That's Not the Best of Health, Y'all

I normally don't want to watch donald trump gaslighting / bloviating / spewing lies on national television, so I didn't watch this morning's Meet the Press to see this happen (via Laura Esposito at the Daily Beast):

The president, 79, furiously stormed off an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press after journalist Kristen Welker confronted him on his election conspiracies.

Trump began to sour on Welker after she pointed out in the interview that aired Sunday that there’s “no evidence” of rigged elections in the United States.

“Do you have evidence?” she asked after Trump slammed California’s elections as “rigged.”

The president then fired back: “All I have to do is look.”

When Welker replied: “That’s not evidence,” the interview took a turn.

“You’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN one-sided crooked networks. Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” Trump raged. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Confronted with questions he can't answer, confronted with even the simplest requirement that he present evidence of voter fraud - something he's NEVER been able to do since 2016 or 2020 - trump would rather attack his interviewer - especially when it's a woman - and later claim he "won" the argument even though he fled like a coward.

But that's not the thing that should be troubling today.

If you watch that video clip, as trump tries to get up to flee the scene, he cannot stand upright on his own. he has to put a hand on Welker's shoulder to maintain any balance, and as he shuffles away he's bent over like he's got back pain.

Add to this the reality that trump's had his third "annual" medical checkup in 13 months, trump keeps falling asleep at Oval Office gatherings to where Congress members are questioning Cabinet members about it, and growing rumors about CHF (congestive heart failure) and we're dealing with a clear constitutional crisis that nobody among the Republican ranks wants to deal with.

The moment where IT HAPPENS is coming closer by the minute.

Why Bother Your Evening?

There is a Presidential debate tonight on CNN and none of us are obligated to watch. 

Considering what happened during the previous election cycle - involving the same two candidates - when donald trump attempted to violate every norm and civility in the most crass manner, I'm not about to expect him to improve his behavior. Even with the supposed safeguards in place for this televised spectacle - the moderator can cut off microphones this time - we're going to get trump gaslighting - there are no fact-checkers at this debate - and bullying his way through another night of pandering towards his own base.

It's not helping any that trump's Republican allies and spokespeople have been running around the last week or so accusing President Biden of being drugged up on "smart" or "debate enhancement drugs" and demanding drug tests on Biden as a means to embarrass him (and provide cover for trump if he underwhelms/collapses during the event).

After all, if there were such a "performance enhancing drug" to improve your mental acuity, trump's own people would be injecting it into trump the last six months or so to hide the growing public signs that he's suffering dementia and cognitive failure.

This is all performative circus, designed to stir up fervor for the mainstream media outlets to cover the horserace nature of campaigns and fill their own narratives. The partisan landscape dividing the Republican and Democratic voting bases are already decided (since 2020!): the Undecided voters at this point tend to be tuned out anyway, and won't pay attention until the last month or so (hence the constant attempts at October Surprises to undermine each other).

At best, we're going to see Biden pitch to the media that he's built back a strong economy generating more jobs at better wages, and punching at trump for being a convicted felon. trump's narrative is going to be that things were better under him, that the border security is in shambles, and making none-too-subtle threats for his Proud Boy supporters to "prep for another uprising".

The only thing worth watching for is if trump physically collapses from his own inability to stand upright as his neurology short circuits.

Me? I'm trying to get into this Martha Wells' Murderbot book series. Wish me luck.

A Focal Point of Racism, Domestic Violence, Injustice, and History

Update: thanks again to Driftglass for sharing this at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. P.S. suck it trump, your Trial of the Century begins Monday!

News broke today on the passing of O.J. Simpson.

A sports celebrity from the early 1970s - a running back at a time when such players were icons - Simpson converted that fame into an acting career by the 1980s defined by his natural charisma. Right up until June 1994 when his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were found murdered at her place.

At that moment, the United States - indeed the world - was falling into a strange new territory of instant media craving for stories, alongside the collapse of the Cold War shifting historical trends in unknown directions. We'd just had CNN and cable news gaining acceptance through its coverage of the First Persian Gulf War where the U.S. pounded Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. We were getting more cable networks springing up filling niche interests including criminal justice and true crime scandals. Syndicated celebrity shows and daytime tabloid talk shows were filling the airwaves. We were just barely getting the Internet up to speed to fill in all the rumors and speculation among the masses.

