The Corporate Media War On Facts and America (w/ Update)

I wrote awhile back about the blind eye of the national / mainstream media - especially the Beltway Media that tracks our political discourse 24/7 - and where I made observations about why that media behaved irresponsibly about the partisan nature of the Far Right. Fellow blogger Green Eagle posted this comment pointing out something I overlooked:

Here is the real reason: Before Ronald Reagan took office, over 80% of the press was owned by individuals and small companies. Thanks to Reagan's "deregulation" of the media, today, about 90% of the press is owned by large corporations or multi-billionaires, almost all of which are Republicans. When I hear people explain what causes the press to behave the way it does, I want to ask them, did you never have a job in your life? And if you did have a job, did you do what you wanted, or what the boss wanted? Our mainstream press is doing what the boss wants, period. That is the real, entire story of why Democrats will never get a fair break from the national media, whose owners cannot fathom the idea that things will not be better off if government gives them everything they want.

I've thought back to GE's comment recently because this weekend the owners of NBC proved that when they hired Ronna Romney McDaniel - the head of the Republican National Committee that just got booted out by donald trump in a hostile takeover - to be a regular contributor to their news division at an obscene salary of $300,000 as though there was nothing wrong with her.

Even though there is a shit-ton wrong with her: Above all, McDaniel's unwarranted and dangerous election denialism, willingness to do trump's dirty work, and attempts to undo the 2020 election results.

McDaniel's hiring is actually standard operating procedure in the national media workplace: Over the decades, the news networks routinely hired politicians and political handlers to work as pundits from both major political parties (and even a few Libertarians to spice up the crazy).

But McDaniel's hire set off fire alarms throughout the industry, because it threatened one thing: Defending - and worse, normalizing - trump and the Far Right's open war against democracy itself.

David A. Graham at the Atlantic documented the horror show (paywalled):

On Sunday, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker rightly raked McDaniel over her past election denialism. Chuck Todd, Welker’s predecessor at MTP, then said the network’s bosses owed her an apology for placing her in a tough position—he said he didn’t know whether to take McDaniel’s answers as honest. “There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” Todd said on air.

Then, on Morning Joe today, the titular Scarborough said, “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski said she hoped NBC would reconsider.

When that "Both Sideism" hack Chuck Todd is freaking out, when Far Right former congresscritter Scarborough is objecting on-air, you know the head honchos at NBC crossed a line. 

Graham posted his Atlantic article before major MSNBC figure Rachel Maddow got her two cents in, and oh yeah Maddow dropped napalm on the hiring (via Dominick Mastrangelo at The Hill):

“If you care what I think about this, the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News — to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said on her show. “You wouldn’t hire a wise guy, a made man like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so, I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable...”

“And it’s not about Democratic party, Republican party, it’s not about partisanship or right versus left,” she continued. “It’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”

Maddow highlighted McDaniel’s role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and said NBC, like all news organizations, is currently tasked with “trying to cover an election … and cover bad actors who are using the rights and privileges of a democracy to end democracy...”

While McDaniel's first appearance on Meet the Press showed her reversing her stance and claiming the 2020 election "was fair," it still doesn't undo the actual damage McDaniel committed while serving as RNC Chair (and overlooks the possibility she can be charged in Michigan for her efforts to throw out thousands of votes). And even though trump kneecapped her and drove her from her leadership position among Republicans, you can guarantee that McDaniel - daughter to a powerful GOP political family, long-standing conservative on her own - will "carry the water" for a Republican Party that will spend most of the 2024 election cycle playing out trump's gaslighting over "unfair elections" and "stolen ballots."

Graham even wonders what actual value McDaniel has that would be of interest to the NBC bosses who signed off on her contract:

The problem is that McDaniel has no apparent value to viewers or the network. When outlets hire figures like her, they typically say that these people add perspective and insight that only insiders can provide. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” the NBC political editor Carrie Budoff Brown said in a statement.

Sometimes, the private explanation is more mercenary. When CBS hired former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney in 2022, an executive bluntly told staffers that the network expected Republicans to capture Congress in that year’s midterm elections, and that Mulvaney would assist in getting “access.” Semafor’s Ben Smith has a related theory for this year: Many corporate leaders seem to have concluded that Donald Trump will win the presidential election, and so they’re trying to make moves to get in his good graces.

The problem is that McDaniel falls short both as an editorial offering and as favor-currying... McDaniel is not known for her strategic acumen or ideological fervor. She was chosen for the job for loyalty for Trump, and then discarded later when that loyalty proved insufficient.

McDaniel’s credibility is also in question. As Welker pointed out, she spent years indulging Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that January 6 insurrectionists were patriots. McDaniel’s explanation was not reassuring: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right? This is what I believe.” In other words, Trust me, I was lying.

All of this makes it hard to take McDaniel’s on-air political commentary all that seriously...

...There are three kinds of prominent Republicans: Those who are in Trump’s good graces; those who have been cast out of Trump’s good graces; and those who have always loathed Trump. The third group has no truck with McDaniel, whom they see as a sycophantic sellout. (They note that she dropped her maiden name, Romney, in deference to Trump’s disdain for her uncle.) McDaniel herself is in the second group—she was available for the NBC gig because Trump demanded her removal as RNC chair, after all.

The Trump loyalists in the first group have no affection for McDaniel either. A top campaign official crowed to Politico’s Playbook about her getting caught in the crossfire. No one in Trump’s current orbit will want to appear close to McDaniel for fear of being cast out themselves. If Trump wins the election, McDaniel won’t be able to speak very effectively to his inner circle; and if he loses, she won’t be a credible voice in a post-Trump era of Republican politics.

This leaves McDaniel without any constituency...

In some respects it was never about McDaniel's place in trump's inner circle of power (she was easily dismissed like many others before her). If we look closely at McDaniel herself, all she presents - to the media and the nation watching her - is a consistent, hard conservative world-view of tax cuts to the rich (that ever-fixed mark she shares with her father), deregulations across the board, and slashing at social safety nets to make the poor suffer more.

It's a world-view consistent with the cruelty and self-serving interests of the corporate powers as well.

Like Green Eagle notes, our Beltway Media is corporate-owned and fixated on the narratives that serve their needs, rather than the factual reporting that the national audiences need to stay properly informed.

If the CEO and managers in control of NBC - and ABC, and CBS, and Fox, and C-Span for that matter, hell throw in ESPN and the Weather Channel while we're at it - want certain messages and narratives and explanations (and gaslighting) to get broadcast, they will hire the people - usually those within their own small circles of colleagues and party invites - that will shill those narratives while raking in annual salaries more than triple that of their standard employees (it doesn't help NBC's judgment when they've recently fired 100 people to clear payroll).

