because it’s institutional abuse conducted by political entities with boundless authority, such as the White House and the DOJ.
“Taken together with the Republican Party’s refusal to hold Trump to account for the Capitol insurrection and its nationwide efforts to restrict voting, the new allegations also indicate that the freedoms and core values that have underpinned American life for two-and-a-half centuries remain in almost unprecedented peril,” stressed CNN’s Stephen Collinson.
It’s worse than Watergate because this is what it looks like when democracies begin to crumble. It happens regularly all over the world, usually in emerging democracies, as nations lose their grip on crucial liberties while under the leadership of autocratic rulers.
And it’s worse because since the scandal first broke last week, the Republican Party, as usual, has refused to acknowledge Trump’s radical ways and condemn the anti-democratic behavior. While Democrats now push for Congressional investigations into the scandal, it appears Senate Republicans wlll stand in the way of issuing subpoenas, which are crucial in terms of gather evidence and compelling cooperation.
There’s little doubt that today’s blindly loyal GOP would have tried to block Congressional subpoenas issued during the Watergate investigation. (As the break-in and cover-up revelations tumbled out, Nixon eventually lost the support of Congressional Republicans.)
Late last week, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general opened an investigation into the decision in 2018 by federal prosecutors to secretly seize the iPhone data of House Democrats, including Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and their family members. Trump’s team, which subpoenaed Apple, was desperately trying to hunt down who had leaked classified information early in the Trump administration. Specifically, leaks with regards to Trump’s collaboration with Russia during the 2016 election.
It’s almost unheard for the DOJ to use the courts to secretly seize data from members of Congress if those members are not the target of a corruption investigation, which Schiff and Swalwell clearly were not. They became abuse-of-power targets because they were trying to hold Trump accountable for his criminality.
Democrats weren’t the only Trump enemies targeted by his out-of-control DOJ. It also secretly obtained the phone records of multiple Washington Post reporters. Imagine if Nixon’s DOJ had snagged Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s phone logs as they reported out the Watergate caper?
On another wild fishing expedition, the Justice Department tossed CNN into a prolonged, Kafka-esque legal battle. Demanding access to 30,000 emails from Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr, government lawyers refused to tell the network what the larger DOJ investigation was about, who the subjects of the investigation were, the subject matter of the reporting at the center of the matter, or when the investigation was open. The Justice Department also forbade CNN’s general counsel from talking to Starr about the extraordinary chain of events in play.
“I was informed that, other than conferring with counsel, the order prohibited me from acknowledging to anyone that it even existed unless I had express permission from the Department of Justice,” CNN’s top lawyer David Vigilante explained. “And I was further informed that if I violated the order, I was subject to charges of contempt and even criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice.”
Last December, a district court heard CNN’s appeal and was unimpressed with whatever secret evidence the DOJ had accumulated in its mysterious case that required taking possession of 30,000 Starr emails. The gag order was soon lifted.
The good news that CNN, the Times, and the Post are scheduled to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday. In alignment with President Joe Biden, Garland's DOJ has said that it will not seize reporters' records as part of leak investigations.
And you can be sure it won’t target Biden’s political foes with partisan and secretive subpoenas.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Longtime Los Angeles Times journalist Jackie Calmes details the GOP transformation she’s witnessed over the decades.
From her new piece, “My Front Row Seat to the Radicalization of the Republican Party”:
The radicalization of the Republican Party has been the biggest story of my career. I’ve been watching it from the start, from the time I arrived in then-Democratic Texas just out of college in 1978 to my years as a reporter in Washington through four revolutions — Ronald Reagan’s, Newt Gingrich’s, the tea party’s and Donald Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.
From this perspective, it seems clear that the antidemocratic drift of the GOP will continue, regardless of Trump’s role. He didn’t cause its crackup, he accelerated it.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Yola, “Diamond Studded Shoes”
I’ve featured Yola, the British-born, Grammy-nominated singer a few times at PRESS RUN. A true force of nature, Yola masterfully travels across so many musical styles.
Here, she teams up again with producer Dean Auerbach, who doubles as guitarist for the Black Keys. The result is a more muscular, bluesy guitar sound, which helps fills out Yola’s magnetic sound. The dynamic and uplifting “Diamond Studded Shoes,” with its Resistance vibe, is an early pick for one of my favorite songs of 2021.
Watching and waiting for answersHoping we might see the lightYou beat it into us like a hammerSo don't you tell me it'll be alright
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Stay healthy.
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Stepping into the role of theater critic, CNN this week panned Vice President Kamala Harris’ first foreign trip, as she traveled to Guatemala and Mexico. The negative review wasn’t based on the substance of Harris’ diplomatic excursion, instead the network deducted points for style, following the direction set by Republicans who were dead set on giving the trip a negative slant.
Leaning heavily on Republican talking points, CNN declared the Central American visit had been marred “by her seemingly flippant answer” given during an interview with NBC News. “Republicans are using this moment to ramp up their attacks on Harris” the network announced, as if that somehow determines Harris’ fate.
CNN’s coverage was relentlessly negative, attacking her “defensive” behavior, questioning her “political agility,” stressing her “political missteps,” mocking her “clumsy” and “tone deaf” media performance; her “shaky handling of the politics” surrounding immigration.
Over and over, the CNN report stressed that because Republicans and conservatives didn’t like Harris’ trip, it must be considered a failure — it was a “bad week” for the VP. And all because of a single back-and-forth she had with NBC’s Lester Holt, who pushed a favorite GOP talking point, repeatedly demanding to know why Harris hasn’t visited the U.S. southern border — the one that the press and the GOP insist represents a “crisis.”
Doubling as the Gaffe Police, CNN uniformly announced that her brief response to the border question had “overshadowed” her entire trip. But who decided it “overshadowed”? News outlets like CNN, which were busy singing off the GOP chorus, and noting how Republicans had “pounced” and “piled on” the kerfuffle. CNN insisted Harris’ trip had produced “poor reviews,” but CNN and Republicans were the ones producing them.
The lack of context was also telling, coming after four years of Trump and his team ransacking the norms. In light of his dangerous tenure, the Harris controversy this week about a single border question and whether she was too casual in her response, seems quaint and rather absurd. The last time Trump’s vice president made news was because he was in danger of being killed in the halls of Congress by a roaming, insurrectionist mob unleashed by his boss. By contrast, Harris got hit with days of bad news coverage for possibly mishandling a policy question during a television interview. (By the way, CNN published a Mike Pence valentine this week.)
Would Harris likely answer Holt’s question differently if given a second chance? It’s possible. But the idea that her 30-second border response “overshadowed” her entire Central American trip is absurd.
Harris’ foreign visit coverage was part of a larger media push recently to try to trip up the VP with Beltway gotcha coverage — her Memorial Weekend tweet was all wrong! She’s hiding her Asian heritage!
This kind of eagerly negative coverage springs from a media yearning for conflict. Frustrated by the No Drama Biden era, which has been completely absent of backstage White House gossip, and the kind of daily and hourly tumult that marked the Trump years, journalists are constantly overreaching trying to create news where none exists.
Consider this bewildering media narrative that’s become commonplace in recent weeks: It’s bad news for Harris that she’s taking on substantive responsibilities as vice president, such as leading the administration’s response to stemming the flow of migration from Central America, and organizing the Democratic fight against a slew of Republican suppression laws being passed nationwide. This bad-news VP meme has been relentless (“Is Kamala Harris Being Set Up to Fail?” Slate asked), and it defies logic. Instead of giving Harris credit for tackling the nation’s tough problems, the press is preemptively dinging her for possible failures. “Harris can’t win,” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently announced.
As for the role Harris has played in the administration’s stunning Covid-19 vaccination success story, that mostly gets buried in the coverage of her tenure to date, as the press scrambles for missteps to highlight.
Note that a recent Atlantic profile of Harris was dripping with condescending commentary, calling her “uninteresting,” “having a hard time making her mark on anything,” and stressing that, “she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself.” Of course, the piece was loaded with quotes from Republicans demeaning her, which appears to be the basis for most Harris coverage these days.
Last year, when Biden announced Harris as his running mate, the conservative media machine set off allegorical bomb blasts all around her, frantically trying to depict Harris as radical and dangerous, not a mainstream U.S. senator from the largest state in the union.
"In style and policy, Harris epitomizes an authoritarian," the National Review gasped. The far-right Federalist warned panicked readers that Harris, a former prosecutor, represents a "radical threat to America." And Fox News' Sean Hannity announced the Biden-Harris duo was "the most radical ticket of a political party in our lifetime by far."
The right wing loves to vilify Harris. The mainstream media fails when it treats those attacks as news.
(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
👩🏻⚕️ GOOD STUFF:
Last month, I criticized the press for largely ignoring workers when telling the story of the post-pandemic labor shortage, and instead relaying on business and GOP sources to bash workers and accuse them of being lazy for not filling jobs.
Since then, we’ve seen signs of better, more nuanced coverage, like this recent piece from the Washington Post, “These businesses found a way around the worker shortage: Raising wages to $15 an hour or more”:
Republicans have blamed enhanced unemployment benefits for the shortage; Democrats and most labor economists say the issue is the result of a complicated mix of factors, including many schools having yet to fully reopen, lingering concerns about workplace safety and other ways the workforce has shifted during the pandemic.
The experience of 12 business operators interviewed by The Washington Post who raised their minimum wage in the last year points to another element of the equation: the central role that pay — specifically a $15-an-hour minimum starting wage — plays in attracting workers right now.
Nine of the businesses had announced pay increases to at least $15 an hour since March, amid concerns about hiring in the face of the tight labor market. The other three increased wages last year.
⚽️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Marcus Mumford & Tom Howe, “Ted Lasso Theme”
I know I’m super late on this, but I finally watched the Apple TV+ series, ”Ted Lasso,” featuring Jason Sudeikis as a relentlessly positive American football coach recruited to take over a British soccer team. Like everyone says, the show is sweet and delightful, and it has a wonderfully catchy, driving theme song, featuring the lead singer of Mumford and Sons.
And always remember what Ted says, “Takin’ on a challenge is a lot like ridin’ a horse. If you’re comfortable while you’re doin’ it, you’re probably doin’ it wrong.”
If you slow down for a second take your timeYou know I'm yours if you remember that your mineAnd when everybody's telling me I have no time I prove 'em wrong again
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Now in its seventh week, the pointless review of two million ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous outpost, has not only emerged as a dishonest, partisan circus, it’s also a blueprint for how right-wing conspiracists want to treat future GOP election losses. Along the way, they’re deliberately destroying faith in the democratic process.
As the “fraudits” spread to other states, and as it becomes clear that hard-core Republican fanatics will stop at nothing in their pursuit of overturning the 2020 election, it’s imperative the press undertake a course correction and stop calling these partisan sham events “audits.” They’re not going away and the press needs a better, more exact way to describe them. By adopting GOP “audit” language, journalists are doing the right wing’s bidding and undermining confidence in U.S. elections.
Once again, the GOP’s radical and dangerous behavior in the age of Trump ought to prompt news outlets to change the language they use to cover American politics. There is no precedent for a former U.S. president to barnstorm the country insisting his election loss was fraudulent and claiming “Indians” were paid to vote in 2020. And there’s no precedent for the mockery that’s being made out of ballot-counting in Arizona, a charade that even local Republican election officials have dismissed as a “grift disguised as an audit.”
The question is, how does the media cover the Grand Canyon State’s slow-motion train wreck? By using “audit” without including qualifiers, such as “so-called,” “alleged,” or “absurd,” the press lends an undeserved air of legitimacy to the clown proceedings. The language use becomes especially problematic when “audit” is deployed in headlines, which is what most people end up reading, instead of the body of the article. A New York Times front-page, print headline yesterday read, “Arizona’s Vote Audit Is Scorned. Republicans Press On, Anyway.”
On Twitter, Washington Post editors were promoting an article about “the national push by Trump allies to audit 2020 ballots.” (The Post constantly refers to the disinformation campaign as an “audit.”)
For casual news consumers, the assumption is that Republicans are simply conducting an audit of the votes, and may start doing them in other states. And what’s wrong with an “audit,” right? “Audit” sounds serious and precise.
By contrast, NPR took a smart approach with a recent headline, putting the word in quotation marks to signal the dubious nature of the Arizona sham: “Experts Call It A 'Clown Show' But Arizona 'Audit' Is A Disinformation Blueprint.” And a recent CNN report referred to the Arizona effort as a “so-called audit” and a “partisan ballot review.”
Another good description for the ongoing shenanigans might be an “unofficial review,” since the ballot exercise carries no legal weight and cannot change the vote outcome. “Partisan inquisition” is also an accurate offering, as well as “boondoggle,” “charade,” “farce,” and “sham.” Using those terms means journalists would have to stand up to Republicans and not be afraid of “liberal media bias” cries that would certainly follow.
The truth is, “Most certified auditors contacted by The Arizona Republic, including accountants, internal auditors, and forensic auditors, say this is not an audit,” the state’s largest recently newspaper reported.
The ongoing process in the Southwest clearly fails to meet any of the standards required for official recounts or audits by state law. With financial support from My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell and a nonprofit set up by a reporter for One America News Network, which has been given exclusive access to livestream from the audit site, Arizona partisans have reportedly scanned ballots with UV lights to look for secret watermarks that fanatics think Trump’s Department of Homeland Security placed on legitimate ballots to differentiate them from fake ones. They’re also inspecting ballots for traces of bamboo to determine if they were snuck into to the country from Asia.
Note that a legitimate post-election audit of Maricopa County was conducted one week after last year’s election. That is to say, a multiparty audit board conducted a hand count of ballots from a sample of randomly selected voting precincts and compared them with the results from voting machines. For Arizona’s largest county, the audit uncovered not a single ballot discrepancy. The county also hired two separate, independent firms to perform a forensic audit of the voting equipment used and found nothing amiss.
What’s happening in Arizona is not a recount, either. Recounts typically occur when there’s an infinitesimal margin of victory, but Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes. “In the recount and audit space, 1,000 votes is, for all intents and purposes, a landslide,” David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, told FiveThirtyEight. “A margin of 10,000 votes is an off-the-charts landslide” for a recount.
The Arizona ballot charade is a perfect example of conservative extremists trying to create their own reality and their own set of facts, and hoping the mainstream media helps them by adopting misleading language, like an Arizona “audit.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
📕 GOOD STUFF:
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter has updated his Fox News book, Hoax, with additional reporting on the post-Trump network.
From the recent excerpt, “'We Turned So Far Right We Went Crazy:' How Fox News Was Radicalized By Its Own Viewers”;
The post-election changes at Fox happened one day at a time, one show at a time, but when viewed in totality, they are unmistakable and stark. Practically every change was about having less news on the air and more opinions-about-the-news. It was like serving dessert without dinner, when the dessert consisted of screaming about how awful the dinner was, and warning that the meal might be a socialist plot, and hey, while we're at it, why are chefs so corrupt?
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Vance Joy, “Missing Piece”
Releasing his first single in three years, Australian Vance Joy delivers a heartfelt indie-folk anthem with “Missing You.” Written during a lockdown via Zoom with New Zealand buddy Joel Little, the song touches lots of anthemic notes, and is wrapped with Joy’s irresistible and affirming, toe-tapping vibe.
I remember happy wasted daysSummer's golden haze in our eyesLifting you above the breakin' wavesMemories floatin' back to my mind
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Trump’s lies about the 2020 election continue to do extraordinary damage to our democracy, as his loyalists fan out across the country, demanding endless, bogus recounts and spreading wild lies about the American ballot process. The Washington Post recently detailed the deeply disturbing trend. But instead of being an honest truth-teller, the Post hid behind indefensible word-salad language, as part of the media’s long-running tradition of not calling Trump and his followers liars.
Timid news outlets like the Post are still hiding behind “falsehood” nonsense in 2021. This, as more stunned scholars are warning us that Republicans are clearly and deliberately putting American democracy at risk with their unprecedented and brazen attacks on free and fair elections.
The Post article originally ran under the headline, “Ballot Reviews Consume Trump as He Touts Falsehood of Stolen Election.”
Here’s how the Post described Trump’s lies:
• “Trump’s ceaseless attacks”
• “baseless theories”
• “unsubstantiated claims”
• “baseless claims”
• “baseless theories”
• “alleging without evidence”
• “falsehoods”
• “The accusations”
• “Claims”
• “false allegations”
• “Allegations”
This is not the normal, instinctive language people use when telling the story about nonstop lies. This is the strained language reporters opt for when they want to avoid blunt adjectives to describe deeply disturbing Republican behavior that threatens democracy. The Post used “lie” just once in its 3,000-word article about lies.
Stilted “falsehood” language like this isn’t employed by accident. It’s not a coincidence that Post reporters are burning through the thesaurus to find ways of not saying “lie.” It’s clearly a newsroom guideline to avoid the term in straight news coverage.
Editors at the Post, possibly responding to online criticism about the “falsehood” nonsense in the headline, later changed the article’s headline to, “Inspired by Arizona Recount, Trump Loyalists Push to Revisit Election Results in Communities Around The Country.” But the updated headline was arguably worse, since it eliminated the central premise that the Arizona “recount” was based on complete lies.
This would have been a better, more accurate Post headline: “Inspired by GOP Election Lies, Trump Loyalists Demand More Bogus Recounts.”
How is it that in the summer of 2021 major news outlets are still peddling “falsehood” gibberish in the face of the Republican Party’s increasingly undemocratic behavior? This is such a pointless, self-inflicted mistake that editors and producers choose to keep making, five years after they began covering Trump, who’s a pathological liar.
It happens all the time at the Post:
• “Trump’s Election Fraud Falsehoods Have Cost Taxpayers $519 million — and Counting”
• “For Republicans, Fealty to Trump’s Election Falsehood Becomes Defining Loyalty Test”
• “How the Election-Fraud Myth Was Spread by Russell Ramsland and the Texas Security Company ASOG”
• “Liz Cheney Refuses to Link Trump’s False Election Claims, GOP’s Push for New Voting Restrictions”
• “Stefanik Emphasizes Support for False Election Claims, Trump Movement Ahead of Leadership Vote”
Again, the GOP’s Big Lie is not a “falsehood,” a “myth,” or a “false claim.”
The good news is some key news players have fixed this problem and now are much more forthright in their language. Here’s the lede to a recent CNN article, which covered similar ground as the Post article: “Donald Trump is more obsessed than ever with the 2020 election and pushing his lie that there was widespread fraud that led to his defeat.”
After years of failing on this front, the New York Times last month let it be known that it would be using “lie” to describe Trump’s election propaganda. "In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies," one Times headline read. The next day, the Times published, "Cheney’s Replacement Repeats Trumps Lies as Party Looks Ahead."
Others hopped onboard:
• "The 15 Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump's Presidency" (CNN)
• "Legacy of Lies -- How Trump Weaponized Mistruths During His Presidency" (ABC News)
So what explains the Post’s stubbornness?
And what’s so distressing is that as he prepared his retirement from the Washington Post as editor this winter, Marty Baron specifically noted the daily should have called out Trump's lies more forcefully:
We had to be much more forthright about Trump’s mendacity, his lies over the course of the administration. We needed to call them that from the very beginning. We were very much operating on good principle; and let’s be fair, he was president, he was duly elected. But he was exploiting that. He was exploiting our principles. That said, I don’t think it would have made any great difference.
Baron conceded the Post knew it should've been labeling Trump a liar instead of hiding behind a carousel of euphemisms — "falsehoods," "false claims," "inaccurate claims.” But the Post kept its head down, and it’s still making the same egregious misstep today, as Trump fantasizes about being “reinstated” in the White House this summer.
The Post this month is settling in under its new editor, Sally Buzbee. An early, welcome move from her would be to flush the newsroom use of hollow, misleading phrases like “allegations” and “falsehoods” when reporting on the GOP’s ugly election lies.
(Photo: Getty Images)
📻 GOOD STUFF:
The dissenting voices within the GOP who are willing to stand up to Trump’s election madness are becoming fewer and fewer.
But here’s an interesting update from the Los Angeles Times’ weekend piece, “A Conservative Talk Radio Host Once Backed the Arizona GOP Election Recount. Now He’s Warning Republicans Against It”:
[Mike] Broomhead is not shy about his opinions — that’s the whole point of being a talk radio host. But anytime he starts to talk about the recount’s backers, his tread becomes notably lighter.
“I don’t want to make the people that believe this angry,” he explained during a commercial break. “I don’t think they are crazy. I think that these are people that genuinely believe the election was stolen.”
Every time he talks about those involved, be it officials like [Karen] Fann or Ken Bennett, a former GOP secretary of state who has largely been the recount’s public face, or the volunteer ballot inspectors at the coliseum, he takes pains to praise their intentions. Nevertheless, he catches heat from some listeners who accuse him of being biased against the effort.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Joy Oladokun, “Let It Be Me”
I recently heard this Nashville-based, Nigerian-American singer-songwriter for the first time, and I’ve become a big fan.
From Billboard’s review of her new, major label debut: “The stunning, emotional album sees Oladokun wading through emotional trauma, sorrow, anger, solitude and, yes, eventually the happiness hinted at in the title, all with surgical songwriting and soulful vocals that will send chills down your spine on each repeat listen.”
I grew up scared of my fatherHis words were known to draw bloodI know that nobody's perfectBut I never questioned his loveWhen he cursed the televisionAnd that ‘God damn rainbow parade’I wrapped my wounds in religionThat night I learned how to pray
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via a Spotify playlist.
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Stay healthy.
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After less than a month of postings, Trump’s blog was officially taken offline this week, after drawing an embarrassingly small audience. Loyalists will no longer be able to check on “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” to read his latest, bitter musings.
The sudden move to unplug the aging Florida blogger comes as Trump continues to struggle to attract an online audience after getting de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the wake of the January 6, mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. The social media giants rightly accused Trump of inciting violence and of depicting the mob vigilantes as patriots. Once accustomed to seeing his tweets and Facebook posts garnering millions of likes and responses, Trump now finds himself lost in the online wilderness, ignored and rejected.
NBC News last week reported that Trump’s blog had “attracted a little over 212,000 engagements,” a shockingly small number for someone of his political status. By comparison, when Trump got banned for life from Twitter, he had 88 million followers.
While Trump is widely seen as the odds on favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination if he decides to run again, competing in a general election campaign with virtually no online presence could pose a major problem for the him.
Although there had been chatter about Trump launching an ambitious media play in his post-presidency years, he’s always been lazy. Which is why the idea that he’d undertake the Herculean task of building a social media outpost from nothing always seemed farfetched. To date, it’s clear he’s taken a haphazard approach to his website.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Trump’s blog was taken down because he was upset that people were making fun of its paltry audience. Going back to his days at “The Apprentice,” Trump has always used ratings as a way to judge a person’s worth. One of his favorite putdowns as president was to claim that a particular news network had bad ratings, which means his dismal showing online this year no doubt stings. Especially after his flak Jason Miller had hyped the site as “hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game.”
Why the online collapse this year? Aside from Trump’s hibernation down at Mar-a-lago, he’s clearly been unable to reproduce the buzz that his tweets, and to a degree his Facebook posts, generated. Reveling in Twitter’s rapid-fire insult style, Trump became a social media star by making news and announcing controversial government policy online. By comparison, his dreary, boring blog posts generated yawns. His namesake site is also seen as being primitive by 2021 standards, and included no comment section for Trump’s blog postings.
The site’s audience collapse in the last 12 months has been astonishing. “Data provided by right-wing website monitor the Righting revealed that last April, DonaldJTrump.com pulled in 14.412 million unique visitors. Last month, it garnered a mere 161,000,” The Wrap recently reported.
It hasn’t just been his colossal flop as a blogger. All across the internet, references to Trump have plummeted, even as Republican leaders scramble to placate him.
“Chatter about Trump has fallen across the biggest social media sites to its lowest level since May 2016, when he was just becoming the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, according to the BuzzSumo data,” the Post reported. “On Twitter, data from the online-analytics firm Zignal Labs shows, mentions of him have cratered to an average of about 4 million a week, the lowest since 2016.”
The bad online news comes after Trump’s recent one-hour sit-down with Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino on NewsMax on May 25 drew just 295,000 viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research data — and just 62,000 viewers in the advertiser-coveted age demographic of 25 to 54. That same night during the 9 p.m. time slot when Trump appeared on NewsMax, his interview got beat badly in the ratings by “Chopped,” and by HGTV’s “Unsellable Houses” which pulled 1.3 million total viewers, or nearly four times the Trump audience.
For years, the media loved to portray Trump as a cultural phenomenon who produces bonanza ratings. Of course, Trump pushed that media myth himself. He once claimed that when he appeared on Fox News Sunday in November 2018, the show landed 9 million viewers. In truth, 1.7 million people tuned in. The truth is, he often produces shoulder shrugs.
Trump’s convention acceptance speech last year was the lowest-rated one in primetime history. The summer before, ABC News aired a primetime Trump special, built around the idea of tagging along with him for 30 hours inside the White House. The special flopped, coming in third place among the three major networks on Sunday at 8 PM ET. Worse, the show produced just half the television audience that ABC's Celebrity Family Feud had attracted in the same time slot one week earlier.
The dichotomy now at play is an amazing one: As Trump fades from public view and generates so little interest online, the Republican Party continues to genuflect in front of him.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
📚 GOOD STUFF:
The No Drama Biden era is proving tough for the right-wing media, and specifically conservative book publishers.
From The Atlantic’s “The Conservative Publishing Industry Has a Joe Biden Problem”:
His presidency may be young, but industry insiders have told me in recent weeks that the market for anti-Biden books is ice cold. Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and—though the hypothesis has yet to be tested—it’s widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his superpower, the American right has gone hunting for richer targets to elevate.
🏍 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Leon Bridges, “Motorbike”
This Texas singer-songwriter has emerged as one of my favorite artists in recent years, especially because of the way he’s constantly evolving his sound and style. For his new release, “Motorbike,” it’s a chill, trippy summer sound — the video features a “Pulp Fiction”-meets-“Bonnie and Clyde” storyline.
On the back of my motorbike? Switch lanes twenty-nine, oohIt's whatever you like, oohOn the back of my motorbike, write your name in the sky, oohIt's whatever you like, we can ride, ride, ride
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When Republicans used their first filibuster of the Joe Biden era to block a comprehensive investigation of the deadly Trump mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, much of the press rushed in to announce the stunning move was done because the GOP’s remains in the “grip” of Trump. Republicans refused to set a up a fact-finding commission into the murderous insurrection because they “feared” Trump’s wrath, news consumers were told.
• “Their opposition highlights the hold former President Donald Trump still holds on most of his party.” (CNN)
• “There’s the fear of openly defying Trump and earning the enmity of his supporters, since those deemed insufficiently loyal to the former president tend to see their jobs put at risk.” (Vox)
• “Trump’s grip over Republicans hardens as party cleaves to election ‘big lie’” (The Guardian)
And writing in the Washington Post, Dan Baltz confidently insisted that Republicans, “fear Trump and they fear his followers, who now dominate the GOP rank-and-file, and so they voted on Friday to protect the former president by obstructing the commission.”
The clear implication is that Republicans were forced by Trump to take a position on the January commission that they did not agree with; that Republicans in the U.S. Senate are honest and decent people who put country over party, but they’re not able to do that right now because they live in fear of Trump’s power and political wrath.
Note that no Republican senators ever told journalists they were “afraid” of Trump, or that’s why most voted to scuttle the fact-finding mission. Reporters made that conclusion themselves as a way to explain dangerous GOP behavior — as a way to cover for the GOP instead of telling the glaring truth, which is that Republicans couldn’t care less what caused the bloody insurrection, or if it happens again.
This “grip” narrative is nonsense and it needs to stop —the Republican Party in recent weeks and months has made it clear with its anti-voter drive that it no longer adheres to the tenets of democracy, and that it is determined to permanently wound free and fair elections, passing laws that make it harder, and in many cases, impossible for lawful Americans to vote. Republicans are doing this because they want to. Not because they’re quivering at the sight of Trump.
Emphasizing the idea that fear of Trump is motivating Republicans “risks misleading people about the true nature of the threat posed by the GOP’s ongoing radicalization,” Post columnist Greg Sargent correctly noted weeks ago. “It implies that Republicans would prefer on principle to stand firm in defense of democracy but are not doing so simply out of fear of facing immediate political consequences.”
If you were part of an amoral political movement, wouldn’t you want to attack free and fair elections in order to give yourself a permanent advantage? If you had no concern for democracy, wouldn’t you set out to make sure future Democratic victories could be invalidated? That’s what Republicans are now doing, without pause, and out in the open.
In Texas this weekend, Republicans held an all-night legislative session over the holiday weekend to try to pass one of the most stunning voter suppression laws in the country. The bill was written behind closed doors. The law moves to, “cut back early voting hours, ban drive-thru voting, further clamp down on voting-by-mail rules and enhance access for partisan poll watchers,” the Texas Tribune reported. It’s designed to curb voter fraud that does not exist in Texas. (Republicans failed to pass the bill before the Sunday midnight deadline for the legislative session expired. They will likely seek a special session this summer to act again.)