It was also a time of massive racial upheaval, not just in the Los Angeles metro where the Brown Simpson and Goldman murders took place. The Rodney King police brutality trial two years earlier had shocked the nation when the jury acquitted four police officers - even with them caught on tape pummeling King to near-death - and the city of L.A. erupted into riots. The violence exposed a raw nerve, the racial divide of the United States re-emerging in a post-Civil Rights Era and reminding us just how embedded racism is in our nation's psyche.

All of these factors were in play as the media coverage went into hyperactive as OJ became a prime suspect in the murders, as the narrative consumed everyone's attention right up to the point where OJ tried to flee the police in a suicidal fugue. The Bronco Chase - broadcast live by helicopter reporters - entered memetic folklore.

I know. I saw it. I watched the madness on television as it happened, and I - like millions of others - couldn't look away. It became An Event: akin to the JFK assassination, the Moon Landing, Nixon's Resignation, the Challenger disaster, the Fall of the Berlin Wall. (It would echo in later events like the night Princess Diana died) History as it happened. 

With my background in journalism, I watched with a mixture of contempt, alarm, and bemusement as it all exploded into a "Trial Of the Century", more three-ring circus than an attempt to uphold justice for grisly murders. Everybody covered it: Even Doonesbury got into the act. It permeated every layer of our nation.

What the trial revealed were lessons our nation and our legal system never seemed to learn from. For all the evidence of Simpson's involvement in the deaths - the history of domestic violence towards Nicole that exposed a deeply jealous and violent man - Simpson was able to use his wealth to hire lawyers who knew how to game the system and cast doubt on forensics, and played his celebrity status to sway a jury. The acquittal revealed a nation divided by race where White communities were certain that OJ would be found guilty, and Black communities bought into the defense's argument that the LAPD - staffed with racist detectives - tampered with evidence in order to send "another Black man" to prison.

We're still coping with a legal system that still doesn't take domestic violence serious enough to protect women, and a legal system that still creates distrust of law enforcement every time an unarmed Black person gets gunned down or beaten up by cops.

I read a Vox article by Constance Grady that covers the impact of what the OJ Trial wrought:

The trial of the century was a lightning rod for sociopolitical commentary. Feminists argued that it was a matter of public record that Simpson had stalked and beaten his ex-wife, and that if law enforcement had taken the problem seriously and made the proper interventions, Brown would still be alive. Simpson’s lawyers argued that he was being unjustly targeted because the police could not stand to see a Black man be successful, and they wanted to tear him down. The argument was potent enough that support for Simpson fell strongly along racial lines. A Los Angeles Times poll found that Black people were more than four times more likely than white people to think Simpson was not guilty...

Simpson’s celebrity was, perhaps, able to protect him from a guilty sentence in criminal court. Yet the act of cashing in his social capital in such a way seems to have transformed fame into infamy. There was a kind of hole in the fabric of American culture where a hero used to be, and it was hard to know what stood in its place now. After the long run of trials, Simpson was no longer the kind of figure that rental car companies wanted promoting their product. He had lived off his reputation for a long time, and now that reputation had changed...

The story of O.J. Simpson has become an American morality tale, a myth. It is the story of how all our national sins converged into a single terrible crime. Even after the man at the center is gone, the sins persist...

Even with the acquittal, Simpson could not return to the celebrity life, too toxic for film/television and for the sports world that once feted him. The criminal trial led into a civil trial for wrongful death by the victims' families, and in that OJ was found liable, forcing him to sell whatever he could to pay the legal bills. It led to an infamous attempt to publish his side of the story If I Did It, an act that even his staunchest defenders flinched away from: It ended up under the editorial control of Goldman's parents who made sure the subtitle of the book read Confessions of the Killer.

In the meantime, the media circus that consumed the world back in 1994-95 heralded a new world dominated by immediate information. With the advent of cell phone cameras, the ability to record a moment - even a snapshot - as it happened and sending it across the globe became possible. Smartphones became news cameras on the front lines. The impact - no, the hype - of the OJ sensationalism seems so quaint now.

And speaking of Trials of the Century...

You're next, trump. Welcome to history as it happens.

Just the Facts Jack In This Age of trumpian Bull

One of the more frustrating things about The Darkest Timeline has been how trump would take to his Twitter account to post and retweet nonfactual statements, wild accusations, and straight-up lies.

However over the past week or so, trump has gone overboard pushing a discredited conspiracy theory about former Congresscritter-turned-MSNBC-talking-head Joe Scarborough, a story involving a staff worker who died at a district office back in 2001. It's gotten so bad that the woman's widower sent formal letters to Twitter and the press begging for the social media outfit to use its authority to delete the offending tweet(s).

