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Worthless Media
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Aug 21, 2019
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: politicus usa, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
*‘Was Ivanka not available?’ Internet ridicules ‘dweeb’ Sean Spicer’s new gig on ‘Dancing With the Stars’
*‘Was Goebbels Unavailable?’:ABC blasted for ‘normalizing Fascism’ by putting Sean Spicer on ‘Dancing With the Stars’
*MSNBC conservative smears Dem congresswomen: Steve King is a ‘Republican version of the Squad’
Arthur Brooks, former president of the American Enterprise Institute, made the remarks during a panel discussion about King’s controversial comments about rape and incest.
*Public television to bring back racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semite Pat Buchanan as show panelist
The man even Donald Trump found too hateful will be a regular panelist on the revived McLaughlin Group.
Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias
Mainstream media is shocked at Sanders' suggestion that ownership influences coverage. I can tell you it's true
JEFF COHEN - Salon
AUGUST 16, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
Mainstream journalists are having a ridiculous hissy fit over Sen. Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that there may be a connection between the owner of a news outlet and the content or biases of that outlet’s coverage.
If Sanders had suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News impacts its coverage, few would argue with him. But Sanders referred to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post — a corporate centrist outlet. And the senator, an Amazon critic, complained that the newspaper “doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.”
Immediately, the Post’s top editor denounced Sanders’ “conspiracy theory” – claiming his newsroom operates “with full independence.” A Post columnist tweeted that she’d never “heard a hint of Jeff Bezos interfering.”
Are they deluding themselves? Or sincerely clueless?
I worked in and around mainstream TV news for years, including at corporate centrist outlets CNN and MSNBC. Unlike at Fox News (where I’d also been a paid contributor), there’s almost never a memo or direct order from top management to cover or not cover certain stories or viewpoints.
But here's the sad reality: There doesn’t have to be a memo from the owner to achieve the homogeneity of coverage at “centrist” outlets that media watchdog groups like FAIR (which I founded) have documented in study after study over the decades.
It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.
And then ask yourself why someone like Noam Chomsky can be quoted regularly in the biggest mainstream outlets abroad, but almost never in mass media in his own country — even though he mostly analyzes the policies of his own country’s government.
Bernie Sanders is one of the world’s most effective critics of Jeff Bezos and the fact that Amazon paid no federal income tax last year. And the Bezos-owned newspaper has exhibited an unrelenting bias against Sanders in recent years — perhaps most acutely in March 2016, when FAIR analyst Adam Johnson famously wrote an article that quickly went viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.” Among the Post's headlines during that period: “Five Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate,” followed an hour later by “Bernie Sanders’s Two Big Lies About the Global Economy,” followed a few hours later by “Even Bernie Sanders Can Beat Donald Trump.”
The day after this anti-Bernie barrage, which included a half-dozen articles on how badly he’d performed in the Michigan Democratic primary debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders shocked the Post and the rest of the political establishment by defeating Clinton in Michigan’s primary.
If you still want to believe there’s no connection between corporate media ownership and content, join me in a mental exercise: Imagine how quickly heads would roll at the Post in the fantastical event that it somehow produced even three negative stories about owner Jeff Bezos in a few hours. (Needless to say, there’s much to critically report about Bezos, including Amazon’s tax avoidance, labor exploitation, taxpayer subsidies and CIA contracts.)
I said above that there’s “almost never a memo or order from top management” to newsroom journalists. In normal times, the media system works smoothly without top-down directives. But in times of crisis, such as during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — when I was a senior producer of MSNBC’s primetime Phil Donahue show — there may well be orders and memos.
As the invasion neared, top management at MSNBC/NBC News ordered us to bias our panel discussions. If we booked one guest who was antiwar on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer proposed booking Michael Moore, she was told that three right-wingers would be required for balance. (I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t have accommodated the 28 right-wingers we might have needed for balance.)
During that period, we were told by MSNBC brass that invasion opponent Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general, should not appear on the channel. Apparently, some sort of blacklist.
When the Donahue show was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion, internal memos that had circulated among top NBC News executives actually leaked. (God bless whistleblowers!) One memo said that Phil Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The memo described a dreaded scenario in which the Donahue show would become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
NBC’s solution? Pull the plug.
My point is a simple one: Our corporate-owned media system too often functions as a corporate-friendly propaganda system, and it operates smoothly. It typically operates without orders from the owner or top management, and without firings for blatantly political reasons.
At MSNBC in those months, we were ordered to bias our content. Memos were written. I don’t know that orders were given in all the other big TV newsrooms. Yet, the content was amazingly homogeneous.
How else do you explain this finding from FAIR? In the two weeks surrounding Secretary of State Colin Powell’s inaccurate, pro-invasion presentation to the UN in February 2003, there were 393 on-camera sources discussing Iraq on the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. Only three of them represented the antiwar movement. That’s less than 1 percent of the total.
If Sanders had suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News impacts its coverage, few would argue with him. But Sanders referred to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post — a corporate centrist outlet. And the senator, an Amazon critic, complained that the newspaper “doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.”
Immediately, the Post’s top editor denounced Sanders’ “conspiracy theory” – claiming his newsroom operates “with full independence.” A Post columnist tweeted that she’d never “heard a hint of Jeff Bezos interfering.”
Are they deluding themselves? Or sincerely clueless?
I worked in and around mainstream TV news for years, including at corporate centrist outlets CNN and MSNBC. Unlike at Fox News (where I’d also been a paid contributor), there’s almost never a memo or direct order from top management to cover or not cover certain stories or viewpoints.
But here's the sad reality: There doesn’t have to be a memo from the owner to achieve the homogeneity of coverage at “centrist” outlets that media watchdog groups like FAIR (which I founded) have documented in study after study over the decades.
It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.
And then ask yourself why someone like Noam Chomsky can be quoted regularly in the biggest mainstream outlets abroad, but almost never in mass media in his own country — even though he mostly analyzes the policies of his own country’s government.
Bernie Sanders is one of the world’s most effective critics of Jeff Bezos and the fact that Amazon paid no federal income tax last year. And the Bezos-owned newspaper has exhibited an unrelenting bias against Sanders in recent years — perhaps most acutely in March 2016, when FAIR analyst Adam Johnson famously wrote an article that quickly went viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.” Among the Post's headlines during that period: “Five Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate,” followed an hour later by “Bernie Sanders’s Two Big Lies About the Global Economy,” followed a few hours later by “Even Bernie Sanders Can Beat Donald Trump.”
The day after this anti-Bernie barrage, which included a half-dozen articles on how badly he’d performed in the Michigan Democratic primary debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders shocked the Post and the rest of the political establishment by defeating Clinton in Michigan’s primary.
If you still want to believe there’s no connection between corporate media ownership and content, join me in a mental exercise: Imagine how quickly heads would roll at the Post in the fantastical event that it somehow produced even three negative stories about owner Jeff Bezos in a few hours. (Needless to say, there’s much to critically report about Bezos, including Amazon’s tax avoidance, labor exploitation, taxpayer subsidies and CIA contracts.)
I said above that there’s “almost never a memo or order from top management” to newsroom journalists. In normal times, the media system works smoothly without top-down directives. But in times of crisis, such as during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — when I was a senior producer of MSNBC’s primetime Phil Donahue show — there may well be orders and memos.
As the invasion neared, top management at MSNBC/NBC News ordered us to bias our panel discussions. If we booked one guest who was antiwar on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer proposed booking Michael Moore, she was told that three right-wingers would be required for balance. (I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t have accommodated the 28 right-wingers we might have needed for balance.)
During that period, we were told by MSNBC brass that invasion opponent Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general, should not appear on the channel. Apparently, some sort of blacklist.
When the Donahue show was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion, internal memos that had circulated among top NBC News executives actually leaked. (God bless whistleblowers!) One memo said that Phil Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The memo described a dreaded scenario in which the Donahue show would become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
NBC’s solution? Pull the plug.
My point is a simple one: Our corporate-owned media system too often functions as a corporate-friendly propaganda system, and it operates smoothly. It typically operates without orders from the owner or top management, and without firings for blatantly political reasons.
At MSNBC in those months, we were ordered to bias our content. Memos were written. I don’t know that orders were given in all the other big TV newsrooms. Yet, the content was amazingly homogeneous.
How else do you explain this finding from FAIR? In the two weeks surrounding Secretary of State Colin Powell’s inaccurate, pro-invasion presentation to the UN in February 2003, there were 393 on-camera sources discussing Iraq on the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. Only three of them represented the antiwar movement. That’s less than 1 percent of the total.
Jeffrey Epstein: how US media – with one star exception – whitewashed the story
The Miami Herald exposed a vast criminal network and a government cover-up – but why the silence elsewhere?
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian
Sat 13 Jul 2019 01.00 EDT
When Julie K Brown of the Miami Herald approached a former police chief of Palm Beach, Florida, in 2017, hoping to get him to open up about his investigation of the child sex crimes for which the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein had been fleetingly jailed a decade earlier, she was surprised by how unresponsive he was.
Michael Reiter told Brown he had been down this road many times and was sick of it. As Brown recalled in a WNYC interview last month, Reiter said he had talked to many reporters and told them precisely where to find damning evidence against Epstein. But nothing ever came of it.
“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she said.
Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
Brown did not heed his warning. She flung herself at the investigation and eventually persuaded Reiter to go on record. Her resulting, award-winning three-part series last November exposed a vast operation in which 80 potential victims were identified, some as young as 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged abuse. She persuaded eight to tell their stories.
Brown also exposed a government cover-up in which Epstein got away with an exceptionally light sentence that saw him serve only 13 months in jail. She discovered that a “non-prosecution agreement” had been negotiated secretly in 2008 by the then top federal prosecutor in Miami, Alexander Acosta, that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution.
In 2017, Acosta was appointed by Donald Trump as labor secretary, a post that ironically is responsible for combating sex trafficking.
The media’s handling – or mishandling – of the Epstein affair is a story of extremes.
It is a heartwarming success story, of how one intrepid reporter pierced the veil of secrecy and found the truth. Brown’s coverage has had consequences: Epstein was arrestedlast Saturday and indicted on new sex trafficking charges by New York prosecutors who praised her work. In the fallout, Acosta was forced to resign.
But there is also a less cheerful narrative. Why did the police chief’s appeals to the media fall on deaf ears? Why would so many years pass before the shocking extent of Epstein’s crimes and Acosta’s sweetheart deal were revealed by a local newspaper with severely limited resources?
In fact, the two extremes of the story are directly linked: Brown told WNYC one of the reasons she began looking into Epstein was that she was puzzled about the public silence surrounding him.
“There really was nobody pursuing this at all,” she said. “That was one of the things that intrigued me about this case. Why isn’t anyone standing up and screaming?”
‘I believe him … I’m Canadian’
That silence stretches all the way back to 2003, when Vicky Ward wrote a profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair. During her reporting, she was introduced to a mother and her two daughters from Phoenix, Arizona who alleged Epstein assaulted the girls, one of whom was 16 at the time.
Ward told the Guardian she spent a lot of time with the family discussing whether they should go public.
“They were frightened,” she said. “The mother told me that every night when she walked the dog she looked over her shoulder.”
Eventually, the women agreed to go on the record, Ward said, and when Epstein was told about their accounts he went “berserk”. Epstein had already threatened to get a witch doctor to put a curse on Ward’s unborn children – she was pregnant with twins at the time – and now he campaigned to stop Vanity Fair publishing the allegations, even turning up unannounced at the office of the then editor, Graydon Carter.
Publication was delayed, then Ward was told the paragraphs on the abuse of the women had been deleted.
“I was extraordinarily upset,” she said. “I asked the women what they were going to do and they said they would lick their wounds and retreat, as this was exactly what they feared would happen.”
Ward believes Carter caved under Epstein’s pressure. She recalls confronting the editor about the excised paragraphs, and said she has a note in her archives that has Carter saying: “I believe him … I’m Canadian.”
Carter remembers events very differently. In his account there were legal issues around the women’s stories that prevented publication, most significantly that the women themselves were unwilling to go on the record.
In a statement to the Guardian, Carter said: “I respected the work Vicky Ward did at Vanity Fair but unfortunately her recounting of the facts around the Epstein article is inaccurate. There were not three sources on the record and therefore this aspect of the story did not meet our legal and editorial standards.”
Ward says she has documentary evidence that shows the women were emphatically prepared to go public, including fact-checkers’ and legal emails to Epstein from Vanity Fair asking for his response to the allegations made by both sisters.