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, the farcical “audit” continues unabated, as the unhinged Republican Party there repeatedly tries to conjure up different election results than the ones that handed Biden a 2020 victory there. The clownish ballot review, conducted by a private security company called Cyber Ninjas with a MAGA CEO, has drawn widespread fire for its lack of professionalism and chain of custody, and for chasing conspiracy claims, such as hunting for bamboo fibers in ballots supposedly shipped in from Asia.
All across the country, Republican legislatures have moved swiftly to make sure that fewer people vote in upcoming elections.
These partisan, sustained attacks on democracy have nothing to do with Trump’s day-to-day involvement in the GOP. He simply arrived five years ago and tapped into the party’s obvious authoritarian leanings and gave it political permission to pursue an agenda built around throwing out millions of legitimate votes each election cycle.
As longtime conservative commentator Charlie Sykes recounted last week that following Trump’s 2016 win and what it unleashed, he and fellow pundit George Will “had to admit that we obviously didn’t understand what the conservative movement was about, that all the intellectual cover of the right had been this tiny, thin layer on top of this molten something or other that turned out to be pretty ugly.”
The media need to stop pretending Trump is steering the Republicans’ eager descent into madness. The press needs to acknowledge, in its straight news coverage, that the GOP is no longer a mainstream player and is quickly evolving into something very different and unparalleled. And that Republicans are making these un-American moves freely and of their own accord.
👩🏽🎓 GOOD STUFF:
An update on the recent University of North Carolina school of journalism controversy, after the university’s Board of Trustees failed to grant tenure to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known for her ground-breaking work at the New York Times on the 1619 Project, a reframing of slavery in America.
A new report from The Assembly reveals that it was a UNC mega-donor, Walter Hussman, who led the push against Hannah-Jones:
He relayed his concerns to the university’s top leaders, including at least one member of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees. The Assembly obtained copies of emails in which Hussman expressed his concerns about Hannah-Jones to David Routh, vice chancellor for university development; Susan King, the dean of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media; and chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz.
“I worry about the controversy of tying the UNC journalism school to the 1619 project,” Hussman wrote in a late December email to King, copying in Guskiewicz and Routh. “I find myself more in agreement with Pulitzer prize winning historians like James McPherson and Gordon Wood than I do Nikole Hannah-Jones.
😉 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Rachel Mazer, “Is It So Wrong”
A multi-instrumentalist with a love of pop, jazz, soul, and funk, Mazer has a magnetic swing style that reminds me of the beloved Boston band, Lake Street Dive. Here, “Is It So Wrong” delivers an endearing, flirtatious look at first glances.
Fun fact: Mazer is the cousin of a Press Run subscriber!
Ooh I put my arms around yaJust to see if our shoulders were in syncOoh I bought a beer for yaYou don't have to be single to drink
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There’s lots of media hand-wringing following the latest in a conveyor belt of hate statements from QAnon supporter and Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s doubled down about how pandemic-era mask requirements are like when Nazis forced Jews in Germany to wear gold stars in order to easily identify them, and then exterminate them. “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star,” Greene tweeted.
We’ve seen this same news cycle countless times with Greene, who functions less as a member of Congress and more as an extremist troll, forever posting hate statements in order to generate big donor contributions from the radical- right base. The question journalists are grappling with is, should Greene be ignored, thereby denying her a platform. Or does her toxic awfulness represent an important part of today’s politics, as the GOP runs off the rails in so many ways, urgently trying to outlaw choice in America, and refusing to investigate Trump’s deadly insurrection from January 6.
“Whether and when and how to cover Greene's appalling conduct continues to stir debate in newsrooms large and small,” noted CNN’s Brian Stelter. His colleague Anderson Cooper announced Tuesday night, “This is the last you will hear from her on the program" because "this is less about her and her deeply stupid remarks and more about the people leading the Republican Party." My hunch though, is that will not be the last time Cooper’s viewers hear about Greene on his program.
CNN’s John King justified Greene coverage because her behavior is “part of something bigger.” It's about the GOP being "the grand ostrich party."
There’s a simple solution to this riddle — be far more aggressive when covering Greene and use the proper language to describe what she’s doing. What she wants is a ton of coverage that depicts her as somewhat controversial and antagonistic towards liberals and the media. What she likely doesn’t want are headlines labeling her a racist, anti-Semite, stalker, and an unstable buffoon, all of which are accurate. News outlets should use that language without reservation.
The only thing stopping news organizations from posting accurate headlines such as, “Anti-Semitic Republican Lies About Holocaust,” is the media fear of a GOP backlash.
When members of the press raise concerns about giving Greene too much time and attention, what journalists are really worried about is giving her too much time and attention within the narrow confines of how the Beltway press treats elected Republicans. They’re acknowledging that they’re boxed in, by their own design, and they’re not willing to rethink how to aggressively cover a public menace like Greene.
Right now, there’s too much tap dancing around the truth. “CBS Evening News” this week referred to her as a Republican “firebrand.” Webster’s dictionary defines firebrand as, “one that creates unrest or strife,” which in many political instances can be viewed as a redeeming quality.
In its coverage of the latest Greene controversy, the New York Times referred to her as a “first-term Congresswoman” with a “combative style,” known for “increasingly brazen behavior” and her “conspiratorial brand of politics.” None of that properly conveys the looming threat Greene poses. The Washington Post noted her “extreme rhetoric,” which sounds innocuous.
After refusing to call Trump a liar for four years, most major news organizations now openly refer to the election “lies” he’s pushing about 2020. Meaning, editors and producers learned from their mistakes and have tacitly admitted that critics were right about the foolishness of dancing around using “lies” to describe a pathological liar.
That’s why it’s so important that the press make the right call now regarding Greene, and not misplay the story for years only to realize in 2023 or 2024 they should have shown more courage and been more honest about her serial mendacity and clearly unhinged behavior.
Reporters, producers, and editors all understand the danger Greene poses. Just like reporters, editors and producers all understood the danger Trump posed to democracy for four years, yet spent their time playing pointless word games so as to not be accurate and honest. The question is will journalists learn from their Trump errors?
Also, the press should constantly stress Greene’s obvious QAnon roots in the straight news coverage. There’s lots of media mentions of Greene “conspiracies,” but that’s entirely inadequate in terms of describing her beliefs. The press needs to be transparent that the Republican member of Congress believes in a cult-like political movement that insists Democratic elites are murderous pedophiles who worship Satan, and that Trump is the chosen one sent to cleanse America’s sins. And also remind news consumers that the FBI has declared QAnon to be a domestic terrorism threat.
The GOP has crossed over into the abyss and the press needs to change the way it covers some of the party’s maniacs.
📰 GOOD STUFF:
Another update from the AP’s misguided firing of a young reporter last week, who became the target of a right-wing smear campaign because of pro-Palestinian tweets she posted in college.
From the Washington Post:
Senior managers at the Associated Press admitted fault on Wednesday in the firing last week of a 22-year-old junior staffer, Emily Wilder, who was being targeted by right-wing commentators over her political activism in college.
…
But managers took a much more apologetic tack in a town hall with employees on Wednesday, an audio recording of which was shared with The Washington Post.
Several executives expressed regret at how the company handled the situation in the meeting, though managing editor Brian Carovillano called them “mistakes of process, and not of outcome.” He said it was still “the right decision” to fire Wilder.
🍺 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Vandoliers, “Every Saturday Night”
I’ve featured lots of music here in the last year that was Covid-related, as musicians sang about the pandemic and changes in our world, and here’s another.
It’s from a Texas band I recently highlighted. The song’s written from the perspective of someone stuck in lockdown and wishing he hadn’t taken Saturday night bars and concerts from granted. (“I miss the last calls at the dance halls.”) Now that America is opening back up again, it’s a perfect, shout-along song to hear as we head back into bars and concerts.
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The welcome announcement from New Jersey this week that fully vaccinated people there will no longer have to wear masks inside stores and that indoor sporting events can soon return to 100 percent capacity, in a state that was hit especially hard by the Covid-19 virus, was just the latest, sweeping example of America emerging from the pandemic. With 130 million Americans fully vaccinated, and millions of children soon to join the ranks, the country is putting the pandemic in the rearview mirror.
It’s been a miraculous worst-to-first turnaround under President Joe Biden, who inherited a Covid crisis at its zenith, with nearly 3,000 American deaths each day. It was a virus calamity that had been mismanaged nearly every day of 2020 by Trump and his virus-denying advisors.
Trashing science and urging people to inject bleach into their bodies, Trump oversaw the worst government response to a public health crisis in U.S. history — 400,000 Americans likely died because of Trump’s incompetence. He spread more deliberate lies about Covid to a larger audience than anyone else on the planet, according to a study from Cornell University. "When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away," he once predicted.
Under Biden, that nightmare has been turned into an American success story, as the vaccination rollout continues to be a model for the world.
That victory was not pre-ordained. Back in January, the Christian Science Monitor noted, “He faces steep obstacles, with the virus actively spreading in most states, slow progress on the vaccine rollout, and political uncertainty over whether congressional Republicans will help him pass a $1.9 trillion economic relief and COVID-19 response package.”
But Biden pulled it off, far exceeding expectations. So how come he never got a victory lap in the press? Why has the media decided to instantly move on from one of the biggest news stories of the last century — how Covid-19 crippled America and killed more than 600,000 people here. Has the Beltway press in the Biden era simply adopted the mantra that only bad news is real news? Politico actually posted this April headline: "How Good News Could Complicate the Biden Agenda." Note that just 25 percent of Biden’s early news coverage was positive, according to a study from Pew.
The migrant surge at the border? That’s considered big news by the media, and Biden was personally responsible for it. The cyber-attack on the Colonial Pipeline, fighting in the Middle East, a disappointing April jobs report. All of those stories received excited coverage in recent weeks, while Biden’s stunning vaccination success receives mostly shrugs.
There’s clearly a partisan angle to this, because by turning away from Biden’s Covid victory, the press is following the GOP’s lead. Republicans have no interest in dwelling on America’s stunning vaccination turn-around, and apparently neither does the press. During Biden’s inaugural press conference, he wasn’t asked a single question about Covid, which had dominated American life for 15 months. That, despite the fact that the press conference featured Biden announcing that the new goal was to have 200 million Americans receive a shot within the first 100 days of his presidency — an unthinkable benchmark compared to the national embarrassment the vaccine rollout had been under Trump.
Today, rather than acknowledging Biden’s stunning Covid accomplishment, the press is racing ahead to flag all the looming problems the White House supposedly faces, while often completely ignoring the startling pandemic win. “Biden Battles New Crises as Honeymoon Fades,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” recently announced.
The Washington Post this week warned that Biden’s “big agenda is imperiled as his priorities stall in Congress,” without mentioning that the number one priority on Biden’s agenda — safely reopening the country — has already been achieved with miraculous speed.
CNN posted a nearly simultaneous dispatch, about the slow-motion state of Biden’s legislative agenda, claiming it was causing distress among progressive Democrats. (CNN politely glossed over the fact that radical GOP obstruction is what has slowed the agenda.) Nowhere in the 1,400-word piece was there mention of Biden’s Covid accomplishments.
Incredibly, when the White House’s pandemic win is referenced, it’s sometimes framed as bad news for Biden, as this recent Politico headline demonstrates: “Vaccines' Success Could Undercut Biden's Multibillion-Dollar School Testing Plans.” And from the Post: “Biden’s Vaccination Success Story is About To Run Into a World of Pressure.”
The New York Times this week stressed that the post-Covid economic recovery is so strong that it’s creating problems for the White House: “State Revenues Pour In, Raising Pressure on Biden to Divert Federal Aid.”
The vaccination rollout has been too successful, basically. For Biden, it’s more heads you lose, tails you lose coverage.
(Photo Alex Wong/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
Repercussions continue to be felt from the AP firing a young reporter last week after she became the target of a right-wing smear campaign for tweets she posted in college, with the wire service announcing it will review its social media policy for employees.
From the AP:
The Associated Press said Monday that it is launching a review of its social media policies after questions were raised about last week’s firing of one of its journalists who had expressed pro-Palestinian views.
That announcement came hours after more than 100 AP journalists signed a letter expressing concern about how former news associate Emily Wilder was treated. The journalists want more clarity in what can be said on forums like Twitter and Facebook and faith the company would protect them from pressure campaigns.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Bob Dylan, “Mississippi”
In honor of his 80th birthday this week, this is my go-to for favorite Dylan song, which is an almost impossible category to create because of the embarrassment of riches to choose from.
From his 2001 album, Love and Theft, the slow-moving and majestic classic “Mississippi” remains a mystery, like most of the Dylan greats. Fun fact: Sheryl Crow released an uptempo version that sounds great when the car windows are down. (Here’s a great Dixie Chicks version, too.)
Well, I ain't got nothing for you, I had nothing beforeDon't even have anything for myself anymoreSky is full of fire, rain is pouring downThere's nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around
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Two weeks ago, the Washington Post announced with much fanfare that it was hiring Sally Buzbee to be the newspaper’s new editor. Arguably the second most important newspaper in America, the top Post position carries with it enormous responsibility. Buzbee will soon join the Post in June after she finishes up her current position as senior vice president and executive editor at the Associated Press, the world’s largest news outlet.
But suddenly Buzbee and the AP are facing a barrage of questions after the wire service fired a young reporter, Emily Wilder, last week. She became the target of a concerted right-wing smear campaign because of Pro-Palestinian tweets she had posted in college. (Wilder is Jewish.)
The episode is not only troubling for the AP, it’s also a problem for the Post, as it prepares for Buzbee’s arrival. The last thing the paper wanted during this key transition period, which followed an extensive, high-profile search for a new leader, was to be grappling with doubts about Buzbee’s leadership. But after watching the Winter debacle unfold last week at the AP, it’s impossible to not question the editor’s newsroom guidance. Post reporters must be wondering how many of them will soon be thrown under the bus by management if GOP activists target them with bogus claims of “bias.”
The stunning termination of Wilder came just 16 days after the Stanford University graduate was hired. Her AP bosses told her she had violated the company’s social media policy, although they would not detail how. Her college tweets became newsworthy when conservative news outlets, including Federalist, Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, began highlighting them and accusing AP of having an anti-Israel bias. Note that the entry-level Wilder was working out of the AP’s Arizona bureau and her journalism output had nothing to do with the Middle East.
Wilder was initially assured that her previous tweets were not a problem and that the AP would stand by her, but was subsequently fired. The move came just days after the AP’s bureau in Gaza was bombed by the Israeli military as part of the May fighting that erupted in the Middle East. The Israeli government insisted the building housed Hamas operatives, but has not provided definitive proof in order to justify leveling the AP building. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pointed to Wilder’s employment and tweeted, “Not a surprise from a media organization that shared office space with Hamas." He also suggested the AP colluded with Hamas and allowed reporters to be used as “human shields.”
It’s clear the AP found itself in the middle of a contentious, international national standoff when the Wilder story, and the manufactured claims of bias, began to gain traction. Rather than defend its targeted reporter, AP caved to the right-wing mob, thereby encouraging to take aim at more journalists in the future.
“It feels like AP folded to the ridiculous demands and cheap bullying of organizations and individuals,” Wilder said. “What future does it promise to aspiring reporters that an institution like The Associated Press would sacrifice those with the least power to the cruel trolling of a group of anonymous bullies?” she asked.
Added Columbia Journalism School professor, Emily Bell, “If news organizations cave in to pressure from bad faith campaigns, if they cancel workplace contracts on the basis of student activism or errors of judgment, then the field will miss out on some great reporters. Newsrooms are too often unprepared for this predictable onslaught.”
The whole sordid chapter represents a black eye for the AP and raises real questions about its leadership.
Whether Buzbee directly ordered Wilder’s firing is unclear. But Buzbee is a high ranking executive of the news operation and everyone there must have known terminating Wilder would generate lots of news. More significantly, Buzbee has remained silent as the controversy has escalated and the AP has been widely denounced within journalism circles for giving in to disingenuous, right-wing trolls who aren’t seeking fairness, but instead want media scalps as trophies.
It was clearly Wilder’s college tweets that prompted AP’s review of her online content. But in justifying her firing, the AP insists she was fired "for violations of AP’s social media policy” for tweets posted this year.
None of this is believable and it all reflects poorly on the AP. If the Associated Press did have a problem with a new hire regarding a tweet or two, the normal course of action would be for an editor to counsel that person and warn them about the social media policy. It’s completely irrational to fire someone hired just 16 days earlier because of a minor social media guidelines transgression.
It’s obvious the AP did not want to defend Wilder and did not want to do battle with bogus GOP allegations, so the wire service took the cowardly way out.
And soon, the AP’s executive editor will be taking over the Washington Post newsroom.
📺 GOOD STUFF:
Last month I wrote about the need for CNN to cut ties with Republican commentator Rick Santorum after his racist comments about how white European colonists miraculously created this nation out of whole cloth: "We birthed a nation from nothing.”
Over the weekend, CNN terminated Santorum’s contract.
From HuffPost:
But on Saturday, a CNN senior executive told HuffPost that the network quietly ended its contract with Santorum this week. This executive, who requested anonymity to speak openly, said the decision to cut ties with Santorum came after he went on one of the network’s shows, “Cuomo Prime Time,” to explain himself shortly after he made his racist comments. He blew it, said this executive, and after that, nobody at the network wanted to keep him around.
👨🏻🌾 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Alan Jackson, “Where the Cottonwood Grows”
I’ve joked here before that in my previous life I think I was a farmer and have rural roots running through my bones, as the only way to explain my lifelong affection for country music.
This latest from Jackson, who has posted 30-plus No. 1 country songs over his career and who just released his first album in six years, instantly puts a smile on my face. It’s a simple, upbeat, two-stop ditty about the joys of young love along a riverbank. A little fiddle here, a little steel guitar there, and Jackson’s honeydew voice produces an instant “repeat” candidate for me.
I can still recall the words you saidAnd the plans we dreamed as we looked aheadBut the fork in the river took us separate waysAs the years went by, I can't forget those days
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President Joe Biden is getting trashed by Democrats over the Middle East!
Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t acknowledging her Asian heritage!
Those were two breathless dispatches Politico posted this week, as the Beltway insider outlet did its best to gin up drama surrounding the Democratic administration. Apparently still longing from the non-stop news cycle of the Trump era and the relentless controversies and scandals that came with it, Politico has decided that during the No Drama Biden era the best strategy is to just make stuff up and post it as news.
In both gotcha articles it became abundantly clear that Biden is not being trashed by Democrats regarding the Middle East. And Harris is not being widely criticized for downplaying her Indian roots. Both premises are fabrications. How do we know? Because neither article contained evidence to back up the click-bait headlines.
This is indefensible journalism, as Politico eagerly does the GOP’s bidding by trying to create controversies where none exist. The daily is hardly alone in this regard. The New York Times recently promoted a long article about Biden’s “short fuse” and “quick temper” in a piece that included no quotes or evidence of Biden’s “short fuse” and “quick temper.” But Politico does seem to be particularly aggressive in concocting unsupported storylines during the Biden era. And Politico is doing it with weighty topics that should not be used as ways to manufacture news.
The deadly, unfolding humanitarian disaster in the Middle East, where the Israeli military and Hamas continue to wage urban warfare with a mounting death toll, should not be used as the backdrop for a false, unsupported story, like Politico’s “‘I’m Troubled By It’: Dems Trash Biden’s Handling of Israeli Strikes in Gaza,” from May 15.
It’s clear Politico wanted to tell a damning story about how the Biden White House was under siege at home politically, as Democrats lined up to denounce the president’s handling of the Middle East crisis. If true, that would be a huge story. But the Politico claim was entirely bogus.
The news outlet could not find a single Democrat to “trash” Biden. The only quotes even remotely critical came from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) who said he was “troubled” by earlier U.S. votes at the United Nation against the call for a ceasefire. (Biden has since said he supports a ceasefire.) And a quote from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who claimed Biden could stop the carnage “with one phone call,” which seems highly unlikely.
Instead, what the Politico article featured was a collection of thoughtful quotes from Democrats who are grappling with a complicated, long-running, and deadly foreign policy dilemma.
• “I just think it’s a no-brainer for the United States to be pushing for a ceasefire.” (Sen. Chris Murphy)
• [Biden has] chosen a diplomatic tack, to do it behind the scenes. It obviously hasn’t produced the results that everybody wants to see, which is an end to the violence, but I would venture to say it will.” (Sen. Bob Menendez)
• “The escalation of violence, the continued death of civilians in Israel and the Palestinian territories demands the negotiation of a ceasefire.” (Sen. Jon Ossof)
• “There has to be some indication on the ground that a ceasefire is feasible before the president commits himself.” (Sen. Jack Reed)
Despite the actual contents, Politico pitched the piece via a preposterous headline as the another Dems In Disarray update, with the party fuming over Biden, even though nothing in the piece suggested that was true.
And then there was the dubious Harris article, which Politico hyped on Twitter this way: “After nearly four months in office, Kamala Harris faces criticism that she hasn’t struck the right balance, that she’s focused more often on being the United States’ first Black vice president than the first Asian American one.” And from the sub-headline: “Asian Americans celebrated Kamala Harris' win. But they also want more.”
But like the Dems-trash-Biden article, this one was also supremely lacking in evidence to support the provocative claim that Harris was under siege for not acknowledging her Asian heritage. Instead, most experts quoted in the piece raised no concerns about the issue:
• “Her presence will transform the way our community looks at itself.” (Neil Makhija, Indian-American advocate)
• “I think we need to give everyone who is interracial, intersectional the space to talk about themselves in the way they see themselves.” (Rep. Mark Takano)
• “It’s a tremendous tool and a tremendous way of connecting with people and making them feel included so I would just encourage more of that for her because she is such a symbol for so many people in this country that are Asian American Pacific Islander.” (Rep. Judy Chu)
Among the only people in the article who made the claim against Harris was a Republican doctor from Mississippi who raises money for GOP candidates. (“I think she is keeping distance from Indian Americans. She should start identifying who she is.”) By the way, the political implications of Harris’ biracial background represent an interesting topic, and there’s a smart way to cover it, as the Los Angeles Times did this week with, “Fellow Asian Americans Laud Kamala Harris’ Rise, But Want More Clout For Their Communities.”
The Beltway press gorged on Trump chaos for years and now seems to be having trouble adjusting to the return to White House normalcy. The solution is not to just make stuff up.
(Photo: the Washington Post/Getty Images)
👩🏽🎓GOOD STUFF:
Fox News rails against liberal “cancel culture,” but conservatives love to try to silent voices they disagree with. The latest example comes from the University of North Carolina, where Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who oversaw last year’s acclaimed “The 1619 Project” for Th New York Times Magazine, was denied tenure by the Board of Trustees because of a conservative backlash.
From NC Policy Watch:
Last summer, Hannah-Jones went through the rigorous tenure process at UNC, [journalism dean Susan] King said. Hannah-Jones submitted a package King said was as well reviewed as any King had ever seen. Hannah-Jones had enthusiastic support from faculty and the tenure committee, with the process going smoothly every step of the way — until it reached the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.
The board reviews and approves tenure applications. It chose not to take action on approving Hannah-Jones’s tenure.
“I’m not sure why and I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before,” King said.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lucy Dacus, “Hot & Heavy”
I featured Dacus last year for her gripping and innovative cover of Bruce Spring’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Her third album comes out in June. “Hot & Heavy” is an irresistible guitar gem that showcases a melancholy indie rocker — and gifted songwriter — who’s growing by leaps and bounds.
Being back here makes me hot in the faceHot blood in my pulsing veinsHeavy memories weighing on my brainHot and heavy in the basement of your parents' place
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Singing from the GOP chorus once again, the Beltway press is certain President Joe Biden is careening towards trouble because of “the flurry of crises he is suddenly facing” (Washington Post),” and the “barrage of major challenges” that loom (Politico). The doom-and-gloom takes are everywhere.
The administration is “struggling to find a clear narrative.” “Multiple Crises at Home and Abroad Provide a Reality Check for Biden's White House,” a CNN headline declared, while NBC’s “Meet the Press” announced, “Biden Battles New Crises as Honeymoon Fades.” And from The Hill: “The Imminent Crises Facing Joe Biden.”
After a wildly successful first 100 days in office, Biden is riding high in the polls. But instead of touting his victories, the press seems eager to paint a portrait of a presidency on the brink, nervously confronting “crises” and “chaos.” As one reporter recently asked at a White House briefing, “Does it suddenly feel like the external world is turning on you guys?", the implication being that the Biden White House is just now facing public policy emergencies.
Also, “chaos” compared to what? A pathological liar president who was also clearly unstable and spent his final three months in office waging war on free and fair elections in this country?
This new bad-news storyline represents GOP messaging filtered through the Beltway media. The Washington Post over the weekend dedicated an entire news article to Republican leaders claiming things like, “The world is increasingly engulfed in chaos on Biden’s watch.”
Journalists though, often overreach while trying to construct the new narrative. In an effort to paint a dire picture of mounting “crises,” several pointed to the already-fixed Colonial Pipeline shutdown from last week as proof Biden is staring into the abyss and facing “new” calamities.
What’s astounding in the claims that the Biden White House is just now facing major crises is that the Democratic president has already helped conquer a once-in-a-century deadly pandemic that claimed more than 600,000 Americans, crippled the country for more than a year, and consumed the previous president. How on earth does the Beltway press consider the Covid-19 pandemic not to have been a “crisis”?
The answer seems to be that because Biden posted such a huge win overseeing a vaccination rollout that became the envy of the world and has the country of a brink of returning to coast-to-coast ‘normalcy,’ the press is gaslighting the whole chapter of his presidency. In other words, the pandemic didn’t really count. But violence in the Middle East? Now that’s a presidential disaster.
And news outlets that aren’t gaslighting the pandemic are actually using it as proof of more bad news for Biden. In a doomsday round-up from Politico this week headlined “Biden Under Pressure To Act, Not Mull,” “uncertainty over the post-mask stage of the pandemic” was pointed to as a looming “major challenge” for the president. Basically, because the CDC made the good-news announcement much quicker than expected that vaccinated Americans no longer have to wear masks, Politico included that in its list of problems for Biden.
Hands down, Biden’s top priority and the promise he made to voters was to get the pandemic under control and to vaccinate tens of millions of Americans as quickly as possible. His administration has been incredibly successful doing that, meeting and surpassing all key goals, but now the press says he’s in trouble because there’s “uncertainty over the post-mask stage of the pandemic.” Republicans didn’t like the mask announcement, claiming without proof it was done for political reasons to help Biden, so the press treated the mask declaration as bad news. (It was too “abrupt”!)
Talk about heads you lose, tails you lose.
Meanwhile, what about the border “crisis” the press hyped relentlessly in March, claiming the seasonal surge in migrants crossing the border was going to sink Biden’s young presidency?
ABC This Week in late March staged its entire Sunday program from the border in order to focus on the "emerging crisis for the Biden administration." During Biden’s inaugural press conference that month, reporters read off GOP talking points and peppered him with questions about the border, while completely ignoring the topic of the pandemic. “‘No End In Sight’: Inside the Biden Administration’s Failure To Contain the Border Surge,” read an over-the-top headline from the Washington Post two months ago.
With border crossings now falling, the political press has lost interest in the former Biden “crisis.” Apparently, the pandemic and the migrant surge weren’t real crises because the administration helped deal with them efficiently.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, eager for some White House drama, recently concocted the claim that Biden suffers from a “short fuse” and “quick temper.” The problem was that the Times article contained zero evidence to back up the click-bait claim. Instead, the piece painted a portrait of a thoughtful president who requires lots of input and information before he makes key decisions.
Biden remains the most popular president among Democratic voters in the history of modern polling. But the press doesn’t care much about that. It’s more interested in parroting GOP rhetoric about “crisis” and “chaos.”
(Photo: NIcholas Kamm/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
🖥 From Amanda Marcotte’s excellent piece in Salon, “No, the media can't "move on" from Trump's Big Lie — not until Republicans end their war on voting”:
Republicans are increasingly circling around this talking point. They insist that the coup is ancient history and that it's churlish to keep rehashing who did and did not join in efforts to overturn democracy. It's the favored justification for the ouster of Wyoming's Rep. Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership, with Republicans claiming it's not that she refuses to support Trump's election lies so much as that she just keeps going on about it. And it was the line that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., trotted out last week, while trying to wave off media inquiries about the GOP's increasingly fierce backing of Trump's Big Lie: "I don't think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with, we're sitting here with the President today."
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Glass Animals, “Heat Waves”
Released nearly a year ago in England, “Heat Waves” has slowly made its way around the globe, becoming a slow-burning hit in lots of countries, including No. 1 in Australia. Now, it’s blossoming in the U.S.