The public outcry against trump's abuse of Twitter's code of conduct had been an ongoing protest ever since 2017 - no previous President Loser of the Popular Vote has been so vulgar towards the general population the way trump has - but this moment seemed to have crossed a line even for the notoriously lax Twitter bosses.

The next time trump went to Tweet an outrageous falsehood - about the legitimacy of vote-by-mail - Twitter took the extraordinary step of adding a footnote that basically accused the Tweet (and trump) of being wrong. Let's refer to Gilad Edelman at Wired for the rest:

What prompted Twitter to finally break the seal was a two-tweet tirade about the supposed dangers of expanding vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic...

Later that evening, Twitter added a note to the bottom of the tweet: a big exclamation mark and a message reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” read the bold heading. Beneath it came some bullet points on vote-by-mail, followed by a curated feed of tweets picking apart Trump’s various recent claims about it...

The Twitter spokesperson said that flagging Trump’s vote-by-mail tweet was the debut of a similar policy to protect “civic integrity” by correcting false information about voting or the census. Twitter didn’t say so, but it surely helped that this particular tweet contained one nugget of rock-solid, certifiably false information: the claim that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, ballots are going only to registered voters...

This is, for the most part, the first time trump has been contradicted in real-time pretty much to his face (nearly every other countering in the media has been indirectly through op-ed articles and pundit shows).

It's telling that Twitter still hasn't confronted trump on the personal attacks he's done on their service, which are offensive and wrong and deserve him getting his account suspended (AKA Twitter Jail). Still, any little bit helps... Because trump's response to getting punched back has been to lash out in full meltdown. Via Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair:

Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies the day after being fact-checked by Twitter. “Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” the president wrote in a post on Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Funny thing about the First Amendment, it's not on trump's side here:

The president, notes the Associated Press, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission,” and Trump’s call to expand regulation on such tech giants “appeared to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles on deregulation...”

Anything trump tries to do to punish Twitter will likely lead to lawsuits taking years to resolve, by which time trump could be out of office (and fleeing for a country without extradition).

The facts, obviously, aren't going to slow trump down on this. he's threatening to issue an Executive Order (remember when Republicans attacked Obama for his EOs?) to compel Twitter and other social media outlets - Facebook and YouTube, both services facing increasing pressure to police their websites for disinformation over COVID-19 and other conspiracy nutcase theories - to bend to his will. trump doesn't have the legal standing but he has the ego of the bully to make life harder for the companies attempting to curtail his - and his cronies' - ongoing efforts to gaslight the world.

But the facts should matter. And these social media sites have an obligation, not only to the First Amendment but also to the common interest of properly informing the public. Forcing trump to confront his falsehoods in real-time, cutting off the Russian bots trying to overwhelm our attention with disinfo, and making sure Americans have the correct facts ought to be their agenda here on out.

Because as we've seen with three years of trump's gaslighting, lies and disinformation kills.

In Sadder News, I Did Not Receive Even a Nomination in the Fake News Awards

It turns out that trump and his people did not look to bloggers for their "fake news" documenting trump's many lies, failures, and stumbles.

Which is a damn shame. I'm sure I would have received a nomination for "Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Shitgibbon In a Long-Form Blog Entry".

Just think of all the coverage and attention that nomination would have garnered me. I would have at least gotten three or four more people buying my underwhelming Surviving the Age of Obstruction book off of Amazon or BN.com.

I'm just gonna have to go over to the corner here and cry my out, hoping beyond hope that more people talk their libraries at least into buying my books.

Insert tears here. (Wailing and gnashing of teeth)

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.

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.

I Feel Like Bragging That I Got To This First (w/ Update)

So there's a kerfuffle over this past weekend when the Boston Globe decided to take Donald Trump at his word and projected what it would like if Trump became President:

It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it...

If you can't read the print or can't enlarge the image, click for the PDF version here.

And lemme just note how they have Trump's administration falling apart by April 2017:

• The headline points out Trump's deportation of illegal immigrants has gotten to the point of placing multiple cities under curfew with riots everywhere.
• Markets are tanking as Trump's tariff war with Chinese trade has panicked investors and has set the stage for a deep global recession. It did not help that Trump named a new pet dog after the Chinese President's wife.
• Trump's planned border wall hits a snag because the banks are balking at his short-term loans to pay for it.
• Soldiers are balking at orders to kill the families of ISIL members (as that sort of thing is an honest-to-God war crime).
• Trump's promise to hit back at the media for their "hit pieces" on him is leading to an aggressive libel law that would violate everything we know about First Amendment free speech rights.
• Trump is on a short list for the Nobel Peace Prize because he achieved the impossible of uniting the entire Arab world against him for his anti-Muslim trash talk.