The Guardian spoke to the mother of the girls, Janice Farmer. She said all three did speak to Ward in 2003 and told her on the record what Epstein had done, including allegations he had invited her youngest daughter, then 16, to his New Mexico ranch and molested her.
“I was hesitant to go public because I was worried about the safety of my daughters – by that point I didn’t trust Jeffrey at all,” Farmer said. “But I did want him to be exposed.”
She said she recalls vividly agreeing with Ward along with her daughters for their stories to be told in her Vanity Fair profile. She also said she recalls vividly her reaction when she learnt that part of the piece was not to be published.
“I felt angry,” she said. “I felt like Jeffrey’s money, power, connections – whatever – had been put into play.”
There is another complicating element to the story. In 2011, after Epstein had gone to jail, Ward wrote a blogpost for Vanity Fair. In it she used language that was strikingly uncritical of Epstein, referring to him as “not without humor” and praising him for being highly knowledgable.
She referenced Epstein’s sex crimes as “sexual peccadilloes” and referred to her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of him, saying it had alluded to his sexual relationships with young women but “didn’t really go there, focusing instead on … how Jeffrey made his money”.
The piece went on: “This is not to say I didn’t hear stories about the girls. I did. But, not knowing quite whom to believe, I concentrated on the intriguing financial mystery instead.”
The Guardian put this blogpost to Ward and she said she regretted writing it. At that point, she said, the victims she had interviewed were not willing to talk. But nonetheless, “this blog did not need to be written – here I am toeing the Vanity Fair party line”.
‘My journalism benefited from #MeToo’
Fast forward to 2007, when Acosta reached his bizarrely lenient plea deal with Epstein. By then, investigators had identified 35 potential victims who said they had been lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and sexually assaulted.
Yet records obtained by the Miami Herald showed prosecutors led by Acosta actively worked with Epstein’s attorneys to minimize media coverage.
One of Acosta’s prosecutors wrote in an email to Jay Lefkowitz, an Epstein lawyer: “On an ‘avoid the press’ note … I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?”
That Acosta felt that he had to resign on Friday was an indication that the collective failure of US media to grapple with a story of serial sex trafficking and abuse that had been hiding in plain sight for years no longer holds true. In the wake of Brown’s exemplary reporting, the rest of the American media has fallen in line. Acosta paid the price.
That may in part be thanks to the #MeToo movement that had not erupted when Brown began her investigation but did draw attention to her work when it was published. As she told MSNBC after Epstein’s arrest last weekend: “My journalism benefited from #MeToo as we [started] giving these cases much more scrutiny.”
Mary Angela Bock, associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s school of journalism, said #MeToo had dented the prevailing patriarchy that has existed in newsrooms for decades and that had led to sexual crimes being overlooked as merely “the way of the world”.
“#MeToo has led to greater awareness among journalists that this is not OK,” she said. “This is not ‘boys being boys’. This is rape and sexual exploitation of children.”
Michael Reiter told Brown he had been down this road many times and was sick of it. As Brown recalled in a WNYC interview last month, Reiter said he had talked to many reporters and told them precisely where to find damning evidence against Epstein. But nothing ever came of it.
“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she said.
Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
Brown did not heed his warning. She flung herself at the investigation and eventually persuaded Reiter to go on record. Her resulting, award-winning three-part series last November exposed a vast operation in which 80 potential victims were identified, some as young as 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged abuse. She persuaded eight to tell their stories.
Brown also exposed a government cover-up in which Epstein got away with an exceptionally light sentence that saw him serve only 13 months in jail. She discovered that a “non-prosecution agreement” had been negotiated secretly in 2008 by the then top federal prosecutor in Miami, Alexander Acosta, that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution.
In 2017, Acosta was appointed by Donald Trump as labor secretary, a post that ironically is responsible for combating sex trafficking.
The media’s handling – or mishandling – of the Epstein affair is a story of extremes.
It is a heartwarming success story, of how one intrepid reporter pierced the veil of secrecy and found the truth. Brown’s coverage has had consequences: Epstein was arrestedlast Saturday and indicted on new sex trafficking charges by New York prosecutors who praised her work. In the fallout, Acosta was forced to resign.
But there is also a less cheerful narrative. Why did the police chief’s appeals to the media fall on deaf ears? Why would so many years pass before the shocking extent of Epstein’s crimes and Acosta’s sweetheart deal were revealed by a local newspaper with severely limited resources?
In fact, the two extremes of the story are directly linked: Brown told WNYC one of the reasons she began looking into Epstein was that she was puzzled about the public silence surrounding him.
“There really was nobody pursuing this at all,” she said. “That was one of the things that intrigued me about this case. Why isn’t anyone standing up and screaming?”
‘I believe him … I’m Canadian’
That silence stretches all the way back to 2003, when Vicky Ward wrote a profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair. During her reporting, she was introduced to a mother and her two daughters from Phoenix, Arizona who alleged Epstein assaulted the girls, one of whom was 16 at the time.
Ward told the Guardian she spent a lot of time with the family discussing whether they should go public.
“They were frightened,” she said. “The mother told me that every night when she walked the dog she looked over her shoulder.”
Eventually, the women agreed to go on the record, Ward said, and when Epstein was told about their accounts he went “berserk”. Epstein had already threatened to get a witch doctor to put a curse on Ward’s unborn children – she was pregnant with twins at the time – and now he campaigned to stop Vanity Fair publishing the allegations, even turning up unannounced at the office of the then editor, Graydon Carter.
Publication was delayed, then Ward was told the paragraphs on the abuse of the women had been deleted.
“I was extraordinarily upset,” she said. “I asked the women what they were going to do and they said they would lick their wounds and retreat, as this was exactly what they feared would happen.”
Ward believes Carter caved under Epstein’s pressure. She recalls confronting the editor about the excised paragraphs, and said she has a note in her archives that has Carter saying: “I believe him … I’m Canadian.”
Carter remembers events very differently. In his account there were legal issues around the women’s stories that prevented publication, most significantly that the women themselves were unwilling to go on the record.
In a statement to the Guardian, Carter said: “I respected the work Vicky Ward did at Vanity Fair but unfortunately her recounting of the facts around the Epstein article is inaccurate. There were not three sources on the record and therefore this aspect of the story did not meet our legal and editorial standards.”
Ward says she has documentary evidence that shows the women were emphatically prepared to go public, including fact-checkers’ and legal emails to Epstein from Vanity Fair asking for his response to the allegations made by both sisters.
The Guardian spoke to the mother of the girls, Janice Farmer. She said all three did speak to Ward in 2003 and told her on the record what Epstein had done, including allegations he had invited her youngest daughter, then 16, to his New Mexico ranch and molested her.
“I was hesitant to go public because I was worried about the safety of my daughters – by that point I didn’t trust Jeffrey at all,” Farmer said. “But I did want him to be exposed.”
She said she recalls vividly agreeing with Ward along with her daughters for their stories to be told in her Vanity Fair profile. She also said she recalls vividly her reaction when she learnt that part of the piece was not to be published.
“I felt angry,” she said. “I felt like Jeffrey’s money, power, connections – whatever – had been put into play.”
There is another complicating element to the story. In 2011, after Epstein had gone to jail, Ward wrote a blogpost for Vanity Fair. In it she used language that was strikingly uncritical of Epstein, referring to him as “not without humor” and praising him for being highly knowledgable.
She referenced Epstein’s sex crimes as “sexual peccadilloes” and referred to her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of him, saying it had alluded to his sexual relationships with young women but “didn’t really go there, focusing instead on … how Jeffrey made his money”.
The piece went on: “This is not to say I didn’t hear stories about the girls. I did. But, not knowing quite whom to believe, I concentrated on the intriguing financial mystery instead.”
The Guardian put this blogpost to Ward and she said she regretted writing it. At that point, she said, the victims she had interviewed were not willing to talk. But nonetheless, “this blog did not need to be written – here I am toeing the Vanity Fair party line”.
‘My journalism benefited from #MeToo’
Fast forward to 2007, when Acosta reached his bizarrely lenient plea deal with Epstein. By then, investigators had identified 35 potential victims who said they had been lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and sexually assaulted.
Yet records obtained by the Miami Herald showed prosecutors led by Acosta actively worked with Epstein’s attorneys to minimize media coverage.
One of Acosta’s prosecutors wrote in an email to Jay Lefkowitz, an Epstein lawyer: “On an ‘avoid the press’ note … I can file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?”
That Acosta felt that he had to resign on Friday was an indication that the collective failure of US media to grapple with a story of serial sex trafficking and abuse that had been hiding in plain sight for years no longer holds true. In the wake of Brown’s exemplary reporting, the rest of the American media has fallen in line. Acosta paid the price.
That may in part be thanks to the #MeToo movement that had not erupted when Brown began her investigation but did draw attention to her work when it was published. As she told MSNBC after Epstein’s arrest last weekend: “My journalism benefited from #MeToo as we [started] giving these cases much more scrutiny.”
Mary Angela Bock, associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s school of journalism, said #MeToo had dented the prevailing patriarchy that has existed in newsrooms for decades and that had led to sexual crimes being overlooked as merely “the way of the world”.
“#MeToo has led to greater awareness among journalists that this is not OK,” she said. “This is not ‘boys being boys’. This is rape and sexual exploitation of children.”
Trump is the end result of 40 years of right-wing radio hate-mongering: media expert
August 3, 2019
By Matthew Chapman - Raw Story
On Saturday, journalism expert Brian Rosenwald told CNN’s Michael Smerconish that the real seeds of Trumpism were planted decades before Trump took office — in right-wing talk radio.
“You said it was not the ride down the escalator, but actually August 1, 1980,” said Smerconish. “How come?”
“That’s the day that Rush Limbaugh takes to the radio,” said Rosenwald. “And people tune in, what they hear every day is calls for action. It doesn’t make for good radio to say, hey, nuance, compromise, that stuff is boring. But fighting, that’s good radio. And Donald Trump captured that.”
Limbaugh, Rosenwald said, “was simply giving voice to the bedrock conservative sentiments that he had grown up with or that his audience had. That doesn’t mean he didn’t shine the spotlight on issues that his audience might have obviously heard. It didn’t mean that he didn’t shape expectations for what it was for Republicans. But it wasn’t like he was a puppet master who directed his audience to believe things. His audience already believed them.”
“There’s this mindset out there … that the whole landscape was controlled by those eager to spread wisdom or ideology,” said Smerconish. “What was the motivation.”
“The motivation was to charge advertising rates which is how can we make the most money,” said Rosenwald. “What’s the best, most engaging show that we can put on every single day? And that didn’t always work with what Republicans wanted to do. At times, Republicans would say, hey, this is the best deal we can cut. And talk radio would say, no, stand up and fight for us. Fight for our values. They’re rolling over again. For the mainstream media, the Democrats, that’s all they do, they just roll over. And that’s the sentiment that helps give us Donald Trump.”
“They were frustrated by both Bushes. They were frustrated by John Boehner and Paul Ryan,” said Rosenwald. “These guys made promises and they got to the campaign trail and they didn’t actually deliver. The reason they didn’t deliver, the whole country wasn’t with them. We have a lot of checkpoints and veto points in our government. But that’s not what the folks heard on the airwaves. They heard frustration. They heard anger. They were afraid, hosts were saying, just to pick one issue, immigration, they were saying this is going to destroy the fabric of America. And the end result was they were looking for someone like Donald Trump. Someone who sounded like their favorite host. Someone who the most important thing was punching back against the liberal elite. Not just people on television, but in the democratic parties. And Donald Trump gave them that.”
“You said it was not the ride down the escalator, but actually August 1, 1980,” said Smerconish. “How come?”
“That’s the day that Rush Limbaugh takes to the radio,” said Rosenwald. “And people tune in, what they hear every day is calls for action. It doesn’t make for good radio to say, hey, nuance, compromise, that stuff is boring. But fighting, that’s good radio. And Donald Trump captured that.”
Limbaugh, Rosenwald said, “was simply giving voice to the bedrock conservative sentiments that he had grown up with or that his audience had. That doesn’t mean he didn’t shine the spotlight on issues that his audience might have obviously heard. It didn’t mean that he didn’t shape expectations for what it was for Republicans. But it wasn’t like he was a puppet master who directed his audience to believe things. His audience already believed them.”
“There’s this mindset out there … that the whole landscape was controlled by those eager to spread wisdom or ideology,” said Smerconish. “What was the motivation.”