The band is basically Dave Bayley, who functions as the singer, songwriter, and producer of the group. “Heat Waves” delivers a shimmering, dreamy pop song that lurks around and into curious corners.
Sometimes, all I think about is youLate nights in the middle of JuneHeat waves been fakin' me outCan't make you happier now
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Workers suddenly enjoy newfound clout in the emerging post-pandemic economy. With lots of employers desperate to fill a stockpile of new positions as retail outlets spring back to life in a vaccinated America, a short-term worker shortage has emerged. Republicans and their business community friends are furious, blaming a lazy workforce, and the press is helping their cause by shining a spotlight on employer complaints, while paying far less attention to employee priorities.
Republicans are loudly braying that President Joe Biden is to blame for the sea of “Help Wanted” signs, as GOP governors across the country take the extraordinary step of cutting off additional unemployment benefits for their struggling citizens. They’re refusing the funds even though the benefits, $300 a week until September, are paid for entirely by the federal government, as part of the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package signed into law.
“We are currently facing a labor shortage created in large part by the supplemental unemployment payments that the federal government provides,” South Carolina’s Republican governor announced, while turning down millions in aid, much of which would have been spent by residents inside red states, thereby boosting local economies.
Republicans have been cheered on by the Chamber of Commerce and other deep-pocketed interest groups which are demanding the government somehow make people go back to work often for low, stagnant wages, under poor working conditions, and while punching the clock for huge corporate employers that pocket billions in profits. (The median hourly pay for American fast-food workers in 2020 was $11.47, the same year McDonald’s posted $5 billion in profits.)
First off, rarely have we seen an unproven economic hunch like this treated so seriously by the press. The vast majority of the news coverage simply accepts as fact that government benefits might be keeping people from returning back to work. Even though that same coverage rarely includes a single piece of empirical evidence to back up the claim. (Economists have found no proof to support it.)
Writing in the Washington Post, Megan McArdle announced unequivocally that the $300 stimulus checks were “holding back the economic recovery,” by giving people a strong disincentive to work. McArdle’s proof? “Anecdotally,” she was sure it was true.
Over and over that pro-business talking point has been echoed in local news coverage, as well. When WKNB in Youngstown, Ohio, reported on the Republican governor cutting off employment benefits, only business owners who supported the move were quoted, no workers. Same with a local report from the Albany Times Union in New York, which quoted a restaurant manager blaming the worker shortage on the government for “giving them all the money to stay home.” No workers were interviewed.
That GOP narrative misses an important story unfolding as America emerges from the pandemic: Long-held assumptions about how we live are being scrambled.
For instance, as more schools nationwide reopen, millions of schoolchildren are opting not to return to in-person learning, just like millions of Americans, for now, are currently choosing not to return to the workforce. If the claim is that workers are staying home because the government is paying them in $300 weekly checks, what’s the reason students are staying home, since there’s no federal financial incentive to do so?
Answer: Priorities and lifestyles changed during the pandemic.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch recently nailed it in a column:
A year of lockdown has scrambled our ways of thinking about the workplace and where our paycheck fits into the broader meaning of life, our concept of what a job is worth, and — and here’s where things get really interesting — who hold the upper hand? For the first time in decades, American workers are wondering ... who’s the boss?
Maybe the glut of low-paying jobs isn’t a sign of American slothfulness — it’s a growing sign of worker awareness and self-preservation.
Over the last four decades worker productivity in the U.S. has increased nearly 70 percent, but pay for hourly workers has only gone up 11 percent. People are working more efficiently, producing bigger profits for companies, and not being properly compensated.
That’s the more important story, and it’s going largely ignored by the mainstream media, which seem more interested in helping Republicans shame workers, as they deny additional unemployment benefits to two million people in red states.
Meanwhile, the press frets over the plight of employers while breezing past worker priorities. The New York Times last week did a long, front-page piece looking at businesses in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, struggling to find workers and stressing that government benefits are keep applicants away. The article featured the owners of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. But how much was the brewery willing to pay employees as owners complained that they couldn’t fill their slots? That’s important context in terms of how businesses are responding to the workforce shortage. If they refuse to significantly raise the rates they pay, should readers be sympathetic to their hiring plight and their claims that the Biden administration is responsible for the shortage?
But the Times article never reported how much the brewery paid. Down at the final sentence in the article, readers were informed, “When asked if it was raising pay, Dogfish Head said it offered competitive wages for the area.”
Shorter answer: No, the brewery likely isn’t paying higher wages. But the brewery is complaining about its worker shortage — a complaint the media gladly amplify.
(Photo Olivier Douliery/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
It’s astonishing that the Beltway press has spent years turning out Dems in Disarray stories, considering it’s the GOP that’s fracturing right before our eyes.
From the AP’s “Republican Arizona Election Official Says Trump 'Unhinged’”:
The Republican who now leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming former President Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.
🚂 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Vandoliers, “Waiting on a Train”
How can a song about being caught at a train crossing be this fun, tuneful and sing-alongable? Dallas’ Vandoliers pull it off with effortless Americana ease with their latest release. And yes, the harmonica seals the deal.
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Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Hours after Republican House members forced Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to surrender her leadership role for the sin of denouncing Trump lies about his election loss, Republicans at a House Oversight Committee hearing addressing the Capitol Hill insurrection spent the same day spreading misinformation about Trump's attempted coup.
Claiming that what transpired that day really wasn't a riot but instead a collection of misguided enthusiasts voicing their concerns, Republicans made clear not only would they not assign blame to Trump for stoking the deadly assault, but they were going to defend the rioters and rewrite history about that ugly day on Capitol Hill.
From Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA): "There was no insurrection. To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie."
In normal times, if the public sacking of Cheney for lack of fealty and the public support for insurrection had happened in the same calendar year it would be been considered a shocking turn of events for a mainstream political party in this country. The fact that both events happened within hours of each other this week only highlighted how radical, dangerous, and anti-democratic the GOP has become, as it hurtles far beyond the mainstream and into the abyss.
Unfortunately, the Beltway press has no idea how to cover this story. It still refuses to use the proper tools and language to put the troubling actions of the GOP in context via its straight news coverage. Hiding behind Both Sides journalism, timid language, and purposeful naïveté, news outlets still aren't being honest about the dire threat Trump Republicans now pose to the country.
Watching the party maneuver itself to be able to invalidate future elections — by passing voter suppression laws, installing local election boards that refuse to certify wins, empowering state legislatures to refuse to certify their state tallies, and electing a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that deny the Electoral College count — means the United States faces the most entrenched, internal political threat since the Civil War. That's no exaggeration, considering the defining loyalty test for the GOP today is backing Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which in turns positions the party to question all future election results.
The GOP and its followers have become consumed in deliberate lies, yet the press still views the party as a serious entity whose views deserve to be treated respectfully.
"It's time the media stop covering the GOP as a political party - it's not," tweeted SiriusXM radio show host Dean Obeidallah. "Today's Republican party is a white nationalist, fascist movement and those exact words need to be used by the media so everyone gets the threat the GOP poses to our nation."
It's clearly a conservative movement that's flown off the rails, and resembles nothing we've seen before in modern American politics.
Just in recent days:
• Republicans in Arizona running the clown 'audit' of the 2020 election are searching for traces of bamboo in paper ballots to prove they are counterfeits smuggled in from Southeast Asia.
• A Colorado State representative referred to a colleague as “Buckwheat” while addressing the House.
• QAnon loyalist and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in the halls of Congress, and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists.”
• 124 GOP-friendly retired generals and admirals released an open letter spreading the lie that President Joe Biden stole the election, while labeling him a "Marxist" and "tyrannical" threat to America.
• A Republican lawmaker in Michigan wants to force non-partisan "fact checkers" to register with the state and face $1 million fines if public officials prove "wrongful conduct" in their work.
Nervous about claims of "liberal media bias" though, the press holds back.
After witnessing Taylor accost Ocasio-Cortez this week, Washington Post reporter Marianna Sotomayor told CNN that the ugly encounter “really does speak to the polarization that exists and the tensions between both parties, Republicans, and Democrats.” [Emphasis added.] Wrong. What Taylor’s deranged behavior speaks to is a Republican Party that has torn down the guardrails of common decency.
The New York Times recently published a long piece about the deepening "era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation." The article highlighted obvious partisan lies pushed by right-wing media and conservatives, such as Biden's going to force Americans to eat less meat. Instead of framing the epidemic as a Republican-created one, the Times pretended the avalanche of right-wing conspiracies represent a larger, cultural issue.
The press for years has consistently misreported on the increasingly extreme nature of the Republican Party. Specifically, journalists have pressed the faulty notion that GOP members are supposedly worried about Trump. Last summer, the Times announced Republicans were “despairing” over Trump’s erratic and authoritarian behavior.
Today, the Times' coverage looks deeply naïve in retrospect. Just like when, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, the Beltway media insisted a "reckoning" was looming for the GOP over Trump. Instead, Republicans just purged Liz Cheney for criticizing his anti-democratic behavior.
All last winter, the D.C. press told us not to worry about Trump's refusal to acknowledge Biden's lopsided victory — Politico insisted it was just "bad sportsmanship."
Today, there are some glimmers of media hope. CNN on Sunday night is airing a special report, "Radical Rebellion: The Transformation of the GOP," which hopefully won't downplay the rebellion, or what's now at stake. And more news outlets are now using "lies" to describe Trump claims about the 2020 election. That language change is welcome, although long overdue.
The Beltway press has never had to cover a political party that openly embraces anti-democratic policies, such as undermining free and fair elections in America. It’s a defining media challenge.
(Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
⌨️ GOOD STUFF:
The GOP voter suppression laws that have spread across the country didn’t just randomly pop up in local statehouses.
From Mother Jones’ “Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country”:
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
🍑 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Justin Bieber, “Peaches” (featuring Daniel Caesar, Giveon)
He gets his peaches out in Georgia, and his weed from California — that’s you all need to know about the singer’s mellow R&B jam that arrives as the backyard BBQ anthem of 2021.
You ain't sure yet, but I'm for yaAll I could want, all I can wish forNights alone that we miss moreAnd days we save as souvenirsThere's no time, I wanna make more timeAnd give you my whole life
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After a reporter last week asked President Joe Biden, yet again, why he still sometimes wears a mask while being fully vaccinated, CNN's Jake Tapper highlighted the question during Sunday's "State of the Union." "Is it really necessary for a fully vaccinated person to wear a mask at a limited indoor gathering, if everyone there is vaccinated?" he asked White House advisor Jeffery Zients.
Then Tapper asked again: "Why does President Biden, in a room full of vaccinated journalists, with everybody in that room vaccinated, why does he need to wear a mask?"
One month earlier, Tapper pressed White House advisor Anita Dunn on the same topic, stressing that Biden "doesn't seem to be following" CDC guidelines on masks.
It's slightly jarring that in the wake of the Trump presidency, when Americans were urged to inject bleach as a way to combat Covid-19, that Biden sometimes wearing a cloth facial covering is treated as a pressing news story by the Beltway media. And the recent emphasis isn't just on Biden. More journalists are setting their judgmental sights on those vaccinated liberals who remain cautious and continue to wear masks, dubbing them "pandemic addicts," "irrational" and "odd."
The focus is absurd. I live in what's considered to be a liberal community, and the idea that vaccinated residents here categorically refuse to part ways with their masks is preposterous. It's simply not a thing, yet journalists seem obsessed with the idea that it's a widespread phenomenon among stubborn progressives.
Also, wearing a mask while being fully vaccinated is a personal choice, and it's a choice that has no effective downside, so why is the press so focused on the topic?
As one Twitter follower of mine wrote after I raised concerns about the media's weird mask coverage, "So many of us lost love ones this past year or got really sick and they act like there is something nefarious to being cautious for a little while longer."
Make no mistake, the media mask fixation comes straight from Fox News, which pressed Biden on his mask wearing practices just hours after he was sworn into office. Tucker Carlson has since declared, “the only people who wear masks outside are zealots and neurotics.”
The ongoing mask coverage comes with an unmistakable whiff of Both Sides journalism, as journalists insist both liberals and conservatives “ignore the science” during the pandemic. But like most media Both Sides equations, this one is comically imbalanced — vaccinated liberals who keep wearing a mask cause no harm to anybody, whereas conservatives who refused to wear a mask during the pandemic helped spread a deadly virus that claimed more than 600,000 American lives.
The most aggressive example of the media finger pointing came from a recent piece in The Atlantic headlined, "The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown." Painting progressive as detached from reality in 2021, and weirdly committed to living their lives by pandemic era protocols, The Atlantic insisted, “diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity."
And this:
Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.
Yet the anecdotal examples The Atlantic linked to in that paragraph — closing beaches, banning access to playgrounds — were events that took place last year.
Meanwhile, the supposed news hook for the Biden mask fixation is the idea that by occasionally wearing one he's causing people not to get vaccinated because he's signaling there's no light at the end of the tunnel, or that the vaccine doesn't work. The evidence is overwhelming that the people who refuse to get vaccinated are made up largely of white, conservative, Trump supporters who have treated the pandemic as a partisan issue and who refused to wear masks last year.
Taking their cues from Trump who spent much of 2020 mocking people who wore masks as being "politically correct," they lean towards thinking the virus was a hoax. The idea that those entrenched Republicans are now looking to a president they uniformly dislike for guidance on the pandemic, and that if he sometimes wears a mask it will deter them from getting vaccinated, defies logic.
Instead, the Biden mask coverage seems to be driven by a silly gotcha premise: The CDC says fully vaccinated people don't have to wear masks, so why's he wearing mask? It's like when reporters kept asking why Biden was flying to Delaware to be with his family on the weekends at a time when the CDC was urging people to avoid airplane travel. (Spoiler: Biden doesn't have to pass through a crowded airport while flying on Air Force One.)
Note that there is a smart, interesting way to cover the story of vaccinated people who still prefer to wear masks, without the drenching the coverage in judgment. A recent piece in The Guardian noted the mask-wearing trend, "has nothing to do with being pro-science or anti-science, liberal or conservative, they said. Instead, it’s about the fact that there are more things that can hurt them than viruses, including the aggressive or unwelcome attention of other people – or even any attention at all."
In other words, the once-in-a-century pandemic has altered how we live in so many ways, and some people choosing to wear a mask while vaccinated is just one small example.
It ought to be obvious for the media that the pressing pandemic story today is not about Americans who choose to still wear a mask, it's about Trump loyalists who refuse to get vaccinated.
(Photo: Alex Wang/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Pushing back on the Beltway narrative about masks is Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham and her excellent piece, “I’m Fully Vaccinated. I’m Still Wearing a Mask Outdoors”:
My own mask caution is also informed by sorrow. As a Black woman, I have seen my community devastated by the pandemic. Because of the racial inequities baked into this nation and its institutions, Black people have suffered disproportionately higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and death than white people. And more because of access than hesitancy, they are now getting vaccinated at a significantly slower pace.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Dinosaur Jr., “I Ran Away”
The pride of Amherst, Mass., J. Mascis’ Dino Jr. just keeps putting out great records, decade after decade.
Co-produced by Kurt Vile, who also plays the 12-string guitar here, “I Ran Away” features the band’s signature indie rock sound with a $100 hook and lyrics that remain eternally baffling.
Keep it now and keep the soundAll the pieces that you foundFit together just to reach youHold up outta townIn the head's a jumbled messLike to sort this out insteadI can't hold on just to meet youPush out all the rest
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With a quick succession of headlines last week, the New York Times quietly unveiled a new chapter in its Trump coverage — the paper was suddenly calling out his lies.
"In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies," a Times headline read. The next day, the Times published, "Cheney’s Replacement Repeats Trumps Lies as Party Looks Ahead." (In a nostalgic twist, the online headline for that article referred to "False Claims.") And the following day, a print subhead for a front-page Times article read, "Party Is Banking On Pushing Elections Lies."
The good news: Beltway journalists no longer seeking access to the Trump White House are now detailing his "lies" in news coverage:
• "The 15 Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump's Presidency" (CNN)
• "Legacy of Lies -- How Trump Weaponized Mistruths During His Presidency" (ABC News)
Yesterday, the Associated Press reported, "Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans."
The bad news: The press should have been doing this for the last four years. Instead, they played purposeful semantics games. Burning through the thesaurus, journalists opted for watered-down phrases such as "falsehoods," "false claims," "inaccurate claims," "alternative facts," "alternative reality," “unsupported claim," and "erroneous description."
It was a deliberate decision to turn away from the truth —and from accurate language — while covering the most dangerous president in American history. Afraid that calling Trump a "liar" in straight news reports would spark cries of "liberal media bias," the press capitulated. In the process, Trump used his avalanche of untruths to chip away at our democratic institutions.
Because there’s been no explanation from media outlets for their recent “lie” flip-flop, we don’t know if the change in language only applies to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, or for the lies he tells about all topics, all the time.
Note that this word-choice debate isn't just about Trump. Today, we're seeing journalists maneuver to avoid being honest about today's radical GOP — most notably how the press is tiptoeing around the right-wing's open and drastic voter suppression movement, politely referring to it as "voter restrictions," an effort to "limit voting," or the GOP having concerns about "election security." A straight line exists that connects the media refusing to call Trump a liar, and the media now refusing to call the Republican strategy of "voter suppression" for what it is.
The recent, belated embrace of "lies" simply confirms that news outlets could have, and should have, been doing this for years. There was never a coherent reason not to. Recall that as he prepared his retirement from the Washington Post as editor this winter, Marty Baron conceded the daily should have called out Trump's lies. His reasons for why the paper failed to do so were entirely unconvincing, though. It seems clear the Post just didn’t want to fight that fight while Trump was in office.
And yes, access was likely a driving factor for the purposeful, four-year obfuscation. Do you think the Times' Maggie Haberman would have received privileged access to Trump if each day her employer had been publishing "Trump Lies" headlines?
Instead, Times editors produced pointless phrases such as:
— "Trump Misrepresents"
— "Trump Falsely Claims"
— "Trump’s Baseless Claim”
— "Trump’s Falsehoods"
— "Trump’s False Claims"
— “Trump’s Inaccurate Claims"
When Trump lied without pause during his presidential debates with Joe Biden last year, it was crickets from the press. When Trump spent most of 2020 lying about every aspect of a public health crisis, we never saw a single "Trump Lies About Pandemic" news headline from a major news organization. In office, Trump lied about doctors trying to "execute" healthy newborn babies in the delivery room. Trump even lied about 9/11, and lied during an address to West Point cadets, and the press let him.
And the New York Times led the way in normalizing his atrocious behavior. The incredible part is that during portions of the 2016 campaign, the paper's executive editor Dean Baquet actually bragged about how the Times was comfortable calling Trump a liar, and that using "falsehoods" didn't adequately capture the damage Trump was doing to the truth. Specifically regarding Trump's birther claims against Barack Obama. "I think to say that that was a "falsehood" wouldn't have captured the duration of his claim, to be frank, the outrageousness of his claim," Baquet told NPR in September, 2016. "I think to have called it just a falsehood would have put it in the category of, to be frank, 'usual political fare.'"
After Trump won his unexpected 2016 victory, Baquet and the Times then sprinted into a retreat and spent most of the next four years pretending it wasn't fair to call out Trump's lies in the news coverage. Suddenly, "falsehoods" was the preferred newsroom describer, and the media succumbed to its defining failure of the Trump era.
Here’s Baquet in 2018, just two years after boasting how the paper aggressively treated Trump’s lies:
The word “lie” is very powerful. For one thing, it assumes that someone knew the statement was false. Another reason to use the word judiciously is that our readers could end up focusing more on our use of the word than on what was said. And using “lie” repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role.
It wasn’t the Times’ “role” to report accurately about Trump’s lies, because that would mean the paper was “taking political sides.”
That’s the definition of institutional failure.
(Photo: Pete Marovich/Getty Images)
🗞 GOOD STUFF:
A solid, in-depth read from the Washington Post on how the seeds of the Big Lie were planted years ago among conservatives.
From the Post’s “The Making of a Myth”:
Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.
At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jonathan Tyler and Nikki Lane, “Old Friend”
My favorite part comes at the :30 mark when Lane’s lovely, high voice meets Tyler’s, and the two take flight on this sweet, Texas acoustic tale about lasting companionship.
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A "powerful boost."
That's how the New York Times in March 2019 famously described Attorney General William Barr's supposed exoneration of Trump following Barr's reading of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. Refusing to release the sprawling report, Barr instead put out a thin, four-page press release where he brazenly lied about Mueller's contents, and claimed Trump was in the clear.
It was an audacious move by Barr, and it worked because the Beltway press eagerly played along, reporting that Trump's Russia worries were not only over, but that Mueller's unseen conclusions had given Trump's re-election a "powerful boost."
This week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington confirmed Barr lied about the Mueller report:
From the Washington Post:
[Berman] blasted Barr’s four-page letter to Congress in March 2019 that said the special counsel did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed the investigation and that Barr’s own opinion was that the evidence was insufficient to bring such a charge.
In reality, Mueller’s report laid out evidence of obstruction but said the special counsel could not fairly make a charging decision, given department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
Even in real time, the news coverage of the Mueller report and Barr's crooked summary of it stood out as one of the low points of the Trump presidency in terms of a systemic press failure. It was stupefying to watch grown men and women at elite news outlets treat Barr as a serious, honest person; to treat the story as truthful simply because it involved the U.S. Attorney General.
Three years into Trump's ransacking of democracy, and after three years of watching Republicans completely disregard the truth, journalists foolishly played along with the charade, running in front of cameras to announce Trump had been "exonerated," without having a read a single sentence of the Mueller report. Overnight, journalists collectively decided that a four-page summary—typed up by a partisan GOP official who had promised Trump he'd never been indicted —was the same thing as seeing the special counsel’s findings. It was truly astonishing.
Now that a federal judge has confirmed that the press got played, badly, what's the media response going to be? Will there by any introspection, will editors and producers reflect on how and why they got taken for a ride on one of the most important news stories of 2019? Will there be any transparency with readers and an apology, along with an explanation for what went so terribly wrong in March, 2019?
The likely answer is no to all those questions, because when it comes to being honest and open about grave blunders the press made while covering Trump, there's no appetite for it, except when the criticism comes from conservatives screaming "liberal media bias." There was never any soul searching from the Beltway media for its colossal failure from the 2016 campaign, when it treated Hillary Clinton's emails as if they were Watergate + Iran Contra. Or the way the press conveniently obliterated policy coverage while Trump ran a policy-free campaign.
At the head of the apology line ought to be the Times, which sent an immediate message to the Beltway with its "powerful boost" proclamation, and announcing the Russia “cloud” had been “lifted” from the White House. Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote an entire piece that referred to the findings of the Mueller report, even though nobody at the newspaper had seen it. "Robert Mueller seems to have concluded after a definitive investigation, Mr. Trump’s win was not the illegitimate product of a treasonous conspiracy," he wrote [Emphasis added].
He also mocked "the aggrieved and embarrassed #resistance-tweeting punditocracy" for “downplaying Mr. Mueller's findings,” even though Majoo had no idea what Mueller's "findings" were. Additionally, the paper matter-of-factly detailed, "The Mueller Report’s Findings," as if those were verifiable things at the time. Reminder: No reporter had read the report at that time.
Of course, it wasn't just the Times that fell on its face treating Barr's obfuscation as fact. CNN's Chris Cillizza labeled it, "A credible and well investigated report that [Trump] nor his campaign colluded with the Russians," while NBC's Ken Dilian announced it was a "total exoneration" of Trump.
Journalists who typically demand access to documents when evaluating investigations made sweeping conclusions based on the Barr press release. The "Mueller report is out," CBS News announced, even though nobody at CBS News had read it. Stonewalling Republicans refused to release the Russia investigation findings, but the Washington Post at the time insisted it was Democrats who lookrf bad because they "boxed themselves in" on the Russia story.
Rather than going with accurate headlines, such as "Trump's Attorney General Claims Mueller Has Cleared the President," newsrooms tossed context aside and embraced GOP-friendly proclamations: "Mueller Finds No Conspiracy" (Washington Post), "Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy" (New York Times)," Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy" (Politico), "Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired with Russia" (Wall Street Journal), "Mueller Finds No Trump Collusion, Leaves Obstruction Open" (Associated Press).
None of those headlines were accurate, and they did extraordinary damage because they allowed the White House to proclaim victory. "This was an illegal takedown that failed," Trump bragged at the time. "It’s complete exoneration. No collusion."
Beltway journalists failed in so many ways during the Trump years. It’s time for them to acknowledge that.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
🎤 GOOD STUFF:
From The Washingtonian’s “The Awkward Feeling of Rooting for the White House Press Secretary,” by Jessica Goldstein:
Psaki succeeds by arguably doing the impossible: Her face and voice beam out of our screens on a regular basis, and she rarely draws attention to herself. She’s the highest-visibility yet lowest-profile member of the administration. If the measure of modern cultural penetration is how much someone has been memed, all Psaki has is her oft-repeated promise to “circle back” being made into some supercuts. (The thing is, she does circle back. “If it’s not her, it’s somebody from the staff,” says Doocy. “We will hear within a couple of hours.”)
🪗 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Wallflowers, “Roots and Wings”
On Wednesday, I highlighted new music from Counting Crows, today I continue with the 90’s theme with a fresh offering from The Wallflowers, their first new music in almost a decade.
As Far Out put it, “Folksy, hooky, and directly indebted to classic rock, it has all the features you’d want, and expect, from a Wallflowers song, down to [Jacob] Dylan’s inimitable rasp waxing poetic about flighty romances.”
And now you've got your looks and your pretty thingsAnd a new set of chances that I wouldn't giveNow if you've forgotten, well I'll tell you againThat I gave you roots, baby, I gave you wings
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Imagine if the toxic nature of Rupert Murdoch media's lies and bullying became so overpowering in America that a bipartisan movement sprang up against it. Imagine if former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush came together to demand a Congressional inquiry into Fox News and the danger Murdoch poses to our democracy.
That's what recently happened in Australia, when former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull — occupying different parts of the political spectrum — joined forces to denounce the Murdoch media cancer that’s eating the country. They're urging the government to take steps to diversify media ownership and to break up the dangerous coalition that now exists between right-wing politicians and the Murdoch press, which serves as an unaccountable, but extremely powerful, entity in Australian politics.
Parliament hearings were held after Rudd's petition to establish a royal commission into media diversity became Australia's largest-ever e-petition, and the country's third largest petition of any kind.
Rudd, a progressive, has labelled Murdoch's' empire a "cancer" on the country, while the center-right Turnbull branded it "an absolute threat to our democracy." Both men were targeted by the Murdoch media machine when they were in power. Turnbull actually pointed to the destruction Murdoch has done to Australia's "most important ally," the United States, and specifically the Fox News-backed January 6 insurrection, and warned Australia was headed for the same type of democratic calamity. (We’ll never know how many thousands of people Fox News killed during the pandemic by spreading lies to its mostly elderly audience about the virus, and then the vaccine.)
In Australia, Murdoch media's relentless attack on climate change has already fed sweeping natural disasters, most notably the epic bushfires in 2019 and 2020, which killed dozens of people, more than a billion animals perished, and 2,000 homes were lost.
Murdoch’s media concentration there is unmatched. His News Corp controls 60 percent of newspapers in Australia, the country where he was born. To get a sense of his pull Down Under, that would be as if he not only owned the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the U.S. but also the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, and used them all to pump out toxic, right-wing misinformation. In Australia, he does it for the counter-intuitively named Liberal Party. It’s News Corp that effectively governs the country and makes policy by using its vast media properties to push politicians around.
News Corps also owns the country's second-biggest news website news.com.au and 24-hour channel Sky News Australia. (Murdoch might soon make Fox News available in Australia.) The country recently ranked third in the world for media concentration, behind only the state-owned media of China and Egypt.
“The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the Liberal party or the National party or the Labor party, it is News Corporation,” Rudd warned. “And it is utterly unaccountable. It is controlled by an American family and their interests are no longer, if they ever were, coextensive with our own.” He added, “We are drowning in lies.”
That feeling of disdain may be spreading. Last year, a News Corp finance manager sent a stinging, all-staff email as she resigned. “I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies,” she wrote. She described the news reports that came out Murdoch's The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun as “irresponsible” and “dangerous”.
All during Australia's Black Summer of 2019, as deadly bushfires spread, "News Corp’s massive misinformation campaign defended fossil fuel interests, accused arsonists of being the major cause of the fires and repeatedly attacked individuals who advocated urgent action on climate change," Al-Jazeera reported.
Months after the Black Summer, State Environment Minister Matt Kean broke ranks with the conservative government when he delivered a speech calling for stronger action on climate change and criticized those that treat the issue as a "matter of religion" rather than science. He clearly stated that the unprecedented bushfires had been caused by climate change. Kean then became a prime Murdoch media target, especially from his largest Australian tabloid.