And those are just the major articles. There's sillier side notes about how Trump's influence on everything else in government is making things bizarre/weird/self-destructive, but you get the idea.

Thing is, I dunno why everyone's making a big deal out of the Boston Globe writing up this satirical take on Trump's own outlandish campaign promises and how such promises would be actively implemented in the Real World.

'Cause I've already been here and done that, months ago:

...Okay, deep breaths. Try to remember this is just a game, we're just trying to figure out how this could play out. It hasn't really happened. We're just thinking it. Just in case. Don't Panic. Settle. Breathe... breathe... Okay, you good? Okay.

So, what exactly would we expect to get on Day One of a Trump administration?

Election Night is November 8.

We'll get an immediate response by November 9th before Trump even gets into the Oval Office. Because I get the feeling Mexico is going to recall their ambassador and kick ours out of their country as soon as humanly possible...

...Day One itself is probably going to look like this: Trump issues an Executive Order suspending ObamaCare until Congress acts on "repealing and replacing" it. Given that Congress under Republicans - who likely will remain in power in this scenario - so far has a repeal in mind but nothing to replace it, that will likely mean millions on Medicaid coverage and hundreds of thousands on federal-level exchanges are sh-t out of health care luck.

Day One will also include Trump introducing a Republican Cabinet made of up of some of the nastier remnants of the Bush the Lesser administration - neocons in foreign policy, tax-cutters and deregulators in domestic policy - still eager to re-establish the bad habits and disasters of 2001-2009 they never answered for...

Granted, I never delved into the economic catastrophe that will take place when Trump tries a trade war against China, but otherwise I was predicting a lot of the same disasters that the Globe is predicting.

Man, I'm feeling like I'm five steps ahead of everyone here. I'd been wondering about the possibility of a contested GOP convention - and how screwed the Republicans were no matter what - well before anyone else had. I'd been thinking about the importance of the women's vote years before it's turning into a serious problem for the Republicans now. I'd been right about Rubio tanking in spite of all the Beltway cheerleading, and how the Establishment can't see how they've lost their own voting base to outrage and fear.

To quote the Bard: I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

You all are playing checkers while I'm breaking out the chessboard.

Peace out.

And for the Love of God DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Update 8/21/16: Well, hell. Someone did beat me to this. Jon Lovett in the Atlantic posted this a year ago well before I did a What If? proposal. He wins.

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.

When Beltway Media Is Out of the Loop

There is something tangible to the "what the hell happened" response of the mainstream media this week, all involving the combined fascination and fear the media elites have with Teh Trumpster.

After the Republican leaders and most of the Washington DC power circles attacked Trump for going after one of their beloved own - Senator McCain - the prognosticators and experts and talking heads were crowing that Trump had finally gone too far, had insulted a hero POW, was likely to lose supporters from the vast number of Vietnam War vets and other vets who leaned Republicans.

Instead, Trump's polling numbers have stayed well in the 20 percentile - give or take a few points - and remains in a clear lead among the Republican primary candidates.  We're all - guilty party here alongside the Beltway media elites - talking Trump (even as we're all in the need for bathing in holy water once we walk away from the blog writing).

The media probably couldn't understand why, although I kinda figured Trump wasn't going to get hurt at all by going after McCain.  Because he wasn't so much going after John McCain the Vietnam Navy pilot, he was going after John McCain the Media Darling.

Look, back in the day before the Republican Party got to be too insane even for me, I backed McCain, I liked him as a candidate in 2000 mostly because he wasn't Dubya (by that time my ire for the Bush clan due to Jeb was greater than anything else) and partly because he showed bipartisan efforts as a Senator.  Problem with him now is, I swear McCain gets invited to Sunday talk shows every week.  He's become a go-to interview subject for the mainstay political roundtables to where he's over-saturated the market.  They - the media elite - hang on his every word even when he's not the real guy they ought to be interviewing on that given topic.  They act like he really won the Presidency in 2008 or something.  It's gotten annoying, even to a former fanboy like me who will on occasion forgive McCain for the sad-but-unavoidable pandering he did to win the GOP nomination back then (I do, in fact, absolve him of making the horrific move of picking Palin for the Veep spot: he wanted someone the party wouldn't take, so he went either out of spite or frustration for a complete unknown whose governing record wasn't deep enough to reveal how much of a loon she was.  I blame a poor vetting system and a party obsessed with image over competency...).  Anyhoo.