NBC is going to hire pundits who will gladly talk up "the benefits" of tax cuts for the rich and "reforming" Social Security and Medicare and all the other standard Far Right talking points, especially during an election cycle when they need to overwhelm the public forum with their skewed priorities. It's just that the CEOs and people who made this deal happen didn't pay attention to all the damage McDaniel is really threatening to inflict - the end of voting rights, the destruction of fair elections, the rise of authoritarian figures like trump seeking to burn the American Dream down to rule the ashes - as part of her messaging.

It's not shocking that NBC hired a prominent Republican. It's shocking that they hired one willing to destroy America.

Update: It's later in the day and the reports are out that NBC will sever ties with McDaniel, although it may be a messy situation because McDaniel will likely be looking for a lawsuit claiming her First Amendment rights were denied. This is going to cost the network a ton of money, as well it should, and the people involved are likely going to get "encouraged" to retire on their own terms in short order. But it remains a serious problem that the CEOs and company heads are going to try this again, hiring another "trump insider" who will shill the upper-class agenda of "SAVE US FROM DEMOCRATS TAXING THE RICH THEIR FAIR SHARE".

The Blind Eye of the Beltway

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone browses the other articles here and gains enlightenment in some form. Also, why the hell didn't Barbie win for Best Set Design?! I mean, they used ALL that pink...! 

One of the reasons for my apprehension about this 2024 presidential cycle is how the mainstream media - the Beltway (Washington) punditry leading the Fourth Estate that overwhelms our awareness - is mishandling the entire thing as a personality horse race: Between an elderly Democratic white guy the Beltway is deeming too old, and an enraged bullying Republican white guy (who's not that much older, and showing more signs of dementia) facing criminal charges across four different court rooms threatening to impose a dictatorship on Day One.

Try to guess which issue the esteemed Beltway expresses a more pressing concern. /headdesk

And try to remember how this all feels so similar to how that Beltway - now older, but still operating with the same hive-mind "Both Sideism" world view - mishandled the 2016 presidential cycle, which proved disastrous. I wrote back in 2017 how the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review evaluated the media's performance and found it biased - obscenely so - towards donald trump and against Hillary Clinton:

In other words, the mainstream media - the Beltway pundits that dominate the political discourse - flipped the real world. They focused more on Hillary's "scandals" - which turned out to be nothingburgers, inflated to inflame the voters against her - than on her policy positions to where I guarantee the average voter didn't even know what her policies were. They focused on trump's "policies" - which was BUILD A WALL, Start a TRADE WAR with China, and Shut Down NATO - while ignoring trump's failures, financial scandals, and sexual assaults.

In short: Hillary got all the bad press, trump got all the good press.

We're seeing it happen again, especially in the national press like the New York Times and Washington Post (not to mention the 24-hour cable punditry like Fox Not-News (obviously), CNN, and yes even liberal-leaning MSNBC). Most of that mainstream media focusing on narratives over Biden "needing to step aside for a younger more winnable Democrat" even as the early primary results have Biden body-slamming his opponents by 80-90 percent. Most of that same mainstream media ignoring donald trump's open calls to put immigrants into internment camps, to destroy NATO as a bulwark against Russia, to operate as a dictator on Day One "to punish" his enemies; even ignoring the recent reports of how trump's White House staff was pumping themselves full of drugs as a dangerous abuse of power.

It's that disconnect - especially at the Paper Of Record the New York Times - that is leaving our whole nation vulnerable to disinformation, misplaced outrage, and misled voters. It's the kind of thing enraging the likes of Lucian K. Truscott IV (a long-tenured reporter and pundit himself) over at Salon:

Two things — check that, three things — appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there. At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.” You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend. You’ll have to read other publications — for example, Salon or maybe the Guardian — if you want to learn how often Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.” It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias.

A favorite of poll skeptics is its sampling bias. How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 proportion of rural voters was 19 percent? Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed. The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by 11 points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest. The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion, including in such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky, and handed every special election to Democratic candidates in the bargain. They just want you to believe there’s been a 12-point swing toward Trump among women, with no evidence except, poof!  It happened!...

Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again?... None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president...

If I could answer from my spot on the sidelines, there are several overlapping reasons why the Times - and the Post, and CNN, and everybody else with a free pass to the green rooms of every talking head show out there - are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.

One of the most obvious reasons the mainstream media behaves this way is the "horse race mentality" that a political campaign brings to the public's attention. It's the simplest way to frame and cover an election - This Guy vs. That Guy, let's see who wins! - even at the expense of the practical issues. The media wants this to be a personality contest.

But part of the problem is how the media frames this personality contest with a mindset of "Both Sideism" - that both candidates AND the two major parties they represent have to be balanced in some way - to where they will enlarge or over-report any minor issue for one candidate/party - to the point of fabricating scandal where there is no scandal - in order to balance the open and major flaws of the opponent. We're seeing it now where the Beltway elites are whining over the "scandal" of Biden being "too old" (when he's only three years older, and shows signs of being more fit than trump) while papering over the reality that trump is facing up to 91 felony charges in four different court rooms.

This is, by the by, why the House Republicans are still so desperate to dig up dirt on Biden's family: Fresh red meat to feed to a media corps hungry for "Both Sides" scandal reporting.

A less obvious reason the punditry are acting this way is due to their own world views getting shaped during the Reagan Era of "Sunny Conservative" Born Again Americanism. Much like the punditry and journalism of the Sixties and Seventies shaped by those who grew up to the FDR New Deal experience, today's punditry and media leadership came of age in the Eighties and Nineties, which shapes their bias of today. I said this before: 

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows...

Far too many pundits and reporters view modern Democrats as "out of touch" of the "mainstream" American thought, which the media thinks means "Rural" "White" and "Angry". This is the reason why the Times/Siena College polling skewed their sample population 36 percent Rural instead of making it 19 percent like the 2020 vote turnout confirmed. The national media EXPECTS this to be fact when instead its their own bias showing.

This is why the mainstream media keeps wishcasting - thank you, Tom Nichols - for The Next Reagan: this charming, wistful, flag-waving pie-loving patron for that Small-Town America where neighbors knew everybody well enough to leave folding chairs along the 4th of July parade route down Broadway Avenue the day before, because they trust each other enough that nobody will go stealing them.

The media elites kind of know that donald trump cannot be the Reagan figure, he doesn't come from that America - he and his will happily steal or vandalize those folding chairs, and then blame it on immigrants - but the pundits still can't wrap their heads around the possibility that Biden and the Democrats can represent that part of America alongside the 4th of July parade routes down MLK Boulevard in Los Angeles and Chicago and Tampa and San Antonio and Cleveland and every other major metro where most Americans actually reside.