"The attack on him in the [Daily] Telegraph following that was bitter, vicious and personal," Turnbull testified last month. "And it was designed not only to punish him but it sends a message, and this is how it operates like a gang, like a mafia gang, it sends the message, 'If you step out of line you'll cop some of this, too.' That's the threat. So other politicians look at that and say, 'Oh gosh I don’t want to go there.' That is the reality."
In the U.S., Fox News was first created to serve as an obedient megaphone for the Republican Party, loudly spreading its talking points. Over the last two decades, the network has taken a much more proactive position, often launching attack campaigns against liberals and Democrats, which the GOP eventually signed on to.
Now, as in Australia, we're seeing signs of Fox News and other Murdoch properties ascending to the role of party disciplinarian and punishing players who fall out of line. Look no further than the Murdoch media attacks on Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has emerged as a rare, interparty Trump critic and who voted for his impeachment this year.
America and Australia remain uniquely plagued by the Murdoch cancer.
(Photo: Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
Another update on the CNN/Rick Santorum story from last week, and how the cable news channel has bungled the controversy, which erupted when the contributor claimed white colonists had “birthed a nation from nothing.”
After refusing to comment on Santorum for a week, and after the network’s reporters and anchors ignored the story for seven days, the Pennsylvania Republican appeared on Chris Cuomo’s show Monday night and gave a toothless explanation for his offensive comments.
From Talking Point Memo’s “CNN’s Don Lemon Slams Santorum’s Non-Apology For Racist Comments: ‘It Was Horrible’”:
“I mean, Rick Santorum, really? Did he actually think it was a good idea for him to come on television and to try to whitewash the whitewash that he whitewashed?” Lemon said during his program shortly after fellow CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s interview with the contributor.
“It was horrible. It was horrible and insulting, and I apologize to the viewers who were insulted by this,” Lemon continued. “I was sitting in my office, furious, because he’s done it so many times. So many times.”
Note: CNN should have addressed all of this one week ago. They should also cut Santorum loose.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Counting Crows, “Elevator Boots”
This California rock band that will always spark 1990’s memories for me — I saw them at Wetlands in NYC at a ridiculously crowded club show during their first national tour. Happily, they’re back with their first batch of new music in seven years.
“Elevator Boots” arrives as a pleasing, mid-tempo rumination, offering the band’s usual poetic storytelling, along with some rollicking guitar and piano. Lead singer Adam Duritz still has one of the most reassuring voices in rock music.
Plug into the buzz and shake it 'til it turns aroundAnd you can't stop feelingThe Paul Smith suits and the elevator boots astoundAnd you can't help healingThey want you and you want toWith their hips on fire and your head unglued'Til it's time to whip another change and hit one more town
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One month after falsely blaming the Biden administration for creating a crisis at the southern border, the Washington Post remains oddly reserved regarding good news about the plummeting number of migrant youths now held in U.S. detention centers. The Post for months led the media charge with nonstop, negative coverage about the surge; coverage that often mimics GOP talking points.
But now as conditions at the border improve, much of the media, including the Post, are suddenly less interested in the immigration story.
The good news came on Thursday when CNN published a scoop detailing how the number of unaccompanied children held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, "dropped nearly 84% in the span of a month, according to a White House official, underscoring the significant progress made by the administration after reaching record high custody figures." The CNN report quoted an official who spoke anonymously.
The decline was mostly because the Department of Health and Human Services has opened up a string of temporary shelters to accommodate minors. "That's allowed for an increasing number of children being transferred out of border facilities to spaces equipped to care for them at a quicker pace," CNN reported.
The New York Times soon confirmed the "80 percent drop over the past month in the number of migrant children in Border Patrol custody," and quoted Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
As of Sunday night, a check of Google and of the Post's archives uncovers no stand-alone reports in recent days regarding "detentions" at the border, or any dispatches quoting Mayorkas about the extreme decline.
In March, the Post considered the number of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells to be a very big deal. In fact, they reflected "the magnitude of the crisis" Biden faced. Today, the Post considers the plummeting number of migrant teens and children in detention cells to be less newsworthy. On April 23, the Post published just a single sentence about how the administration had reduced, “by more than half the number of unaccompanied teens and children held in dangerously overcrowded Border Patrol stations and tent facilities.”
The relative silence is telling considering the Post for months has been committed to breathless border coverage. Leaning heavily into conservative talking points about how the border surge was threatening to sink Biden's entire presidency, the Post over and over posted doomsday headlines:
• "Biden administration rushes to accommodate border surge, with few signs of plans to contain it"
• "Biden officials fall behind in race to add more shelter space for migrant teens and children"
• "Biden faces growing political threat from border upheaval"
• "‘No end in sight’: Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge"
• "At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard"
That final headline was published just days ago. Meaning, the Post is still pushing the bogus narrative that Biden badly bungled the border and created the "crisis."
Five weeks ago, the Post uncorked a finger-pointing, front-page piece designed to portray the White House as standing on the brink of a defining and fatal failure. The article was drenched in politics instead of policy — "Republicans are reveling in the administration’s border problems.” The piece stressed the issue of immigration could be a loser for Democrats — it could cost them the House in 2022! — and even "overshadow" the administration's success in vaccinating tens of millions of Americans in recent week.
The Post's GOP-friendly report also included no context for how Biden's new administration had been addressing border crossings while at the same dealing with the aftermath of a deadly insurrection, an impeachment trial, rolling out an unprecedented, nationwide vaccination regime, and passing the largest social spending bill in U.S. history by a single vote in the Senate.
If the Biden administration were to blame for the migrant crisis, if its missteps were the reason for the rising number of border detentions, as the Post insisted in March, doesn't it stand that the Biden administration deserves credit for the sweeping reduction at the border that’s now unfolding? Or does the Post only consider bad news for the White House to be real news? The Post literally ran a border detention story that included this quote in the headline: "No End in Sight." Now, according to the last figures, there is end is sight.
The paper has hardly been alone in echoing apocalyptic GOP rhetoric about the border this year. In a highly unusual move, ABC This Week in late March staged its entire Sunday program from the border in order to focus on the "emerging crisis for the Biden administration." During the president's inaugural press conference that month, he was peppered with questions about the border (a topic the GOP was pushing), and was not asked a single question about Covid-19 (a topic the GOP was not).
In terms of the amount of border news coverage this year, it's been eye-popping, as the press continues to take its cues from Republicans. During Biden's first nine weeks in office, immigration was the third most-common topic of new coverage, according to a new Pew study — and that coverage was overwhelmingly negative. That volume of immigration coverage is especially startling considering the topic didn't really gain traction until six weeks into Biden's presidency. Then the media avalanche arrived.
The press and the GOP helped create the border "crisis" this year. Now they need to acknowledge reality.
(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
A bit ironic — after detailing how the Post needs to apologize to Biden for its dubious border coverage, I’m promoting a compelling piece in the Post. But that’s how most news outlets operate; some good, some bad. We shouldn’t be afraid to criticize and praise both.
The good one is the latest from Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, “The Politicians Who Tried to Overturn an Election — And the Local News Team That Won’t Let Anyone Forget It”:
The journalists at WITF, an all-news public radio station in Harrisburg, Pa., made a perfectly reasonable decision a few months ago. They decided they wouldn’t shrug off the damaging lies of election denialism.
In late January, the station — whose newsroom includes six reporters and two editors — posted an explanatory story stating that they would be regularly reminding their audience that some state legislators signed a letter urging Congress to vote against certifying the Pennsylvania election results, and that some members of Congress had voted against certifying the state’s election results for President Biden, despite no evidence to support their election-fraud claims.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Rag’n’Bone Man, “All You Ever Wanted”
A great new rocker from award-winning British singer-songwriter Rory Graham. Kinetic energy abounds.
From London’s NME: “Fused with jangly electric guitar lines, the uplifting ‘All You Ever Wanted’ finds Graham taking on a classic rock-influenced sound as he reminisces about the places he grew up in. The song’s official video captures the artist’s journey through various model locations.”
It's a city of a thousand heartbeatsNo room for another soulThe same building on a different streetBut nobody knows
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Viewing the world through the prism of the GOP, Politico announced President Joe Biden's speech to Congress Wednesday night, where he presented a sweeping, optimistic view for America's rebound from Covid-19, was a big win…for Republicans. Pushing the absurd storyline that Biden's speech hurt him because it highlighted his agenda (he's been trying to keep it hidden?), Politico declared the GOP had seized the night. Or, as its headline announced, "Biden Gives Republicans What They've Been Waiting For."
That is some tortured logic. Especially considering that people who watched Biden's First 100 Days speech loved it, as he outlined new initiatives for cheaper childcare, smoother roads, faster internet, and promised to combat climate change.
The Politico misstep this week didn't occur in a vacuum. The Beltway press hasn't figured out how to cover the low-key president, who so clearly does not crave attention or insert himself into every news cycle. Journalists mistake Biden’s No Drama persona as him being some sort of placeholder figure. Just 25 percent of Biden’s early news coverage from mainstream media outlets has been positive, according to a new study from Pew. Yet Biden keeps posting big win after big win — a vaccination rollout that's become the envy of the world, an economy that’s roaring back to life, and signing into law the largest social spending bill in U.S. history.
Politico actually posted this April headline: "How Good News Could Complicate the Biden Agenda." Apparently, too much good news is bad news for the White House.
Let's face it: If Biden were a Republican and had posted the same jaw-dropping first 100 Days, the Beltway press would be marveling at his accomplishments and crowning him a political phenomenon. They'd also be making the case for why he was the next Ronald Reagan, whom the media still tout as a universally loved, master communicator.
Back in the early 1980s, the Beltway press fell all over itself praising the new Republican president, showering him with fawning coverage that set the tone for his eight years in office.
"When Ronald Reagan arrived in January 1981 to begin his term as the fortieth President of the Unite States, he was blessed to inherit a national press corps that had long since abandoned the mildly adversarial posture of the late Nixon years in favor of a more deferential attitude towards conservative ideology and authority," Mark Hertsgaard wrote in his seminal book on Reagan and the press, On Bended Knee. "It's hard to say whether White House cajoling or news media self-censorship was the stronger goad in producing the extremely friendly news coverage that greeted the Reagan administration in 1981."
He noted, "While top Reagan officials later affirmed that press coverage of the administration had been fair and balanced throughout the first term, both [David] Gergen and [Mike] Deaver cited these first six months as an especially friendly time."
Truth is, Reagan's first 100 Days were nowhere near as successful as Biden’s. Consider:
• 200 million vaccine shots have been administered to Americans.
• A recent Pew poll found that a stunning 72 percent of Americans, including 55 percent of Republicans, say Biden has done an excellent job managing the Covid vaccination.
• Biden has witnessed unprecedented growth on Wall Street, better than any of his predecessors going to back 70 years.
• Jobless benefits have fallen to their lowest of the pandemic.
• Retail sales recently soared 10 percent as Democratic-backed stimulus checks hit bank accounts.
• Biden has promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and rallied world leaders in the process.
• His $2.2 trillion infrastructure proposal remains widely popular with voters.
Yet, Biden is still often met with media shrugs. The New York Times recently claimed, "Joe Biden never captured the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama once did." This, just months after Biden scored 81 million votes, more than any candidate in American history.
ABC News tweeted this GOP-friendly take over the weekend: "BREAKING: 52% of Americans approve of Pres. Joe Biden's first 100 days in office—the third-lowest of any president at that milestone since Harry Truman."
First of all, a recent Pew poll had Biden at 59 percent, which put him on par with George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at their 100 Days mark. More importantly, Biden is immediately 15 points more popular than his Republican predecessor, but ABC decided to pretend Biden's polling numbers are weak.
In terms of Biden's overall approval, his current, solid-but-not-spectacular numbers should to be put in context. We've entered such a polarized era in American politics that the days of a sitting president coasting along at 65 percent are a relic of the not so distant past, simply because across-the-aisle support is so rare today. It didn’t used to be. Just 20 years ago, W. Bush snagged 39 percent support among Democratic voters during his first 100 days in office.
Understandably, Democratic voters resisted Trump's radical and corrupt presidency in a nearly uniform manner. Now Republicans consistently oppose Biden's center-left presidency simply because he's a Democrat.
Despite that extreme polarization, Biden’s approval ratings remain sturdy as his agenda wins bipartisan support. We’re watching a president who goes deep each time he comes to the plate. The press covers him like he’s hitting singles.
📺 GOOD STUFF:
An update on the controversy surrounding CNN contributor Rick Santorum, and his racist comments recently about how white colonialists, “birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture."
CNN still refuses to acknowledge the story. Its communications team has not answered any questions, and nobody who works for CNN has mentioned it on the air.
Santorum, who was hired to provide a Republican perspective on political news, was glaringly absent from CNN’s coverage Wednesday night of Biden’s address to Congress.
My hunch is he was not invited to participate precisely because of the Native American controversy. Yet CNN still won’t address the story, or even acknowledge it, proving once again that news outlets that demand transparency from public officials are often bad at being transparent themselves.
🇨🇦 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Dennis Ellsworth, “Bound By Love”
I’m fond of songs about songs, and this one from 2020 is a treasure. (I heard it for the first time last week.) Detailing his lifelong passion for music, Ellsworth with his soft, hypnotic voice paints a picture of someone who’s been eagerly caught in the grips his whole life, and how it still frames his days as a Canadian parent in Prince Edward.
It’s a beautiful piece of songwriting delivered with a lilting melody.
I was a kid in the 80’s I wore a red thriller jacket to school I had a silver boombox Corduroy pants and cassettes were cool “Licensed to Ill” blew my mind My dad let me listen to it in his truck I bought the “Joshua Tree” and “Mother’s Milk” With birthday money that my grandma sent
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Rewriting history with a racist flair, CNN contributor Rick Santorum recently told a group of young conservatives that white European colonists miraculously created this nation out of whole cloth. “We came here and created a blank slate," said the two-time Republican senator. "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture."
Santorum’s comments, "effectively dismissing the millennia-long presence of Native Americans and the genocide inflicted on them as the Christian settlers transformed and expanded their colonies into the United States of America, angered many within the Native American community, and beyond," The Guardian reported. As of Monday night, CNN wasn't answering reporters' questions about the controversy, nor did any on-air hosts or panelists acknowledge it.
In a statement, the National Congress of American Indians, the nation’s largest organization representing American Indian and Alaska Native groups, condemned the former senator and his employer. “Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform,” the group’s president, Fawn Sharp, said.
That is accurate. The question is can CNN be disgraced into action? "Because of CNN, Rick Santorum is a prominent face in America who used his white privilege to erase the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people," wrote Oliver Willis on Monday.
Santorum has been a staple of ignorance for years at CNN — in 2018 he cheered a report that Trump had tried to bury a government report on climate change, insisting, "A lot of these scientists are driven by money."
That same year he made hateful and foolish comments about students trying to change gun laws after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. "How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that," Santorum said, incredibly.
CNN's professional embrace of a bigot like Santorum highlights the branding conundrum the network faces — CNN wants to position itself as occupying the center of American politics, which means CNN has to have conservative voices on to match liberal voices so it can stage Both Sides debates. (Think: Crossfire format.) For decades, that worked for the network.
And on paper, there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is trying to find honest conservatives in the GOP that's been remade in the image of Trump.
It's not up to CNN and other media players to hire and platform bad actors like Santorum simply because the conservative movement is filled with so many bad actors. All news outlets ought to have easily identifiable standards, and if paid contributors can't meet those standards, they should not be associated with the network. Being pro-genocide ought to be an easy demarcation line for CNN.
Sadly, we've seen this dance before. In 2019, CNN hired former Congressman, and habitual liar, Sean Duffy, whose previous claim to fame on Capitol Hill had been his undying loyalty to Trump. During his CNN debut, Duffy lied about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords. He lied about Joe Biden trying to fire a Ukraine prosecutor in order to protect his son. Duffy helped spread the preposterous lie about the Democratic National Committee's email servers from 2016 somehow ending up in a foreign country. And he soon questioned the patriotism of Purple Heart recipient Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman after Vindman told House investigators damaging information about Trump's open collusion with Ukraine.
When pressed about the hiring of Duffy, CNN chief Jeff Zucker insisted it was all done in the name of diversity. "It's my belief that we should represent out there what those who support Donald Trump think. ... We need those voices and I think there's a place for them." He added: "I acknowledge there are people who disagree with me on that. I feel strongly that their point of view should be heard."
Reminder: During the 2016 campaign, that same Zucker privately offered the Trump campaign media advice, and floated the idea of CNN giving the GOP candidate a weekly TV show.
Eventually, CNN and Duffy parted ways. He now pops up on Fox News, where he belongs.
Over the years, CNN tried hiring lots of Trump loyalists who chewed up the cable news scenery, spreading lie after preposterous lie, including ones spun by Jason Miller, Jack Kingston, Ed Martin, Jeffrey Lord, and Corey Lewandowski, among others. None of them, to be generous, covered the network in glory. Following the Parkland school shooting, Kingston told CNN viewers that students who rallied against gun violence were being taken advantage of by "left-wing gun control activists" led by billionaire George Soros.
Santorum’s attempt to erase both Native American culture and white settlers’ mass killings ought be reason enough for CNN to show him the door.
🍔 GOOD STUFF:
In case you hadn’t heard about the latest right-wing invention, which has actually been pushed by Republican governors.
From CNN’s “Fact Check: No, Biden is Not Trying to Force Americans To Eat Less Red Meat”:
Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans' red meat consumption. In fact, he has not proposed any limit on Americans' consumption of any food. The false claim about Biden trying to restrict people to four pounds of red meat per year appears to have originated with a deceptive Thursday article by the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The article baselessly connected Biden's climate proposals to an academic paper from 2020 that is not about Biden and says nothing about the government imposing dietary limits.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Silk Sonic, “Leave the Door Open”
Featuring Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, Silk Sonic is a new group with its eye on R&B’s “quiet storm,” slow jam past of the 1970s and 1980s.
Already a global smash, as well as a No. 1 R&B single in the U.S, “Leave the Door Open” has become a staple on TikTok, featured by users in countless inspiring dance clips.
What you doin'? (What you doin'?) Where you at? (Where you at?) Oh, you got plans? (You got plans?) Don't say that (Shut yo' trap)
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Busy pursuing the mythical creature known as the Republican "moderate" — that rare species of conservative who's willing to work with Democrats— the Beltway press recently announced a key sighting. A gaggle of influential "moderates" were willing to work with President Joe Biden to pass a sweeping infrastructure bill.
Those handful of GOP senators include Shelly Capito (R-W.V.), Patrick Toomey (R-PA), John Barrasso (R-WY), and Roger Wicker (R-MS), and they've been eagerly portrayed in the press as middle-of-the-road deal-makers in search of bipartisan compromise. Slight problem, there's nothing "moderate" about these Republicans, all of whom were Trump loyalists for four years and served as his lapdogs in the Senate. Also, the comically small infrastructure "compromise" they offered up last week was deeply unserious.
This kind of misleading coverage has been a long running staple of the Beltway media, which loves the idea of "moderate" Republican stepping forward, in part because journalists have been ceaselessly harping on the idea that all legislation in the Biden era needs to be bipartisan because the Democrat had promised to "unite" the country during the campaign. Also, because the press embraces the narrative that there's a group of thoughtful centrists at the heart of today's GOP — pragmatic do-gooders, happy to occupy the middle ground.
The media bar is set so low for Republicans that apparently the simple act of being willing to discuss a pressing piece of lawmaking with a Democratic White House makes GOP senators "moderates.” But are the Republicans actually "moderates"? Do they hold a worldview that places them in the middle of the political spectrum, and do they often work with both sides of the aisle?
No, no, and no. In fact, it's not even close. The so-called moderates spent the last four years voting with Trump 80 and 90 percent of the time. There's nothing centrist about their view, not when they were in bed with the most radical player in modern American politics. Still, the press loves to tell a pleasing tale about Republicans.
Just look at how the press treated Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) when he announced in February that he's retiring from the Senate. A Republican who served as a reliable rubber stamp during four years of Trump insanity, voting with the White House nearly 90% of the time, Portman was lauded in the press at the time of his retirement announcement as being "pragmatic," "serious," and a man who privately bristled at Trump's dangerous behavior.
Yet just days after announcing his looming retirement, and without facing the political pressures of running for re-election, Portman voted to acquit Trump of inciting a deadly insurrectionist mob at the U.S. Capitol, because he said the Senate impeachment trial was "unconstitutional." (It clearly was not.) So that's how "moderate" Rob Portman actually is.
Speaking of impeachment, during Trump's first Senate trial, the New York Times tried to present Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), as a "moderate" while he ferociously defended Trump's attempt to help a foreign country interfere with a U.S. election.
If the current infrastructure "compromise" looks familiar, it's because we just saw this same off-base coverage surrounding the Covid relief bill. When ten Republican senators reached out to the Biden White House this winter to discuss a possible compromise on the Democrats' proposed $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, the media quickly identified the players as "moderates," and pushed the idea about a possible bipartisan deal. The Associated Press singled out Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) as a key "moderate" who hoped for a bipartisan deal — Katko sided with Trump eight out of ten times in the House.
Over the winter, the Times stressed that, "Moderate Republicans in competitive districts are navigating a careful balance in addressing the coronavirus crisis, eager to put some distance between themselves and a president whose response has been criticized." That's simply not true — not one Republican member of the House voted for Covid relief.
And the "compromise" they offered was laughable, just like the recent GOP "compromise" proposal on infrastructure was laughable. On Covid, the so-called moderates backed a $600 billion relief package, compared to the $1.9 trillion pandemic bill Biden signed into the law. Being the party out of power and urging the president to strip away 70 percent of his Covid and infrastructure bills simply did not represent a sincere negotiating position. And that's why Biden ignores Republican offers. (On infrastructure, Biden wants to spend $2.3 trillion; Republicans are backing a $568 billion proposal.)
But for news consumers, the story presented by the media is that there's an honest back-and-forth negotiation going on, because "moderates" have offered a "compromise." The press constantly plays along with the charade. Weeks ago, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) signaled Republicans would support a comically small $800 billion infrastructure plan, compared to the $2.3 trillion one Biden supports. Yet the Wall Street Journal, among many, treated the offer as being legitimate, claiming the minuscule counter-proposal underscored the "GOP interest in a bipartisan fix for the nation’s aging roads and patchy broadband service," and that "Republicans are seeking a compromise on infrastructure."
Spoiler: They're not. A serious, GOP counter-proposal for Biden’s $2.3 trillion proposal would be in the $1.6 billion range.
This media trend isn't new. When Jeb Bush ran for president in 2016 and was a contender before the arrival of Trump in the GOP primary field, the campaign press worked overtime positioning him as a "moderate" — a pragmatic label Bush embraced as he eyed a general election against a Democrat. Yet when he served as governor of Florida, the Sunshine State became one of the nation's most pro-gun states, with a variety of laws that lessened restrictions on ownership. After leaving office, Bush remained a far-right politician regarding taxes, climate change, abortion, repealing Obamacare (it's "clearly a job killer"), civil rights, right-to-die, gun control, relations with Cuba, and legalizing marijuana.
Why on earth was the press touting him as a "moderate" in 2016? Same reason they’re scrambling today to describe some Republicans who voted with Trump 95% of the time as “moderates.” In the hands of the Beltway press, it’s become a meaningless compliment.
👩🏾🦱 GOOD STUFF:
Interesting read here, from CNN’s “Kamala Harris Cements Her Place in Biden's Inner Circle During a Consequential Week”:
Nearly 100 days into their tenure, Biden and Harris have worked to deepen their relationship, spending five hours or more together per day in meetings at the White House, according to aides. Both Biden and Harris shunned work travel in the early days to set an example during the pandemic -- forcing them into closer proximity than their predecessors.
She began her tenure attending nearly every one of Biden's events, provided her own speaking slot and always in-frame as the President delivered remarks, an unmissable -- and intentional -- level of visibility.
Her position as the country's highest-ranking woman of color, she said in an interview last week, brings with it a heavy weight.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Eric Church, “Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones”
Church just released two, highly anticipated full-length albums, and they were worth the wait.
Here, it’s a sterling piece of storytelling about a mother who named her son after her favorite band, and a lifetime of unanswered family questions. It’s just Church with a guitar, a sprinkle of piano, and it’s mesmerizing.
Lynyrd Skynyrd JonesSpelled with all 4 y'sWas born in 70-somethingBetween "Sweet Home" & "You Got That Right"His mama met his daddyAt a Tallahassee showBut just like TuesdayDaddy wound up gone on down the road
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An overwhelmingly majority of Americans support the guilty verdict that was reached in the Minneapolis trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd one year ago, by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while the Black man begged for his life. At Fox News though, the trial outcome was met with hysterical condemnations — it was an "attack on civilization," Tucker Carlson warned. It was "mob justice," announced Candace Owens.
The trial’s conclusion did not spark civil unrest. Instead, solemn scenes of candlelight tributes played out across the city. Robbed of the chance to demonize the Black Lives Matter movement — robbed of the chance of scaring viewers into thinking community activists would soon be banging down their doors and ransacking their Main Streets — Fox News reacted to the verdict with frustration and rage.
The aggravation sprang from the fact that the network desperately wanted to air scenes of mayhem from Minneapolis following a 'not guilty' verdict, and to spend the week denouncing Democrats and President Joe Biden for lawlessness on the left.
It's a chilling reminder that Fox News isn't merely a "conservative" media outlet that provides a GOP perspective on the news. It's a dangerous propaganda machine whose goal is to undermine American democracy. It's driven by a blood lust for conflict and feeds off civil unrest if it can cast progressives as villains.
Attacking Democrats for Black Lives Matter protests has become a hallmark of Fox News programming in recent years. Last spring, Rupert Murdoch’s incendiary cable network spent weeks claiming the police's use of excessive force against peaceful protesters was justified in order to quell threats posed by anti-fascist activists who allegedly stood poised to demolish cities across the country. Last May, following the spread of Black Lives Matter protests, Carlson aired a 25-minute, race-baiting monologue condemning BLM as a "mob" that would soon "come" for his loyal viewers.
A would-be crisis like unrest in Minneapolis this week was why Roger Ailes created Fox News in the first place— to give the conservative movement an oversized microphone that could distort the national conversation, while putting Democrats on the defensive with endless, baseless allegations. The network's business model is based on fear and grievance. But the jury's swift verdict in the Chauvin trial robbed Fox News of all of that. The anger and frustration was palpable.
And it wasn't just Fox News. The entire right-wing echo chamber denounced the verdict, not because commentators could point to any reason why Chauvin should have been found not guilty after being videotaped killing Floyd in slow motion. They were furious because they hated the idea of a Black victim getting justice, and Black activists posting a courtroom victory:
• The Trial Was a Disgrace (Townhall)
• Vile Response to the Derek Chauvin Verdict (New York Post)
• Americans Can't Trust the Jury's Chauvin Verdict (The Federalist)
• Chauvin Trial Unleashed the Dogs of Thuggery and Revolution (American Thinker)
In truth, most of the conservative media paid little attention to the Chauvin trial while it was unfolding because they couldn't find anything to grab onto. (Fox News mentioned "Chauvin" one-fifth as often as did CNN and MSNBC, according to TVeyes.com.) The trial was unique because instead of it sparking a debate about police tactics, and Minneapolis top brass defending their officer, the trial featured the city's chief of police testifying against Chauvin, as did his fellow officers.
By correctly turning its back on Chauvin, the Minneapolis police department robbed Fox news of its preferred angle — liberals vs. law enforcement. That explained the network's passing interest in the trial itself.
As for the verdict, the GOP just hated the idea that a jury needed only 11 hours of deliberation to convict a white officer. Right-wing pundits rendered their garments insisting it was "mob" justice — that jurors were terrified of delivery a not guilty verdict because protesters would then burn the city. (It was "jury intimidation," cried Carlson.)
But there's zero evidence this week that any jury felt pressured. And there hasn't been a single, serious legal analyst who has made a compelling argument for why the jury should have set Chauvin free. It was an open-and-shut case.
The conservative Washington Times conceded, "The guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on all counts was correct, based on the evidence" — and then promptly attacked the "theatrics" of Democrats surrounding the trial.
Make no mistake, Fox News was hoping Minneapolis erupted this week. They’re rooting against America.
💵 GOOD STUFF:
Elections matters, part infinity.
From the New York Times' " Biden Will Seek Tax Increase on Rich to Fund Child Care and Education":
The next phase of President Biden’s $4 trillion push to overhaul the American economy will seek to raise taxes on millionaire investors to fund education and other spending plans, but it will not take steps to expand health coverage or reduce prescription drug prices, according to people familiar with the proposal.
The president will also propose eliminating a provision of the tax code that reduces taxes for wealthy heirs who sell assets they inherit, like art or property, that have gained value over time. And he would raise revenue by increasing enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service to bring in more money from wealthy Americans who evade taxes.
☀️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Common "What Do You Say (Move it Baby)"
Common can do it all — actor, rapper, and writer. His latest is the perfect R&B spring breeze you've been waiting for.