THAT is the guy - the Interview All-Hours-Of-The-Day McCain - Trump was really targeting: Trump was pointing out how McCain's reputation was vastly inflated all because of his years in a POW camp.  And most of the Trump fanbase knew that.  A good amount of the Republican voting base knew that: it may surprise the media elites to know that McCain is not all that popular to the Tea Party and Far Right crowds.

It's amazing how an entire profession - media people, whose backgrounds are supposed to be in journalism and are supposed to handle information and data on a regular basis - can be so clueless, out-of-touch, and misinformed about a lot of things about their own nation, their own audiences.

I'm amazed but not surprised.  I've known for over a decade that the higher-end of the media power structure - the national media, the cable and nightly newspeople - have been disconnected from the general public ever since the Lewinsky scandal.  How the talking heads were all predicting doom for Bill Clinton, that he had to resign for having betrayed everyone (mostly themselves), the moral indignity of it all (swoon)...  Only to find a majority of Americans still liked Slick Willie, that they backed him during the Republicans' failed effort to impeach, and that all of their outrage had been mocked or ignored.

The disconnect is still there, and it's gotten worse.  Per David Atkins at Washington Monthly:

The interesting question is why there is such a disconnect between the establishment pundit class and average American voters.  ...The professional political class lives in same socially rarefied air as America’s business...elites, culturally and economically separated by a widening gulf of inequality and disconnection that prevents them from grasping at an emotional, fundamental level the challenges faced by normal families...

The low-end journalists, the ones working local markets and on papers and magazines (the ones not yet dying out) may still earn within the real middle-class range (between 40k to 70k yearly) and may well remain connected to the real world.  However, once you get to the cable channel level, the nightly news level, the talking head level, those are people pulling down the seven-figure incomes and book deals of the upper classes.  Even the ones still "thinking" themselves as liberals/left-leaning are going to find themselves unable to fathom what a family living under $10 an hour has to do to survive.

The professional political class tends to believe that there is a mythical American “centrist/moderate” voter who loves John McCain and Joe Lieberman because they are serious, respectable moderates who “get things done...”

Note: we don't.

...The fact that the centrist voter is largely a myth doesn’t dawn on them, because they spend more time misreading poll results than they do actually talking to average voters. (Hint: lumping progressive and conservative voters who call themselves “independent” together into a single voting bloc and then marveling at their seemingly moderate collective policy choices isn’t terribly smart statistical analysis.) In a Washington DC where John McCain is a permanent fixture of the talk show circuit, McCain is the “maverick” and bellwether of serious opinion. In the real world, John McCain is just another extremist Republican to Democrats, and a despised Establishmentarian to the Republican base.

The media elites don't grok that McCain might not get all the fans agiggling because they meet with him so often and interact with his circle of friends to where they are blind to how others outside that circle would view him.  Epistemic closure at its simplest.

And by the by, moderate voters DO exist, we just don't sit there going Ooh and Ahh at everything you all say on the cable shows and Sunday morning gush-fests.

In the elite pundit world, voters are fairly happy with American society generally but unhappy with Washington specifically because of an “extremist” environment where no one cooperates to pass respectable centrist legislation. But in the real world, voters understand that the middle class is coming apart at the seams—which leads more knowledgeable left-leaning voters to support economic populist approaches to reduce inequality and hold corporations accountable, and that leads less educated, more racist and reactionary conservative voters to try to restrict immigration from allowing others to take “their” jobs...

To the media elites, those views both Left and Right are considered 'extremes' mostly because they can't see themselves being on the wrong side of income inequality (it's not their fault they're rich, after all) that's driving those views in the first place.  It's far easier to sit in their hermetically-sealed studios sharing coffee and jokes with "experts" like themselves and joke that it's all "Washington's fault" without realizing their part of that Washington culture - hi, Morning Joe! - making it a mess.

Easier for them to sit on the sidelines wondering where all the good times under Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill went than it is to empathize with the growing evidence that the United States has fallen apart and needs serious reforms and fixes - to our tax codes, to our highway budgets, to our immigration system, to our drug war and incarceration policies, to our racial conflicts and growing body count - that just can't be bothered with because they would involve messy disagreements among their own.

I said it before: it's not that we need term limits on our elected leaders, we need term limits on the Talking Heads dominating the cable news shows.  We need to slap some journalistic sense - and journalistic ethical standards - into these vapid chatterers, and remind them there's a real world outside the Green Rooms.