“The motivation was to charge advertising rates which is how can we make the most money,” said Rosenwald. “What’s the best, most engaging show that we can put on every single day? And that didn’t always work with what Republicans wanted to do. At times, Republicans would say, hey, this is the best deal we can cut. And talk radio would say, no, stand up and fight for us. Fight for our values. They’re rolling over again. For the mainstream media, the Democrats, that’s all they do, they just roll over. And that’s the sentiment that helps give us Donald Trump.”
“They were frustrated by both Bushes. They were frustrated by John Boehner and Paul Ryan,” said Rosenwald. “These guys made promises and they got to the campaign trail and they didn’t actually deliver. The reason they didn’t deliver, the whole country wasn’t with them. We have a lot of checkpoints and veto points in our government. But that’s not what the folks heard on the airwaves. They heard frustration. They heard anger. They were afraid, hosts were saying, just to pick one issue, immigration, they were saying this is going to destroy the fabric of America. And the end result was they were looking for someone like Donald Trump. Someone who sounded like their favorite host. Someone who the most important thing was punching back against the liberal elite. Not just people on television, but in the democratic parties. And Donald Trump gave them that.”
Fox & Friends hosts fling around some casually racist remarks to back up Trump on Baltimore
July 30, 2019
By Travis Gettys -
The hosts of “Fox & Friends” flung around some casually racist remarks to defend President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on Baltimore and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), which were apparently prompted by a Fox News segment over the weekend.
The president slurred Baltimore as “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” where “no human being would want to live,” after watching a “Fox & Friends Weekend” report featuring footage of trash and run-down buildings in Cummings’ district — and the hosts of his favorite TV show engaged in additional racist attacks to defend him from criticism.
“First it was collusion, then obstruction and now it’s racism,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt, lamenting what she perceived as the unfairness of it all. “I don’t think if the president wants to crack down, though, on the border, that means he doesn’t like people from Mexico. It just means he doesn’t want illegals in here, he doesn’t want drugs in here. He’s trying to keep our country safe.”
After slurring migrants as “illegals” and suggesting all or most of them are smuggling drugs, Earhardt justified the president’s attacks on a majority-black city as unclean, riddled with corruption and unfit for human habitation.
“Just because he wants to clean up Baltimore, and he’s wondering what happened to that money, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like people that live in Baltimore,” she said. “He’s just calling out what a lot of people are saying.”
Earhardt lamented that Baltimore children are living and sleeping in buildings with “rats running around,” and co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested those children weren’t doing enough to improve their circumstances.
“Look at the results of their education, which is the key to their future,” Kilmeade said. “I don’t think anyone passed statewide tests in some of these inner-city schools for math and reading.”
Later in the segment, the co-hosts fiercely debated whether Lil Nas X’s record-smashing chart-topper “Old Town Road” was, in fact, a country song.
The president slurred Baltimore as “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” where “no human being would want to live,” after watching a “Fox & Friends Weekend” report featuring footage of trash and run-down buildings in Cummings’ district — and the hosts of his favorite TV show engaged in additional racist attacks to defend him from criticism.
“First it was collusion, then obstruction and now it’s racism,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt, lamenting what she perceived as the unfairness of it all. “I don’t think if the president wants to crack down, though, on the border, that means he doesn’t like people from Mexico. It just means he doesn’t want illegals in here, he doesn’t want drugs in here. He’s trying to keep our country safe.”
After slurring migrants as “illegals” and suggesting all or most of them are smuggling drugs, Earhardt justified the president’s attacks on a majority-black city as unclean, riddled with corruption and unfit for human habitation.
“Just because he wants to clean up Baltimore, and he’s wondering what happened to that money, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like people that live in Baltimore,” she said. “He’s just calling out what a lot of people are saying.”
Earhardt lamented that Baltimore children are living and sleeping in buildings with “rats running around,” and co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested those children weren’t doing enough to improve their circumstances.
“Look at the results of their education, which is the key to their future,” Kilmeade said. “I don’t think anyone passed statewide tests in some of these inner-city schools for math and reading.”
Later in the segment, the co-hosts fiercely debated whether Lil Nas X’s record-smashing chart-topper “Old Town Road” was, in fact, a country song.
David Gregory Gets Regular Gig At CNN; Immediately Makes Excuses For GOP Racism
The new substitute co-host for CNN's New Day uses his first day on the job to note that some Republicans might "compartmentalize" Trump's racism because tax cuts.
By driftglass - Crooks & Liars
7/23/19 5:00am
David Gregory decided on his first day as "CNN's New Day" substitute host, that he just had to go and lecture me about what Trump voters are really like.
Damn.
In case you are unfamiliar with Mr. Gregory's body of work, until he was fired and replaced with the equally odious Chuck Todd, he spent most of the Obama Administration failing spectacularly every week to even pretend to care about journalism as the Meet the Press pitchman.
During his tenure at Meet the Press, Mr. Gregory had basically three signature moves that kept him on good paper with NBC/Comcast management --
-- by making Meet the Press an impregnable fortress of Beltway Conventional Wisdom:
1. Never ask any Republican any inconvenient followup questions about the seditious BS they're slinging. For example, Gregory personally oversaw the rehabilitation of Newt Gingrich's reputation over and over again by putting him back on the air and treating him with cloying deference every time Gingrich publicly pooped the bed.
2. Reverently reading aloud from the latest column by David Brooks and then asking David Brooks what he thought of it.
3. When in doubt, Both Sides Did It.
After finally getting the ax from NBC, Mr. Gregory followed the familiar path trod by so many other pundit hacks who had found themselves temporarily on their uppers and needing to make up some Important Journalism-Looking shite to look busy while they were weaseling their way back into the spotlight.
And thus Mr. Gregory decided to Have a Placeholder Podcast, which lasted 36 episodes. FYI, Gregory's podcast has now been "archived" and should you try to listen to any episode the app will rapidly cycle you through the titles of all the episodes, showing them as having zero minutes and zero content, which has to be the most accidentally awesome metaphor for Gregory's career I have ever heard. Guests included most of the Usual Horribles (Ron Fournier, Tom Friedman, Charlie Sykes, etc).
Mr. Gregory then went on to Write a Sh*tty Book About His Spiritual Journey and use the IOU's he had collected as the Meet the Press pitchman to persuade his fellow members of the Beltway Pundit Guild to treat his book as a work of profound insight, and give him the opportunity to dish on office politics at NBC.
Then, inevitably, CNN bought his contract and put him back to work in front of the camera doing exactly what had had been doing at NBC: obediently toeing the company's party line. And so, today, in his new job as a CNN political analyst and substitute co-host of New Day :
GREGORY: But I think -- I think, you know, one of the problems -- and this was the problem with Hillary Clinton's "deplorable" line. And this is the problem with -- what a lot of Democrats have now, which is to say the president is racist. And, as some commentators have said on -- on this network, if you support him, then you're supporting a -- a white nationalist, is that there's lots of people who compartmentalize and say, gosh, I really don't like that stuff he's doing on Twitter and all the rest, but I like my -- you know, I like my tax cuts or I like how the economy's going or -- and people are going to feel like, oh, so then I'm a racist, so I'm supporting him?There's a chance -- this is what you're saying -- that -- that -- that this kind of approach can divide people who might not approve of it but feel all of a sudden besieged by that attack.
Yeah.
Sure.
Democrats are the problem because "a lot of Democrats now" are making "lots of people who compartmentalize" feel bad about their unstinting support for the pathologically-lying, openly racist, sexual predator in the White House who -- since Day One -- as been torching our alliances, sucking up to dictators and madmen, stoking white supremacist rage, propagating deranged conspiracies, wrecking every democratic institution and stooging for Russia's imperial ambitions.
And you know what? I'm absolutely sure David Gregory does know literally dozens of people who don't like the Tweeting, but fking love their tax cuts and feel "all of a sudden besieged" by us awful, dirty hippies for lumping them in with Donald Trump.
In fact, I'd bet the rent money that most of them are the very same Beltway Insider Club Members and Very Serious Republicans to whom Mr. Gregory used to administer soothing h-jobs when he was the pitchman forMeet the Press.
Because David Gregory isn't in journalism business. He never had been.
David Gregory is in the Beltway Conventional Wisdom business. Which is why a place will always be found for him at the Beltway media table.
And right now, the Beltway media is frantically building an armada of lifeboats for themselves, their collaborators and fellow travelers, and that sizable percentage of the Republican Party who are thoroughly enjoying Donald Trump's braying racism and fascist cos-play, but plan to pretend they never heard of Donald Trump or the Republican Party once the party is over and the bill for the breakage comes due. And in exchange for a place in the spotlight, hollow, unprincipled sock-puppets like Gregory are only too happy to put their shoulders to that disgraceful project.
Damn.
In case you are unfamiliar with Mr. Gregory's body of work, until he was fired and replaced with the equally odious Chuck Todd, he spent most of the Obama Administration failing spectacularly every week to even pretend to care about journalism as the Meet the Press pitchman.
During his tenure at Meet the Press, Mr. Gregory had basically three signature moves that kept him on good paper with NBC/Comcast management --
-- by making Meet the Press an impregnable fortress of Beltway Conventional Wisdom:
1. Never ask any Republican any inconvenient followup questions about the seditious BS they're slinging. For example, Gregory personally oversaw the rehabilitation of Newt Gingrich's reputation over and over again by putting him back on the air and treating him with cloying deference every time Gingrich publicly pooped the bed.
2. Reverently reading aloud from the latest column by David Brooks and then asking David Brooks what he thought of it.
3. When in doubt, Both Sides Did It.
After finally getting the ax from NBC, Mr. Gregory followed the familiar path trod by so many other pundit hacks who had found themselves temporarily on their uppers and needing to make up some Important Journalism-Looking shite to look busy while they were weaseling their way back into the spotlight.
And thus Mr. Gregory decided to Have a Placeholder Podcast, which lasted 36 episodes. FYI, Gregory's podcast has now been "archived" and should you try to listen to any episode the app will rapidly cycle you through the titles of all the episodes, showing them as having zero minutes and zero content, which has to be the most accidentally awesome metaphor for Gregory's career I have ever heard. Guests included most of the Usual Horribles (Ron Fournier, Tom Friedman, Charlie Sykes, etc).
Mr. Gregory then went on to Write a Sh*tty Book About His Spiritual Journey and use the IOU's he had collected as the Meet the Press pitchman to persuade his fellow members of the Beltway Pundit Guild to treat his book as a work of profound insight, and give him the opportunity to dish on office politics at NBC.
Then, inevitably, CNN bought his contract and put him back to work in front of the camera doing exactly what had had been doing at NBC: obediently toeing the company's party line. And so, today, in his new job as a CNN political analyst and substitute co-host of New Day :
GREGORY: But I think -- I think, you know, one of the problems -- and this was the problem with Hillary Clinton's "deplorable" line. And this is the problem with -- what a lot of Democrats have now, which is to say the president is racist. And, as some commentators have said on -- on this network, if you support him, then you're supporting a -- a white nationalist, is that there's lots of people who compartmentalize and say, gosh, I really don't like that stuff he's doing on Twitter and all the rest, but I like my -- you know, I like my tax cuts or I like how the economy's going or -- and people are going to feel like, oh, so then I'm a racist, so I'm supporting him?There's a chance -- this is what you're saying -- that -- that -- that this kind of approach can divide people who might not approve of it but feel all of a sudden besieged by that attack.
Yeah.
Sure.
Democrats are the problem because "a lot of Democrats now" are making "lots of people who compartmentalize" feel bad about their unstinting support for the pathologically-lying, openly racist, sexual predator in the White House who -- since Day One -- as been torching our alliances, sucking up to dictators and madmen, stoking white supremacist rage, propagating deranged conspiracies, wrecking every democratic institution and stooging for Russia's imperial ambitions.
And you know what? I'm absolutely sure David Gregory does know literally dozens of people who don't like the Tweeting, but fking love their tax cuts and feel "all of a sudden besieged" by us awful, dirty hippies for lumping them in with Donald Trump.
In fact, I'd bet the rent money that most of them are the very same Beltway Insider Club Members and Very Serious Republicans to whom Mr. Gregory used to administer soothing h-jobs when he was the pitchman forMeet the Press.
Because David Gregory isn't in journalism business. He never had been.
David Gregory is in the Beltway Conventional Wisdom business. Which is why a place will always be found for him at the Beltway media table.