We did lots of living and lots of giving A higher vibration but it's not religion I wanna pour into the riches of your being We don't diss each other even when we disagreeing
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Pushing the implausible claim that America faces symmetric threats to democracy today from conservatives and liberals, the New York Times' Nate Cohn on Monday uncorked a wildly misguided Both Sides foray that highlighted the anxious tradition of the Beltway media to position Republicans and Democrats as being equally at fault for today's political turmoil.
Instead of forcefully pointing out the conservative movement's dangerous and proud turn toward authoritarianism and paramilitary violence, Cohn tried to argue that what's happening with extreme polarization represents a move towards “political sectarianism," and that the right and left are now caught up in a ceaseless war featuring equal attacks from each side. At every turn, Cohn could only find examples of right-wing behavior that threatens our democracy, yet he insisted Both Sides were to blame.
Here's his bewildering opening paragraph [emphasis added]:
New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.
After detailing the many threats Republicans pose to democracy, Cohn announces Both Sides are to blame for the political suspicion in this country, or the rising sectarianism. Cohn notes that the term is often associated with violent, religious-based conflicts, such as Sunnis vs. Shiites in Iraq, or Catholics vs. Protestants in Northern Ireland. He stresses that with sectarianism, there becomes clearly defined generational hatred between identity groups: "It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drive sectarian conflict."
Cohn frames American politics today as the battle between two unbending factions. But it's not. Instead, it features a struggle between a mainstream center-left party trying to pass an infrastructure bill, and a party that has divorced itself from reality, embraced a cult-like devotion to a pathological liar in Trump, opposes free and fair elections (and welcomes foreign interference), sponsored a deadly insurrection, surrendered itself to lunatic ravings of a conspiratorial Q cabal, and spent the last year spreading deadly misinformation about a public health crisis.
Instead of a generational battle underway, what's unfolding in America is a specific reaction to the Republican Party’s aggressive embrace of anti-democratic and racist initiatives, as led by Trump. Liberals aren't alarmed and vocal because they were taught by their parents to despise conservatives. They're alarmed and vocal because of what they've seen unfold everyday for the last five years, and they're watching the extremist trends continue unabated.
Look at this astonishing passage, as Cohn strains to Both Sides everything in sight:
That contention helps make sense of a lot of what’s been going on in American politics in recent years, including Donald J. Trump’s successful presidential bid, President Biden’s tortured effort to reconcile his inaugural call for “unity” with his partisan legislative agenda, and the plan by far-right House members to create a congressional group that would push some views associated with white supremacy.
In Cohn's eyes, Biden's inability to bring "unity" to the country is on par with Republican members of the House weighing the idea of starting a white supremacy caucus. Forget that Cohn uses the media's ridiculous "unity" charade to attack Biden (when he ran for office promoting "unity," Biden wasn't signaling he'd abandon his agenda in order to placate Republicans), it's disturbing that Beltway journalists can't see how those two examples of behavior by Biden and far-right members of Congress are in no way similar. (Note that Cohn also equates MSNBC with Fox News.)
He goes on: "[Sectarianism's] an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory."
So the reason every Republican member of the House and Senate voted against the Covid relief bill was because they view Democrats as the enemy? Even though the bill enjoyed overwhelming public support. The reason every Republican will likely vote against the infrastructure bill is because they see Democrats as the enemy? Even though that bill also enjoys bipartisan support. The reason Republicans categorically oppose every common-sense gun safety bill as America drowns in mass murders is because Republicans view Democrats as the enemy?
What have mainstream Democrats done to cause Republicans to view them as monsters, to demonize them? Cohn doesn't provide a single example or insight, which suggests that's not what's happening with today's radical Republican Party.
In an effort to normalize the increasingly extreme and dangerous actions of Republicans, Cohn stresses, "the minority often poses a challenge to democracy in a sectarian society. It’s the minority who bears the costs, whether material or psychological, of accepting majority rule in a democracy. In the extreme, rule by a hostile, alien group might not feel much different than being subjugated by another nation."
In other words, conservatives and Republican supporters are anxious about being in the political minority under Biden, which is why they're acting out and posing a threat to democracy. Right, but Democrats just spent four years in the minority during the Trump presidency and Cohn can't point to a single instance of anti-democratic behavior by them.
The media's biggest challenge during the Biden administration is being honest and accurate about today's extremist Republican Party. It's a test the press continues to fail.
(Photo: Ramin Talei/Getty Images)
👍🏻 GOOD STUFF:
Last month I wrote about how Fox News was floundering in its inability to land rhetorical punches on the Biden presidency.
The Washington Post this week picks up that baton with, “Why the GOP is Fretting About its Inability to Define Biden”:
For the better part of a year now, Republicans have tried and largely failed to define Joe Biden — or even just to make people dislike him. And with his 100th day as president approaching, they’re admitting as much…It’s worth evaluating just how much Republicans have failed in their efforts to knock Biden down a peg and where he stands at this point in his presidency relative to others.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Drew Holcomb, “Both Sides Now”
PRESS RUN readers by now know my affinity for Tennessee’s Drew Holcomb, a wickedly talented singer and songwriter with an eagle eye for detail. Here he produces one of my favorite cover songs of the last year.
I still can’t put my finger on why I find his version of Joni Mitchell’s classic to be so transporting. Maybe it’s Holcomb slowing the song down a beat, or hearing the love song standard sung on the other end of the vocal spectrum, as compared to Mitchell’s beautiful, angelic voice.
Whatever it is, there’s magic here in Holcomb’s performance.
Moons and Junes and ferries wheelsThe dizzy dancing way that you feelAs every fairy tale comes realI've looked at love that way
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America’s deadly scroll of mass murders doesn’t have a pause button:
•April 15: Eight dead in Indianapolis.
•April 13: Six dead in Allen, Texas.
•April 7: Six dead in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
•March 31: Four dead in Orange, California.
•March 28: Five dead in Essex, Maryland.
•March 22: Ten dead in Boulder, Colorado.
•March 16: Eight dead in Atlanta.
We are stuck on this deadly loop because Republicans categorically refuse to pass common sense gun safety initiatives that enjoy overwhelmingly public support. That's it — that's the only Beltway story that matters in terms of the habitual mass murders that plague America in a way they haunt no other country on the planet.
Yet after each numbing gun rampage, the press glosses over the GOP's radical obstruction. The media have absorbed as fact that a small number of Republican senators can hold the country hostage to assault weapon mass murders, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The unspoken point from the press is there is no legislative fix — that’s a narrative that lets Republicans off the hook.
"When does it become urgent?" lamented a CNN anchor on Friday, in the wake of the Indianapolis workplace slaughter, just moments after a CNN reporter suggested all gun reform bills remain in "limbo," which represents a very passive way to cover this ongoing American nightmare.
Republicans and their blind allegiance to the NRA exacerbate this crisis by blocking gun reform laws while simultaneously loosening ownership restrictions and helping to flood the country with firearms. Yet how many "Republicans Still Oppose All Gun Reform In Wake of Mass Murders" headlines have you read in the last month? I haven't seen any. But I have seen lots of coverage about how "Congress" can't pass gun laws, how there's "gridlock," and even how the lack of meaningful new gun laws might be the fault of Democrats.
In a Politico article about President Joe Biden urging new gun reform legislation last week, this was the entirety of the role Republicans play [emphasis added]: “The legislation faces an uphill battle in the Senate, which Democrats hold by the slimmest possible majority and would need 10 Republicans to get on board. Democrat-backed efforts to enact gun reform legislation have failed in recent years.”
Why have gun reform bills "failed in recent years"? Politico doesn't mention the GOP's radical obstruction. Meanwhile, in this CNN article about why gun laws don't get passed, the word "Republican" is never even mentioned.
Even when the media do address the issue of Republicans and gun reform, they botch the story. "I wrote an article three years ago, explaining why Republicans were unlikely to change their minds and why there was little backlash to them opposing a measure that some polls indicate is supported by more than 80% of Americans," CNN's Harry Enten posted last week. Left unsaid was the fact that a key reason Republicans don’t face a "backlash" is because the press routinely portray GOP's obstruction as mere "gridlock," or "Washington" being unable to pass laws.
Enten's analysis stressed that Republicans haven't moved on the specific issue of gun reform because polling suggests they don’t have to. What he conveniently omitted was the fact that Republicans oppose Biden on everything. Just like Republicans opposed Obama on everything. The press for years has refused to tell that simple truth about today's GOP.
The New York Times recently asked "Is Biden Missing His Chance on Guns?," as if the Democrats were the reason bills don't get signed into law. In the wake of the Indianapolis massacre — that city's third mass shooting this year — U.S. News announced, "After Shootings, Even Democrats Pose a Barrier to Gun Control Legislation." The Both Sides article included zero evidence that Democrats are blocking gun safety bills.
Following the latest mass murder last week, the Times again framed the issue as being about Biden's lack of action, stressing that he "rejected calls to appoint a gun “czar” to more forcefully confront the crisis." The Times also reported gun legislation fails because of "apparent gridlock." This is exactly how Republicans want the gun reform debate to be covered.
Blaming Democrats for the GOP's concrete obstruction isn't new. The Beltway press did the same thing to President Barack Obama, when his administration made a major push to pass a background check bill after 20 first graders were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. in late 2012. Even after Democrats whittled the bill down to a fraction of its original intent in order to win enough Republican votes to break the filibuster, the GOP refused to pass the bill.
Incredibly, the pundit class then blamed Obama: If only he had acted sooner, or proposed other legislation, or talked more often to Republicans, or not held public events in support of new gun laws. If Obama had just done everything differently, pundits suggested, he would've been able to win substantial Republican support and been able to easily secure passage of new gun safety legislation. Democrats were criticized for getting "cocky" during the legislative process, missing "their window" following the school massacre in Newtown, CT., and for "grasping at straws."
Following the Sandy Hook mass murder, Republicans for months blocked every conceivable Democratic proposal, and the pundits blamed…Democrats. Nearly ten years later we know there's nothing Democrats can do in terms of cajoling, because Republicans mindlessly oppose addressing gun safety no matter how many Americans die.
By the way, how radical of a shift is today's GOP behavior on guns? Note that in 1999, 31 Senate Republicans voted in favor of mandating background checks at gun shows. And in 1994, 42 House Republicans voted for the Crime Bill, which included a ban on assault weapons. But all of that context gets left out of gun reform coverage today, as the press pretends Republicans have always been uniformly opposed to new laws to protect citizens.
There’s a mass murder crisis in this country, and the press needs to tell the truth about the GOP and its role.
😠 FRUSTRATING STUFF:
And the press is still giving the GOP a pass for its gun obstruction under Obama.
On Sunday, former Speaker of the House John Boehner was asked about the lack of reform following Sandy Hook. He gave a pointless answer about how, “We couldn’t find common ground with the other side,” which CNN host Dana Bash politely accepted.
Fact: Boehner played a leadership role in making sure no gun laws were passed. Period.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Hey, King! “Get Up”
What’s more exciting, musically, than finding an act you’ve never heard of and then falling completely in love with them within five minutes? That’s how I feel about the indie rock band Hey, King!, led by Natalie London and Taylor Plecity.
With a producing boost from the multi-talented Ben Harper, Hey, King’s debut EP last year, Be Still, featured an epic remake of The Animals classic, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Now comes a the full-length album in 2021. “Get Up” is a first taste and it grabs you right from the hand-clapping introduction, then Natalie and Taylor’s voice fly around the exuberant feel-good declaration of love.
Cultivate an attitude of gratitude Believing in yourself 'cause you're the greatest Smilin' at the person right in front of you Get up before you hit the ground
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Before Fox News there was Rush Limbaugh. Before Breitbart, InfoWars and QAnon, there was Rush, purposefully polluting American minds for profit. Today's billion-dollar, name-calling conservative media traces its origins to the rise of Limbaugh's three-hour radio show. But now, with the host's passing this year, the nationally syndicated program represents a propaganda void that's unlikely to be filled.
That's not to say there will be fewer, less dangerous conservative voices in the media, spreading deliberate lies and dividing Americans. There won’t be a shortage there, particularly on cable TV, online, and with burgeoning podcasts. But it does mean that in the increasingly fractured media landscape that the uniquely powerful and national position that Limbaugh occupied on the AM dial will not be replaced.
Premiere Networks, which syndicates the show, is currently airing Limbaugh reruns instead of hiring a new host for the noon-to-three time slot. That's not ideal for radio station programmers across the country, since talk radio is supposed to revolve around current events. (Today on Rush Limbaugh: Why Obamacare will destroy America!) But are the existing options any better, in terms of finding new talkers who can command the attention of millions of right-wing followers each afternoon?
For years, talk show hosts mostly stayed clear of competing with Limbaugh's three-hour afternoon slot. Since his passing, Cumulus Media's Westwood One announced Fox News contributor Dan Bongino will launch a noon show starting in May. Meanwhile, former NRA flack Dana Loesch has signed a new three-year deal with Radio America to continue to her noon-to-three, right-wing show. Both hosts stand almost no chance of replicating Limbaugh's success or taking over his mantle. Stations could hire local hosts to fill that afternoon slot, but that costs more than signing up a nationally syndicated program.
Trying to launch a new conservative talk show during the Biden era also represents a huge challenge for GOP radio. Like Fox News, conservative radio seems to be struggling to land rhetorical punches against the Democratic president. (Look at how its Hunter Biden obsession has flopped.) Fixated on fighting cultural wars while Biden enjoys solid public support, the conservative media remains adrift in the Biden era, as Trump remains mostly in seclusion in Palm Beach, Florida.
"Biden, not only do I think is a terrible president in these last few months, it's just terrible for talk radio," Bongino recently admitted. "I think Biden is a disaster for the country and his ideas are an atrocity. But he's boring. He's just boring. It's going to be a challenge.”
Another missing element will be the way the mainstream press treated, and often lauded, Limbaugh — this New York Times Magazine profile of Limbaugh from 2008 still reads like a 4,000-word press release, touting the AM troll as "an American icon." Overly impressed by his inflated claim of having 20 million listeners, the Beltway media treated Limbaugh as a Very Serious Person, even though he was a name-calling bully who often had no idea what he was talking about — he told listeners Covid-19 was no worse than “the common cold," and claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
Still, the media loved to portray Limbaugh as deeply informed and influential, even as his ratings sagged, and presented the country club demagogue as a spokesman for (white) working class Americans. It's unlikely Ben Shapiro for instance, the far-right ideologue with a large following, is ever going to land that kind of glowing, mainstream media coverage.
Limbaugh helped save AM radio when he emerged as a talk radio star in the late 1980s at a time when AM stations had lost out to the cleaner, less static sounds of FM radio. At the same time, in 1987, Ronald Reagan's Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required stations to present politically “balanced” programming. That meant Limbaugh could bash Democrats for three hours nonstop every day. Fast forward three decades and Limbaugh's death arrived alongside AM's slow motion demise.
"Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media," the Washington Post reported this year.
The pandemic also hit talk radio hard. "2020 is the year that in-car AM/FM radio has hit the proverbial iceberg," Radio World reported. "The COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns severely curtailed regular commuting journeys, where much of consumers’ radio-listening originates."
The right-wing talk format also skews way too old. "We're at the sea-change moment," Radio America's Mike Paradiso recently told Axios. "At some point, the stations need to make a shift to bring in younger listeners."
Demographically, that's just not going to happen on AM radio. Today, fewer than 8 percent of those who regularly listen to talk radio are between the ages of 25 to 54, according Nielsen’s research. And just 4 percent of consumers 18 to 34 listen to talk stations.
Online, Limbaugh's presence had also been dwindling. In January of 2020, his website ranked as the 15th most popular among conservative outposts, according to TheRighting's analysis. By January 2021, the Limbaugh site had fallen out of the top 20. In terms of audience size, last November RushLimbaugh.com drew 1.4 million unique visitors, compared to Fox News' 130 million for that month.
For three decades, Rush Limbaugh held a uniquely powerful and influential position in American media. Thankfully, that won’t be replicated on the AM dial.
(Photo: Mark Peterson/Getty Images)
📺 GOOD STUFF:
It’s not fun being the target of Fox News’ wrath. It happened to me about a decade ago, when hosts criticized me by name on the air over a concocted controversy. The fallout online was ugly. But it’s only gotten worse since then.
From the Washington Post’s “Tucker Carlson Villainizes Journalists On His Top-Rated Show. Then the Threats Pour In”:
Carlson cut his teeth jousting with the nation’s top elected officials and brand-name pundits on CNN’s “Crossfire” 20 years ago. But as his influence within the conservative media ecosystem has grown, with some calling for him to run for president in 2024, he has increasingly found fodder in criticizing lesser-known media figures whom he presents to his audience as symbols of liberalism run amok. And a subset of viewers are inspired to personally harass those journalists with threatening messages.
🍷 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Kelsea Ballerini, “Hole In The Bottle”
Drinking songs don’t come any more joyful and infectious than this one, as Ballerini laments her dwindling supply of ruby red, and does it to a nifty Nashville dance beat.
It ain't my faultSo don't blame meI swear I just came here to unwind and have one drinkThe way it looksAin't what you thinkThis Cabernet has a way of vanishin' on me
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Concerned about six rare and severe blood clot reactions out of nearly seven million Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the CDC and the FDA on Tuesday announced a sweeping pause of the immunization in order to investigate the handful of cases.
The J&J vaccine, with its single-dose regimen, currently represents less than five percent of the 100 million-plus vaccines that have been administered this year. The government has more than enough Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to hit the goal of 200 million shots by the end of the month, according to the White House.
Unfortunately for Tuesday's J&J breaking news, crucial context was missing from most of the headlines. Instead of stressing that less than one in a million J&J shots had produced the troubling blood clot reaction, the press focused on "concerns" surrounding the "halt," and how the move "threatens to slow U.S. pandemic progress”:
•"Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Halt Across Country After Rare Clotting Cases Emerge" (New York Times)
•"CDC and FDA Recommend US Pause Use of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns" (CNN)
•"US Recommends ‘Pause’ For J&J Vaccine Over Clot Reports" (Associated Press)
•"Pause of J&J Vaccine Threatens to Slow U.S. Pandemic Progress Amid Rising Caseload" (Washington Post)
•"Stocks Wobble After J&J Vaccine Halted, Inflation Uptick" (Wall Street Journal)
•"US Calls For Pause in Johnson & Johnson Vaccinations Over Blood Clot Concerns" (ABC News)
•"U.S. Recommends Pausing Use Of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns" (NPR)
It would have been such a simple fix to include "six cases" in each of those headlines, or "extremely rare" in order to give the story crucial, factual context. It's especially important to provide that full meaning during a public health crisis. Reading those headlines, people likely assumed there were hundreds if not thousands of cases that prompted the vaccine "pause."
The key omission played into the hands of conservatives who work hard to raise doubts about the virus shots.
It's true that news consumers who dug into the reports discovered how rare the vaccine-related blood clots were. But those consumers were likely in the minority. According to a a 2016 study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, nearly 60 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked. "People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper," the chief researcher announced.
The J&J news also attracted lots of media attention speculating whether the halt would cause more people to not want to get vaccinated.
It was a bit ironic Tuesday to watch reporters repeatedly press White House officials at the daily media briefing about whether the J&J pause will increase vaccine hesitancy, while never addressing the role the press might play in that phenomenon. By repeatedly failing to put the J&J pause in proper context, specifically with headlines, news outlets bear some of the responsibility this week in pushing alarmist narratives that don't match the facts.
The CDC and FDA move comes at a time when the conservative media have raised doubts about the vaccines and Republican voters, and white evangelicals in particular, have expressed disdain for getting vaccinated as the country tries to achieve herd immunity in order to return to normalcy. For that to happen, anywhere 75% to 85% of the total population — including children, who are not currently getting the shots — need to be vaccinated.
Nationally, a recent Marist poll in partnership with NPR and PBS found 49% of Republican men said they would not take the vaccine. In Texas, 61 % of white Republicans say they'll decline. In one county in Alabama, just seven percent of the eligible population has opted to get vaccinated. (More than 90% of county voters backed Trump last year.) And in North Carolina, a coastal county will stop administering vaccines at the end of the month because so few residents are scheduling appointments for the shot.
On Tuesday, the J&J announcement was treated as the biggest Covid news in weeks. The halt came at a time when there had been endless encouraging news about the vaccine rollout during Joe Biden's presidency.
Is it possible the bad-news angle appealed to the press? A recent study found that the U.S. press prefers to lean into bad Covid news:
The [pandemic] coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity."
The important J&J pause story was one that cried out for full context in all aspects of the coverage, including the all-important headlines. Instead, the press bungled the assignment.
UPDATED: “Axios’ Neal Rothschild notes that of the 20 most-engaged stories on social media about the Johnson & Johnson pause, just two headlines included the context that the blood clots were rare occurrences, according to data from NewsWhip.”
(Photo Frederic Brown/Getty Images)
⌨️ GOOD STUFF:
Some welcome news in an industry that has been dominated by men for so long, “Reuters Names Alessandra Galloni as Its Next Editor-In-Chief”:
Reuters News has named one of its top editors, Alessandra Galloni, as its next editor-in-chief, the first woman to lead the globe-spanning news agency in its 170-year history.
A speaker of four languages, and with broad experience covering business and political news at Reuters and previously at the Wall Street Journal, Galloni takes the helm as the news agency faces an array of challenges. Some of these are common to all news media. Others are specific to the organization’s complexity: With a worldwide staff of some 2,450 journalists, Reuters serves a range of divergent customers and is also a unit in a much larger information-services business.
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Matt Berninger, "In Spite of Me"
I’m familiar with Berninger because he’s the lead singer of The National, an engaging and ambitious indie rock band from Cincinnati.
Today, more music fans might know him as Taylor Swift's new best friend. Berninger recently emerged as a vital piece of Swift's musical team, singing duet on the epically beautiful "Coney Island" track from Swift's Evermore album.
Here on his new solo album, Berninger delivers a stellar set of new songs, all built around his slow, smoky delivery.
Late last night I saw you in my living roomYou seemed so close but yet so coolFor a long time I thought that you'd be coming back to meThose kind of thoughts can be so cruelSo cruel
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Blogger Heather Digby Parton tweeted a perpetual truth last week: "I didn't think Fox could go any lower. I was wrong."
Rupert Murdoch's propaganda network dove towards new depths recently when its most-watched host, Tucker Carlson, openly promoted white supremacy conspiracies, and the entire Fox News staff tried to cover up the raging Matt Gaetz sex scandal. In the process, Fox News again confirmed it has no business being allowed in the White House press briefing room, where legitimate news outlets are given the opportunity to pose questions.
Fox News isn't a newsgathering organization, therefore it does not need White House access. Giving them prestigious 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. press passes just delays the much-needed Beltway discussion that’s needed about the crooked network and its place in our political culture.
It's clear the Biden White House doesn't want to pick a fight with Fox News right now, which would inflame the entire Republican Party and the billion-dollar right-wing media industry. Not when Democrats are dealing with a country still reeling from a deadly health crisis and millions of out work. And having Fox News in the briefing room does help brandish the image that the Biden team is willing to engage with the other side, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki often does, patiently unplugging Fox News correspondents' attempted gotcha questions.
That's the politics of the situation — the optics. But the reality is that Fox News continues to be a deliberate cancer on this country, and any attempts to help legitimize it — by pretending it deserves to be alongside CNN in the White House briefing room — is not only wrong, it's dangerous.
In fact, it's deadly. We know that from the pandemic and watching Fox churn out lies about the Covid-19 virus for more than a year — raising doubts about wearing masks, about the seriousness of the pandemic, and suggesting viewers not get the vaccine. There's little question the network killed thousands by airing dangerous lies about a public health crisis, and pushing blatant disinformation about how the pandemic is a "Deep State" creation.
Now comes Carlson's proud, rancid embrace of the "great replacement theory" — the bogus claim that Democrats want to allow tens of millions of undocumented migrants into America so the party can replace the U.S. white population with people of color who, somehow in Carlson's addled mind, would immediately be given the right to vote. "The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate," he announced. It's a zero-sum view of immigration and is designed to threaten the existence of frightened whites, portraying them as under the attack from a tidal wave of deliberate immigration from "Third World" invaders.
The racist theory "has informed the ideology of mass shooters in El Paso, Christchurch and Pittsburgh," noted Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who last week called for Carlson to be fired.
Not surprisingly, white supremacists cheered Carlson's declaration. Recall that, "You will not replace us" chants rang out in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when Nazi supporters marched in the streets.
Then there's Fox News' truly shocking attempt to erase the Matt Gaetz story. Make no mistake, it's been a company-wide effort. Here's the number of "Matt Gaetz" mentions since March 31, when the stunning sex-trafficking scandal first broke, according to TVeyes, a 24/7 monitoring service:
CNN: 431
MSNBC: 468
Fox News: 43
The Gaetz non-coverage represents one of the great, deliberate media cover-ups in modern times. It was expected that Fox News would slow play the scandal, since it was not only embarrassing to the GOP and a high-profile Trump ally, but the network itself. Fox News worked tirelessly to make Gaetz a Republican star. Since 2017, he had appeared on Fox News an astounding 300-plus times, according to Media Matters. But the idea that Fox News would effectively order its newsroom for two weeks to boycott one of the biggest political stories of the year, often not addressing the scandal for days on end, has been truly remarkable, even for a cable channel that has no discernible journalistic guidelines.
This isn't everyday gaslighting — a Fox News attempt to erase reality. This is gastorching.
Meanwhile, this year the network jettisoned it's 7 p.m. "news" slot and is in the process of handing it over to hosts who echo lies for a living, like Maria Bartiromo, who hosted the 7 p.m. show and quickly told viewers that Antifa had dressed up like Trump supporters and staged the murderous insurrection on January 6. More recently, Fox turned over its 11 p.m. "news" slot to the professionally unfunny Greg Gutfeld, who simply regurgitates right-wing talking points while people are paid to laugh nearby.
It's blindingly obvious that Fox News has no business presenting itself as a legitimate player inside the White House briefing room. The network makes no effort to be a serious enterprise, yet keeps receiving the benefits and privileges of being one.
💻 GOOD STUFF:
It’s the dog that won’t hunt, even though Republicans have been trying for three years.
From The Guardians’ “The Scandal That Wasn’t: Republicans Deflated as Nation Shrugs at Hunter Biden Revelations”:
Rightwing efforts to demonize Hunter have been further blunted by a crisis in their own ranks. The memoir played second fiddle to almost daily revelations about Matt Gaetz, a fiercely pro-Trump Republican congressman, reportedly under investigation over allegations of a relationship with an underage girl and payments for sex with women recruited online. Many observers find Gaetz a less sympathetic figure than Hunter.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Jon Batiste, “I Need You”
Pure, infectious R&B joy is what Batiste delivers here, with a tip of the hat to the past. A great way to start the week.
We done a lot of livingWe working overtimeDon't need another millionYou got that gold mineI love the way you're livin' (Hey)'Cause you're so genuine (Genuine)
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Nobody in journalism rode the Trump wave quite like New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, who was toasted by the media for her dogged sleuthing.
"She’s the queen of political journalism," Vanity Fair proclaimed. She "may be the greatest political reporter working today," Elle announced in a 5,000-word profile. And the Times itself worked hard branding Haberman, hyping her Trump coverage as "one of the most astonishing runs in the history of American journalism."
But the constant scoops that marked her Trump era work have dried up with his exit from the White House, a development that would confirm just how important access played to Haberman's success during the GOP years. If she were the greatest reporter of her generation — if she was "regarded as the best-sourced reporter in Washington" — wouldn't she be posting a conveyor belt of exclusives during the Biden era? Or did every one of Haberman's sources leave town with Trump?
With his White House term over, the Times announced its Trump point person, Haberman, would continue to cover D.C. politics, and also report on the former president. Two glaring problems have emerged. First, she's stuck covering a politician who's virtually vanished from the national scene. Trump's post-presidency has been a New Coke-like flop, as he flounders down at Mar-a-Lago, locked off Twitter, and releasing gibberish statements that carry no weight.
That means Haberman has been posting the kind of Trump dispatches that rarely threaten to run on page one:
• “Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club Partially Closed After Positive Coronavirus Tests”
• “Trump Endorses a Loyalist, Jody Hice, for Georgia Secretary of State”
• “Ivanka Trump Will Not Run Against Marco Rubio For One of Florida’s Senate Seats”
Second: the new Democratic administration has turned off the leaks, leaving Haberman and other political reporters scrambling for any behind-the-scenes reporting.
"Reporters drank lustily from the fire hose of leaks that emanated from the West Wing during the past four years. President Donald Trump’s inexperience and chaotic management style begot “West Side Story”-level infighting among subordinates, which translated into the drip-drip-drip of insider accounts, sometimes on a near-daily basis," the Washington Post's Paul Farhi noted this week.
It was the leaks and the Trump White House's circus-like environment that fueled book deals for so many Beltway journalists. Odds are there won't be many six-figure publishing contracts signed during the Biden years. (Haberman is writing a Trump book, which won't be published until 2022.)