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.

The Rump Parliament of Media

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!  - Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament

In the aftermath of this 2012 election, one of the most obvious results of last night was how the conservative columnists and media darlings sitting at the head of the American political commentary were so utterly and completely wrong about how the election was going to play out.

To quote Conor:

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed...

Each of those talking heads/columnists have been publicly exposed for putting personal viewpoints ahead of the facts and sticking to fantasy of their narrative - they are more invested in a close horse-race in order to keep ratings high - rather than doing the hard work of actual journalism - which would have involved research, genuine analysis, and more than likely direct interviewing of key people which in this case would have been a decent sampling of Honest-to-God voters.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that these media types - isolated in their offices, traveling in hermetically-sealed limos, chatting with each other in closed studios - are truly in a bubble of their own making.  They can't perceive the world outside that bubble and think that Real America - some idealized majority among us 300 million -  is just like them: pining for the era when America saved everyone during the Cold War, our Dollar was golden and Reagan their God.  Just look at Peggy Noonan's insistence that she could see the Real America, simply because she saw so many yard signs for Romney as she rode down the streets of Florida... without realizing that a low-staffed Romney ground game had little else to do BUT put yard signs everywhere they could.  Or that Obama yard signs kept getting stolen by spiteful Romney supporters.

This shouldn't be too surprising when the Republican leadership during the Bush the Lesser years embraced the idea that their belief, and acting on that belief, would force the Real World to bend to their will.  Again to Conor:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

Each of the people named by Friedersdorf - including Rush Limbaugh, who wasn't named but is part of the same problem - are now conservative columnists and radio hosts who came of age in the shadow of Reagan.  None of them seem to grasp that it's not 1985 anymore.  It's been 30 years since the heyday of Saint Ronnie's regime and yet the likes of George Will and Noonan and seem to think that most of America's problems can be solved the same way (Unlikely: the problems we have now stem from what happened in 1985.) and with the same leadership (A solid conservative manly, religious, and devoted to deregulated economics).  These columnists and permanent guests on the talk show circuits have a problem accepting the slight possibility that a non-Republican could lead this nation: These are the same people who had problems accepting Bill Clinton, focusing more on his flaws than his skills, and it's only 10 years after he left that they're finally grokking why a majority of Americans still think well of Clinton and his presidency.

Their failure this weekend to stick to the facts, the whole-hearted way they gleefully predicted a Romney landslide as though he would be yet another Return to Reagan-ism, brings to the fore just how out-of-touch these self-appointed judges of Real America really are. This is the breaking point of "Epistemic Closure", the groupthink of people who haven't the need to think for more than 30 years...

I'm with Ta-Nehisi here: time to fire the pundits.  We don't need a term limit for elected officials, we can just vote them out if needed.  No, it's time to retire some of these self-indulgent out-of-touch media elites who have sat too long in the television studios (here now to James Fallows):

Remember, these people's claim to fame -- especially in the case of (in their respective primes) Barone, Morris, and Rove -- is that they know something special about politics. If they are putting their names behind these predictions, presumably they would like us to take them seriously. We'll see what happens in the next day or two: If they are right, all appropriate credit. But if they are not, this should be remembered, rather than just blown off. And similarly, if the "quants" who are unanimously predictable a sizable Obama win prove to be wrong, they should be made to explain.

They should be fired.  They should resign if they have any true perspective on the world around them.  But ah, the temptations of those six-figure speaking fees and seven-figure book deals...

Policy of Truth Is Very Much Needed In The U.S.

Lane Wallace, a contributor to The Atlantic, had a recent piece on lying in the media.  The article starts off with the revelation that the Canadian law books has a provision that "A Licensee (media outlet) shall not broadcast ... d) false or misleading news".  There was a recent effort to revise that provision when a Far Right tabloid sought to begin a new news channel "to challenge the mainstream media" which around here sounds like they were trying to start their own Fox-Not-News channel up there.

Wallace's article then considers the impact of if the United States could or would consider such a law here (some snippage):

But the question remains ... why don't we have a similar requirement here in the U.S.? Traditionally, both broadcast radio and television and cable television stations have been subject to regulation, including content regulation, by the FCC. Although that regulation originated from the fact that airwaves were extremely limited, and not accessible to everyone, the regulation continued even after the birth and expansion of cable television, because courts recognized that television and radio are "uniquely pervasive" in people's lives, in a way print media are not... why can't we have a restriction on broadcasting (or cablecasting) false or misleading news?