And right now, the Beltway media is frantically building an armada of lifeboats for themselves, their collaborators and fellow travelers, and that sizable percentage of the Republican Party who are thoroughly enjoying Donald Trump's braying racism and fascist cos-play, but plan to pretend they never heard of Donald Trump or the Republican Party once the party is over and the bill for the breakage comes due. And in exchange for a place in the spotlight, hollow, unprincipled sock-puppets like Gregory are only too happy to put their shoulders to that disgraceful project.
Here’s how the press rewards GOP cowardice in the age of Trump
Written by Eric Boehlert / Alternet
Daily Kos July 21, 2019
After Donald Trump ignited a firestorm by launching a racist attack on four Democratic members of Congress, the Beltway press last week temporarily revised a time-honored journalism tradition of forcing members of the president’s party to respond publicly to controversial behavior. The results were utterly predictable, of course, with most Republicans refusing to criticize Trump’s latest bout of open bigotry. But even the recent media questions for the GOP seemed muted, given the stunning and historic nature of Trump’s racist behavior.
The sad truth is, the press mostly gave up a long time ago on holding Republican lawmakers accountable for Trump’s erratic behavior. Faced with a party that has completely capitulated to Trump’s unbalanced ways, reporters seem to have lost interest in the pursuit.
Why isn’t there constant, nonstop coverage detailing how radical the Republican Party has become, and how any hints of dissent in the age of Trump are cultishly hidden from view? Instead of vivid portraits of a party abandoning its principles as GOP lawmakers obediently fall in line behind Trump’s nasty behavior, we get coverage about how savvy Republicans are for holding their tongues about Trump and refusing to hold him accountable—about how strategic Republicans are being in allowing someone like Trump to maintain a stranglehold grip on the party.
Indeed, Republicans seem to have cracked the media code: By remaining devoutly loyal to Trump—or, at least, obediently silent—they’ve drained the oxygen the press needs to file stories about the type of turmoil Trump may be creating in the party with his buffoonish and offensive antics. Now entirely bored with the prospect of asking nonemotive Republican lawmakers for their take on Trump’s latest outrage, journalists for the most part have stopped trying to hold party members accountable for Trump’s actions.
We saw a brief flurry of activity in the wake of Trump’s racist tirade in recent days. But the media pursuit of Republicans seemed restrained compared to the avalanche of coverage that would accompany demands that basically every elected Democrat in the country provide a comment if a Democratic president ever acted as hatefully and erratically as Trump has this week—or for the last two years.
Newsrooms seem to have simply accepted GOP silence. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “makes a practice of avoiding comment on remarks by President Trump that have electrified social media,” The New York Times recently reported. Republicans “also believe that, in most cases, the firestorm lasts only so long and will be quickly followed by the next iteration, making it pointless to get caught up in the repeating cycle.” Oh, well; I guess that takes care of that. Apparently now, if a political party essentially takes a vow of silence with regard to hateful behavior by the head of that party, the press shrugs its shoulders and moves on, abandoning all efforts to hold public officials accountable for those they support politically.
After being worn down by the GOP’s cowardly capitulation to Trump, reporters have most often given Republicans a pass. Simultaneously, the press has decided to devote its time and resources to playing up dissension within the Democratic Party, where members are more open and honest about their interparty conflicts. The Beltway press in recent weeks has given significant time and space to the story of internal dissension with the Democratic House caucus, which centers on a handful of freshman Congresswomen and their policy conflicts with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The press has consistently leaned on the “civil war” narrative in reporting on Democrats, as fewer than five House members wage a public battle with the leadership. Contrast that to how reporters are playing Republican reaction to Trump in recent days.
“While a smattering of Republicans chastised Mr. Trump on Monday, most party leaders in the House and Senate and much of the rank-and-file remained quiet about the president’s weekend tweets directing dissenters to ‘go back’ where they came from,” the Times reported. Interestingly, that language also perfectly sums up the so-called Democratic civil war, in which most “party leaders” and “much of the rank-and-file” have remained quiet on the issue. But for some reason, the two similar scenarios are covered quite differently. When just a handful of Republicans criticize Trump, it illustrates party unity. And when just a handful of Democrats criticize Pelosi, it illustrates a civil war.
Obviously, the circumstances are different in that a lot more Republicans ought to be criticizing Trump for his blatantly racist attacks on sitting members of Congress. And I’m not suggesting the internal strife within the Democratic Party isn’t news, because it is. But there is a double standard in play with how the press treats each party in terms of members having to answer for prominent party leaders.
We also saw that recently with coverage of Joe Biden and Trump. Both made headlines for how they have treated women in the past, although the actual behavior couldn’t be more different. But only one party was pressed on the issue of accountability. Last month, longtime advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll claimed that Trump had once raped her inside the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City, when he lunged at her and pushed her up against a fitting room wall. That disturbing news story broke on a Friday afternoon and was completely ignored by all the Sunday network morning shows two days later. None of the Republicans who appeared on the show were asked about Trump’s behavior, or asked to condemn it. Yet last winter, when some women complained about the way Joe Biden interacted with them, especially with unwelcome touching in public, the allegations were covered extensively on the Sunday shows.
Note: Democrats were repeatedly pressed about whether Biden’s behavior was “disqualifying,” while Republicans weren’t even asked about a rape charge against Trump.
The signal the press is sending remains clear: Republican cowardice in the age of Trump gets a pass.
The sad truth is, the press mostly gave up a long time ago on holding Republican lawmakers accountable for Trump’s erratic behavior. Faced with a party that has completely capitulated to Trump’s unbalanced ways, reporters seem to have lost interest in the pursuit.
Why isn’t there constant, nonstop coverage detailing how radical the Republican Party has become, and how any hints of dissent in the age of Trump are cultishly hidden from view? Instead of vivid portraits of a party abandoning its principles as GOP lawmakers obediently fall in line behind Trump’s nasty behavior, we get coverage about how savvy Republicans are for holding their tongues about Trump and refusing to hold him accountable—about how strategic Republicans are being in allowing someone like Trump to maintain a stranglehold grip on the party.
Indeed, Republicans seem to have cracked the media code: By remaining devoutly loyal to Trump—or, at least, obediently silent—they’ve drained the oxygen the press needs to file stories about the type of turmoil Trump may be creating in the party with his buffoonish and offensive antics. Now entirely bored with the prospect of asking nonemotive Republican lawmakers for their take on Trump’s latest outrage, journalists for the most part have stopped trying to hold party members accountable for Trump’s actions.
We saw a brief flurry of activity in the wake of Trump’s racist tirade in recent days. But the media pursuit of Republicans seemed restrained compared to the avalanche of coverage that would accompany demands that basically every elected Democrat in the country provide a comment if a Democratic president ever acted as hatefully and erratically as Trump has this week—or for the last two years.
Newsrooms seem to have simply accepted GOP silence. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “makes a practice of avoiding comment on remarks by President Trump that have electrified social media,” The New York Times recently reported. Republicans “also believe that, in most cases, the firestorm lasts only so long and will be quickly followed by the next iteration, making it pointless to get caught up in the repeating cycle.” Oh, well; I guess that takes care of that. Apparently now, if a political party essentially takes a vow of silence with regard to hateful behavior by the head of that party, the press shrugs its shoulders and moves on, abandoning all efforts to hold public officials accountable for those they support politically.
After being worn down by the GOP’s cowardly capitulation to Trump, reporters have most often given Republicans a pass. Simultaneously, the press has decided to devote its time and resources to playing up dissension within the Democratic Party, where members are more open and honest about their interparty conflicts. The Beltway press in recent weeks has given significant time and space to the story of internal dissension with the Democratic House caucus, which centers on a handful of freshman Congresswomen and their policy conflicts with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The press has consistently leaned on the “civil war” narrative in reporting on Democrats, as fewer than five House members wage a public battle with the leadership. Contrast that to how reporters are playing Republican reaction to Trump in recent days.
“While a smattering of Republicans chastised Mr. Trump on Monday, most party leaders in the House and Senate and much of the rank-and-file remained quiet about the president’s weekend tweets directing dissenters to ‘go back’ where they came from,” the Times reported. Interestingly, that language also perfectly sums up the so-called Democratic civil war, in which most “party leaders” and “much of the rank-and-file” have remained quiet on the issue. But for some reason, the two similar scenarios are covered quite differently. When just a handful of Republicans criticize Trump, it illustrates party unity. And when just a handful of Democrats criticize Pelosi, it illustrates a civil war.
Obviously, the circumstances are different in that a lot more Republicans ought to be criticizing Trump for his blatantly racist attacks on sitting members of Congress. And I’m not suggesting the internal strife within the Democratic Party isn’t news, because it is. But there is a double standard in play with how the press treats each party in terms of members having to answer for prominent party leaders.
We also saw that recently with coverage of Joe Biden and Trump. Both made headlines for how they have treated women in the past, although the actual behavior couldn’t be more different. But only one party was pressed on the issue of accountability. Last month, longtime advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll claimed that Trump had once raped her inside the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City, when he lunged at her and pushed her up against a fitting room wall. That disturbing news story broke on a Friday afternoon and was completely ignored by all the Sunday network morning shows two days later. None of the Republicans who appeared on the show were asked about Trump’s behavior, or asked to condemn it. Yet last winter, when some women complained about the way Joe Biden interacted with them, especially with unwelcome touching in public, the allegations were covered extensively on the Sunday shows.
Note: Democrats were repeatedly pressed about whether Biden’s behavior was “disqualifying,” while Republicans weren’t even asked about a rape charge against Trump.
The signal the press is sending remains clear: Republican cowardice in the age of Trump gets a pass.
Fox News host decimates Trump aide’s defense of racism and hypocrisy
Chris Wallace did not let Stephen Miller gaslight his viewers.
JOSH ISRAEL - Thinkprogress
JUL 21, 2019, 10:30 AM
Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser said to be the architect of the administration’s cruel anti-immigrant policies, went on Fox News Sunday to defend President Donald Trump’s latest round of racist and hypocritical attacks on congresswomen of color. The interview went rather poorly for him.
Host Chris Wallace began the interview by asking Miller about Trump’s recent tweets attacking Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and demanding that they go back to their home countries (Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a child, the other three are natural born citizens). Miller responded that the president isn’t a racist because the jobless rate has been falling for racial minorities.
“I think the term ‘racist,’ Chris, has become a label that is too often deployed by left/Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear,” Miller began, asserting that Trump “has been a president for all Americans” because “historically low black unemployment rates, historically low Hispanic unemployment rates,” and his crackdown on immigration “to protect safety, security, rising wages for all American citizens.”
Wallace responded that Trump’s claims that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers and his proposed total ban on Muslims were “not protecting the American people” but “playing the race card.”
After Miller tried to change the subject to criminal gang members, Wallace shut him down, reminding him that Trump had pushed racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama. Miller likened those efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the former president to questions that were once raised about John McCain. Wallace quickly fact-checked him, noting that concerns surrounding the late Arizona senator were not racial, but based on the 2008 nominee’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone.
Miller then argued that questioning people’s Americanism is okay as long as you don’t intend it to be racist.
Wallace also fact-checked Miller when he attempted to claim Trump had been “clear” that he disagreed with his supporters racist chant — repeating his own attacks on Omar and demanding she be sent back to Somalia.
“No, he was clear after the fact,” he responded. “He let it go on for 13 seconds and [it] was only when it diminished that he started talking again.” Wallace noted that Trump “said nothing there or in his tweet after that rally that indicated any concern about the chant.”
Wallace also pointed out that Trump has criticized the four lawmakers for comments he deemed critical of America, yet attacked the nation, and President Obama, with comments that were far more negative. “President Obama is ignorant, this country is killers, on and on.”
Miller attempted to spin a “fundamental distinction” between “people who think we need to lean into and strengthen American’s core values” and “people who think we need to turn America into Venezuela.” But Wallace again responded with Trump’s own quotes that were explicit attacks on America.
“I’ve never called any of his tweets racist,” Wallace admonished Miller. “But there’s no question he is stoking racial divisions.”
Host Chris Wallace began the interview by asking Miller about Trump’s recent tweets attacking Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and demanding that they go back to their home countries (Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a child, the other three are natural born citizens). Miller responded that the president isn’t a racist because the jobless rate has been falling for racial minorities.