So they chide the Democratic front-runners for not fulfilling their Reaganesque fantasy - even as Biden, as I've noted before, is as close a Reagan (Passive-Positive) figure the Democrats have to lead the nation - all the while promoting less-charismatic Republicans - stop making Rubio happen, he's not going to happen! - or worse providing cover for Republicans representing the racism, sexism, greed and violence of America's darker Id - at the expense of the American voters remaining misinformed and disillusioned.

I'm finishing this up just as the Super Tuesday voting is wrapping up. Both Biden and trump won enough states and delegates to effectively wrap up their respective nominations, but with noticeable differences. Biden - again - curb-stomped his primary opponent Dean Phillips to where in most states Phillips was in third place behind "Uncommitted" (which also tended to be in single digits). trump actually lost a state - Vermont - to opponent Nikki Haley; and while he dominated in several states in most others Haley had secured around 30 percent, which is a significant portion of party voters.

Biden is winning big as an incumbent candidate for the Democrats, while trump is struggling as the incumbent candidate for the Republicans.

And yet you'll never see the Beltway Media frame The Narrative of their horse race in that manner.

The pundits just can't see it that way.

Anniversary: When Doonesbury Dropped the GUILTY Bomb On The National Discourse

On May 29, 1973, in the midst of the then-ongoing investigations into the Watergate DNC headquarters break-in by Nixon's campaign (and dirty works) handlers, a singular comic strip appeared in the daily newspapers crossing the lines from objective observation to subjective opinion when artist Garry Trudeau focused on John Mitchell - one of the key players in the overall Watergate scandals - and pre-judged the man with the conclusion that he was "GUILTY! GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!" (Yes, CAPS LOCK was even a thing before the Internet, kiddos)

the strip that defined not just a moment, but 
altered how we perceive political commentary to this day

The Doonesbury comic strip was merely three years young in 1973, having been bought up by a comic strip syndicate as part of an effort to infuse the four-panel humor sections of daily newspapers with younger, more college-oriented (in those days, Boomer generation) artists appealing to similar audiences.

The artwork itself was pretty basic, "fresh out of art school" kind of linear inking, with static bodies and "camera placement" with distance (and no shifting of angles or position) to set the scenes for characters to interact. There was also more dialogue than most strips worked with.

What creator Trudeau brought to the comics readership was a brash willingness to discuss modern-day topics - the political upheaval happening across college campuses in those days, the then-ongoing Vietnam War (which ended in 1972) and its immediate post-war consequences, the growing feminist movement, and the struggles to integrate schools and society as a whole in the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights battles - whereas most strips were mild observations of daily life and struggles of quiet desperation.

There'd been other daily comic strips that delved in politics with as much fervor and impact: Pogo by Walt Kelly, for example, was a "cute animal" strip that discussed issues - even political topics - of the day. Kelly famously attacked the Red Scare baiting of McCarthyism of the 1950s by exposing Joe McCarthy himself as a gaslighting bullying character Simple J. Malarkey (some scenes of Malarkey hunting down several Pogo characters are considered the scariest moments in comic strips history). Modern-day political satirists - Trudeau among them - openly claim Pogo as their inspiration. 

But where Pogo could hide on the "funny pages" by being animal characters playing out allegory and metaphor in a cartoon swamp, Doonesbury is a strip about humans in real-life environments, tackling issues with real-life ramifications, and making commentary directly on people - not a ink-suited representative, but directly named like Mitchell - who could hire lawyers and sue for defamation.

That "Guilty!" strip is the moment when Trudeau crossed a line in journalism ethics - as much as cartoon strips could be considered journalism. After all, the comics page was part of the whole daily newspaper package: Front page news, Local news, Sports, Lifestyles, and Classifieds. (With crossword puzzles and comics stuck in either the Lifestyles or Classifieds. Such was the glory years of print media. I digress)

As Paul Hebert notes on his Reading Doonesbury blog about this strip:

In response to the 1973 strip, a dozen newspapers dropped Doonesbury. The Washington Post – now (in 2017), ironically, Doonesbury’s online home – argued that guilt or innocence should be adjudicated by “the due process of justice [and] not a comic strip artist,” and maintained that it could not “have one standard for the news pages and another for the comics.” Kerry Soper, in Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire, frames the Post’s “discomfort” with the “GUILTY!” strip as a product of the “problematic” fact that Trudeau blurs the line between “comic strip storyteller, journalistic muckraker, and political watchdog...”

It's the ethical dilemma in journalism between being Subjective or Objective when reporting on an event (or a person). Subjective meaning "based on personal opinion" with an emotional or judgmental bias, Objective being more "based on facts and evidence" with an eye towards informing the audience. It's a struggle that is ongoing: Especially with the rise and domination of 24/7 cable news needing to fill all those hours with more Subjective punditry discussing topics at an emotional biased level, as well as social media overwhelming the discourse with Twitter (or YouTube) bites and badly written blog essays (stares at self in the mirror). 

This ethical conflict is what I studied as a Journalism student at University of Florida, even taking a class on Journalism Ethics. Hell, my term paper was on Doonesbury's place in print media, whether it belonged in the daily comics pages or if it belonged in the Op-Ed/Letters to the Editor sections where commentary and subjective essays were permitted. I got an A for that paper, I was very proud of that fact, although I ended up with a B for the class grade (I did poorly on a mid-term exam). It's why I joke semi-seriously that I got a B in Ethics but a D in Reporting, which is how I ended up as a librarian.

The solution a lot of newspapers took was to make that move, taking Doonesbury from the less-partisan comics pages and placing it in the more opinionated Editorial pages, as a compromise whenever facing some of the more boundary-breaking storylines Trudeau illustrated, such as introducing a gay character for the first time in comics, or showing a man and woman in the same bed post-coitus, or any of the political attacks Trudeau aimed at Reagan or conservatives in general. 

Trudeau was an unabashed liberal, and it often showed in his works. However, Trudeau did his homework: On the scales of Subjective vs. Objective, when he skewered a political figure or public celebrity, he did it based on the facts he could uncover through basic research. Although he'd reach into levels we'd consider slander - such as the series of strips he inked pointing out how Frank Sinatra had questionable connections to mobsters - he at least based the attacks on provable facts. It still made for interesting reads.

I grew up as a pre-teen - I was eight or nine years old - reading Doonesbury collected paperbacks in the Young Adult section of the Dunedin Public Library (back when the library occupied a refurbished Publix storefront). I was a bit ahead of my fellow classmates having gotten bored with the juvenile lit (stop killing puppies, you damn juvenile writers!) and preferred the sci-fi and humor novels for the teens where my older brother hung out. It surely disappointed my dad somewhat as part of my left-leaning ideology comes from that exposure, but I still remember Trudeau's work being more of a gentle skewering of ideologies of the 1970s and 1980s. He would attack liberals - more of a chiding out of disappointment - for some of their follies - obsessing over symbolism more than the issues needing work - as much as attacking conservatives for their disdain and self-serving actions.