One reason is probably the same reason the Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. It's laughable now, with the explosion of narrow-interest fringe websites and narrow-audience, right-wing and left-wing cable shows on Fox News and MSNBC, but in the deregulation atmosphere of the 1980s, the FCC's rationale for getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was twofold: first, that the Fairness Doctrine inhibited the broadcasters' right to free speech, and second, that the free market was a better regulator of news content on television than the government. Specifically, the FCC said that individual media outlets would compete with each other for viewers, and that competition would necessarily involve establishing the accuracy, credibility, reliability and thoroughness of each story ... and that over time, the public would weed out new providers that proved to be inaccurate, unreliable, one-sided, or incredible.

One wonders, really, if the FCC had ever studied human behavior or the desire of people to have their individual points of view validated. Far from "weeding out" providers of one-sided, or even incredible information, we now revel in... a selection of news outlets that never ever challenge our particular points of view.

Contrary to the FCC's theory, our particular public seems to reward, rather than punish, outrageous or one-sided news providers. And while that may make each of us feel nice and righteous as we pick and choose our news broadcasters and commentators, one would be hard-pressed to argue that it enhances the quality of our public--or even our personal--discourse.  Especially given the questionable "truth" of many of the statements or inferences made on those highly targeted outlets. In theory, we could all fact-check everything we hear on the TV or radio, of course. But few people have the time to do that, even if they had the contacts or resources...

...Think about it. We prohibit people from lying in court, because the consequences of those lies are serious. That's a form of censorship of free speech, but one we accept quite willingly. And while the consequences of what we hear on television and radio are not as instantly severe as in a court case, one could argue that the damage widely-disseminated false information does to the goal of a well-informed public and a working, thriving democracy is significant, as well. What's more, if we really thought everyone had the right to say whatever they wanted, regardless of truth or consequences, we wouldn't prohibit anyone from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater that wasn't actually on fire. We wouldn't have slander or libel laws. We wouldn't have laws about hate speech. And we'd allow broadcasters and cablecasters to air all words and all images, no matter how indecent, at all times. 

Ah. But what if a broadcaster or cablecaster didn't know the information was false? I suppose you could prohibit only knowingly airing false or misleading information. But on the other hand, if a station were at risk for sanction or a license revocation for getting it wrong (even if the FCC rarely enforced the measure), it might motivate reporters and anchors to do a bit more fact checking--and even, perhaps, a bit more research into alternative viewpoints--before seizing on and running with a hot or juicy scoop or angle. 

It's odd, really, that the idea of requiring news broadcasters to be fundamentally honest about the information they project across the nation and into our homes sounds radical. Surely we wouldn't argue that we want to be lied to and misled, would we...?

This is what I wrote in a comment field to Wallace's article.

We make Holocaust denial a criminal offense because it is fraud: historical fraud as well as financial fraud (how much money do those guys make from their followers buying up their books and t-shirts?). We're not making the deniers martyrs: we're identifying them as the criminals they are.

Hate speech is also made up of "false and misleading news." And Hate speech has a tendency to lead into violent action. So we regulate and criminalize Hate speech as well.

Just look at the "debate" over health care. There have been lies aplenty by those opposed to the recent reform act ("Death panels" above all). Check the link to PolitiFact: http://www.politifact.com/trut...

Because of the "false and misleading news" about the Health Care Reform efforts, a majority of Americans are mis-informed about the program, don't know that some of the benefits are available now for use, and a sizable number already believe (WRONGLY) that the Health Care bill signed by Obama is already gone. This the damage lying does through the media and through our elected leaders. What the First Amendment defends - the open marketplace of ideas - cannot operate properly when that marketplace of ideas is swamped by falsehoods and frauds.

Holding our media and our elected officials accountable to the truth - Truth Based On Facts, Not Opinion, And Certainly Not On Lies - should go a long way towards cleaning up the mess we are in now.

I've been arguing on this blog for some time that we need a revision of the law - even in the Constitution itself - to spell out once and for all that Lying (or any other form of falsehood) Is Not Protected Speech.  You may get argument about censorship, about the "thought police", stuff like that.  But lies have no place in a nation that's supposed to be based on Truth Justice and the American Way.

Breitbart Delendus Est.