“I think the term ‘racist,’ Chris, has become a label that is too often deployed by left/Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear,” Miller began, asserting that Trump “has been a president for all Americans” because “historically low black unemployment rates, historically low Hispanic unemployment rates,” and his crackdown on immigration “to protect safety, security, rising wages for all American citizens.”
Wallace responded that Trump’s claims that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers and his proposed total ban on Muslims were “not protecting the American people” but “playing the race card.”
After Miller tried to change the subject to criminal gang members, Wallace shut him down, reminding him that Trump had pushed racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama. Miller likened those efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the former president to questions that were once raised about John McCain. Wallace quickly fact-checked him, noting that concerns surrounding the late Arizona senator were not racial, but based on the 2008 nominee’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone.
Miller then argued that questioning people’s Americanism is okay as long as you don’t intend it to be racist.
Wallace also fact-checked Miller when he attempted to claim Trump had been “clear” that he disagreed with his supporters racist chant — repeating his own attacks on Omar and demanding she be sent back to Somalia.
“No, he was clear after the fact,” he responded. “He let it go on for 13 seconds and [it] was only when it diminished that he started talking again.” Wallace noted that Trump “said nothing there or in his tweet after that rally that indicated any concern about the chant.”
Wallace also pointed out that Trump has criticized the four lawmakers for comments he deemed critical of America, yet attacked the nation, and President Obama, with comments that were far more negative. “President Obama is ignorant, this country is killers, on and on.”
Miller attempted to spin a “fundamental distinction” between “people who think we need to lean into and strengthen American’s core values” and “people who think we need to turn America into Venezuela.” But Wallace again responded with Trump’s own quotes that were explicit attacks on America.
“I’ve never called any of his tweets racist,” Wallace admonished Miller. “But there’s no question he is stoking racial divisions.”
Facebook profited off of its latest scandal
Even when Facebook loses money, it earns money.
LUKE BARNES - Thinkprogress
JUL 17, 2019, 11:03 AM
The Federal Trade Commission last week decided to impose a roughly $5 billion fine on Facebook as part of a settlement in a long-running probe into whether or not the social media giant’s infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal violated a 2012 consent degree in which Facebook agreed to better protect user privacy.
The fine, which has been referred to the Justice Department’s civil division for review, would be the largest ever handed out to a tech company by the federal government. But if Facebook’s recent stock price is anything to go by, the company is not at all fussed by the fine.
As Business Insider reported this week, after news of the fine broke last Friday, Facebook’s stock value actually rose 1%, netting CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who owns 88.1% of all Facebook shares — an extra $1.1 billion dollars. In April, Facebook had also reportedly set aside $5 billion in anticipation of a decision by the FTC, further dampening any sort of effect the fine may have hoped to have.
Lawmakers fiercely criticized the Facebook settlement, which was passed 3-2 along party lines by the Republican-controlled FTC. “The FTC just gave Facebook a Christmas present five months early,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement. “It’s very disappointing that such an enormously powerful company that engaged in such serious misconduct is getting a slap on the wrist.”
“Given the magnitude of the Cambridge Analytica violation, the FTC not only needs to impose a more significant fine, they need to be clear about what Facebook must change when it comes to data practices,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, (D-MN) who previously co-introduced legislation to improve the transparency of political ads on Facebook. “It appears that they haven’t done that, which is why Congress must take action.”
In addition, Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) all wrote to the FTC on Tuesday, describing the fine as “woefully inadequate,” and asking for an explanation of the process by which the commission determined the size of the fine, as well as if it had interviewed Zuckerberg or other top-ranking Facebook executives before deciding on its settlement.
Regardless of the intricacies of the settlement, the reaction of Facebook to what was supposed to be a record-breaking federal fine shows not only the obvious financial power of the social media behemoth, but also how ill-equipped U.S. regulators currently are to level out significant, impactful punishments to such companies.
If regulators want inspiration, they might do well to look to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The framework, which was introduced in the spring of 2018, is designed to give EU citizens better control of their data and better hold companies which misuse that data to account.
Crucially, the GDPR allows for a maximum fine equivalent to 4% of the company’s global revenue. These penalties, in turn, could potentially make the FTC’s “record-breaking” fine of $5 billion much more common for Facebook.
The fine, which has been referred to the Justice Department’s civil division for review, would be the largest ever handed out to a tech company by the federal government. But if Facebook’s recent stock price is anything to go by, the company is not at all fussed by the fine.
As Business Insider reported this week, after news of the fine broke last Friday, Facebook’s stock value actually rose 1%, netting CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who owns 88.1% of all Facebook shares — an extra $1.1 billion dollars. In April, Facebook had also reportedly set aside $5 billion in anticipation of a decision by the FTC, further dampening any sort of effect the fine may have hoped to have.
Lawmakers fiercely criticized the Facebook settlement, which was passed 3-2 along party lines by the Republican-controlled FTC. “The FTC just gave Facebook a Christmas present five months early,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement. “It’s very disappointing that such an enormously powerful company that engaged in such serious misconduct is getting a slap on the wrist.”
“Given the magnitude of the Cambridge Analytica violation, the FTC not only needs to impose a more significant fine, they need to be clear about what Facebook must change when it comes to data practices,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, (D-MN) who previously co-introduced legislation to improve the transparency of political ads on Facebook. “It appears that they haven’t done that, which is why Congress must take action.”
In addition, Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) all wrote to the FTC on Tuesday, describing the fine as “woefully inadequate,” and asking for an explanation of the process by which the commission determined the size of the fine, as well as if it had interviewed Zuckerberg or other top-ranking Facebook executives before deciding on its settlement.
Regardless of the intricacies of the settlement, the reaction of Facebook to what was supposed to be a record-breaking federal fine shows not only the obvious financial power of the social media behemoth, but also how ill-equipped U.S. regulators currently are to level out significant, impactful punishments to such companies.
If regulators want inspiration, they might do well to look to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The framework, which was introduced in the spring of 2018, is designed to give EU citizens better control of their data and better hold companies which misuse that data to account.
Crucially, the GDPR allows for a maximum fine equivalent to 4% of the company’s global revenue. These penalties, in turn, could potentially make the FTC’s “record-breaking” fine of $5 billion much more common for Facebook.
Right-Wing 'Historian' Says Dems Are Conspiring To Force Republicans From Cities
Bill Federer, self-proclaimed historian, cranked up the Truth & Liberty Coalition "Livecast" to warn The Faithful that liberals are plotting against them. Again.
By Karoli Kuns - Crooks & Liars
7/13/19 5:00am
Bill Federer is a failed Congressional candidate and current bloviator on the Salem Radio Network where he delivers a short segment called "The American Minute," which is some kind of history lesson for listeners delivered through right wing frames of course.
Federer joined the Truth & Liberty Coalition Livecast earlier this week to share some insight. This is another wingnut welfare operation intended to boost the evangelical crowd, without whom Republicans would have no hope of being re-elected.
And like all good right-wing bloviators, Federer served up a nice hot serving of conspiracy nonsense for his willing audience. His theory: Democrats are letting the crime rate rise in cities to drive Republicans out so Democrats can control the popular vote.
“You let antifa have demonstrations in the city, you let homeless people come into the city, you let the crime go up; what do people that have the financial means do? They move out," Federer explained. "So usually people who are financially responsible, a good percentage of those are Republicans."
"So in other words, you let the crime go up; a whole lot of Republicans will leave,” he concluded.
Most Republicans flee cities so they don't have to deal with those pesky brown and black folks, but Federer didn't let facts get in his way. It's hard for me to imagine rogue gangs of anti-fascists driving Republicans from cities unless those Republicans are, in fact, fascists.
On this "Livecast," the topics were diverse and far-ranging. Here are some samples:
What is being taught to our children in schools that undermines God’s plan.
· National Alzheimer’s and a revival of patriotism in the US.
· The Quakers, Betsy Ross and their stand against slavery.
· Deconstruction tactics in schools.
· Colin Kaepernick and how misinformed he is.
· Britain’s historical divide and conquer strategies and this strategy being used today in America.
Yeah, all that AND a conspiracy theory, too! Federer is Colorado-based, so I'm guessing that James Dobson's Focus on the Family has a hand in this particular broadcast.
Federer joined the Truth & Liberty Coalition Livecast earlier this week to share some insight. This is another wingnut welfare operation intended to boost the evangelical crowd, without whom Republicans would have no hope of being re-elected.
And like all good right-wing bloviators, Federer served up a nice hot serving of conspiracy nonsense for his willing audience. His theory: Democrats are letting the crime rate rise in cities to drive Republicans out so Democrats can control the popular vote.
“You let antifa have demonstrations in the city, you let homeless people come into the city, you let the crime go up; what do people that have the financial means do? They move out," Federer explained. "So usually people who are financially responsible, a good percentage of those are Republicans."
"So in other words, you let the crime go up; a whole lot of Republicans will leave,” he concluded.
Most Republicans flee cities so they don't have to deal with those pesky brown and black folks, but Federer didn't let facts get in his way. It's hard for me to imagine rogue gangs of anti-fascists driving Republicans from cities unless those Republicans are, in fact, fascists.
On this "Livecast," the topics were diverse and far-ranging. Here are some samples:
What is being taught to our children in schools that undermines God’s plan.
· National Alzheimer’s and a revival of patriotism in the US.
· The Quakers, Betsy Ross and their stand against slavery.
· Deconstruction tactics in schools.
· Colin Kaepernick and how misinformed he is.
· Britain’s historical divide and conquer strategies and this strategy being used today in America.
Yeah, all that AND a conspiracy theory, too! Federer is Colorado-based, so I'm guessing that James Dobson's Focus on the Family has a hand in this particular broadcast.
Fox News Hasn’t Asked Paid Contributor Ken Starr About His Pedophile Client Jeffrey Epstein
One of the major attorneys behind Epstein’s unconstitutional 2008 deal is a paid Fox News pundit. No one on the network has thought to ask him about his pedophile client.
Justin Baragona, Maxwell Tani - Media Reporter - Daily Beast
Updated 07.11.19 11:55AM ET
Fox News is apparently incapable of asking Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers about Jeffrey Epstein.
As The Daily Beast reported earlier this year, high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz, who helped negotiate a secretive deal for the billionaire pedophile to avoid federal prosecution, has appeared on Fox News more than 70 times since news of that 2008 deal broke. Not once was he asked about Epstein or the plea deal a judge recently declared unconstitutional.
But Dershowitz isn’t the only member of Epstein’s legal team who has repeatedly gotten a pass from Fox News: famed prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who also helped negotiate the illegal Epstein deal, is a paid Fox News contributor who makes regular appearances across the network.
In the nearly nine months since the Miami Herald revealed that Epstein’s legal team pressured then-U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta (now Trump’s labor secretary) into accepting a shockingly lenient deal, Fox News has interviewed Starr at least 59 times. But not a single host at the network has asked Starr about Epstein, Dershowitz, or their involvement in negotiating the plea.
Starr, who is billed as a paid Fox News contributor since at least early this year, has appeared across the network’s opinion and news shows, almost exclusively as a commentator on matters related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian election interference.
The majority of Starr’s interviews were with Fox’s primetime opinion hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. He also makes frequent appearances on Fox & Friends and shows anchored by Shannon Bream, Neil Cavuto, and Martha MacCallum. As the former independent counsel appointed to investigate President Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky affair, Starr’s voice is often used to bash the Mueller “witch hunt” and deny collusion by the Trump campaign.
Neither Fox News nor Starr responded to requests for comment on this story.
Many of the high-profile attorney’s appearances came around the same time as major developments in the Epstein saga, yet even some of the network’s “hard news” anchors have not asked him or Dershowitz about their role in negotiating the sweetheart deal for the financier accused of running a massive sex-trafficking scheme.
One day after the Herald broke news of the 2008 plea on Nov. 28, however, MacCallum did mention on-air that Starr was one of Epstein’s attorneys at the time. That appeared to be the only on-air mention of any such connection until after Epstein’s arrest this month.
Starr, meanwhile, appeared that same weekend on Sunday Morning Futures and despite the Epstein news still being fresh, host Maria Bartiromo instead focused solely on bashing the Mueller probe and asking the attorney about the death of former President George H. W. Bush.
Months later, on Feb. 21, a federal judge ruled that the plea deal negotiated by Starr was unconstitutional as the victims were not notified. Three days later, Mark Levin hosted Starr for the entirety of his weekend show called Life, Liberty & Levin. Despite speaking to Starr for an entire hour, Levin, a right-wing talk radio host, found no time to ask his guest about recent news regarding his pedophile client.