One thing that Trudeau excelled at was being sympathetic, even empathetic, towards the targets of his criticism. Even at their worst, the harshest Republican characters - especially the real-life figures like both Bush Presidents - received some level of bathos that made them human to readers (even as they didn't appear on-screen except as floating hats, waffles, or air bubbles). Save for donald trump: Even in the 1980s, his excessive greed and narcissism was on full display whenever he appeared in a Doonesbury story arc.

Compare Trudeau's character building to the likes of Bruce Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore, which never rose above caricature and attacked only one side of the political spectrum (liberals) with ire and excessive outrage. That strip essentially devolved into an Author Tract instead of any kind of running commentary. Whereas Trudeau aims for a punchline at the end of every strip, Tinsley often has no punchline, just punches.

Doonesbury itself is rarely in the papers anymore, as much as there are any newspapers still surviving. It's a question of how soon Trudeau will retire for good instead of the extended vacations he's been known to take. It may depend on whenever donald trump ends up physically in jail after all the appeals on his felony convictions are exhausted a few years from now, at which point Trudeau might put up a final Sunday strip of a large banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED."

We'll see.

In the meantime, Trudeau just keeps rolling with the hits.

from October 22, 2017
History does repeat, first as tragedy and then as farce...

The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

A Nation Divided By The Comfort of Right Wing Lies

As the impeachment proceedings into trump's scandalous behavior with Ukraine soldier forward, the likelihood of it ending in peace and with some national solace in justice served grows less.

Mostly because the Far Right of this nation will never believe the truth of it. Via David Frum at The Atlantic:

...Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack...

Nunes can complain about this story, but it has since been corroborated by the haul of text and other evidence uncovered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump lied about the deal again and again, on Twitter and from his own lips. For Nunes to suggest that Trump was somehow a victim of false reporting on the Trump Tower Moscow project is to endorse that lying.

Nunes knew that his intended audience would not bother to review the history as you and I just did. Nunes is not interested in talking with anyone who is interested in checking claims, or verifying statements. He is talking only with people locked into a closed and sealed knowledge system.

This closed knowledge system entraps millions of Americans in a universe of untruth, in which Trump is a victim and the allegations against him are “fake news.” The prisoners and victims of this system live in a dreamworld of lies. Yet it would not quite be accurate to describe them as uninformed. They are disinformed, and on a huge scale. The false-knowledge system supported by Nunes is closed and sealed, but also vast and intricate.

The Ukraine allegation against President Trump is simple and straightforward. It can all be summarized in a few sentences of plain English: Trump wanted dirty help for his 2020 reelection campaign. He sent messages demanding that dirty help to the Ukrainians directly on the phone and via his henchmen. He stalled military aid to extort the help. The Ukrainians nearly surrendered, until the whistle-blower report reached Congress on September 9 and knocked loose the aid on September 11.

Now watch Fox News or read the pro-Trump websites. Suddenly the story becomes very long and very complicated. It can hardly be summarized at all; it can only be alluded to indirectly by a litany of callout phrases: “Burisma.” “Hunter Biden.” “Where’s the whistle-blower?” “Vindman’s conflict of interests.” “Star chamber.” “#coup has started.” The intricate tale is animated by a burning rage of injustice against “fake news”—most of that “fake news” (like the story about Trump Tower Moscow) in fact true and corroborated...

The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.  

At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.

This system of communication tightly bonds in-group members. That bond, in turn, exerts tremendous power over American politics.

The price paid for this achievement is that the communications system lacks any means to convince nongroup members. How can you convince people when they cannot understand what on Earth you are talking about?

Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the others have fenced off conservative Americans from the rest of American society. Within that safe space, insiders hear only what is familiar and comforting. When those protected insiders step outside into the larger world, they find themselves completely unprepared for it. To those not immersed in the fantasy franchise, people like Devin Nunes sound like crazy people. Which in turn, of course, only drives them crazier...

Frum knows the world of which he speaks: Formerly a speechwriter for Dubya (infamously responsible for the Axis of Evil speech), he's since moved away from a Republican Party he can't even speak to anymore.

But it's not even with the upper echelons of the Republicans. Buzzfeed is reporting now how Facebook, a social app with millions plugged in, is inundated with fly-by-night pro-trump groups that form, spread false reports about the impeachment hearings, and close out before the company can close them down. Staying on just long enough to convince the MAGA crowds and confuse the rest.

The entire Republican Media Bubble is self-sustaining now. Holding the pundits and politicians accountable won't stop the GOP base from perpetuating their own bullshit.

The only thing the rest of us can do is vote the bastards out of power. Prevent them from causing more damage within our legal and political and economic systems.

It won't stop their bullshit or their hatred of fellow Americans. It might not even make us safer, because they've been riled up now to the point of violence.

But it's the only way to bring the United States back to some level of sanity.

Gods help us.

Blood on the Streets of Annapolis, Blood In the Newsroom (w/ Update)

Jesus.

At least five people were killed and several others were “gravely injured” in a shooting Thursday afternoon at the Capital Gazette in Anne Arundel County, authorities said.

A shooter is in custody, police said. Police would not name the suspect, but said he was a Maryland resident in his late 30s and had specifically targeted the Capital.

“This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” said Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf. “This person was prepared today to come in. He was prepared to shoot people...”

Phil Davis, a Capital Gazette crime reporter who was in the building at the time of the shooting, said multiple people were shot, as others — himself included — hid under their desks. He said there was a lone male gunman.

“Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees. Can’t say much more and don’t want to declare anyone dead, but it’s bad,” Davis wrote on Twitter as he waited to be interviewed by police.

“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload...”

This attack on a newspaper office is coming on the heels of certain Far Right wingnuts openly calling for fellow wingnuts "to start gunning journalists down on sight." It's coming after months of donald trump calling reporters "enemy of the people."

We are at a moment when every form of public discourse is tinged with violence, and anger, and frustration while civil liberties are getting trampled by an administration eager to kill off due process.

We are at a moment where every sign in this nation is that we are honest to God in a Civil War. Side vs. Side, divided not by state lines but by conflicting ideologies of Right vs. Wrong.

Human Decency versus Sadistic Brutality.

And the brutes are gunning for a body count.

This isn't about angry guys with guns anymore.

This is about radicalized terrorists - toxic masculinity males - with an agenda to make this nation theirs by the tools of violence as their means.