Oh, One More Thing, 2010 Year End Thingee

Why our nation is screwed, Evidence #4,718.  The media does not have any accountability for their partisan bullshit.  From Conor Friedersdorf, covering for Sully:

There's a guy named Juan Carlos Vera. He worked at an ACORN office in San Diego, California. One day, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles walked in with a hidden video camera, and pretended to be a pimp and prostitute. They asked for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border so that they could work in a brothel. Confronted with what appeared to be a sex trafficking plot, you'd hope that someone would play along, get as much information as possible, and call the police. And guess what? That's exactly what Mr. Vera did! Unbeknownst to O'Keefe or Giles, he called his cousin, a police officer, shortly after they left his office.
Perhaps you know what happened next. Having cut his teeth editing The Drudge Report and its notoriously misleading headlines, Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart published the ACORN videos, which fooled me at the time – I praised them, and even encouraged Breitbart to pressure attorneys general into investigating the organization. I've never felt like such a fool. Some of the ACORN tapes reflect very badly on that organization, but taken as a whole, they are misleading in a lot of ways...
After publishing videos of Vera that made him look like a sex trafficker and costing the man his job, did Breitbart explain how the mistake happened, apologize and correct the record? Did he alert his readers to the truth? Having expressed outrage at the media on countless occasions for trafficking in serious accusations that weren't grounded in facts, did he behave better after realizing that he'd done exactly the same thing?
Nope. As far as I know, neither an apology nor a correction has ever appeared. The vast majority of his readership remains misinformed. The San Diego videos remain posted at Big Government, misleading as ever. I've attempted to get Breitbart and O'Keefe to address this. No luck...

Brietbart Delendus Est.

Breitbart Delendus Est

What Andrew Breitbart did wrong:

1) He either edited - or received it already edited - a video of Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP convention discussing her evolving beliefs on race, in which Sherrod admitted that 24 years ago as a state-level agricultural employee in Georgia she wasn't helping a White farming family as much as she would for a Black family.  The video clip that Breitbart shows on his website (I refuse to link to him) ends rather abruptly, suggesting there was more to what she said.  And there was...

2) Rather than present the whole of Sherrod's speech or dig any deeper, Breitbart immediately presents the video clip on his website.  To describe the video clip, Breitbart claims "...Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer. Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement."  Breitbart essentially claims Sherrod is a racist, which can be a defaming and possibly libelous thing to write.

3) Breitbart fails to conduct any pre-posting research or any discernible follow-up, for example doing any work to find the white farming family that Sherrod supposedly discriminated (it's up to other reporters and media outlets to find the Spooners).  If he did any research like that, he doesn't demonstrate it on his website on his own initiative.  For example when other news outlets uncover the full video clip of Sherrod's speech, only then does Breitbart link it on his site.

And why did Breitbart do wrong?

Because Sherrod had more to her tale, and Breitbart avoided or ignored it.

If Breitbart had done his research, or found a full video of Sherrod's speech, he'd have heard the rest of it where Sherrod gains insight, rejects her hardened attitudes towards whites, goes out of her way to work harder to save that White family's farm, and ends up befriending them.  In other words, Sherrod proves she's not a racist (to wit, "It's not about Black or White, it's about being poor"), and openly called on others to think the same.

Linkage to Glenn Greenwald about why Sherrod is the heroine of the month.  Additional linkage to Greenwald letters where he thinks (FINALLY I might add.  I say this because I'd emailed him earlier about OTHER times that innocent people got slimed by FOX News and their ilk) that Sherrod has an actionable case against Breitbart and FOX News.

Personally, as a Journalism college graduate (Bachelors, University of Florida) I sincerely believed Breitbart committed an act of libel.  He posted with malicious intent (calling Sherrod a racist), he posted using incorrect and deceitful materials (the edited video clip), he posted without having done any deeper research into the matter (the thing I would have done: find the white farmers who would have been discriminated against and getting their side of the story.  It's called The Human Element and it gets your readers/viewers' attention a lot quicker).  Worse of all: Breitbart cannot claim a defense against libel because Breitbart WAS NOT TELLING THE TRUTH (he commits Lie By Omission by either editing Sherrod's tale or using an edit given to him.  Given Breitbart's track record, I have every reason to believe he made the edit, and you're going to have to prove me otherwise).

I hope to God Sherrod's talking to a lawyer about going after Breitbart and FOX News (who took Breitbart's story and ran with it).  It has been too damn long that any news media outlet has been held accountable like this.  It has been especially a long time for FOX News to answer for their many journalistic sins.

And until he does go away, either by explusion from an embarrassed conservative media corps or by lawsuit, this is all I have to say about Breitbart from now on.

Breitbart Delendus Est.