Following the judge’s ruling, several weeks later, Starr co-authored a New York Times op-ed on March 4 with several other Epstein attorneys, defending the plea deal while claiming that the “number of young women involved in the investigation has been vastly exaggerated, there was no ‘international sex-trafficking operation’ and there was never evidence that Mr. Epstein ‘hosted sex parties’ at his home.”
Two days after that op-ed ran, Epstein and his associates were accused by a victim’s lawyer of running a sex-trafficking ring. On March 8, Starr appeared on The Ingraham Angle but, of course, was not asked about either the Times op-ed or the latest accusations against his client. Three days later, a federal court took action begin unsealing documents related to the Epstein case.
Over the following month, Starr made another 15 Fox News appearances, including a hit alongside Dershowitz mere days after a mystery party filed federal documents attempting to prevent the release of Epstein documents. The pairs’ pedophile client was never discussed.
As Epstein investigations picked up steam over the spring, Starr’s Fox News appearances increased rapidly, sometimes including multiple hits in the same day. But the topic of conversation was always Mueller-related. Since mid-April, the counselor has made a total of 32 appearances on Fox News, including his most recent: a July 3 Mueller-bashing chat with Sean Hannity.
Two days later, on this past Saturday evening, Epstein was arrested, kick-starting hours upon hours worth of coverage across cable-news network this week, including on Fox News.
Dershowitz had been scheduled to appear Monday night on Hannity’s show, hours after federal prosecutors indicted Epstein and alleged a “vast network” of sex-trafficking. But Epstein’s famous attorney did not appear on-air that evening—because of a “crowded schedule,” Dershowitz told The Hollywood Reporter.
And since Epstein’s headline-grabbing arrest, much ado has been made about Sec. Acosta’s role in the sweetheart deal that prevented the billionaire from being prosecuted a decade ago.
Ken Starr, the man who negotiated that deal—and is a paid network employee—is nowhere to be found on Fox News’ airwaves.
As The Daily Beast reported earlier this year, high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz, who helped negotiate a secretive deal for the billionaire pedophile to avoid federal prosecution, has appeared on Fox News more than 70 times since news of that 2008 deal broke. Not once was he asked about Epstein or the plea deal a judge recently declared unconstitutional.
But Dershowitz isn’t the only member of Epstein’s legal team who has repeatedly gotten a pass from Fox News: famed prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who also helped negotiate the illegal Epstein deal, is a paid Fox News contributor who makes regular appearances across the network.
In the nearly nine months since the Miami Herald revealed that Epstein’s legal team pressured then-U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta (now Trump’s labor secretary) into accepting a shockingly lenient deal, Fox News has interviewed Starr at least 59 times. But not a single host at the network has asked Starr about Epstein, Dershowitz, or their involvement in negotiating the plea.
Starr, who is billed as a paid Fox News contributor since at least early this year, has appeared across the network’s opinion and news shows, almost exclusively as a commentator on matters related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian election interference.
The majority of Starr’s interviews were with Fox’s primetime opinion hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. He also makes frequent appearances on Fox & Friends and shows anchored by Shannon Bream, Neil Cavuto, and Martha MacCallum. As the former independent counsel appointed to investigate President Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky affair, Starr’s voice is often used to bash the Mueller “witch hunt” and deny collusion by the Trump campaign.
Neither Fox News nor Starr responded to requests for comment on this story.
Many of the high-profile attorney’s appearances came around the same time as major developments in the Epstein saga, yet even some of the network’s “hard news” anchors have not asked him or Dershowitz about their role in negotiating the sweetheart deal for the financier accused of running a massive sex-trafficking scheme.
One day after the Herald broke news of the 2008 plea on Nov. 28, however, MacCallum did mention on-air that Starr was one of Epstein’s attorneys at the time. That appeared to be the only on-air mention of any such connection until after Epstein’s arrest this month.
Starr, meanwhile, appeared that same weekend on Sunday Morning Futures and despite the Epstein news still being fresh, host Maria Bartiromo instead focused solely on bashing the Mueller probe and asking the attorney about the death of former President George H. W. Bush.
Months later, on Feb. 21, a federal judge ruled that the plea deal negotiated by Starr was unconstitutional as the victims were not notified. Three days later, Mark Levin hosted Starr for the entirety of his weekend show called Life, Liberty & Levin. Despite speaking to Starr for an entire hour, Levin, a right-wing talk radio host, found no time to ask his guest about recent news regarding his pedophile client.
Following the judge’s ruling, several weeks later, Starr co-authored a New York Times op-ed on March 4 with several other Epstein attorneys, defending the plea deal while claiming that the “number of young women involved in the investigation has been vastly exaggerated, there was no ‘international sex-trafficking operation’ and there was never evidence that Mr. Epstein ‘hosted sex parties’ at his home.”
Two days after that op-ed ran, Epstein and his associates were accused by a victim’s lawyer of running a sex-trafficking ring. On March 8, Starr appeared on The Ingraham Angle but, of course, was not asked about either the Times op-ed or the latest accusations against his client. Three days later, a federal court took action begin unsealing documents related to the Epstein case.
Over the following month, Starr made another 15 Fox News appearances, including a hit alongside Dershowitz mere days after a mystery party filed federal documents attempting to prevent the release of Epstein documents. The pairs’ pedophile client was never discussed.
As Epstein investigations picked up steam over the spring, Starr’s Fox News appearances increased rapidly, sometimes including multiple hits in the same day. But the topic of conversation was always Mueller-related. Since mid-April, the counselor has made a total of 32 appearances on Fox News, including his most recent: a July 3 Mueller-bashing chat with Sean Hannity.
Two days later, on this past Saturday evening, Epstein was arrested, kick-starting hours upon hours worth of coverage across cable-news network this week, including on Fox News.
Dershowitz had been scheduled to appear Monday night on Hannity’s show, hours after federal prosecutors indicted Epstein and alleged a “vast network” of sex-trafficking. But Epstein’s famous attorney did not appear on-air that evening—because of a “crowded schedule,” Dershowitz told The Hollywood Reporter.
And since Epstein’s headline-grabbing arrest, much ado has been made about Sec. Acosta’s role in the sweetheart deal that prevented the billionaire from being prosecuted a decade ago.
Ken Starr, the man who negotiated that deal—and is a paid network employee—is nowhere to be found on Fox News’ airwaves.
Civil Rights Groups Have Been Warning Facebook About Hate Speech In Secret Groups For Years
Facebook says its rules prohibit hate in secret groups, but it won’t discuss how it moderated the offensive Border Patrol posts — if it did anything at all.
by Ariana Tobin - Pro Publica
July 2, 7:20 p.m. EDT
Facebook says its standards apply just as much in private groups as public posts, prohibiting most slurs and threats based on national origin, sex, race and immigration status.
But dozens of hateful posts in a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents raise questions about how well if at all the company is policing disturbing postings and comments made outside of public view.
Many of the posts ProPublica obtained from the 9,500-member “I’m 10-15” group (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “alien in custody”) include violent or dehumanizing speech that appears to violate
Facebook’s standards. For example, a thread of comments before a visit to a troubled Border Patrol facility in Texas by Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Veronica Escobar, of Texas, included “fuck the hoes” and “No mames [fist].” Another post encouraged Border Patrol agents to respond to the Latina lawmakers visit by hurling a “burrito at these bitches.” And yet another mocked a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag. A commenter joked, “At least it’s already in a trash bag” — all probable violations of the rules.
Facebook, citing an open federal investigation into the group’s activities, declined to answer questions about whether any posts in the 10-15 group violated its terms of service or had been removed, or whether the company had begun scrutinizing the group’s postings since ProPublica’s story was published. It also refused to say whether it had previously flagged posts by group members or had received complaints.
Facebook’s only response, emailed by a spokeswoman who refused to let ProPublica use her name, was: “We want everyone using Facebook to feel safe. Our Community Standards apply across Facebook, including in secret Groups. We’re cooperating with federal authorities in their investigation.”
Since April, the company has been calling community groups “the center of Facebook.” It has put new emphasis on group activity in the newsfeed and has encouraged companies, communities and news organizations to shift resources into private messaging. These forums can give members a protected space to discuss painful topics like domestic violence, or to share a passion for cookbooks. Groups can be either private, which means they can be found in search results, or secret, which means they are hidden unless you have an invitation.
This is part of an intentional “pivot toward privacy.” In a March blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”
But this pivot also fosters hidden forums where people can share offensive, potentially inflammatory viewpoints. “Secret” groups such as 10-15 are completely hidden from non-members. Would-be participants need an invitation to even find the landing page, and administrators of the groups have full jurisdiction to remove a person’s access at any time.
When such groups operate out of sight, like 10-15, the public has a more limited view into how people are using, or misusing, the platform. In a secret group, only members can flag or report content that might be in violation of Facebook’s policies. The administrators of the group can set stricter policies for members’ internal conversations. They cannot, however, relax broader Facebook standards. They also can’t support terrorist organizations, hate groups, murderers, criminals, sell drugs or attack individuals.
Civil rights groups say they have been noticing and raising the issue of hateful posts in hidden forums for years — with limited response from Facebook.
Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and a member of Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights groups pushing for better content moderation on Facebook, said the platform keeps creating features without “without vetting them for their implications for the use by hate groups or, in this case, Border Patrol agents acting in hateful ways.”
Posts in hidden groups have incited incidents of violence in the real world, most famously against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and at the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. The military launched an investigation of a secret Facebook group in 2017 after Marines shared naked pictures of female service members. Facebook has acknowledged the problem and has made some efforts to address it with new initiatives, such as a proposed independent review board and consultations with a group of 90 organizations, most focusing on civil rights.
ProPublica’s Border Patrol story came out the day after Facebook released an auditof civil rights issues on the platform. Recommendations included strengthening hate speech policies around national origin, enforcing a stricter ban on the promotion of white supremacy and removing an exemption that had allowed humorous posts that contained offensive content.
Facebook did not say whether it will make all of the recommended changes. But in a blog post, COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “We will continue listening to feedback from the civil rights community and address the important issues they’ve raised so Facebook can better protect and promote the civil rights of everyone who uses our services.”
Jessica Gonzalez, vice president of strategy and senior counsel at FreePress and co-founder of Change the Terms, said that even after the back and forth with auditors, she was not surprised that the hateful posts in 10-15 were not flagged.
“What Facebook released on Sunday is an improvement,” she said, “but I think Facebook has engaged in this all along in an appeasement strategy. They’ll do what they need to do to get the bad publicity off [their] backs.”
The civil rights audit also called for better transparency about civil rights issues on Facebook’s advertising portal, which became a priority for the company after multiple ProPublica investigations and lawsuits by civil rights groups.
Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Business, said the new emphasis on privacy is part of Facebook’s attempt to keep users on the platform, while reassuring investors.
“So to the extent that Facebook provides shelter to groups of all kinds — whether they are people who are sharing hateful messages or messages for the good of the world — it benefits their business model.
But dozens of hateful posts in a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents raise questions about how well if at all the company is policing disturbing postings and comments made outside of public view.
Many of the posts ProPublica obtained from the 9,500-member “I’m 10-15” group (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “alien in custody”) include violent or dehumanizing speech that appears to violate
Facebook’s standards. For example, a thread of comments before a visit to a troubled Border Patrol facility in Texas by Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Veronica Escobar, of Texas, included “fuck the hoes” and “No mames [fist].” Another post encouraged Border Patrol agents to respond to the Latina lawmakers visit by hurling a “burrito at these bitches.” And yet another mocked a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag. A commenter joked, “At least it’s already in a trash bag” — all probable violations of the rules.
Facebook, citing an open federal investigation into the group’s activities, declined to answer questions about whether any posts in the 10-15 group violated its terms of service or had been removed, or whether the company had begun scrutinizing the group’s postings since ProPublica’s story was published. It also refused to say whether it had previously flagged posts by group members or had received complaints.
Facebook’s only response, emailed by a spokeswoman who refused to let ProPublica use her name, was: “We want everyone using Facebook to feel safe. Our Community Standards apply across Facebook, including in secret Groups. We’re cooperating with federal authorities in their investigation.”
Since April, the company has been calling community groups “the center of Facebook.” It has put new emphasis on group activity in the newsfeed and has encouraged companies, communities and news organizations to shift resources into private messaging. These forums can give members a protected space to discuss painful topics like domestic violence, or to share a passion for cookbooks. Groups can be either private, which means they can be found in search results, or secret, which means they are hidden unless you have an invitation.