Haberman not only feasted on the Trump White House leaks, she benefited from direct access to him, thanks in part to the time she spent at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which often served as a p.r. arm for Trump during his New York City days. "Longevity, just being around him a long time, is something he values," Haberman once explained of her relationship with Trump. Introducing her at 92nd Street Y event in New York City, former ABC News journalist Jeff Greenfield said he couldn't remember a reporter who had established a relationship with a U.S. president the way Haberman had with Trump.
I have no doubt Trump himself served as a source/leaker for Haberman during his four years in office. Yes, he often publicly railed against her and the "liberal" New York Times, but that was likely part of the kabuki dance that went on as Trump and the Times often used each other to their benefit. Trump certainly provided the paper with crucial access. “He wouldn’t talk to me as much as he does if I wasn’t at the Times,” Haberman once said on a podcast. “That’s just the reality. He craves the paper’s approval." According to Haberman, as president he would at times call her and thank her for her coverage, at one point giving one of her Trump stories an "8."
In return, Haberman and Times often normalized him in ways large and small. The daily spent years painting a false portrait of adult decision making at the White House, suggesting Trump was surrounded by a beehive of aides who plotted policy, instead of a madman setting the agenda.
Example: In March 2020, when Trump changed his mind about America "re-opening" by Easter, Haberman reported the "decisive" U-turn came after he pored over sobering data points about the pandemic. That just happened to be the exact narrative (anonymous) Trump aides wanted the Times to report. In subsequent weeks and months, it became clear that Trump didn't care about data points, or science, or saving lives, which made Haberman's reporting look naïve.
Of course, the daily for years also refused to accurately call Trump a liar in its news stories. Instead, he pushed innocuous "falsehoods." (Haberman though, has no problem calling Democrats liars.) Do you think Haberman would have received privileged access to Trump if each day her employer were publishing "Trump Lies" headlines, or if she regularly interviewed mental health experts about the ramifications of having a pathological liar in the Oval Office?
Normalizing seemed to be the goal. When Haberman sat down with Trump in early 2019 for an extended Q&A, he lied nonstop and came across as utterly incoherent, yet the Times politely typed it all up as a normal White House interview.
In 2019, Haberman famously reported that Trump's former communications director (and likely longtime Times source) Hope Hicks faced an "existential choice " about whether or not to cooperate with a congressional subpoena, as if that's somehow the norm. "When a respected paper such as @nytimes calls this an ‘existential’ question, rather than a question about complying with the law, we have a very serious problem with our democracy," Princeton University historian, Julian Zelizer stressed at the time. "This is what it looks like to become dysfunctional."
One year ago, Haberman's byline appeared on a deeply misguided front-page Times piece as America suffered from the government's futile pandemic response: "Despite Pushback, Trump Suggests Testing Is No Longer an Issue." As if his blatant lies ever should have ever been taken at face value, let alone during a deadly public health crisis.
Nonetheless, Haberman won industry accolades for her Trump reporting. Now with him off the stage the future seems uncertain. That’s what happens with access journalism.
(Photo Robert Daemmich/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
From Los Angeles Times’ “Politicians Dread the Sting of #KHive, The Fervent Online Fans of Kamala Harris”:
Members of KHive, a riff on Beyoncé’s loyal fanbase known as the Beyhive, sometimes use the hashtag #KHive in their social media posts, and many mark their allegiance in their Twitter profiles with yellow hearts and bee emojis.
They share videos of Harris stepping off Air Force Two, make offline friendships, and wear socks and hoodies bearing her name and likeness. They organize virtual “cooking Sunday” parties and offer support to other hive members.
But it’s not all sweetness. Almost any politician, activist or reporter who has questioned Harris has felt the group’s sting.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lake Street Dive, “Hypotheticals”
Another great Boston Band. Powered by lead singer Rachael Price’s rich, magnetic voice and the group’s love of R&B grooves, Lake Street Dive’s latest keys into the early days of a budding romance.
The song really starts to hop at the :45 mark.
I've been playing out a lot of hypotheticals in my mindI've been writing your name down next to mineBeen imagining all the things you and I could doI've seen all the possibilities in my dreamsYou're alone when you should be livin' next to meBaby, let's not wait and see
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Old habits die hard.
After four years of settling into a lazy practice of treating Trump voters as inherently newsworthy and deserving of constant friendly news coverage, some outlets are having trouble breaking free of the routine three months into the Biden era. Even after the insurrectionist mob, stocked with Trump loyalists, tried to overturn an election.
This week it was the Washington Post, which inexplicably published a long piece that served simply as a laundry list of quotes from Trump supporters and Republican politicians trashing President Joe Biden's new $2 trillion infrastructure proposal:
• "It’s got too much junk in it."
• "It's too much."
• "The wrong prescription for America."
• "It’s a coverup for wasteful spending by our government.”
• "It’s a Christmas list of wasteful schemes radical liberals pushed for long before the pandemic."
The Post felt it was important to fan out across the country and record the objections without offering any counter balance.
Meanwhile, how many Biden voter stories are we seeing, even as the Democrat is riding a robust approval wave. Biden just signed into law the most popular social spending bill in more than 50 years. The U.S. jobs market is roaring back to life as the vaccination rollout continues to post astonishing results, with four million shots now being administered each day. (The U.S.'s runaway vaccination rate is five times faster than the global average.)
Yet reporters still aren’t sitting down with diner Democrats in blue states to document just how much they love the new president, the way they did for four years amplifying Trump voters at every possible chance. In the span of just four days in early 2017, the New York Times published a long profile on women who voted for Trump, a piece on Trump fans who traveled to the inauguration, and an adoring profile of a Trump voter who lied about Hillary Clinton during the campaign and profited from his fake news business.
I lost count how many Trump Voter articles the Times published, but it certainly numbered in the dozens. (Here's one from just three months ago.) Even a Trump supporter who had nice things to say about Nazis received a gentle Times profile. Committed to the idea that Trump's white backers were the most important, and most authentic, voices in American politics, the media spent four years glorifying them, marveling at their loyalty in the face of Trump's erratic behavior.
Why newsrooms ever thought that ‘Trump Voters Support Trump’ articles made for compelling reading, we'll never know. But they did. And now to be fair they ought to be churning out ‘Biden Voters Support Biden’ dispatches. Biden today is more popular with Democrats than Trump ever was with Republicans, even though the press portrayed Trump as having a magical, unbreakable bond with the GOP "base."
Instead of Biden Voter stories, we get entirely misguided Republican updates like the recent one from the Post.
Let's look at three wrong-headed assertions from the Post piece, crammed into a single paragraph. [Emphasis added]:
But any window for cooperation appears to have already closed for Republicans in Congress — and it may be closing for GOP voters, as well. Interviews with dozens of voters in three swing congressional districts across the country revealed evidence that attacks on the spending push are beginning to take hold, and congressional Republicans said they are well positioned to capitalize on voter doubts and win their way back to power in 2022.
- Forget about the GOP "window for cooperation" now supposedly closing for the infrastructure plan. The idea it ever existed is pure fantasy. The Post makes it seem like the Republican Party today is stocked with fair-minded men and women who of course, want to give Biden a chance and approach each new initiative with an open mind and the country's best interest at heart. In reality, the Republican Party has embraced a radical strategy where complete obstruction serves as the norm, even on issues where Republican voters support Democrats.
We just saw that with the Covid relief bill, where a clear majority of Republicans nationwide backed the emergency bill — and not one elected Republican in the House or the Senate voted 'Yes.’ Yet just weeks later the Post pretends Republicans are all ears when it comes to listening to Biden infrastructure proposal?
-
The Post didn't interview dozens of "voters" in three swing congressional districts to get the nation's temperature on the proposed infrastructure bill, the Post interviewed Republicans. Of the six voters quoted in the article, not one is identified as a Biden supporter. The Post also quoted four Republican Congressmen — and zero Democratic members of Congress.
-
The Post amplifies the absurd Republican spin that the one-week-old infrastructure proposal is going to cost Democrats control of the House in two years — it's absurd because nobody has any idea what the defining issues of the 2022 midterm election cycle is going to be. Pretending that an infrastructure proposal, which is popular in the polls, is going to be a loser for Democrats is just regurgitating Republican talking points.
Our political landscape has shifted under the weight of a popular Democratic president. The press needs to drop those old, useless Trump habits, fast.
(Photo Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
📈 GOOD STUFF:
Looks like Democrats are going to go it alone again on the huge infrastructure proposal, known as the America Jobs Plan. And like the Covid relief bill, Americans are in favor of the sweeping initiative.
From Data for Progress’ “Voters Support the American Jobs Plan”:
In an April survey of likely voters nationally, Invest in America and Data for Progress tested the attitudes of likely voters towards the American Jobs Plan. We find that the majority of likely voters support the proposed multi-trillion dollar investment. In addition, we find that likely voters also back some of the individual components of the proposal, such as investing in physical infrastructure, American manufacturing, the care economy, and housing. Crucially, this majority includes considerable support from likely voters that self-identify as Republican.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lana Del Rey, “Chemtrails Over The Country Club”
Nobody does dreamy these days quite like Del Rey. From her new, ambitious and compelling sixth album, the title track here finds the singer ruminating over just a piano for the first half of this cosmic travel log.
I'm on the run with you, my sweet loveThere's nothing wrong contemplating GodUnder the chemtrails over the country clubWearing our jewels in the swimming poolMe and my sister just playin' it coolUnder the chemtrails over the country club
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The day after President Joe Biden's first press conference last month, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy arrived at the White House press briefing feeling unloved. Having not been called on at the formal Q&A with Biden, and dwelling on his oversized sense of importance, Doocy raised his hand and asked if there as an official White House policy of not calling on him — he wanted to know if there was a coordinated campaign to ignore the Fox staffer constantly in search of a partisan fight.
Looking slightly bemused while giving her patented third-grade-teacher head tilt that conveys a willing patience, but also an unspoken and stinging, "really?", White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki patiently addressed the grievance:
PSAKI: We’re here having a conversation, aren’t we?
DOOCY: Yes, but.
PSAKI: And do I take questions from you every time you come to the briefing room?
DOOCY: Yes, but…
She soon concluded the back-and-forth by complimenting the reporter on his “awesome socks.” The episode confirmed that Doocy vs. Psaki remains one of the great media mismatches of our time. It also made clear that Psaki's the right woman for the right time, and she's emerged as Biden's silent slayer who carries out covert media missions with a smile. She's our real-life C.J. Cregg who has brought smarts and wit back the White House briefing room, after four years of the Trump infection, where mindless sycophants at the podium waged war on the free press.
"Press Secretary Jen Psaki is kind of badass at her job, and it's because of the extremely non-combative way she is just FINISHED WITH YOUR S**T," Wonkette observed. "It's just like ... some kind of assassin thing where some idiot asks her an idiot question and she handles it so quickly and quietly and effectively, the poor idiot's liver is bleeding out before they even feel a thing."
In less than three months, Psaki has put her permanent stamp on the job, taking over the high-profile position at a time of national crisis. Working hard to reestablish an open, professional relationship with the Beltway press corps, Psaki has perhaps done more than anyone in the administration — including Biden himself — in terms of changing the tone in our politics, and creating a new path forward towards a transparent form of government, in the wake of the Trump's ransacking of the norms.
Psaki's task is made universally easier simply because her boss is not a pathological liar or an unstable narcissist. Biden's purposely not trying to jam himself into every news cycle, or be a part of the often dubious cultural wars cooked up by conservatives.
For generations, the White House press secretary was hired to serve as a conduit between the Oval Office and the press corps, and to provide accurate information so that the Fourth Estate could inform and educate the public. Trump instead hired a series of angry name callers and performance artists paid to act as Trump's attack surrogates, not to serve the White House's or the public's interests.
Now it’s Psaki’s turn to fix all that. Unhurried, rarely flustered, and never instigating a fight, Psaki is not only the pitch-perfect public voice of Biden, she's also what the nation needs right now —competence and confidence. She does it all with a stealth, firm hand as she makes history leading the White House's first all-female communications team.
A consummate pro, she’s completely uninterested in becoming the story. Psaki couldn't care less about going viral, and certainly doesn't plot her days trying to figure out ways to one-up assembled journalists in the briefing room.
We've seen plenty of instances where she's been asked dopey and petty questions — Why isn't Biden throwing out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ home opener? Why is the fully vaccinated president flying to Delaware to be with his family on Easter weekend? They each provided her an opening to easily mock the questioner. But she'll have none of it.
Instead, she patiently and politely walks the questioner through the answer, doing it in a way that often highlights the blatant absurdity of the premise. In the end, the question gets answered and everyone leaves the room on good terms, but Psaki has made her point.
REPORTER: Americans are saying immigrant surges are happening under President Biden's watch.
PSAKI: Who are the Americans?
REPORTER: The former president.
PSAKI: Former President Trump?
REPORTER: Yes.
PSAKI: We don't take our advice or counsel from former President Trump.
Last week when a reporter asked if the White House would soften its "tone" about the sweeping voter suppression law recently passed in Georgia, Psaki was having none of it: "The tone for a bill that limits voting access and makes it more difficult for people to engage in voting in Georgia? … No, our tone is not changing."
Online, fans refer to those as a #PsakiBomb, the disarming way she dispenses with bad faith or plainly misleading questions. The "bomb" part of that description is slightly off, though. The good-natured Psaki remains a quintessential non-bomb thrower. She’s not trying to tear anything down. But her pointed answers can leave a nasty mark when necessary. That's her super power.
And that’s why she’s the understated rock star of the Biden era.
(Photo Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
💉 GOOD STUFF:
I’m going to keep hitting on the absurdity of the press recently trying to crown Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as some sort of Covid star. The more we learn, the worse it gets.
From 60 Minutes’ “How the Wealthy Cut the Line During Florida's Frenzied Vaccine Rollout”:
In West Palm Beach, Mayor James says he was still trying to secure vaccines for his town's firefighters when he learned that at a nursing home in town, some board members and their wealthy pals got vaccinated. Even though those doses were only supposed to be given to elderly residents and staff.
Then, the private jets started arriving.
Hollywood moguls, New York socialites and tourists from overseas were getting vaccinated in Florida, posting on social media and sparking outrage. Early on, there were no residency requirements to get vaccinated in the state.
🎙FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Minor Moon, “Under an Ocean of Holes”
Chicago’s Minor Moon, aptly described as a “cosmic Americana group,” just released its latest album. This instantly engaging, toe-tapping, mid-tempo ditty bodes well for the effort.
According to songwriter Sam Cantor, “Under an Ocean of Holes” is actually about falling into deep personal despair, following the dissolution of a long-term relationship. But the song sounds so upbeat and sunny, most listeners might just ride the wave.
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In an extraordinary attempt at GOP damage control, Fox News failed to make any mention, for more than an entire day, of the exploding sex trafficking scandal that's engulfing Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a close ally of the network. Opting instead for a total blackout, Fox News tried and failed to quell the raging controversy, which on Thursday night hit new heights with another round of explosive revelations.
But at Fox News, it's Gaetz who?
According to TVeyes, the 24-hour cable news monitoring service, Fox News mentioned "Matt Gaetz" just 17 times all day Wednesday and all day Thursday of this week. In fact, the network aired zero mentions of Gaetz on Thursday, and the final mention of him came Wednesday at 6:22 pm. That means for more than 30 hours, Fox News didn't reference the Congressman a single time. During that same period, CNN mentioned Gaetz 70 times, MSNBC more than 80 times.
Suffice it to say that if a prominent Democrat found him or herself at the center of a scandal as lurid as Gaetz's, who's under investigation in a federal sex trafficking probe involving a 17-year-old girl, Fox News would have hyped the story hundreds of times this week. Fox News would have been in nonstop scandal mode demanding answers, pressing for Congressional inquiries, and denouncing the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.
But with one of its closest allies under federal fire, the best Fox News can do is pretend nothing is happening. Instead of opting for covering the story lightly, Fox News went straight to banning it.
Obviously an attempt to erase a story as big and breaking as the Gaetz scandal doesn't happen by accident. We're witnessing a deliberate, top-down attempt by Fox News to unplug an important political story simply because the man at the center is a Republican and a vociferous Trump loyalist who loudly claimed the 2020 election had been stolen. In fact, Gaetz owes his career to Fox News and the hundreds of appearances he's made on the network in recent years.
"His combination of bottomless self-confidence and a rich kid-honed skill at being a remorseless bully turned him into an aspirational figure for the Fox News audience, a role model for the trigger-the-liberals crowd," Salon's Amanda Marcotte noted this week. Suddenly though, the network doesn't want to say his name.
The blackout isn't working as the Gaetz scandal continues to gain momentum with each new blockbuster revelation. Two jaw-dropping reports came late yesterday.
From the New York Times:
A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.
From CNN:
Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.
This is, hands down, the most shocking scandal involving a sitting member of Congress in at least a decade. But Fox News remains on the sidelines, too nervous to cover the story.
Rupert Murdoch's Republican propaganda outlet likely knew it had a major problem on its hands with the Gaetz story when he appeared on Tucker Carlson's show Tuesday night just as the scandal was breaking, and seemed to try to drag the host into the swamp.
"You and I went to dinner about two years ago, your wife was there, and I brought a friend of mine, you'll remember her," Gaetz said. Carlson, reportedly "pissed" about the interview, quickly denied remembering any such female friend and acted confused. He later told viewers the Gaetz segment was one of the "weirdest" interviews he had ever done.
And now Fox News is trying to flush the whole sordid story down the memory hole. But it's not going to work. The Republican bottom feeder, who has been groomed for right-wing stardom by Fox News, where his obnoxious and ignorant antics were celebrated, is now facing his time in the barrel.
(photo Samuel Corum/Getting Images")
🦅 GOOD STUFF:
For an engaging change of pace, check out the recent New Yorker piece, "Why Animals Don't Get Lost":
Nature, in her infinite creativity, has devised many ways for animals to get from A to B. Birds fly, fish swim, gibbons swing from tree branches (the technical term is “brachiate”), basilisk lizards walk on water, and web-toed salamanders curl up in a ball and roll downhill. Certain spiders drift about on homespun balloons, certain cephalopods use jet propulsion, and certain crustaceans hitch rides on other species. But, however they get around, all animals move for the same reasons: to eat, mate, and escape from predators. That’s the evolutionary function of mobility
🎸FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Willie Nile, “House of a Thousand Guitars”
One of my favorite sub-genres is rock songs about rock music — and this one is an absolute gem.
New York City’s prince of the night plays tribute to guitar greats with a song littered in shout-outs and warm embraces. The whole thing sprints along with a group sing-along chorus that can’t be beat. This isn’t a new song, I just recently discovered it — thankfully.
Happy Friday.
You can spread your finger across the universe in the house of a thousand guitarsJohn Lennon, Muddy Waters, man you can do worse in the house of a thousand guitarsWell you can walk bare foot on broken glass in the house of a thousand guitarsCause Mr. John Lee Hooker?s gonna kick your ass in the house of a thousand guitars
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Joe Biden is a riddle that Fox News can't solve — at least not during the Democrat's first two months in office.
Forced by Trump's seven million-vote loss to go on the offensive against the new president — after playing defense every day for the Republican — Fox News ought to easily open up its well-worn playbook for a Democratic administration and seamlessly make the partisan transition. It's the same outline the network used while Barack Obama was in office — relentlessly depict the center-left Democratic president as a dangerous, socialist interloper determined to overturn the American way of life.
Key to whipping up that national frenzy in the spring of 2009, was the emergence of the supposedly grassroots Tea Party movement. With Murdoch's network providing free, nonstop marketing and promotion, soon thousands of people took to the streets to protest Obama’s policies, just weeks into his presidency.
Today though, Fox News can't seem to muster the same anger and excitement to consistently denounce Biden, who to many viewers probably looks like their brother, uncle, or father — a built-in advantage of being a white man in American politics. Obsessed with fighting cultural wars while Biden enjoys solid public support after signing the widely popular Covid relief bill into law, Fox News remains adrift in the Biden era, as Trump remains mostly in seclusion in Palm Beach, Florida. (Trump insurrectionists have shown no interest in protesting Biden in the streets.)
Instead of leading a large scale revolt against Biden and his sweeping legislative proposals, Fox News prefers to play small ball. "Less than two months have passed since Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the network is already responding to the country’s new era by obsessing over similarly absurd and imaginary battlefronts," Vanity Fair noted this month. "The network spent an hour and nine minutes of airtime on the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss on Tuesday—more than twice as long as its coverage of the coronavirus vaccination effort on the same day."
Meanwhile, Biden plays it cool, refusing to provide any oxygen for partisan brawls. Over the weekend, when a reporter excitedly asked Biden what he thought of the news that Trump might go down to the border to basically stage a "crisis" photo-op, the bemused president said simply, "I don’t care what the other guy does."
As Oliver Willis noted, "Biden isn’t jumping when they collectively demand he do so. He is not playing by the approved rules, where the right and the media set the agenda and the Democrats careen from crisis to crisis."
A huge programming hurdle for Fox News this year has been the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote of support, despite the fact it was arguably the most popular spending bill in the last half century. Even a majority of Republican voters — i.e. Fox News viewers — support the legislation, which distributed $1,400 relief checks to tens of millions of families, pumped billions into the pandemic vaccination rollout, and is helping school districts across the country re-open. The bill represents a big huge political win for the Democratic president.
The contrast is remarkable with how Fox News downplayed and tried to ignore the Covid bill's historic passage in Congress, compared to eight years ago when the network relentlessly hyped and attacked both Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the administration’s $787 billion stimulus bill, and then the following year, Obamacare. Neither of those measures enjoyed as much public support as does the Covid relief bill passed this year. Fox News spent countless hours/weeks/months ripping both those Obama initiatives to shreds — the stimulus became a "bailout," and Obamacare was anchored by morbid "death panels."
Amidst that right-wing hysteria about looming socialism came the Tea Party, a media-made invention from day one. It was born on CNBC, when reporter Rick Santelli started ranting about Obama on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, warning viewers the new Democratic president was steering the country toward a Cuban Castro-like economy. CNBC then boosted the clip incessantly, while NBC led its evening newscast that night of the rant with a clip of Santelli, announcing his rant had struck a "populist" chord.
Fox News quickly went all in, provided attendance and organizing information. In early April, as a large Tax Day event approached, the network announced that four hosts – Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity -- would appear live at Tea Party sites across the country and broadcast the protests throughout the day.
By then, Fox News referred to the anti-Obama Tea Parties as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties,” and the Fox Nation also hosted its own “virtual tea party," Media Matters reported. One Fox News producer was even caught coaching a crowd to cheer during one Tea Party Express event.
From April 6 to April 15, 2009, less than three months into Obama's first term in office, Fox News aired more than 100 on-air promotions for their coverage of the GOP protests, providing the movement with tens of millions of dollars in free marketing.
All of the Tea Party noise, which the mainstream media loved to amplify, made it difficult for Obama and his team to communicate, unobstructed, to the American people. The good news is that, so far, Biden’s not facing that same Fox News obstacle.
🦠 GOOD STUFF:
Two weeks ago I noted how absurd it was for the media to try to turn Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis into a Covid star, considering his often mindless and reckless handling of the pandemic.
Now from Yahoo News’ “Florida Covid Numbers Face New Scrutiny”:
New research published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health argues that Florida is undercounting the number of people who died from COVID-19 by thousands of cases, casting new doubt on claims that Gov. Ron DeSantis navigated the coronavirus pandemic successfully…
The impact of the pandemic in Florida “is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest,” the researchers wrote. They came to that conclusion by comparing the number of estimated deaths for a six-month period in 2020, from March to September, to the actual number of deaths that occurred, a figure known as “excess deaths” because they exceed the estimate.
🎧 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Yaeow, “Town I Called My Home”
Teenage angst sounds so appealing in the hands of the British low-fi producer and singer-songwriter who goes by the name of Yaeow.
I love his deep, slow melodic voice here, the simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, and then 30 seconds in the unexpected drum groove that lifts this song up into the realm of mellow superstardom.
I'm a blue boy living in a town where I don't feel like I belongA town I called my homeAnd God knows, I have tried my best to work it outBut in the end I don't feel like I belong
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Trump’s deliberate failure to protect the American public from the Covid-19 pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths — nearly half a million fatalities, according to a new study that's being ignored by the news media. It’s the same press corps that’s been demanding Trump receive more Covid “credit.”
If Trump had shown leadership and used his bully pulpit to advocate Americans wear a mask, if he had issued a national mask mandate, had strenuously urged people to social distance themselves, hadn't demanded the U.S. economy "re-open" too soon, and if he had overseen a robust national testing program, America would be a stronger country today, the news study confirms.
The U.S. Covid death toll, which is expected to plateau at 670,000 at the pandemic's conclusion, would have topped out at less than 300,000 if we'd had coherent leadership, according to estimates from Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles. The new findings came from a study released last week at a conference sponsored by the Brookings Institute, the well-respected public policy think tank.
Atkeson's study did not mention Trump by name, but the ramifications surrounding the Republican's deliberate Covid sabotage remain inescapable. Fact: Trump spread more deliberate lies about Covid to a larger audience than anyone else on the planet, according to a study from Cornell University. "When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away," he once predicted.
It's not just that Trump refused to provide national leadership in a time of crisis. He actively and purposely made everything worse, starting twelve months ago when he downplayed the risks by making misleading and false proclamations. ("Anybody who wants a test will get a test.") Trump actively contradicted established science and willfully endangered Americans. He virtually silenced the government’s public health experts, while accusing hospital workers of stealing pandemic medical supplies, and lying to governors about national testing shortages.
From the moment he gave the stand down order for the virus invasion, to recklessly touting a miracle cure, through the embarrassing vaccine rollout, Trump's carelessness cost lives. At his daily pandemic briefings, Trump lied nonstop, unfurling a multitude of falsehoods about the virus, the government's response, and his own previous comments on the crisis.
That directly led to hundreds of thousands of American deaths, yet we never saw a parade of "Trump Lies about Pandemic" headlines, as the press remained intimidated by the GOP madman.
The new Brookings conference study, which estimates 400,000 Americans died unnecessarily on Trump's watch, has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media since its release several days ago. Reuters has been among the very few national outlets to give the findings any coverage. (Former White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx made news recently when she said U.S. Covid deaths could have been “decreased” after the first 100,000 fatalities, but Birx news coverage ignored the Atkeson findings.)
Note that the disturbing new Covid study comes in the wake of the Beltway media's bizarre, public push in recent weeks to get President Joe Biden to "credit" Trump for all the hard work he did on Covid, and specifically on the vaccination rollout. An annoyed ABC News announced that, “Despite calls for national unity and bipartisanship, President Joe Biden and his top aides have declined to give the Trump administration credit on the nation's COVID-19 vaccine rollout.” The Washington Post insisted Biden's vaccine success was simply built "on Trump team’s work."
Under Trump, the U.S. vaccine rollout was seen as a national embarrassment. Under Biden, it’s become a model for the world, with possibly 200 million shots being administered by the time of Biden's 100th day in office.
Instead of trying to make sure Trump gets his due for something he doesn't deserve, the D.C. press ought to be documenting his criminal negligence and the stunning indifference he showed to human suffering all through 2020.
Why were news consumers recently fed two weeks of Beltway news coverage about the fact Biden's first formal press conference was slightly late coming, yet there’s been almost no coverage about how Trump's deliberate neglect led to nearly half-a-million deaths? How can that chasm of coverage inequity possibly be explained or reconciled?
Is it possible the press doesn't want to accurately label Trump a stone-cold Covid killer because they're anxious for his return to the political stage? If so, it's in their interest to portray him a mainstream political player, not somebody who consciously turned his back on the country while a year-long public health crisis spun out of control.
All through the pandemic, the political press remained reluctant to address the bigger, darker questions about Trump and why an American president seemed willing to watch the country crumble and decay on his watch — why a president would wage war on his own people the way Trump did. The press preferred to explain the staggering Trump failures as him being “distracted,” or not fully engaged in the once-in-a-century crisis.
We now know the staggering toll for his neglect — 400,000 dead Americans. That's more than perished in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, combined. The press can't keep looking away from Trump's criminality.
📺 EXTRA STUFF:
I appeared on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capeheart” yesterday to discuss the media’s Biden coverage. The entire segment is here if you’d like to watch:
⛺️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Drew Holcomb, “Hey Rivers”
Tennessee’s Drew Holcomb and his wife Ellie went on an extended camping excursion with their kids last year, and what we get is a great new batch of songs.
Holcomb remains an artist at the top of his game — each new exuberant, feel-good Americana album somehow sounds better than the previous, while Ellie’s vocal contributions continue to be a revelation.
You saw a squirrel Thought it was a monkey Big old smile, said that you were funny Everydays a party when you live like an ice cream cake In a candy store with a criminal's grin Chocolate running down your chin again Skipping stones at sunset down at Nickajack Lake
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Deep into a five-minute, detailed policy answer about immigration on Thursday, President Joe Biden asked reporters at the White House press conference if he was wading too deeply into the weeds. Biden wanted to know if he was giving too many details and providing too much factual information.