I would still call for everyone I know who wants to stand for the right things - Freedom, Honesty, Justice, Legal Immigration and the Greeting of New Americans, the Right to Choose, the Right to Gay Marry, the Right to be You - to keep standing, to march in protests that are scheduled this Saturday to raise alarm about the children still being held prisoner by our sadistic government. We cannot back down even in the face of violence.

Love can drive out Hate.

But for the Love of God, stay safe.

Update (6/29/18): It is turning out the gunman had a specific grievance against the Capital Gazette newspaper, so this is falling back onto the argument against Angry White Guys With Guns. Still, we are now in a situation where the first impulse about any physical attack on reporters is by someone triggered by the Far Right on trump's word. The Dread that we as a nation are in a civil war is still a valid concern...

Fake News Is Part of the Problem. But REAL News Still Looked The Other Way While the Crime of the Century Took Place

I went to University of Florida for my Journalism degree, and while it's a Top 10 program, it's not as prestigious as Columbia's.

I just note this because the Columbia Journalism Review came out with a devastating report on mainstream media's failures during the 2016 Elections:

We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself...

...A longer and more detailed report by the same researchers shows that by any reasonable metric—including Facebook or Twitter shares, but also referrals from other media sites, number of published stories, etc.—the media ecosystem remains dominated by conventional (and mostly left-of-center) sources such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, CNN, and Politico.

Given the attention these very same news outlets have lavished, post-election, on fake news shared via social media, it may come as a surprise that they themselves dominated social media traffic. While it may have been the case that the 20 most-shared fake news stories narrowly outperformed the 20 most-shared “real news” stories, the overall volume of stories produced by major newsrooms vastly outnumbers fake news.

According to the same report, “The Washington Post produced more than 50,000 stories over the 18-month period, while The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post each published more than 30,000 stories...” 

...(The research team) found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions...

In other words, the mainstream media - the Beltway pundits that dominate the political discourse - flipped the real world. They focused more on Hillary's "scandals" - which turned out to be nothingburgers, inflated to inflame the voters against her - than on her policy positions to where I guarantee the average voter didn't even know what her policies were. They focused on trump's "policies" - which was BUILD A WALL, Start a TRADE WAR with China, and Shut Down NATO - while ignoring trump's failures, financial scandals, and sexual assaults.

In short: Hillary got all the bad press, trump got all the good press.

Go fuck yourselves, mainstream media.

What we're seeing in hindsight - looking back at how the traditional press handled themselves between covering Hillary vs. trump - is growing evidence that media bias played a role.

It's also telling, as an aside, that a lot of the male media pundits who displayed that bias - Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and obviously most of the jerks at Fox Not-News - are turning out to be sexual harassers and misogynists.

They made it easier for trump - one of their own - to campaign against a woman who dared challenged their personal narratives of how women should be treated. Let's be honest: going back to 1992 when her husband Bill ran for President, there was more outrage aimed at HER than at Bill.

It makes me wonder what it will take for a woman candidate to get serious and respectful treatment from the Fourth Estate, ever. This is disgusting. And this is why we've got sexual predators in the highest levels of political office now.

Seriously, mainstream media, go fuck yourselves and die in a collective fire. We've got some wildfires consuming California right now that none of you are reporting on, that ought to do the trick.

That Lies Are Now the Currency of the Realm: Day Two of the Trump Era

This is just wrong:

What Kellyanne Conway said to defend Spicer is worse:

CONWAY: Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What... You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains...
TODD: Wait a minute. Alternative facts?
CONWAY: ...That there’s...
TODD: Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right...
CONWAY: Hey, Chuck, why... Hey Chuck...
TODD: ...Was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.

There are no alternate facts: A Fact is a piece of information as part of an objective reality. If you wanna be Randian about it, that means A is A. You can't go claiming A is B all because B fits your Narrative better.

There's a better word for "alternative facts" or "falsehoods". What my Deep South Grandma Kinzer used to call Good Ole Fashioned "LYING".

Trump and his Republican handlers have no respect for the media they seek to bully into submission. It's not a surprise that they're lying: What's shocking is how brazen they are about it.

Every aspect of journalistic standards and ethics are now facing their greatest challenges. Reporters and editors now have the responsibility to fact-check every WORD uttered by these liars and point them out as falsehoods every step of the way.

For the Record: Trump Lies Like a Rug

Submitted with one comment, from the Politifact website tracking Donald Trump's public statements as he campaigns:

When you put Trump's Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire numbers together, it adds up to 76 percent of his statements being lies. That's the comment I wanna point out: three-fourths of nearly every statement out of Trump's mouth cannot be trusted, cannot be accepted as factual or honest or reliable or good.

And the Politifact people give themselves a ton of wiggle room for politicians and public figures in terms of giving them some benefit of doubt. Trump is so brazen and consistent a liar that for their 2015 Lie of the Year award, they pretty much gave it to Trump for pretty much EVERYthing he said.

I know there's the perception that ALL politicians are liars. But perception doesn't always match the facts. By the same metrics I put Trump: Hillary Clinton lies 28 percent of the time (a little over a quarter), Mitt Romney tracked at 42 percent of the time, Obama at 26 percent of the time, and Bernie Sanders at 30 percent of the time (and the only one avoiding a Pants of Fire).

Trump is by far the biggest, most consistent liar on the political stage.

And yet he keeps getting his fanbase to buy his bullshit. He keeps getting the mainstream media to buy his bullshit: Even with most of them well aware he's a bullshitter.

What the hell does that say about this nation, that we don't hold liars like Trump accountable for the fraud they commit upon the voters? There may be First Amendment restrictions on our government from enforcing such fraud in public statements, but our journalism industry ought to set itself to higher standards and ethics.

The cable channels and newspapers and radio stations are under no obligation to cover Trump, or grant him such privileges as the near-constant - and FREE - coverage he gets for his daily bullshitting. To hell with ratings: where the hell is common sense that Trump is a liar and shouldn't be listened to?

They ought to start charging Trump $50,000 a minute whenever he tries to do a damn phone interview instead of showing up in-person. They ought to set up a bullshit billing system where he has to hand over $100,000 per falsehood to the channel's or paper's lawyers to cover any lawsuits for journalistic malpractice Trump will be costing them.

And why not? It's a business, after all. The channels and papers and radio stations have every right to raise revenues, especially to cover the costs of lies they're forced to shill.

The Failure Yet Again For Our Nation's Media Regarding Accuracy and Facts

As mentioned earlier today, Joe Biden decided not to put his hat in the ring to run for President on the Democratic ticket.

This despite the fact a lot of highly-paid mainstream media pundits from the Beltway (the Washington DC circle of power) were chatting up - with eager grins and happy feet - the FACT - based entirely on unnamed sources running rumor mills non-stop - that everybody was telling everybody else Biden was gonna run.