This is part of an intentional “pivot toward privacy.” In a March blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”
But this pivot also fosters hidden forums where people can share offensive, potentially inflammatory viewpoints. “Secret” groups such as 10-15 are completely hidden from non-members. Would-be participants need an invitation to even find the landing page, and administrators of the groups have full jurisdiction to remove a person’s access at any time.
When such groups operate out of sight, like 10-15, the public has a more limited view into how people are using, or misusing, the platform. In a secret group, only members can flag or report content that might be in violation of Facebook’s policies. The administrators of the group can set stricter policies for members’ internal conversations. They cannot, however, relax broader Facebook standards. They also can’t support terrorist organizations, hate groups, murderers, criminals, sell drugs or attack individuals.
Civil rights groups say they have been noticing and raising the issue of hateful posts in hidden forums for years — with limited response from Facebook.
Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and a member of Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights groups pushing for better content moderation on Facebook, said the platform keeps creating features without “without vetting them for their implications for the use by hate groups or, in this case, Border Patrol agents acting in hateful ways.”
Posts in hidden groups have incited incidents of violence in the real world, most famously against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and at the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. The military launched an investigation of a secret Facebook group in 2017 after Marines shared naked pictures of female service members. Facebook has acknowledged the problem and has made some efforts to address it with new initiatives, such as a proposed independent review board and consultations with a group of 90 organizations, most focusing on civil rights.
ProPublica’s Border Patrol story came out the day after Facebook released an auditof civil rights issues on the platform. Recommendations included strengthening hate speech policies around national origin, enforcing a stricter ban on the promotion of white supremacy and removing an exemption that had allowed humorous posts that contained offensive content.
Facebook did not say whether it will make all of the recommended changes. But in a blog post, COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “We will continue listening to feedback from the civil rights community and address the important issues they’ve raised so Facebook can better protect and promote the civil rights of everyone who uses our services.”
Jessica Gonzalez, vice president of strategy and senior counsel at FreePress and co-founder of Change the Terms, said that even after the back and forth with auditors, she was not surprised that the hateful posts in 10-15 were not flagged.
“What Facebook released on Sunday is an improvement,” she said, “but I think Facebook has engaged in this all along in an appeasement strategy. They’ll do what they need to do to get the bad publicity off [their] backs.”
The civil rights audit also called for better transparency about civil rights issues on Facebook’s advertising portal, which became a priority for the company after multiple ProPublica investigations and lawsuits by civil rights groups.
Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Business, said the new emphasis on privacy is part of Facebook’s attempt to keep users on the platform, while reassuring investors.
“So to the extent that Facebook provides shelter to groups of all kinds — whether they are people who are sharing hateful messages or messages for the good of the world — it benefits their business model.
profit by spreading racism!!!
Civil rights groups demand action after Facebook audit reveals problems with hate speech policy
The audit noted several issues with the social media giant's approach to white nationalism.
LUKE BARNES - Thinkprogress
JUL 1, 2019, 12:51 PM
Facebook published its Civil Rights Audit on Sunday, a document designed to track its progress in tackling hate speech, abusive content, and disinformation that has festered on its platform.
The audit revealed Facebook still has a proverbial mountain to climb. Already, civil rights groups are demanding transparency in any effort to remedy the problem.
The audit, carried out by the company’s civil rights ambassador Laura Murphy and a team from the civil rights law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax focused on four main areas: content moderation, elections, advertising, and the company’s accountability structure. It was the result of months of interviews with more than 90 civil rights organizations, to determine which “key issues to analyze.”
Several of the groups interviewed, including Muslim Advocates and Color of Change, are members of the Change the Terms coalition, which aims to get Facebook to take a stronger stance against extremist content on its platform.
Other groups in the coalition include Free Press, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Center for American Progress. (Editor’s note: ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom housed within the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)
One of the more interesting subsections of the audit is its analysis of Facebook’s approach to white nationalism. The company previously banned white nationalist content in March and has been at pains to note out the changes it made to live-streaming after a far-right extremist used the feature to broadcast a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year.
According to the audit, Facebook’s content moderation doesn’t go far enough.
“The Auditors believe that Facebook’s current white nationalism policy is too narrow because it prohibits only explicit praise, support, or representation of the terms ‘white nationalism’ or ‘white separatism,'” the report read. “The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist.’ As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitted to remain on the platform.”
The auditors also recommended Facebook further expand its white nationalist policy to ban individuals who currently skirt around the policy by advocating for white nationalism while not using the explicitly banned words.
In a separate statement, Muslim Advocates said that Facebook’s half-hearted attempts to crack down on white nationalist content showed that the company did not take its concerns seriously enough.
“This latest audit update shows that on issues regarding content moderation and the increased threat of white nationalist violence, the company has failed to take meaningful action,” Muslim Advocates said. “The murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch broadcast all over the world on Facebook made it clear that this is a life and death matter — still, the company has yet to take serious action.”
More broadly, civil rights advocates shared a similar criticism, saying that while some of Facebook’s changes were undoubtedly positive, its slow, incremental approach left significant room for improvement.
Keegan Hankes, SPLC interim research director, described the audit as “too heavy on platitudes and not comprehensive enough,” adding that a comprehensive plan for tackling hate speech on the platform could not be put in place without an “unvarnished look” at Facebook.
“We cannot move forward to protect targeted groups harmed by activity unless we have both an unvarnished look at the cesspools of hate and misinformation growing and spreading on Facebook with the company’s detailed plan for action to be taken on an urgent timeline,” Hankes said. “This update provided the public with neither.”
Hankes’ comments were echoed by Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and member of Change the Terms committee.
“Facebook remains turtle-slow to change. They need to move now to build a diverse team of experts with real authority to oversee ending hate on their platform to get it moving,” he said. “Relying primarily on monthly meetings of executives and a couple of outside consultants with civil rights expertise is a step forward but insufficient.”
Partially in response to the audit, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced Sunday that the company would be formalizing a civil rights task force so that Facebook could better address content policy, misinformation, and privacy concerns. Facebook also announced that it would be introducing civil rights training for its senior leadership.
“We know these are the first steps to developing long-term accountability,” Sandberg said. “We plan on making further changes to build a culture that explicitly protects and promotes civil rights on Facebook.”
The audit revealed Facebook still has a proverbial mountain to climb. Already, civil rights groups are demanding transparency in any effort to remedy the problem.
The audit, carried out by the company’s civil rights ambassador Laura Murphy and a team from the civil rights law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax focused on four main areas: content moderation, elections, advertising, and the company’s accountability structure. It was the result of months of interviews with more than 90 civil rights organizations, to determine which “key issues to analyze.”
Several of the groups interviewed, including Muslim Advocates and Color of Change, are members of the Change the Terms coalition, which aims to get Facebook to take a stronger stance against extremist content on its platform.
Other groups in the coalition include Free Press, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Center for American Progress. (Editor’s note: ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom housed within the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)
One of the more interesting subsections of the audit is its analysis of Facebook’s approach to white nationalism. The company previously banned white nationalist content in March and has been at pains to note out the changes it made to live-streaming after a far-right extremist used the feature to broadcast a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year.
According to the audit, Facebook’s content moderation doesn’t go far enough.
“The Auditors believe that Facebook’s current white nationalism policy is too narrow because it prohibits only explicit praise, support, or representation of the terms ‘white nationalism’ or ‘white separatism,'” the report read. “The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist.’ As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitted to remain on the platform.”
The auditors also recommended Facebook further expand its white nationalist policy to ban individuals who currently skirt around the policy by advocating for white nationalism while not using the explicitly banned words.
In a separate statement, Muslim Advocates said that Facebook’s half-hearted attempts to crack down on white nationalist content showed that the company did not take its concerns seriously enough.
“This latest audit update shows that on issues regarding content moderation and the increased threat of white nationalist violence, the company has failed to take meaningful action,” Muslim Advocates said. “The murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch broadcast all over the world on Facebook made it clear that this is a life and death matter — still, the company has yet to take serious action.”
More broadly, civil rights advocates shared a similar criticism, saying that while some of Facebook’s changes were undoubtedly positive, its slow, incremental approach left significant room for improvement.
Keegan Hankes, SPLC interim research director, described the audit as “too heavy on platitudes and not comprehensive enough,” adding that a comprehensive plan for tackling hate speech on the platform could not be put in place without an “unvarnished look” at Facebook.
“We cannot move forward to protect targeted groups harmed by activity unless we have both an unvarnished look at the cesspools of hate and misinformation growing and spreading on Facebook with the company’s detailed plan for action to be taken on an urgent timeline,” Hankes said. “This update provided the public with neither.”
Hankes’ comments were echoed by Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and member of Change the Terms committee.
“Facebook remains turtle-slow to change. They need to move now to build a diverse team of experts with real authority to oversee ending hate on their platform to get it moving,” he said. “Relying primarily on monthly meetings of executives and a couple of outside consultants with civil rights expertise is a step forward but insufficient.”
Partially in response to the audit, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced Sunday that the company would be formalizing a civil rights task force so that Facebook could better address content policy, misinformation, and privacy concerns. Facebook also announced that it would be introducing civil rights training for its senior leadership.
“We know these are the first steps to developing long-term accountability,” Sandberg said. “We plan on making further changes to build a culture that explicitly protects and promotes civil rights on Facebook.”
Sinclair Forcing Local Stations To Air What Is Basically A Trump 2020 Ad As 'News'
The only saving grace is it's hard to understand what Boris Epshteyn is saying.
By Frances Langum - Crooks & Liars
6/21/19 7:00am
Congratulations, America! Your local news owned by Sinclair Media is now hosting a "must run," editorial segment that is essentially an unapologetic ad for Trump 2020. Media Matters provides the transcript:
BORIS EPSHTEYN: Well, it’s official. President Trump has launched his 2020 reelection campaign. The energy behind President Trump and his “America First” movement is palpable, and if I’m a Democrat running in 2020, I am worried about my chances. That energy is quantifiable in the crowds that fill up massive stadiums. You see it on display when lines begin to form days in advance of Trump rallies. You see the energy in the unprecedented social media engagement for President Trump. You also see it in fundraising, where, according to reports, President Trump raised more in his first day running than any Democratic candidate did in their first three months.
Democrats have struggled to find a candidate who is able to hit these notes. Democratic candidates from Mayor Bill de Blasio to Sen. Kamala Harris and even the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, are failing to fill crowds or garner supporter reactions. On the other hand, the sitting president is treated like a rock star by his base.
President Trump’s strategy is simple: Keep the energy and motivation high, focus on several key issues, and ride the wind of his accomplishments to reelection. Here’s the bottom line: The advantages of incumbency and a successful first term are on full display for President Trump so far this cycle. While Democrats struggle to differentiate from one another, President Trump is proving that the GOP’s amp goes up to 11.
This is blatant propaganda forced on viewers by Trump toadies who have bought up local stations specifically for this purpose. This kind of "must run" nonsense should be paid advertising and count as an in-kind contribution to Trump2020.
Sinclair's Trump propaganda isn't playing well with some long-time news anchors. From Cincinnati:
John Kiesewetter✔
@TVKiese
News anchor Rob Braun says 'it's time to move on' after 35 yrs at WKRC-TV because 'I don't fit well with the Sinclair News model.' He wasn't fired, and he's not retiring @917wvxu. https://bit.ly/2FmdtOd
7:03 AM - Jun 20, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Rob Braun: 'I Don't Fit Well With Sinclair News Model'
News anchor Rob Braun says it was "time to move on" after 35 years at WKRC-TV because "I don't fit well with the Sinclair News model." Cincinnati's longest
wvxu.org
Expose Sinclair, one station at a time.
BORIS EPSHTEYN: Well, it’s official. President Trump has launched his 2020 reelection campaign. The energy behind President Trump and his “America First” movement is palpable, and if I’m a Democrat running in 2020, I am worried about my chances. That energy is quantifiable in the crowds that fill up massive stadiums. You see it on display when lines begin to form days in advance of Trump rallies. You see the energy in the unprecedented social media engagement for President Trump. You also see it in fundraising, where, according to reports, President Trump raised more in his first day running than any Democratic candidate did in their first three months.
Democrats have struggled to find a candidate who is able to hit these notes. Democratic candidates from Mayor Bill de Blasio to Sen. Kamala Harris and even the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, are failing to fill crowds or garner supporter reactions. On the other hand, the sitting president is treated like a rock star by his base.