Talk about a seismic shift from the Trump years, when the entirety of policy discussion could be squeezed onto the back of a matchbook. Back then, reporters were also lied to nonstop at press conferences, and personally denigrated in front of the cameras. As Biden now constantly does, he flipped the script. Affable and at times folksy, Biden was his usual self, offering a common sense outlook to practical governance: "I can’t guarantee we’re going to solve everything, but I can guarantee we can make everything better. We can change the lives of so many people."
Overall, Biden delivered a strong, one-hour performance during his inaugural press conference, which must have felt like a colossal letdown for the Beltway media. Journalists had spent weeks mindlessly hyping the idea that Biden was hiding from the press and its legions of truth-seekers. The unending desire by the media to turn Biden's press conference into two-week, navel-gazing “news” story was something to behold.
"Stumbling or steady?" asked a Washington Post reporter, hours before the press conference. "Finally," harrumphed Politico.
Did the Beltway press really think Biden, who's been in public life nearly 50 years, who just tallied more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, and who clearly won both televised face-offs with Trump last year, can’t effectively communicate his agenda and answer broad questions from reporters?
Just last week, Biden gave an extended, sit-down interview with ABC News, and he's already participated in a CNN town hall. Yet the media's myopic obsession with press conferences continued, as they worked overtime with Republicans to create a nasty Biden narrative. In the end, he emerged as the clear winner.
The strangest part of the Thursday press conference? Biden wasn't asked a single question about Covid, which has dominated every waking day of American life for the last 13 months, and has claimed more than half-a-million lives. Biden was asked twice if he planned on running for re-election in 2024, and he was peppered with questions about the border, a story Republicans have been pounding for weeks as a "crisis" for the administration. On that issue, the White House press corps was in step with the GOP and tacitly framed their multiple border questions around Republican talking points.
The media however, showed no interest in the topic of Covid, just as the GOP today shows no interest in the topic of Covid, as Biden posts success after success on that front. In fact, the Thursday presser functioned as a Biden victory lap when he announced at the opening of the Q&A that his new goal was to have 200 million Americans receive a vaccine shot within the first 100 days of his presidency. That would be an unthinkable accomplishment compared to the national embarrassment the vaccine rollout had been under Trump.
But the White House press corps on Thursday looked away.
The incessant press chatter over Biden’s missing press conference in recent weeks wasn't about a larger story regarding the Biden White House trying to choke off access to reporters, operating in the dark, or waging war on the Fourth Estate. (That would be bad!) In fact, it's been the opposite, with the Biden team hosting a press briefing nearly every day where journalists are able to pose questions and receive factual, professional answers from the press secretary.
The media caterwauling was all about how Biden hadn't yet appeared in a very specific communications forum to answer questions for an hour. The issue was so pressing that the Washington Post editorial page weighed in. (The paper posted five pieces on the topic in the span of two weeks.)
Here's the reality: Trump made news popular for four years, giving outlets across the country sizeable bumps in readership and viewership as Trump remained committed to creating news all day, every day with his cascade of lies, taunts, and erratic behavior. And Beltway journalists loved it — they loved being in the middle of the tumult and being the creators of the roiling content.
That's all gone now with Biden, who has made a conscious decision to avoid the spotlight and to not needlessly interject himself into every news cycle the way narcissist Trump did. By turning the temperature way down, by refusing to manufacture news where none exists in the name of partisan warfare and general chaos, Biden is denying journalists their professional momentum.
Add to that the fact that Biden slow-walked his way to his first press conference, as compared to his predecessors who held them sooner, and that D.C. journalists hold up pressers as the pinnacle form of presidential communication, and journalists get cranky. They want White House performances. That's why they tried to turn Biden's lack of a press conference into a national news story, when it's really just inside baseball chatter. Searching for a path forward in the post-Trump world, the Beltway press is frantically trying to generate controversy where none exists.
Biden’s modest, winning press conference confirmed all that.
(Photo Chip Somodevilla/Getting Images)
🩺 GOOD STUFF:
This is why it was preposterous for the Beltway media in recent weeks to insist Biden “credit” Trump for helping with the Covid vaccine — it was an absurd premise because Trump spent 2020 deliberately putting American lives in danger by ordering a stand down for the virus invasion.
From Reuters’ “U.S. COVID Response Could Have Avoided Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths: Research”:
The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.
U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Fun fact: There’s now a PRESS RUN playlist at Spotify. It includes many of the songs that I’ve highlighted over the last year.
To listen, click here.
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Eagerly joining forces with partisan Republicans, the Washington Post over the weekend uncorked a doomsday write-up about the surge of young migrants currently overwhelming U.S. facilities along the Southern Border. Laying all of the blame for the three-decade problem directly at the feet of the new, two-month-old Democratic administration, the Post article echoed every conceivable GOP talking point.
What the piece failed to do was include crucial context for a complicated policy puzzle, and to delve deeply into whether Trump spent four years deliberately creating a border crisis that Biden is now trying to fix.
The Post also included no context for how Biden's brand new administration has been addressing border crossings while at the same dealing with the aftermath of a deadly insurrection, an impeachment trial, and passing the largest social spending bill in U.S. history. All in less than 60 days.
The Post is hardly alone in manically hyping the border story, at the behest of the GOP. In a highly unusual move, ABC This Week staged its entire Sunday program from the border, in order to focus on the "emerging crisis for the Biden administration."
On Saturday night, Post reporters fanned out on Twitter to tout their breathless story, which Republicans quickly seized upon. "‘No end in sight: Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge," posted Josh Dawsey of the Post. Even more frantic was the tweet from colleague Nick Miroff: "How the Biden admin's poor planning, botched messaging, rush to repudiate Trump and a broken asylum system unleashed the biggest border surge in 20 years, with "no end in sight""
Fact: This is not currently the "biggest border surge in 20 years." It's not even close.
The Post article, as Julian Castro advisor Sawyer Hackett noted, was "pure hot garbage, beginning to end." He added, "Where the f**k was the outrage when Trump deported 13K children last year?"
Designed to portray the White House as poised on the brink of a defining and perhaps fatal failure, the Post article was drenched in politics instead of policy — "Republicans are reveling in the administration’s border problems.” The piece stressed the issue of immigration could be a loser for Democrats — it could cost them the House in 2022! — and even "overshadow" the administration's success in vaccinating tens of millions of Americans in recent weeks, and passing the wildly popular $1.9 trillion relief package. All of that could be forgotten, the Post stressed, because more people are trying to cross the U.S. border. That’s an absurd premise that only adds up if you're trying tell this story from a Republican perspective.
Among the article's more egregious failures was its refusal to mention that the surge in unaccompanied minors at the border began during Trump's last year in office, as well as a surge in adults seeking asylum, the Trump team's refusal to cooperate with the Biden White House transition, and the Republicans' deliberate delay in confirming key cabinet members who most closely work on border issues.
Additionally, the article quoted former Department of Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf attacking the Biden administration. Wolf was a key member of Trump's anti-immigrant border team who worked overtime creating deliberately ineffective, chaotic, and cruel policies, which Democrats are now trying to fix. But Wolf gets to spout off in the Post about how Biden has created a crisis?
Is Biden alone responsible for the current surge? Not according to the Washington Post's own reporting just four months ago: "Attempted crossings have risen as migrants fled the aftermath of powerful hurricanes in Central America and as crime, hunger and political instability continued to ravage numerous countries in Latin America." That's now all been flushed down the memory hole, as the Post amplifies GOP attacks and targets Biden, and Biden alone for the surge.
Also disturbing was the premise from the Post piece, which echoed a Republican talking point: 'There are too many undocumented people crossing the border and in U.S. custody!' Left out of that simplistic and alarmist narrative is the fact that they're in U.S. custody because this Democratic administration has adopted a humane policy of not sending children back to often unlivable conditions. Basically, the Post penalizes Biden for trying to fix Trump's deliberate mess, by wildly hyping the change in border numbers.
"The politicians and the pundits trying to push America back to the “good old days” of 2018, of ripping families apart or condemning them to inhumane refugee camps in Mexico, are shameless," stressed the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch, after the Post article was published.
In terms of border crossing apprehensions, 2021 is currently on pace to match the 2019 surge under Trump. Where was the panic-stricken media coverage about the border "crisis" then, and how the Republican administration had no policy answer? In truth, Trump touted the huge influx in 2019 because he thought it was good politics for wanting to build a mythical wall across America's southern border, which Democrats opposed.
So when a Republican was in the White House, he claimed the huge border surge was bad news for Democrats, and the press largely played along. Two years later, the press is once again playing along with Republicans, claiming a huge border surge is bad news for Democrats.
(Photo Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
Pressure is mounting on corporate America to take a stand against the GOP’s aggressive campaign to suppress the vote in America.
From Jelani Cobb’s new piece in The New Yorker, “The High Cost of Georgia’s Restrictive Voting Bills”:
The potential economic fallout of the voter-restriction effort started coming into focus last Monday, when the New Georgia Project, which has fought for equal voting access, staged a die-in outside Coca-Cola’s corporate headquarters, to urge it not to support officeholders who vote for the bills. (The day before, the company had tweeted, “RT if you’ve ever hidden the last Coca Cola in the fridge”; the New Georgia Project replied, “RT if you’ve never backed anti-voting legislation.”) Coca-Cola, which donated the site for the civil-rights center, is based in Atlanta, as are Delta, a founding sponsor, and Home Depot, one of whose founders is a major donor.
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Frances Forever, “Space Girl”
Let’s start the week with some irresistible indie pop, courtesy of Boston’s Frances Forever. Launched into the stratosphere via Tik Tok, “Space Girl’s” dreamy, DIY feel and upbeat crush lyrics never fail to generate a smile.
Girl, are you a cancer?'Cause you make me cryWhen we kiss or dance in the skyWe're dancing in the sky
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Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently stirred a local pandemic controversy when he threatened to withhold Covid-19 vaccines from communities where officials had criticized how the state was doling out the crucial shots. After coming under fire for setting up a pop-up vaccination outpost that was only open to residents from two wealthy zip codes in Manatee County that had been least impacted by Covid, DeSantis at a press conference said he'd be happy to ship those vaccines elsewhere if local pols kept griping.
"Let us know if you want us to send it Sarasota or Charlotte or Pasco or wherever, let us know — we’re happy to do it," said the thin-skinned governor. "I’d be thankful because you know what? We didn’t need to do this at all."
DeSantis apparently backed the pop-up post for the mostly-white zip codes at the urging of a local developer. The Governor has “repeatedly put corporate special interests and his campaign donors ahead of Floridians in need," Florida Watch, a progressive policy group, argued at the time.
It was a typical DeSantis move. He’s spent the last year brawling over Covid, trying to silence scientists, covering up data, rescinding mask ordinances, and doing his best Trump II imitation by playing down the virus' threat, fighting with the Florida press, and portraying himself as a maverick under attack. He also foolishly placed one million orders of hydroxychloroquine in tribute to Trump.
In recent weeks though, the Beltway media have rallied to the southern governor’s cause. They’re holding him up as a rare Republican Covid star, pushing GOP talking points about how DeSantis has steered the Sunshine State into "boom” times, and suggesting the pandemic has thrust him to the front of the 2024 White House line.
Despite 32,000 Covid deaths in the state, as well as a mediocre at best vaccination rollout, journalists are lining up to do the Republican's bidding.
“How Ron DeSantis Won The Pandemic,” was the Politico headline Thursday night, for a big write-up that read like it was written by the governor’s press office. The Republican deserves huge praise, readers were told, because his pandemic decisions, “have ended up being, on balance, short of or even the opposite of ruinous.” Can the press post the bar any lower?
"After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight," CNN cheered this week. The report then quoted DeSantis boasting about his Covid record from a recent fundraising appeal, yet CNN raised no objections to the governor raising money off tens of thousands of pandemic deaths.
CNN suggested the "defiant and combative" DeSantis deserves a Covid star turn despite the fact, "Florida lands nearly in the middle of all states on a variety of coronavirus metrics." (With tourism floundering, the state’s also drowning in a $2.7 billion budget shortfall.)
Indeed, Florida's deaths per 100,000 population rate is nearly identical to California and New York, where Democratic governors are not currently being toasted by the Beltway press. DeSantis and his allies argue those two blue states have implemented much harsher lockdown and social distancing measures, while Floridians have been able to roam freely, therefore making DeSantis a success. But scientists note Florida's humid climate may have helped keep the death rate low.
In a recent report about Florida's supposed Covid success story, the New York Times quoted DeSantis bragging, “If you look at South Florida right now, this place is booming." He added, "You can live like a human being. You aren’t locked down. People aren’t miserable.” (No Democratic officials were quoted in the Times piece to offer a counter perspective.)
Politico last month applauded the "wonky" Florida governor and his Covid-fueled rise in Republican politics: "Conservatives are relishing the contrast and holding up DeSantis as an example of effective governance."
In terms of a Republican presidential primary, it's likely a large percentage of voters still think the virus is a "hoax," and bashing science could play well for candidates like DeSantis. But the way that Politico so casually presented DeSantis' Covid track record of 30,000-plus deaths as being a remarkable accomplishment that he can use as a springboard for national office simply highlighted the absurd (nonexistent?) standard the Beltway press often uses for grading Republican politicians.
Note that some local Florida journalists often don't display the same, fawning enthusiasm as the D.C. press. "From the pandemic’s infancy, DeSantis has conveniently, even diabolically, airbrushed Covid-19 out of public life here," Florida's Lizette Alvarez wrote late last year. "The result: 1.2 million total covid-19 cases, nearly 61,000 total hospitalizations and a new seven-day case-positivity rate of 9.7 percent — all rapidly rising toward crisis levels."
And from Nate Monroe in the Florida Times-Union: "Florida has, by the most generous accounting, just barely lurched through to the (hopeful) end of the pandemic under the leadership of Ron DeSantis — neither a particular success story nor the epitome of failure. Just average devastation."
For the Beltway press, average devastation now counts as a Republican win.
(Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
Remember former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson? She was a hardcore Obama critic a decade ago, and has since disappeared into the swamp of right-wing media where she belongs. (I think she currently works at Sinclair Broadcasting.)
Attkisson wrecked her credibility years ago in many ways. One key episode came in 2012. While she was at CBS, she claimed her at-home computer started acting strangely and that “experts” had told her she’d been the target of an illegal wiretapping. So she sued. This week a federate judge threw the case out.
From Politico’s “Judge Tosses Journalist’s Surveillance Lawsuit Against Rod Rosenstein”:
Attkisson filed a new suit in federal court in Baltimore last year, asserting that a source had come forward to confess involvement in the wiretapping. Attkisson said that source said the effort was an outgrowth of a Baltimore-based federal law enforcement operation targeting illegal activity on the so-called dark web, the Silk Road Task Force.
The source was initially anonymous but later identified by Attkisson’s attorneys as Ryan White, an alleged former FBI informant. White is a QAnon conspiracy adherent who appears to have been the source of bizarre child-abuse allegations that Georgia attorney Lin Wood leveled at Chief Justice John Roberts last year, according to a report in the Daily Beast.
☀️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Benny Blanco, Marshmello & Vance Joy, “You”
A producer, a DJ, and a singer collaborate here for the new uplifting pop-rock-R&B single, “You.” “This song makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside and I hope everyone else gets the same feeling when they listen,” Blanco recently told Rolling Stone.
I do. Also, who doesn’t like a claymation music video?
Oh, you, only youWhen the night is over out of all the places I could chooseI go to you, only youFeel you just below the surface, darlingAll I wanna do is go to you
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Scrambling in the wake of Joe Biden's seven-million vote victory in November, Republicans continue to mount a powerful and unapologetic campaign to suppress voting. With so many state legislatures under GOP control, Republicans are sponsoring more than 250 bills aimed at drastically reducing ballot access in coming years. It's being done under the phony banner of "election security." After 2020, Republicans don’t want lots of people voting, especially lots of Black people. So far, the media’s failing to accurately label the crisis that’s unfolding.
The avalanche of bills aim to shorten the early voting period, reduce the number of hours that people can vote on Election Day, eliminate drive-through voting centers, create stricter deadlines for returning absentee ballots, block early voting on Sunday, limit ballot drop boxes, restrict mail-in voting —basically any possible initiative Republicans can think of that would suppress the vote. The obvious implication is that Republicans understand their chances of winning elections decrease when voter turnout increases. And 2020 shattered American records for voter participation. It all represents a massive attempt to roll back democracy.
And it's clearly voter suppression, which is defined as, "any legal or extralegal measure or strategy whose purpose or practical effect is to reduce voting."
The good news is we've seen lots of in-depth, aggressive reporting from various news outlets on the GOP's plan to rewrite election rules in this country. The bad news is that message is getting muted by refusing to call this strategy what it is — voter suppression. The press prefers to frame the GOP's war on democracy as another Both Sides, partisan dust-up over "voting restrictions." That plays right into the hands of Republicans.
"The fact that we are about to be hit with a tidal wave of voter suppression legislation by Republican legislatures throughout the country is the most under reported story right now," Democratic election attorney Mark Elias recently tweeted. "The media is unequipped to cover this in clear moral terms and instead prefers to both sides it."
There’s a deliberate media movement underway to not use the clear, accurate language to describe Republican efforts to suppress the vote, just like there was a deliberate media movement to not accurately describe Trump as a "liar" for four years. (Instead, he pushed "falsehoods" and "exaggerations.") The media erected guardrails against calling Trump and his followers liars. Now we're seeing the same word games employed to avoid "voter suppression."
A recent CNN headline announced, "Arizona Republican Lawmakers Join GOP Efforts to Target Voting, With Nearly Two Dozen Restrictive Voting Measures." Neither the headline nor the article used the phrase "voter suppression" used to describe the GOP's obvious attempt at voter suppression. Yet the URL for the CNN report did make that reference: "politics/arizona-republicans-voter-suppression-bills/." Meaning, inside the CNN newsroom, it's common knowledge Republicans are passing "voter suppression bills." But CNN reporters aren't using that language in their accounts.
Virtually every major news organization is guilty of the same misstep:
• "Republicans Advance More Than 100 Bills That Would Restrict Voting in Wake of Trump's Defeat" (NBC News)
• "State GOP Lawmakers Propose Flurry of Voting Restrictions to Placate Trump Supporters, Spurring Fears of a Backlash" (Washington Post)
• "Republican-Led Legislatures in Dozens of States Are Moving to Change Election Laws in Ways That Could Make it Harder to Vote" (NPR)
An Associated Press headline recently announced, "Critics: GOP Measures Target Black Voter Turnout in Georgia." But why use the "critics" framing? Why can't the AP simply treat as fact what is obviously factual — Republicans are pushing voter laws in Georgia specifically designed to suppress the Black vote.
The Washington Post failed in the same way recently: "A GOP Lawmaker Says The ‘Quality’ of a Vote Matters. Critics Say that’s ‘Straight out of Jim Crow.’" That is straight out of Jim Crow. The Post doesn't need to hide behind "critics" to make that point.
What's driving the media hesitation? Maybe it's because "voter suppression" sounds un-American. It sounds undemocratic, and it sounds like advocates don't support free and fair elections in this country. It’s much easier, and more polite, to use the watered down "voter restriction" description. Voter "restrictions" sound somewhat plausible or defensible. "Suppression" sounds illegal.
Voter suppression has a dark history in this country as a tool used to deter Black Americans and other minorities from voting, and from the media's perspective it's not something mainstream politicians endorse. The press very much wants to portray the GOP simply as a center-right party.
But words matter, especially when dealing with today's radical and dangerous Republican Party. America learned that painful lesson during the Trump years when the Beltway media played senseless semantics games in order to obscure the truth about the GOP.
That truth was confirmed last winter when nearly 150 Republican members of Congress signed an amicus brief supporting a extreme lawsuit that urged the Supreme Court to throw out tens of millions of legitimate, legally cast votes, in order to clear a path for a bogus Trump victory. Lying about presidential election results is now, without question, a mainstream Republican talking point. As is the Big Lie about how the U.S. election system today is fraught with fraud, which requires legislative fixes in the form of voter suppression initiatives.
The media fell down covering the Big Lie last winter. And now it's falling down with the voter suppression challenge.
(Photo Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
One of the Trump scandals that still deserves close scrutiny is the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Specifically, the joke investigation the FBI did at the height of the controversy.
From The Guardian’s “FBI Facing Allegation That Its 2018 Background Check of Brett Kavanaugh Was ‘Fake’”:
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing…Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.
🇨🇮 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
The Irish Tenors, “Toora-Loora-Looral”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, mom!
Over in Killarney, many years agoMy mother sang a song to me in tones so soft and lowJust a simple little ditty, in her good old Irish wayAnd I'd give the world if I could hear that song of hers today
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Leaning hard into the task of creating conflict and controversy where none exists, the Beltway press is trying its best to rustle up gotcha stories that ding President Joe Biden. Struggling to adjust to the new media landscape that does not feature a narcissistic, pathological liar president, and one who does not purposely create outrage, journalists are swinging and missing as they work too hard to manufacture news.
Biden travels during the pandemic! Biden wears a Rolex! Biden hasn't given a press conference! Biden hasn't credited Trump for the vaccine! Biden hasn't "united" the nation! The breathless exercise is already tedious. And it's only March.
In a way this is the Beltway press returning to "normalcy" after Trump's four years of deliberate chaos. And normalcy for the D.C. media is pelting Democrats with gotcha stories about optics and how something the president has done doesn't look right, as determined by journalists. Not that the president has done anything wrong. Just that it doesn't feel right, and that now that gets treated as Important News, just months after a president who ran the White House as a criminal enterprise and tried to demolish free and fair elections in America left office.
Under that Republican president, the daily optics were routinely so horrendous as he tweeted out racist taunts, bullied adversaries, and buddied up to foreign dictators. Faced with an openly corrupt president who didn't even try to hide his misdeeds, the media's optics squad went into hiding and stopped handing out tickets altogether.
Now they're back, as the Beltway press goes searching for infractions, while journalists obliterate all sense of proportion. This double standard has now become commonplace. As a rule, there were no brazen corruption or bouts of lawbreaking when recent Democratic presidents were in office, or running for president. So the press had to lean into optics in order to create drama and allegations of wrongdoing.
Remember during the 2016 campaign when the Boston Globe and other media outlets demanded that the Clinton Foundation, an A-rated global humanitarian powerhouse, be shut down because it didn't look good for it to be operating if Hillary Clinton became president? No such high-level demands were made of the openly corrupt Trump Foundation, or when his tentacles of business dealings created an almost impossible-to-map conflict of interest.
Today, news outlets are straining to create news where none exists, like Biden not yet having a solo press conference with White House reporters. The topic was the very first question asked at a recent daily briefing, signaling how important journalists view the story. It's been the topic of endless cable TV news chatter, especially on Fox News.
In the last week, the Washington Post published no less than three pieces on the supposedly hot topic — a news story, an opinion piece, and an editorial — even though the White House has already announced Biden will have a presser by the end of the month. The administration has also renewed all kinds of access points for journalists that were cut off under Trump.
The fact that Biden arrived in office having to deal with a pandemic, an insurrection, and an impeachment trial rarely gets mentioned in the hand wringing press conference coverage. Do journalists think Biden, who's been in public life for 50 years, isn't capable of answering questions?
Recall that just days into Biden's first week in office, the New York Times dinged him for being out of touch with voters because of the expensive watch he wears, and the exercise bicycle he uses. It was a dishonest pursuit that looked especially absurd following Trump's four years of gaudy, country club excess, which the Times ridiculously labeled, “populism.” Trump regularly wore a $36,000 watch while president, a fact the Times politely omitted in its optics article about Biden's $7,000 Rolex, which was "a far cry from the Everyman timepieces that every president not named Trump has worn conspicuously in recent decades," the Times stressed.
That urgent wristwatch update came three days after the Times reported on Biden's exercise bike of choice, Peloton, noting the high-end workout machine, "does not exactly comport with Mr. Biden’s “regular guy from Scranton” political persona."
Over this weekend, the Associated Press returned to a weird Biden gotcha storyline: He should avoid air travel during the pandemic. "The White House defends those [Delaware] visits at a time when the administration is urging the public to avoid unnecessary travel," the AP tweeted.
The wire service first pushed the Fox News-sponsored narrative last month, stressing that Biden's decision to fly on the weekend to his home in Delaware ran counter to CDC pandemic guidelines. The obvious hole in the gotcha story is that the CDC urges Americans not to travel because it wants people to avoid crowded airports and crowded planes, which is not something Biden has to encounter as the President of the United States. The idea that the Oval Office occupant cannot safely travel one year into a pandemic makes no sense.
Fact: Biden has deliberately unplugged Trump's outrage treadmill. The press needs to adjust and stop trying to concoct gotcha news.
(Photo Jim Watson/Getty Images)
💻 GOOD STUFF:
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has a good, important read on the increasingly toxic internet culture: “Online Harassment of Female Journalists is Real, and It’s Increasingly Hard to endure”:
The digital harassment is pervasive, and it is destructive to the lives and careers of female journalists. Much of it dates back to GamerGate, the Internet culture war that began in 2013, in which armies of misogynistic Internet trolls were sicced on female gamers and journalists. The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey called it “a proxy war for a greater cultural battle over space and visibility and inclusion, a battle over who belongs to the mainstream.”
🇨🇺 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Lucero, “Back in Ohio”
I love the beefy power chords here, the barrel house piano, and the hint of southern rock in a Midwestern shout-out song.
Here, the enduring Memphis rock band Lucero tells the historic tale of Toledo’s William Morgan who fought in the Cuban Revolution and was eventually executed by Castro. Most history lessons don’t sound this sturdy and bold, or make you want to boost the volume.
Looking down the barrelsOf twenty loaded gunsAll the letters writtenAll the fighting's been doneA man without a countryAin't getting out aliveThey never collected the bountyYou're still left to pay the price
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In a wildly misguided attempt at Trump rehabilitation, the New York Times this week suggested Trump deserves credit for the extraordinary success the new Biden administration is having getting Americans vaccinated. Leaning hard into the Both Sides narrative, the Times generously headlined its piece, "Biden Got the Vaccine Rollout Humming, With Trump’s Help."
What the article lacked however, was any compelling evidence that Trump deserves vaccine credit, after having spent all of 2020 completely indifferent to the deadly pandemic, and spreading nonstop public health lies. Fully 60 percent of Americans over the age of 60 have received their first Covid vaccine today, compared to just eight percent under Trump. Biden should rightly take bows for that remarkable trend, after the previous administration showcased its vaccine incompetence.
Under Trump, the U.S. vaccine rollout was seen as a national embarrassment. Under Biden, it’s become a model for the world, administering nearly 100 million shots. And now the Covid relief bill, which Trump and Republicans failed to pass for ten months, will pump billions into helping communities nationwide vaccinate.
The Times article represents some truly egregious revisionist history, politely positioning today's Mar-a-lago resident as a president who simply ran out of time and wasn’t able to get the pandemic job done — who worked hard to create an infrastructure for his Democratic successor. That's a wildly inaccurate retelling of what happened and the almost criminal neglect Trump showed through all of last year in terms of fighting the pandemic and getting Americans vaccinated. Instead, more than half a million died.
Trump wasn't some kind of passive, disinterested bystander during the Covid crisis. He actively made it worse at every possible turn, from the moment he gave the stand down order for the virus invasion last winter ("We have it totally under control"), to lying about testing , telling Americans to ingest cleaning fluids in order to cleanse themselves of the virus, and the complete disregard he showed for mask-wearing right up until his final days in office. In truth, Trump spread more deliberate lies about Covid to a larger audience than anyone else on the planet, according to a study from Cornell University.
Trump purposely contradicted established science and willfully endangering Americans. He virtually silenced the government’s public health experts and welcomed to the White House Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford professor and pandemic crackpot —the virus is overblown, the number of deaths is exaggerated! — whom Trump recruited after seeing on Fox News.
That's the totality of Trump's scandalous and deadly Covid behavior. And no, behind the scenes he didn't create a turnkey vaccine distribution operation that Biden plugged in and is now using to help end the pandemic in the U.S.
Incredibly, the Times wasn’t alone in recent days praising Trump’s vaccine work and scolding Biden for not giving him recognition. An annoyed ABC News announced that, “Despite calls for national unity and bipartisanship, President Joe Biden and his top aides have declined to give the Trump administration credit on the nation's COVID-19 vaccine rollout.” Apparently, pledging “unity” means giving credit to the guy who botched vaccinations for months. The Washington Post also joined in the frantic media effort this week to normalize Trump’s negligent behavior.