The most guilty party was Bill "Always Wrong" Kristol, who kept tweeting gems like this:

You might see my reply: "I don't feel any Joementum at all. You might have to get out of the car and push, Bill."

So why?  Why why why did the media elites keep getting this story - out of so many other stories they screw up - wrong?

1. The mainstream media wanted it to be true, rather than factual.

This is the primary sin.  The simplest explanation.  There are several reasons WHY they wanted it to be true, but it all comes down to this.

2. The mainstream media want political horse races because campaigns are easy to cover.

The give-and-take of politicians fighting each other for coveted seats of power - topped by the big chair of the Presidency - provide reporters and editors personal conflict, driving narrative, winners and losers.  There are reasons why we now have constant political campaigns even in off-years - one major reason is the massive cash-flow involved - and the media's desire to keep campaigns going and going and going is the other major reason.

Sober Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight nails that part:

A Biden run would be a great story for the media — it would get to sit back and watch the fisticuffs between Biden and Clinton, who is otherwise something of a dull, predictable story (“inevitability” is boring). That probably biases the media toward reporting on the few Democratic insiders who would have liked to see a Biden bid, and ignoring the large majority who were satisfied with Clinton.

The joker show that is the Republican field of Presidential candidates is chaotic and thus entertaining.  Without Biden in the race, the Democratic field is pretty much Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (Webb dropped out, and O'Malley and Chafee are polling below zero at this point).  Which brings us to the next point:

3. The media does not like trust Hillary and does not know how - or want - to cover Bernie.

Nearly every pro-Joe Biden reporter / pundit cheering Biden to enter the race just happened to be reporters and pundits who despise Hillary at a personal level.

This came in two ways.  You had one group of pundits who feared the possibility that Hillary would flame out somehow.  The fact that Hillary's list of enemies - not the ones she hates but the ones who hate her (from Limbaugh on down) - scared these pundits into fearing that Hillary would get hit with scandal during the campaign and hurt the Democrats' chances to keep the White House (and even win back part of Congress).  That group wanted Biden to run as insurance, to have a solid Democratic leader they trusted to be there up to November 2016.

You had a second group of pundits who hates her.  You know them as the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that's pretty much the whole Far Right media (pretty vast) and openly disdainful of anything Obama Clinton (which isn't much of a conspiracy nowadays).  They wanted Biden to run in order to hit Hillary and wound her during the primaries, so that way she would be bloodied and weak for the general election.  They wanted division within the Democratic campaign the way they are suffering the chaos of their own party's primary cycle.

And as for Bernie Sanders.  The mainstream media has him mostly in "out of sight out of mind" mode.  If they ever think of Bernie, the Left-leaning media views him as too Left and thus unelectable and the Right-leaning media views him as a Stalinist doombringer.  He brings too much of an ideological difference from Hillary that makes the Narrative too easy even for the media to cover.  They'd have preferred a similar-minded Centrist Dem like Biden as a mirror contrast to Hillary.

4. The mainstream media's prized "sources" and insiders did not have the facts, if these insiders even existed.  There's even the likelihood the Biden stories were just the media elites telling each other what they wanted to hear.  And these same media elites do not care if those sources or right or wrong.

Here we get to the nub of the problem I have with these media elites.  There is no accountability in Washington DC for ever being wrong.

It is easy for a pundit to tweet informally or write formally an article full of hearsay based on information passed on by a "reliable" confidant.  Given the nature of politics - and the sometimes sensitive information needed to stay secure within the halls of government - that pundit doesn't have to give a name to the source, and barely even a rank within the bureaucracy.  Just labeling that "source" a "senior advisor" or "high-ranking official" is all they need for cover.

With that power, that pundit can pretty much publish whatever they want within the foggy range of journalistic ethics.  As long as the pundit doesn't publish something demonstrably false, something libelous, or something criminal they're untouchable.  And their source - whoever that may be - remains untouchable as well.

In one regard, this is a necessary part of journalism - and good governance.  Tales of corruption or bad behavior by our elected officials need to be told, and due to the nature of political reprisals and even legal ramifications, those types of sources - whistleblowers - need all the protection they can get.

However, that journalistic cover is more and more abused by savvy politicians and their handlers who use that need for secrecy to spread rumor and questionable data.  More often than not, they tell stories "off the record" as a way of getting their version of the Narrative out there, and then use the media's telling to reinforce that Narrative even further.  The pundits either fail to recognize how they're getting used for that, or else fear the loss of access that would happen if they started fact-checking their "buddies": either way, the media elite lets it happen again and again.

It's a mutually self-indulgent relationship.  The politician leaking his/her false reports gets to shill to the public without getting caught: the pundits shilling these lies get to enjoy "being in the inner circle" of being in the know, and sell their exclusive "access to the powerful" to all outlets who will hire them and invite them to talk shows, even after a pattern of years proving those pundits are constantly ill-informed and incapable of doing an honest job.

There needs to be an ethical system of handling faulty, ill-informed, consistently false sources.  These reporters and pundits do not need to name who these sources are, but they do need to admit when those sources are wrong and above all these reporters and pundits need to STOP LISTENING TO BAD SOURCES.

At some point, you idiots in the Beltway media bubble need to get this through your epistemic closure.  You are being used.  You are getting lied to by self-serving bastards.  Just stop it.  Just stop it.  You don't seem to remember that old saying Scotty told us on Star Trek: "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me."  You don't even shame the unreliable sources when they are wrong, and you keep letting them fool you multiple times in a row.

There's supposed to be ethical standards in every profession.  Journalism should have ethical standards towards accuracy, attention to facts, and the necessity of informing the public to the best of your ability.  Right now, the Beltway elites are FAILING at all three standards.  Shame on you.

Brief Things about Jon Stewart and the Daily Show

I haven't written much about Jon Stewart, save for the occasional observation that The Daily Show was a more accurate news source than most other cable shows - not just Fox Not-News but also CNN and MSNBC paled in comparison - so this is kinda out of the blue for me writing about him just as this is his LAST DAY hosting The Daily Show after 16 years.  (I'm not about to live-blog the GOP debate tonight because this site's just not built for it, check with Wonkette please).

So, just to say this much:

1) For a stand-up comedian hosting a satire show that parodied the flaws of television media, Stewart took his job seriously.

2) When he took over the show, the tenor of the Daily Show went from a sadistic streak under Craig Kilborn - insulting half of everyone - to a sarcastic one that relied more on the Talking Head media elites getting caught failing basic logic.  Stewart's focus could still rely on crude and direct put-downs of specific targets - Glenn Beck in particular - but that was applied more as a scalpel cutting out cancerous growths instead of the sledgehammer style Kilborn employed.

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

This embedded clip above - if it plays correct - is perhaps Stewart's crowning moment of political satire, shredding Beck's performance style and pointing out the twisted failures at logic Beck tried to shill.

3) I probably would have missed going to college with him as he's eight years older than me, but if the parental units had decided on staying in Virginia Beach instead of moving to Florida, I could well have gone to William And Mary.  Oh well, it wouldn't do.

4) While he's leaving at arguably the most dire time our nation needs him - in the middle of the craziest, wingnuttiest Republican campaign for the White House since Wendell Wilkee - in a lot of ways I don't blame him.  Stewart's made it clear that all these years fighting the BS shilled by Fox Not-News has burned him out.

For all of Stewart's efforts to point out the flaws and insanity of the Far Right, nothing much ever changed.  Some of the messengers got mocked off the stage - Beck is now so fringe that barely anyone quotes him on Twitter now - but Ailes and his network simply reloaded with fresher faces and worse talent.  The Far Right media of which Fox is the major hub keeps chugging along with the same message - FEAR LIBRULS, FEAR THE OTHER - in a way that belittled Stewart's efforts to slap reality into the dialogue.

5) It's DEBATE TIME.  God Help Us All.  When it ends, Jon Stewart is gone.

Fox Not-News And the Reputation Of Bad Journalism

Everything I said about the failures of journalism during the Brian Williams exaggeration-and-lies fiasco remains true.  Especially as a follow-up revelation: that Bill O'Reilly, prime promoter of the Fox Not-News media charade, is himself caught in a web of falsehoods regarding his coverage of the Falklands War.  It's built up into a series of additional revelations that O'Reilly has fibbed and exaggerated his way through various news stories and major moments over the decades he's been paid as a journalist.

To wit:

• O'Reilly claimed to have witnessed deadly rioting - "bodies in the streets" - in Argentina during the Falklands War. While there were riots, none were lethal nor as bad as he claimed.  Adding to this fib has been O'Reilly's contention that being in Buenos Aries qualified him for being in "a war zone" even though the real war zone - the islands themselves - were hundreds of miles away.  There weren't any American reporters in that actual war zone during the firefights.
• O'Reilly claimed to have been at the house when a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories committed suicide in 1979.  The police reports from that incident never mentioned his being there (which would have been investigated, he would have been interviewed as a potential witness), and there's eyewitnesses and documentation O'Reilly was in Dallas that day (oh irony).
• A recent report that O'Reilly claimed to witness "nuns getting shot" in El Salvador during the violent civil war there in the early 1980s.  While nuns were killed, the only documented cases were in 1980, and O'Reilly didn't get there until 1981.

Making O'Reilly's struggles against the accusations more poetic is the reality that his channel has a poor reputation with truth-telling when it comes to reporting.  The channel repeatedly passes along unverified stories as factual, edits clips to distort statements by experts or political figures the channel openly despises, and places on-air people who are not experts on topics to discuss opinions instead of facts.

O'Reilly's not even the worst culprit: the bigger fact-denier has been Sean Hannity, who goes after ill-informed opinions that sync with his own rather than getting actual research and expert opinions.

Fox viewers tend to be the least-informed viewers among the three major cable news channels.  A lot of that is due to Fox News providing reports that tend to be false.  A lot of that is due to Fox News not really being news at all.

There's a push to get Fox Not-News to suspend O'Reilly for his exaggerations/outright lying about his professional career, but considering that cable channel thrives on exaggerations and lies, why expect them to punish him for it?  He's probably going to get a pay raise for this.

Addendum: there's a Washington Post article by Paul Waldman that simplifies the O'Reilly scandal in five easy-to-understand points.  Not only why O'Reilly lies...

So why not just say, “I may have mischaracterized things a few times” and move on? To understand why that’s impossible, you have to understand O’Reilly’s persona and the function he serves for his viewers. The central theme of The O’Reilly Factor is that (his) true America, represented by the elderly whites who make up his audience (the median age of his viewers is 72) is in an unending war with the forces of liberalism, secularism, and any number of other isms. Bill O’Reilly is a four-star general in that war, and the only way to win is to fight.

The allegedly liberal media are one of the key enemies in that war. You don’t negotiate with your enemies, you fight them. And so when O’Reilly is being criticized by the media, to admit that they might have a point would be to betray everything he stands for and that he has told his viewers night after night for the better part of two decades...

...but also why O'Reilly will never admit or acknowledge his lies...

Brian Williams got suspended from NBC News because his bosses feared that his tall tales had cost him credibility with his audience, which could lead that audience to go elsewhere for their news. O’Reilly and his boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, are not worried about damage to Bill O’Reilly’s credibility, or about his viewers deserting him. Their loyalty to him isn’t based on a spotless record of factual accuracy; it’s based on the fact that O’Reilly is a medium for their anger and resentments...

Welcome to the Fox Not-News War on Truth. They distort, you abide.

The Fall of Journalism As a Principled Profession

While there's a sizable amount of schadenfreude involved, there is a sadness to the scandal surrounding NBC News anchor Brian Williams' fall from grace.

A lot of it has to do with the part of the scandal few are talking about: the failure of ethical behavior among the media profession.  The lack of quality control within what is a billion-dollar industry, with regards to offering a product - news - that ought to be factual and trustworthy.

The fact that NBC News was warned as far back as 2003 - during the Iraq War - that Brian Williams was "embellishing" the story about his being under fire highlights the problems within an industry that barely polices its own and ignores warning signs in the pursuit of "the hot story" and the Eternal-Loving Almighty Salacious Scoop.

It's worse than wanting to be the next Woodward and Bernstein (who at least vetted their reporting efforts even as they pursued the "hot" story of Watergate, which wasn't that hot until another year into their investigating).  It's wanting to be the next Drudge (who lived, still lives, for the rumor and innuendo of political sniping), and working a story to look credible enough to anchor a nightly news channel.

The paradox of modern journalism is how "personality" and "celebrity" - being the cool guy of the moment - has to blend with the credibility of being an "accurate" and "fair/balanced" reporter of the facts.  In theory there shouldn't be any conflict between those two sides of journalism.  In practice, the desire for the fame (celebrity) keeps trumping the professional and ethical requirement of being a reporter (accuracy).

The pursuit of celebrity makes someone like Brian Williams work harder at the image - such as making himself look like a fearless, hard-nosed war-front reporter surviving the risks of a rocket attack on a helicopter convoy that didn't really happen to him - to where the need to keep telling the story grows, with the story growing with it.  Up until the point the Truth - not just the spiritual or relative truth, but the factual truth - turns out to be not what he was telling at all.  What's incredible here is that it took over 11 years for the accountability surrounding all this to catch up to him and to the news channel paying him $50 million for his celebrity and not his reporting...