The ill-advised Times article archly claimed to see through the Biden White House spin. Trying to puncture the Democrat's success, the Times stressed that last week's surprise Biden announcement that American adults would be fully vaccinated by the end of May, was all about "public relations" and "conjured an image of a White House running on all cylinders and leaving its predecessor’s effort in the dust." The Times suggested that was a mirage because the new administration had merely "expanded and bulked up a vaccine production effort whose key elements were in place when Mr. Biden took over for President Donald J. Trump."
Specifically, the Times claimed, "Mr. Biden benefited hugely from the waves of vaccine production that the Trump administration had set in motion. As both Pfizer and Moderna found their manufacturing footing, they were able to double and triple the outputs from their factories."
This makes no sense. Trump was responsible for private pharmaceutical companies setting out to produce a vaccine for a once-in-a-century global pandemic? He's the one who set that production in motion? Obviously, those companies did that on their own, and didn't need the President of the United States to prompt them.
Incredibly, that hollow example was the best one the Times could point to for why Trump deserves kudos for Biden's vaccination success. The whole Both Sides framing on vaccinations doesn't work, and for obvious reasons — it's not true.
The only other attempt the Times article made to bolster its claim was to quote from a former Trump aide: "They criticize what we did, but they are using our playbook every step of the way." The newspaper though, made no attempt to verify those claims. Of course, former Trump advisers are going to say they set up an amazing vaccine program and Biden is benefiting from today. But where's the proof?
Note that previously, we saw stunning revelations about how Trump's team aggressively hindered the vaccine rollout.
From STAT News:
Top Trump officials actively lobbied Congress to deny state governments any extra funding for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout last fall — despite frantic warnings from state officials that they didn’t have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation.
From Reuters:
The governors of several states accused the Trump administration on Friday of deception in pledging to immediately distribute millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses from a stockpile that the U.S. health secretary has since acknowledged does not exist.
Denying states money. Boasting about a medicine stockpile that didn’t exist. That’s the ugly Trump record on his dismal attempt to help vaccine Americans. No amount of media whitewashing will change that.
(Photo Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)
🖥 GOOD STUFF:
Facebook algorithms have done extraordinary damage to our democracy. Is there anything that can be done to rescue it from the social media giant’s grip?
From Technology Review’s excellent, new in-depth piece, “How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation”:
“When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who collaborates with Facebook to understand image- and video-based misinformation on the platform.
“They always do just enough to be able to put the press release out. But with a few exceptions, I don’t think it’s actually translated into better policies. They’re never really dealing with the fundamental problems.”
🎙 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Liz Phair, “Hey Lou”
The iconic 90’s alt-rock singer, formerly of Wicker Park, Chicago, has a new album out this year, and this winning, quirky tune is the first single. The playful premise: Lou Reed was a handful when he dated musician Laurie Anderson.
No-one knows what to thinkWhen you're acting like an assholeSpilling all the drinksTalking s**t about WarholAgain
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At last Friday's White House press briefing, reporters assembled amidst a busy news day. A sweeping and historic Covid relief bill was about to be voted on in the U.S. Senate, a signature piece of legislation that Joe Biden has bet his presidency on.
Meanwhile, in the coming days, Biden was set to sign two executive orders to advance gender equity and opportunity for women, meet with the CEO of Johnson & Johnson to discuss the pandemic vaccination rollout, and deliver national remarks on the anniversary of the Covid-19 shutdown in the U.S.
The first question posed to White House press secretary Jen Psaki at Friday's briefing wasn't about any of those key topics, though. The day's first briefing query came from a reporter who asked when Biden was going to take more questions from reporters. "So we’re 45 days into the Biden presidency, and he has yet to hold a presser," the journalist stressed. "Why the delay, and when can we expect the President to hold a press conference?"
Journalists and Republicans have teamed up in recent days to try to turn the topic of press conferences into a news story by demanding to know why Biden hasn't yet held a formal one. Seven weeks into his term, Biden became the first president in the past four decades who has gone this far without holding a formal Q&A session with the White House press corps.
The issue was so pressing that the Washington Post editorial page weighed in. The daily wanted to make sure the lack of press conferences didn't "become a habit," which is odd since Biden has only been in office for 50 days. The Associated Press basically claimed Biden is hiding because he's "a historically gaffe-prone politician."
Of course, unlike his predecessors, Biden arrived in office facing three unprecedented crises: an economic one, a national security one in the form of a deadly insurrection, and a public health one — and oh yeah, an impeachment trial. That might explain why there hasn't yet done a solo press conference.
The White House has pointed out that Biden regularly takes questions from the press during the week (nearly 40 times to date), and has given nine extended interviews. The White House has repeatedly said Biden will give a formal press conference this month. And he certainly should. It's important that the President of the United States address the nation in lots of different ways, and solo press conferences are certainly an important outlet for him to explain and defend his agenda.
But this media hand wringing seems a bit over the top. Is the press conference issue being raised because there's a larger sense that the Biden has curtailed media access or is trying to hide what his team is doing? No. Unlike the previous administration, which at one point unplugged daily media briefings for entire year, the Biden White House hosts one nearly every day where journalists are able to pose questions and receive factual, professional answers from the White House press secretary.
There are no current scandals Biden is trying avoid. If anything, his press conference might end up resembling a victory lap as he rightly takes credit for the U.S.'s runaway vaccination rate, and the passage of a Covid relief bill which will help millions of families and businesses, as well as school districts across the country.
It seems more that the press wants Biden to appear in the specific forum of a solo news conference, which shines a spotlight on the White House press corps. Biden has already participated in a town hall event for CNN, answering voters' questions for more than an hour. But journalists don't think town halls really count, because they don't feature journalists. So there's a self-serving angle to the media's clamoring about a press conference, which journalists glorify as being the pinnacle of presidential communications.
“Press conferences are critical to informing the American people and holding an administration accountable to the public,” said Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The Washington Post in its editorial insisted that press conferences are where "reporters can ask follow-up questions" and "the president’s thoughts on a wide range of issues can be mined." In four years of Trump press conferences, do you recall pointed, aggressive follow-up questions from reporters that helped mine Trump's deeper thoughts? I certainly don't. (I do recall that one press conference held at Trump's Bedminster, N.J., country club where local members were invited to boo reporters and cheer Trump's references to “fake news.”) It's odd that the media let Trump lie his way through solo press events and now are demanding Biden hold one because that's where presidents are held accountable by the media.
Meanwhile, it's hard to miss how CNN for instance is pressing Biden to hold a formal Q&A in the name of access. Yet CNN pulled the plug on Biden White House daily press briefings just four weeks into the Democrat's term. This, after CNN feasted on Trump White House press briefings, airing them live and in their entirety, for four years. CNN clearly operated under different rules for Trump, and now it demands that Biden adhere to the press conference rules that CNN prefers.
Biden will certainly hold a press conference soon and it will likely generate very little news, let alone blockbuster revelations. It also won’t feature insults and concocted fabrications like his predecessor’s did. The press should relax a bit on this issue, Biden has been quite busy to date.
(Photo Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
⚖️ GOOD STUFF:
A quick follow-up on last Friday’s PRESS RUN column on the “QAnon Shaman,” and that 60 Minutes+ interview.
From the Washington Posts’ “‘QAnon Shaman’ Stays In Jail as Judge Slams His Arguments: ‘So Frivolous as to Insult The Court’s Intelligence’”:
On Monday, [Judge Royce] Lamberth denied [Jacob] Chansley’s motion for release in a scathing memorandum that rejected his arguments as “meritless,” “mistaken” and “so frivolous as to insult the Court’s intelligence.” The judge said that Chansley was too dangerous to release and continues to pose a threat to the public.
EXTRA: My friend John Aravosis (of AMERICAblog fame) has a new Substack newsletter, CyberDisobedience. Take a look, I think you’ll enjoy it.
🥁 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Kiwi Jr.,”Guilty Party”
I’m back flogging my favorite new band, indie darlings Kiwi Jr. from Toronto. Poppy, fun, guitary with the perfect amount of rock crunch, the band spits out 2:20 jewels with abandon. Kiwi Jr. basically bottles youth and passes it around for everyone to take a deep swig.
And even though he's rightHow am I gonna trust himWhen I can't see him in the rear-view mirrorGiving me two thumbs way way up?
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President Joe Biden stands poised to pass one of the most substantial and popular pieces of spending legislation in half-a-century, following the Senate's passage of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. The American Rescue Plan will not only provide $1,400 checks for most American families and extend jobless aid, the bill provides money for vaccine distribution and financial relief for cities, schools, and small businesses hit hard by the pandemic.
The sprawling legislation also represents the largest increase in safety net spending in a generation. It includes huge assistance for day care, broadens eligibility for Obamacare, helps renters, and will likely cut the U.S. poverty rate by one third this year.
Reporting on the six most important "takeaways" from the bill's Senate passage this weekend, guess what USA Today ranked as the most significant detail about the American Rescue Plan? Answer: The fact that Biden wasn't able to win over Republican backing for the wildly popular bill, which has 83 percent public support.
Chalking that up as a White House failure, USA Today stressed, "Biden campaigned on bipartisanship following four divisive years under Donald Trump. Yet he was not able to win over a single Senate Republican." The paper made sure to penalize Biden: "The lack of bipartisan support shows that breaking through the gridlock isn't as easy as Biden predicted as a candidate."
Detailing the GOP's deeply radical and dangerous tendencies is not a story the press wants to dwell on. That’s a key reason the media screwed up Covid relief coverage for the last twelve months, constantly presenting a false picture of legislative negotiations, told through the prism of the GOP.
USA Today didn't include one sentence about how bizarre it was that every Republican member of the House and Senate stands opposed to a bill that 70 percent of Republican voters support. Instead, the press continues to depict the GOP's obstruction as being normal and understandable. That way they can ding Biden for failing to make the bill "bipartisan." (Beltway media Golden Rule: Democrats alone are responsible for creating bipartisanship.)
Republican behavior over Covid relief last weekend at times bordered on madness, as they tried to drown the process with sure-to-fail amendments. At one point, they even tried to strip out funds specifically targeted for poor women and children. But that was definitely not the dominant media narrative in recent days. The New York Times insisted it was Democrats who faced an "awkward episode" on late Friday when details over extending unemployment payments had to be ironed out after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) raised objections. The event "threatened to defect and derail" passage, the paper reported excitedly.
Like USA Today, the Times was oblivious to the idea that Republicans faced any awkwardness for unanimously objecting to an emergency spending bill that the vast majority of Americans support, and doing everything in the party's power to slow down its passage, including the demand that the massive bill be read out loud in its entirety in the Senate, a move that wasted hours.
The Times waved off the GOP's extreme behavior as nothing more than, "a minority united in opposition." (i.e. Nothing to see here!)
Over the last twelve months, Republicans sabotaged all Covid relief negotiations, including Trump who routinely, and publicly, gave wildly contradictory statements about the need for assistance. Yet since last April, the press tagged Both Sides for failing to pass a relief package that was universally seen as crucial to the country's economic survival. ("Capitol Hill's failure to compromise" is hurting America, CNN emphasized.)
Fact: House Democrats in May passed a massive $3 trillion Covid relief package. To win over Republican support in the Senate, they then agreed to pass a smaller $2 trillion version. They were then ready to sign off on a further reduced $908 billion proposal. Republican leaders wouldn't even agree to that, yet the press consistently blamed "Congress" for not being able to meet halfway and pass much-needed assistance.
CBS News wondered, "Why hasn't Congress done more at this point?" The Congressional Covid failure represented "an institution gripped with paralysis," the Times stressed, while the Washington Post claimed the lack of legislation was due to "bickering."
Last summer, journalists claimed "Congress" was to blame for weekly $600 relief checks being cut off. Wrong — the payments were ended because Republicans forced them to end. In October, CNN's Wolf Blitzer launched into a heated argument with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, demanding to know why she wouldn't accept a White House relief proposal, even though Senate Republicans didn't support it, which meant the White House proposal would never be voted on.
Twelve months ago, the Beltway press echoed GOP talking points by loudly claiming Democrats were "blocking" the first Covid relief bill, which was eventually signed into law under Trump. The Times stressed that Democrats "risked a political backlash," by lobbying hard for additional unemployment aid, as well as more money for hospitals, healthcare workers, and local governments. (Democrats won, and improved the bill.) Today, there's very little media coverage of Republicans "blocking" the recent Covid bill, or facing "political backlash."
Republicans never supported a second Covid relief bill, yet the press spent the last year pretending otherwise — insisting that of course GOP leaders urgently wanted to aid struggling Americans, where there was little evidence that they did.
The country will be well served by the American Rescue Plan, but the slow-motion train wreck of Covid relief coverage represented a distressing failure of journalism.
(Photo Samuel Loeb/Getty Images)
🖥 GOOD STUFF:
Eric Alterman has launched a new weekly newsletter, Altercation, at American Prospect that I highly recommend. Doubling as an English professor at Brooklyn College, Alterman remains one of our sharpest media critics. His 2003 book, What Liberal Media? is a must-read for those looking for history and context into our current media debate.
🎤 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Caamp, “Square One”
My favorite mellow Ohio trio is back with a new offering — a smart reading of Tom Petty’s 2005, “Square One.” Tenderly framed by two acoustic guitars, the sweetly haunting tale finds a life traveler content in his hard-won satisfaction: “Had to find some higher ground/Had some fear to get around.”
Petty originally wrote and recorded the song in one night.
Try so hard to stand aloneStruggle to see past my noseAlways had more dogs than bonesI could never wear those clothesIt's a dark victoryYou won and you also lostTold her you were satisfiedBut it never came across
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Arriving for the first jailhouse interview with the Trump insurrectionist known as the "QAnon Shaman," 60 Minutes+ this week provided a surprisingly gentle and understanding forum for someone who helped terrorize members of Congress on Jan. 6, when a murderous mob ransacked the U.S. Capitol.
Along with interviewing Jacob Chansley (aka the Shaman), CBS's Laurie Segall interviewed Chansley's mother who insisted her son is innocent of the six charges he faces after storming the Capitol, bare-chested and wearing a fur helmet with horns.
She claimed President Joe Biden had won the election "fraudulently," which is part of the GOP's Big Lie campaign. Her bogus election claim received no direct pushback from Segall. Why would CBS present someone as a credible person who thinks the election was stolen? 60 Minutes+ also allowed Chansley's mother to spout QAnon rhetoric about human trafficking without calling it out.
The whole CBS segment had the unfortunate feeling of a rehabilitation effort, and specifically the national press using a sympathetic lens through which to view white, right-wing political criminals. It's part of an ongoing, compassion campaign to better understand Trump sycophants who are so divorced from reality and the rule of law that they eagerly ransacked the Capitol in a dangerous effort to overturn an American election.
Are these really the type of people we need to better understand, the people who deserve a national platform? Isn't it just giving a megaphone to an insurrectionist who wants to rebrand himself on the eve of his court date, while expressing his deep admiration for Trump? (Segall: "What was it about Donald Trump that you felt so fiercely loyal to?")
"I consider myself a lover of my country. I consider myself a believer in the Constitution. I consider myself a believer in truth and our founding principles. I consider myself a believer in God," Chansley told CBS.
The interview felt like an extension of the media's four-year obsession with profiling Trump voters, and treating them as some sort of anointed tribe of captivating voters who represented the true, authentic voices of America. Not the backbone for a looming insurrection. Segall: "Do you still believe you're a patriot?"
Think of how many prisoners of color are sitting in jails across the country, unjustly convicted or facing disproportionately long prison sentences, and ask if the QAnon Shaman really deserves national attention to better tell his personal tale? Should CBS be working with the insurrectionist's defense attorney, who help set up the Q&A, because he desperately wants to clean up his client's public image in advance of a court proceeding? ("He's like a kid.")
House members this week were allowed to leave town Wednesday night after law enforcement warned about a possible militia-led attack on the Capitol because of the deranged conspiracy claim that on March 4, Trump would be inaugurated. Meaning, QAnon is not a curiosity. It’s a collection of dangerous radicals who have already terrorized the country.
"The "QAnon Shaman" of the January 6th attack on the Capitol tells his story for the first time from jail," is how CBS promoted the report. But why we should care about "his story" was never explained. During the 20 minutes, viewers learned Chansley thinks he's innocent, thinks he didn't do anything wrong on Jan. 6 (i.e. it wasn't an "attack"), and that his intention that day was "to bring divinity, and to bring God back into the Senate." Viewers also learned that Chansley's family and his attorney agree he's innocent — not exactly ground-breaking stuff. What it really comes down to is 60 Minutes+ landed the interview, period, and thought that in and of itself was news.
Additional problems arose when Segall interviewed Chansley's mother, Martha Chansley, who justified her son’s inclusion in the January mob by claiming the 2020 election was stolen. "I don’t think it’s right that [the election] was won fraudulently. I don’t believe it was won fairly at all,” she told CBS. Segall was not shown confronting that lie on camera. Instead, during a voice-over she said, "Both Jacob and Martha Chansley are part of a significant group of Americans who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent, that Donald Trump actually won."
Segall also gave Martha Chansley free rein to spew QAnon lies: "Jacob was exposing that and helping people to being formed; money laundering, human trafficking, all that ugly stuff. How all that revolves around our election and everything is it's part of the draining of the swamp." The CBS report then cut to Martha going through old photo albums as she, "paint[ed] a picture of Chansley's childhood."
Insurrectionists who spread bogus claims about human trafficking don't deserve to be the subject of human interest profiles by 60 Minutes.
(Photo Win McNamee/Getty Images)
GOOD STUFF:
The need to diversify newsrooms continues to be a pressing problem, especially as newspapers across the country shrink, and offer fewer perspectives.
That’s why a recent tweet that pointed out every page-one byline from Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle came from a woman, was so encouraging:
FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
James Brown, “Down And Out in New York City”
You ever hear an old song for the very first time that’s so good and so startling you wonder how you possibly managed to miss it for so long? That was my reaction last week when I came across this James Brown song from 48 years ago! It appeared on the Black Caesar soundtrack from 1973 and became a minor hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard R&B chart.
Today, it stands as an gritty, soul powerhouse, featuring Brown’s signature horns but also more rhythmic, acoustic guitar playing than we usually hear from his songs.
I can’t stop listening to it. Such punch and prowess. It’s timeless.
I was born in New York CityOn a MondayIt seems I was out shinin' shoes 'bout two to noon
All the fat catsIn the bad hats doing me a real big favorForgot the fat catsIn the bad hats laying it on real good
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So many election lies were told at the far-right CPAC conference last weekend that at one point a conservative media outlet, Right Side Broadcasting, had to interrupt its live coverage in order to air a disclaimer so that it wouldn't get sued for spreading election lies.
The conference was drowning in misinformation and whacked out conspiracies about the 2020 election, but very few mainstream outlets identified them clearly. That helps the GOP's Big Lie metastasize and spread. A CNN fact check dubbed the election lies told at CPAC to be "false claims." The network stressed Trump's 90-minute speech was filled with "falsehoods."
Reporting on the right-wing confab, CBS News used weak, vague language when noting that "unsubstantiated claims of interference" had been addressed at CPAC election panels. CBS made no mention of the fact that Trump told attendees the election had been stolen from him — that he already "beat" Democrats twice at the polls. ABC News noted Trump’s “false election fraud claims.”
By depicting the lies as merely disputed claims, the press continues to downplay a Republican cancer in our culture.
It's a problem that the GOP's Big Lie, as its been dubbed by many online, often isn't even called a lie by the mainstream media, which years ago put up artificial guardrails against calling Trump and his followers liars.
Lying about presidential election results is now, without question, a mainstream Republican talking point, or at the very least the claim that 'millions of Americans have concerns' about election integrity. The Big Lie is dangerous because it's clearly being used to fuel an avalanche of sweeping voter suppression initiatives in state houses around the country, as Republicans use election propaganda to pass bills to make it hard to vote. (The RNC recently set up Committee on Election Integrity, in the wake of an election that had no integrity issues.) It's an extraordinary one-two combination, the likes of which our democracy has rarely faced — it's the essence of pure propaganda.
The media help by giving a voice to the Big Lie and treating it as another Republican debating point, as if the finer points of immigration and tax reform are being discussed. It was the Big Lie that sparked a murderous insurrection on Jan. 6. It's the Big Lie that goes to the heart of American democracy. The Republican Party is waging war on free and fair elections in this country, and the Beltway press, especially the Sunday morning network talk shows, too often acts like disinterested spectators facilitating a Both Sides debate — Republicans say elections are rigged, Democrats disagree!
Note this flawed headline for an in-depth New York Times investigation into the Republican commitment to pass sweeping laws that suppress the vote: "Stolen-Election Myth Fuels G.O.P. Push to Change Voting Laws." [Emphasis added.]
It's not a myth, it's a lie. Big Foot is a myth. The Loch Ness Monster is a myth. The claim that Trump's election win was stolen is a lie told by one of our two major political parties, and it's backed by a billion dollar right-wing media industry. Today, the Big Lie represents the tip of a decades-long push by the Republican Party to sever itself from factual debate. That trend was obviously accelerated with Trump's election.
Early in Trump's presidency, while moving to overturn Obamacare, Republicans tried to pass a landmark social policy initiative by categorically misstating almost every key claim about their bill. They lied about pre-existing conditions. They lied about the cost. They lied about the bill being "bipartisan.”
Four years ago this winter, I wrote, "If Republicans succeed by lying about their health care plan, there’s no telling what the next target of GOP fabrications will be." We now know the answer is the Big Lie.
The Sunday morning shows continue to be a media wasteland of Big Lie timidity. A revolving door of Republican politicians who have sowed the seeds of election doubts are politely ushered onto shows and either never asked about election lies, as media critic Matt Negrin has documented, or allowed to echo the lies while facing mild pushback from television hosts.
What should happen is that Republicans ought to fear appearing on national shows when discussing so-called election fraud because they know hosts will unequivocally demand they provide concrete proof to back up their claims of election fraud — the same claims that were the basis for 60 failed Trump lawsuits following the election.
Two weeks ago as a guest on ABC's This Week, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) claimed there were, "a few states that did not follow their state laws" during the last election, and that "the rule of law" was abandoned, which is a categorically false claim. Scalise arrived at the ABC studio having previously signed on to an amicus brief supporting a radical lawsuit from the Texas attorney general that would have thrown out millions of legitimate votes across the country. That move alone should have disqualified Scalise from appearing on This Week.
By continuing to welcome Republican Big Liars on TV and treating their comments as serious and legitimate, the press is doing damage to election integrity.
📺 GOOD STUFF:
To the surprise of no one, Fox News officially announced that it has hired former Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany as a contributor. Not everyone in Murdoch World is thrilled.
From the Daily Beast’s “Fox News Insiders Rage Against Hiring ‘Mini Goebbels’ Kayleigh McEnany”:
“It’s truly disgusting they fired hard-working journalists who did care about facts and news reporting only to turn around and hire a mini-Goebbels whose incessant lies from the White House helped incite an insurrection on our democracy that got five people killed, including a police officer,” a Fox News insider raged to The Daily Beast. “Post-Trump Fox is quickly becoming a very scary place and quite dangerous for our democracy. It’s not even conservative news anymore. They’ve plunged into an alternate reality where extremist propaganda is the only course on the menu.”
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Lord Huron, “Not Dead Yet”
The pensive, provocative signature sounds of Lord Huron get expanded on the LA indie band’s first new effort in three years. “Not Dead Yet” dips into a charming Elvis rockabilly beat and begs you to take it for a ride on the open road.
All messed up with nowhere to goI stare at myself in the mirror aloneIt's hard to make friends when you're half in the graveBut I ain't dead yetAnd I've got something to sayOh, oh, oh, yeah
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Anxious to engage in Both Sides whitewashing of journalism failures from the Trump era, some prominent journalists are lashing out at liberals for having the nerve to criticize news coverage of the Biden White House. Leading the defensive charge is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who penned a condescending harangue over the weekend, claiming liberals are hypocrites for finding fault with the press when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.
Embracing a straw man argument that Democrats "lionized" the media during the Trump years because they detested him so much, Dowd insists the left is guilty of hypocrisy because they can't take it when the media's critical lens focuses on Democrats. "The truth is, many on the left don’t understand what a reporter is," Dowd lectured Times readers, most of whom know exactly what a reporter is.
Dowd's scolding was immediately picked up by other elite journalists on Twitter, who lent their voices to the idea that liberals don't understand how journalism works, and mocked Democrats for thinking the press should not hold their party accountable. (Spoiler: Zero Democrats actually think that.) By embracing that absurd claim, journalists feel free to dismiss criticism from the left, because they say it's not based in reality. That's a convenient dodge and it's also delusional.
First off, if Dowd thinks liberals spent four years lionizing the New York Times for its Trump coverage, then the Beltway bubble she lives in is even more impenetrable and remote than I thought. Progressives for years were rightly fuming over the Times' forced timidity when covering Trump — the paper's failure to call out his lies, its never-ending attempt to normalize his radical behavior, and the daily's relentless, fawning coverage of Trump voters, who were depicted as the true voice of authentic America — not the backbone for a looming insurrection.
Secondly, the idea that after four years of watching the Trump media circus, liberals think Beltway journalists are on their side, as Dowd claims, is beyond comical. Liberals understand perfectly well how this game is played and are under no illusions that the Times is doing the Democrats' bidding. In fact, quite the opposite.
This is the newspaper that waged war for eight years against the Bill Clinton presidency. The newspaper that mocked Democratic nominee Al Gore nearly every day of the 2000 campaign. The newspaper that co-sponsored the GOP's Iraq War, with some of the worst pre-war reporting in modern history. The newspaper that published all kinds of sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016.
The newspaper that on the eve of Election Day 2016 reported there were "no links" between Russia and the Trump campaign. And the newspaper that often prized access over truth telling during the Trump years, publishing a puff piece on his press secretary last year while she lied without pause about a public health crisis. (The Times politely glossed over when the spokeswoman had claimed, "We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.")
So yes, we understand the Times' institutional mindset. Like two years ago when, not having read a single page of Robert Mueller's report on his Russia investigation, the Times rushed to echo GOP spin that Trump had been exonerated and that Mueller had provided Trump with a "powerful boost" toward reelection.
With a change of command at the White House, liberals also know that after depicting Trump, a pro-corporate millionaire crook, as a "populist," it was ridiculous and insulting for the Times to try to paint Biden as an elitist, just days after he moved into the White House. It was equally dopey for the Times to get played by Sen. Mitch McConnell last month by reporting the Republican Senate Minority leader was somehow in favor of Trump's impeachment. (McConnell ended up voting three different times against it.)
The incident that sparked Dowd's tsk-tsking column came last week when Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim was reporting on Neera Tanden's nomination to be director of the Office of Management and Budget and the pushback Tanden has received from senators regarding her 'mean tweets' from the past. Kim took time to track down a four-year-old tweet Tanden had posted about Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to show the Republican and get a response. A picture of the incident traveled around Twitter, and lots of progressives wondered if that was the proper role for a reporter during a confirmation hearing. Beltway journalists insisted they had showed GOP senators lots of Trump tweets over the previous four years in order to get reaction. But of course, those were real-time tweets, not reporters digging up missives from years ago in order to get a response from a senator from the opposition party.
The Post reported Kim was the target of racist and sexists comments from social media trolls, which of course is never okay and is always condemned. But I didn't see any prominent liberals, Democratic members of Congress, or White House staffers insult the reporter, call her un-American or demand she be fired, the way Republicans and the Trump clan certainly would have if the roles had been reversed. The point being, legitimate criticism of a Post reporter from progressives created an instant rallying effect from the Beltway press in a way that unhinged and dangerous criticism from the right under Trump rarely did.
And seriously, liberals raising genuine concerns about the Post's coverage of an OMB budget director is what set Dowd off? That was her a-ha moment to start lecturing progressives about the role of the press in a free society? Talk about being thin-skinned.
Safe to say that Dowd's oversized reaction proves that progressives hit a nerve with media elites early in the Biden term; that the liberal critique of the press is dead-on and journalists are perturbed they're being held accountable after their collective Trump debacle.
UPDATED: The Post’s Kim responded to Press Run today. Sharing it here:
📱 GOOD STUFF:
It’s hard to argue with this New Yorker headline: “Email Is Making Us Miserable”:
A Harvard Business School professor found that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who planned to stay at the firm “for the long term” from forty per cent to fifty-eight per cent. E-mail’s power to makes us unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness!
🎸 FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK:
Pinegrove, “Morningtime” (Amperland, NY)
This inventive rock band from Montclair, N.J now calls Upstate N.Y. home — Kinderhook, N.Y., to be exact. Their musical compound there, dubbed Amperland, N.Y., is the name of the band’s new album.
“Morningtime” was first released several years ago. Here, it gets an updated take — a slightly fuller, more confident sound. The results are compelling, thanks to the band’s signature slow-build, emo-alt country guitar sound, and lead singer Evan Stephens Hall guiding us through his intriguing meditations.
What if I went down to the pine groveBut didn't find anything?What if I went past itYet nothing in me sang?And now I'm behind againBecause my bones won't align that waySome other time, yeahIn another life
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