I highlighted this point before: there is no accountability for being wrong.  Well, there may be some accountability now for Williams at least.  In most respects, Williams isn't getting punished for mishandling a news report, or issuing ill-informed opinions on political issues.  Williams is getting punished for aggrandizement, for promoting himself falsely as a courageous newsman therefore deserving of respect or trust.  While there's no evidence (yet) that Williams has committed the mortal sins of mis-reporting or lying - attempts to discredit his stories about seeing bodies floating during the Katrina disaster haven't gone anywhere yet - he's committed the mortal sin of Doubt.  Because we can't trust him when he talks about his personal actions, we can't trust him when he tries to tell us about the economy or a government scandal or even the weather.

As I wrote earlier, your plumber is better vetted than your news host.  This debacle with Williams is just one more proof of that.

What is happening now, the real scandal here, is the lack of accountability for the entire media/journalism profession.  The news channels that failed to vet their staff... the editors that failed to rein in egos and stick to the reports... fellow reporters and media celebrities who kept up with the embellishments and enabled Williams - and themselves - to keep selling each other as people they weren't...

From my years studying for journalism as a college degree, one of the things debated was the importance of retaining trust in the readership and the audience.  Whenever a story was mis-reported it was vital to get a correction printed or stated as soon as possible.  Journalists were liable in matters of defamation and libel if we got "facts" about people wrong.  Any irresponsible report from us could have hurt or killed people.  If we lost the audience's faith in the facts we try to present, they won't believe us the next time when the reporting was accurate and important.  These were serious matters.

Nowadays, I don't see much interest or focus in accuracy AND honesty.  The cable news channels bring on talking head guests who are not experts on the topics discussed.  There's a rush to report something scandalous only to find out hours later the reports were wrong... only for the reporters to either ignore the facts to report the rumor, or worse double down on the rumor to make the story even more scandalous.  The quality of reporting, of journalism, has slipped.  The quality of journalists has slipped as well.

There's been a push towards inserting the reporter into the narrative: a means to personalize a report, but fraught with the risks of bias and conjecture and the same embellishments that Brian Williams deployed.  The reporter becomes the story - in part or in full - rather than an impartial witness.  Losing that impartiality makes it harder for the reporter - and the media institution backing that reporter - to step back when the story proves false or wrong.  It's been one of the key reasons the Stephen Glass scandal was so huge... and it's been so horrifying how the journalism industry quickly ignored the lessons of that.

Journalism was, ought to be, an honorable profession: it's supposed to keep the public informed and forewarned.  It's supposed to check against the lies of those in power - the leaders of government or a corporation or a church or any institution threatened by corruption - with cold hard facts.  It's not like that now.  Because it lacks accountability, in a timely and just and appropriate manner.

We've got professions that require certification and has authority to punish misconduct.  Lawyers and doctors have ethics boards (and can get disbarred / lose their licenses), teachers have certification boards, plumbers have associations and unions (and government regs where they haven't been gutted yet).  Journalists need the same thing.  There ought to be standards, a code of behavior, something to ensure the public can keep the faith with us when it comes to the facts.

P.S. It does not help that the most trusted person reporting the news is a comedian anchoring a satirical news review show.  And it does not help that today Jon Stewart announced that he's leaving The Daily Show by year's end.  AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHhhhhhhhhh...

P.S.S. We will not get to hear Brian Williams rap to Ludacris after all.

There Is No Accountability For Being Wrong

I have to admit it was the headline that grabbed me.

Washington Is a Cesspool of Faux-Experts Who Do Bad Research.

As a librarian, this kinda pisses me off (per Conor, who's standing on the sidelines chewing the popcorn):

Drawing on nine years in the nation's capitol, Klein acknowledges one class of obstacles. "Washington is a cesspool of faux-experts who do bad research (or no research)," he explained, "but retain their standing by dint of affiliations, connections, or charisma." Sweet validation! I've often suspected that official Washington is populated by enough disingenuous, misinformation-spreading hucksters to fill an underground container of organic waste. No one has better standing to render this judgment than Klein, whose earnest, tireless embrace of deep-in-the-weeds wonkery is unsurpassed in his generation. He wouldn't assert a whole cesspool of intellectual waste product without having seen plenty of specific examples...

They're basically talking about the same set of experts who circle about the DC Beltway getting on the talk shows and getting into the think tank meetings.  They're the same idiots fear-mongering about foreign policy woes and the threats of inflation and wage increases would have against our austerity measures.  Klein and Conor are talking about the same idiots who get proven wrong - constantly, hi there Mr. Kristol - and yet even with a clear track record of failure keep getting invited back by the power elites and the media chains to sell even more faulty intel and questionable opinions.

Paul Krugman - Nobel Prize economist and someone who tends to do the research we librarians like - has been railing against the same faux-experts in the economic circles who keep obsessing over an inflationary threat that never comes: "The predicted surge in inflation has never arrived, but despite being wrong year after year, hardly any of the critics have admitted being wrong, or even changed their tune."

While Krugman worries about the effects that collective ignorance has on our economic recovery (or lack thereof), the thing he hints at but never openly states in that article is how those false predictors are allowed to keep shilling their bad advice. It's because those bad advisors have been in the Inner Circle of power in DC, and once you've been there your advice is always welcome, whether it's factual or not.

There is no accountability for being wrong.  The First Amendment as currently interpreted does not require fact-checkers and enforcement of sticking to the facts.  Whatever Fairness Doctrine we had as oversight for our media gave way to Anything Goes As Long As It's Not Libel (and even then libel is horribly under-enforced).  Journalism as a profession does not require much in the way of certification outside of a bachelors degree and even then it's not a requirement to get hired - just look at Sean Hannity, he doesn't even have a college degree in anything - and there's no association or bar or board of authority to govern how journalists or media outlets can behave.

Your plumber is better vetted than your TV news host.  And if your plumber does something wrong, he/she can lose his/her license.  If your TV news host does something wrong, he/she gets a freaking book deal.  If your TV news host keeps inviting a know-nothing or naysayer talking head who keeps getting the facts spectacularly wrong, that news host will get a contract extension because "it's good for ratings!"  /headdesk

As Raptavio notes on his Daily Kos blog:

With any semblance of real consequence for being so wrong (even willfully wrong) so consistently, there's little incentive for media outlets to pursue accuracy or integrity in their journalism -- and with the phenomenon of market share going to news outlets who present stories and analysis that reflect their audience's biases, this gives the media strong pecuniary disincentives to promote the values of fact-based reporting and instead to pander, irrespective of whether that pandering is grounded in reality.

Dear Beltway Media: stop interviewing (k)no(w)-nothing Senators and billionaire campaign blowhards, and start interviewing librarians and people who are, you know, ACTUAL EXPERTS on the topics being discussed.  You're not doing this nation any favors in your pursuit for ratings over BS.