President Trump’s strategy is simple: Keep the energy and motivation high, focus on several key issues, and ride the wind of his accomplishments to reelection. Here’s the bottom line: The advantages of incumbency and a successful first term are on full display for President Trump so far this cycle. While Democrats struggle to differentiate from one another, President Trump is proving that the GOP’s amp goes up to 11.
This is blatant propaganda forced on viewers by Trump toadies who have bought up local stations specifically for this purpose. This kind of "must run" nonsense should be paid advertising and count as an in-kind contribution to Trump2020.
Sinclair's Trump propaganda isn't playing well with some long-time news anchors. From Cincinnati:
John Kiesewetter✔
@TVKiese
News anchor Rob Braun says 'it's time to move on' after 35 yrs at WKRC-TV because 'I don't fit well with the Sinclair News model.' He wasn't fired, and he's not retiring @917wvxu. https://bit.ly/2FmdtOd
7:03 AM - Jun 20, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Rob Braun: 'I Don't Fit Well With Sinclair News Model'
News anchor Rob Braun says it was "time to move on" after 35 years at WKRC-TV because "I don't fit well with the Sinclair News model." Cincinnati's longest
wvxu.org
Expose Sinclair, one station at a time.
Soledad O’Brien shames the press for calling Trump’s lies about Central Park 5 a ‘controversial stance’
June 19, 2019
By Brad Reed - Raw Story
Former CNN host Soledad O’Brien has once again called out media outlets for whitewashing President Donald Trump’s blatant lies.
This time, O’Brien took issue with a USA Today headline that mischaracterized Trump’s lies about five black men who were falsely accused of raping a woman in New York’s Central Park in the 1980s, only to have their convictions vacated in 2002 after DNA evidence exonerated them and another man confessed that he was the man who committed the brutal Central Park rape more than a decade earlier.
Instead of calling out Trump for lying about the case, the paper simply called Trump’s continued assertions of their guilt a “controversial stance.”
“It’s not a controversial stance,” O’Brien said. “It’s inaccurate. They were paid out 41 million dollars! Another person confessed! But his comment is framed as a perfectly reasonable take, just his take on it. This is not educating the public.”
Trump this week once again suggested that the Central Park Five were really guilty, despite the overwhelming evidence that they were innocent.
“You have people on both sides of that,” Trump said when asked about the five men having their convictions vacated. “They admitted their guilt.”
In fact, the Central Park Five say that police coerced them into making false confessions, and have since been completely exonerated.
This time, O’Brien took issue with a USA Today headline that mischaracterized Trump’s lies about five black men who were falsely accused of raping a woman in New York’s Central Park in the 1980s, only to have their convictions vacated in 2002 after DNA evidence exonerated them and another man confessed that he was the man who committed the brutal Central Park rape more than a decade earlier.
Instead of calling out Trump for lying about the case, the paper simply called Trump’s continued assertions of their guilt a “controversial stance.”
“It’s not a controversial stance,” O’Brien said. “It’s inaccurate. They were paid out 41 million dollars! Another person confessed! But his comment is framed as a perfectly reasonable take, just his take on it. This is not educating the public.”
Trump this week once again suggested that the Central Park Five were really guilty, despite the overwhelming evidence that they were innocent.
“You have people on both sides of that,” Trump said when asked about the five men having their convictions vacated. “They admitted their guilt.”
In fact, the Central Park Five say that police coerced them into making false confessions, and have since been completely exonerated.
Open Letter to the MSM
Nancegreggs - demo underground
6/16/19
Watch any political news show these days and you’ll inevitably hear the same question asked:What are the Democrats doing about Trump?
It would seem obvious that the real question should be: What are the Republicans doing about Trump?
The Democrats didn’t put this Idiot in the White House – Republicans did. They nominated him, elected him, and continue to support him. It’s the Republicans who controlled the House, the Senate, and the “presidency” for two years – so how is it the Democrats’ fault that The Dotard is still where he is? Why is it somehow the failure of the Democrats that a Russian-colluding traitor is distancing us from our allies while praising our enemies?
Why is it the responsibility of the Democrats to stop the insanity of the madman in the Oval Office, while the Republicans support his every lie, his every inane statement, his every attempt to undermine the agencies that keep our country safe from the very people who their “pResident” is determined to align himself with.
I’ve heard it dozens of times now: Why aren’t the Democrats coming up with a way to humanely house immigrant children in cages? Again, shouldn’t the question be: Why are there children in cages in the first place?We all know who put them there – and it wasn’t the Democrats. Why are Republicans let off the hook for their inhumane policies, while Democrats are excoriated for not undoing the damage that Republicans continue to do?
I’m tired of hearing how the Democrats are spineless. It isn’t the Democrats who sat in silence while a Republican “pResident” stood on the world’s stage and declared that Putin’s “word for it” should be taken above the factual findings of our own intelligence community. It isn’t the Democrats who have – consistently and repeatedly – supported the undermining of our most precious freedoms, like a free press, the right to vote, and the safeguards that ensure that every vote is counted – and NOT interfered with or influenced by our enemies.
If anyone has been spineless, it is the Republicans, who – two-plus years into this disastrous “pResidency” – have yet to stand up to the democracy-destroying, brainless bigot they placed in the highest office in the land. Where is the spine of the party that has remained silent while the institutions that underpin our democracy have been demeaned by their “pResident”, who dismisses their efforts to keep our nation secure while instead kow-towing to ruthless dictators who send him “beautiful letters”?
This is not to say that Democrats are above reproach, or above criticism. But when you play the ”What are you doing about Trump?” card, you might think about dealing that card to the players who invited him to the table to begin with. You might want to ask them why they insisted that a known con-man be allowed to join the game.
I am fed up with watching this scenario played out – not on FOX-News (where this bullshit is to be expected), but on networks that hold themselves out as representing serious journalism. There is nothing ‘serious’ about asking the Democrats why they haven’t cleaned-up the shit this “pResident” has smeared all over the Constitution and the rule of law. Serious journalists would be asking the Republicans why they ever allowed their rabid dog to shit on those things in the first instance, and why they continue to enable him to do so, instead of asking Democrats why they have failed to rid us of the stench.
Let’s get this much straight. The Republicans have held the power to curb their mutt all along. They had the power to rein him in, the power to withhold their support of his idiotic ideas, the power to render him powerless if he refused to conduct himself in accordance with the Constitution and the law – and yet they have consistently refused to do so.
So let’s stop this pretense of being fair-and-balanced by asking Democrats what they are going to do about Trump. Ask the Republicans what they’re going to do about their out-of-control, snarling attack dog – because in case you haven’t noticed, they’re ones who have been holding the leash all along.
It would seem obvious that the real question should be: What are the Republicans doing about Trump?
The Democrats didn’t put this Idiot in the White House – Republicans did. They nominated him, elected him, and continue to support him. It’s the Republicans who controlled the House, the Senate, and the “presidency” for two years – so how is it the Democrats’ fault that The Dotard is still where he is? Why is it somehow the failure of the Democrats that a Russian-colluding traitor is distancing us from our allies while praising our enemies?
Why is it the responsibility of the Democrats to stop the insanity of the madman in the Oval Office, while the Republicans support his every lie, his every inane statement, his every attempt to undermine the agencies that keep our country safe from the very people who their “pResident” is determined to align himself with.
I’ve heard it dozens of times now: Why aren’t the Democrats coming up with a way to humanely house immigrant children in cages? Again, shouldn’t the question be: Why are there children in cages in the first place?We all know who put them there – and it wasn’t the Democrats. Why are Republicans let off the hook for their inhumane policies, while Democrats are excoriated for not undoing the damage that Republicans continue to do?
I’m tired of hearing how the Democrats are spineless. It isn’t the Democrats who sat in silence while a Republican “pResident” stood on the world’s stage and declared that Putin’s “word for it” should be taken above the factual findings of our own intelligence community. It isn’t the Democrats who have – consistently and repeatedly – supported the undermining of our most precious freedoms, like a free press, the right to vote, and the safeguards that ensure that every vote is counted – and NOT interfered with or influenced by our enemies.
If anyone has been spineless, it is the Republicans, who – two-plus years into this disastrous “pResidency” – have yet to stand up to the democracy-destroying, brainless bigot they placed in the highest office in the land. Where is the spine of the party that has remained silent while the institutions that underpin our democracy have been demeaned by their “pResident”, who dismisses their efforts to keep our nation secure while instead kow-towing to ruthless dictators who send him “beautiful letters”?
This is not to say that Democrats are above reproach, or above criticism. But when you play the ”What are you doing about Trump?” card, you might think about dealing that card to the players who invited him to the table to begin with. You might want to ask them why they insisted that a known con-man be allowed to join the game.
I am fed up with watching this scenario played out – not on FOX-News (where this bullshit is to be expected), but on networks that hold themselves out as representing serious journalism. There is nothing ‘serious’ about asking the Democrats why they haven’t cleaned-up the shit this “pResident” has smeared all over the Constitution and the rule of law. Serious journalists would be asking the Republicans why they ever allowed their rabid dog to shit on those things in the first instance, and why they continue to enable him to do so, instead of asking Democrats why they have failed to rid us of the stench.
Let’s get this much straight. The Republicans have held the power to curb their mutt all along. They had the power to rein him in, the power to withhold their support of his idiotic ideas, the power to render him powerless if he refused to conduct himself in accordance with the Constitution and the law – and yet they have consistently refused to do so.
So let’s stop this pretense of being fair-and-balanced by asking Democrats what they are going to do about Trump. Ask the Republicans what they’re going to do about their out-of-control, snarling attack dog – because in case you haven’t noticed, they’re ones who have been holding the leash all along.
IN COURT, FACEBOOK BLAMES USERS FOR DESTROYING THEIR OWN RIGHT TO PRIVACY
Sam Biddle - The Intercept
June 14 2019, 8:50 a.m
IN APRIL 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat before members of both houses of Congress and told them his company respected the privacy of the roughly two billion people who use it. “Privacy” remained largely undefined throughout Zuckerberg’s televised flagellations, but he mentioned the concept more than two dozen times, including when he told the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce committees, “We have a broader responsibility to protect people’s privacy even beyond” a consent decree from federal privacy regulators, and when he told the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls.” A year later, Zuckerberg claimed in interviews and essays to have discovered the religion of personal privacy and vowed to rebuild the company in its image.
But only months after Zuckerberg first outlined his “privacy-focused vision for social networking” in a 3,000-word post on the social network he founded, his lawyers were explaining to a California judge that privacy on Facebook is nonexistent.
The courtroom debate, first reported by Law360, took place as Facebook tried to scuttle litigation from users upset that their personal data was shared without their knowledge with the consultancy Cambridge Analytica and later with advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign. The full transcript of the proceedings — which has been quoted from only briefly — reveal one of the most stunning examples of corporate doublespeak certainly in Facebook’s history.
Representing Facebook before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria was Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who claimed that the plaintiffs’ charges of privacy invasion were invalid because Facebook users have no expectation of privacy on Facebook. The simple act of using Facebook, Snyder claimed, negated any user’s expectation of privacy:
There is no privacy interest, because by sharing with a hundred friends on a social media platform, which is an affirmative social act to publish, to disclose, to share ostensibly private information with a hundred people, you have just, under centuries of common law, under the judgment of Congress, under the SCA, negated any reasonable expectation of privacy.
An outside party can’t violate what you yourself destroyed, Snyder seemed to suggest. Snyder was emphatic in his description of Facebook as a sort of privacy anti-matter, going so far as to claim that “the social act of broadcasting your private information to 100 people negates, as a matter of law, any reasonable expectation of privacy.” You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more elegant, concise description of Facebook than “the social act of broadcasting your private information” to people. So not only is it Facebook’s legal position that you’re not entitled to any expectation of privacy, but it’s your fault that the expectation went poof the moment you started using the site (or at least once you connected with 100 Facebook “friends”).
Judge Chhabria was skeptical of Snyder’s privacy nonexistence argument at times, which he rejected as treating personal privacy as a binary, “like either you have a full expectation of privacy, or you have no expectation of privacy at all,” the judge put it at one point. Chhabria continued with a relatable hypothetical:
If I share [information] with ten people, that doesn’t eliminate my expectation of privacy. It might diminish it, but it doesn’t eliminate it. And if I share something with ten people on the understanding that the entity that is helping me share it will not further disseminate it to a thousand companies, I don’t understand why I don’t have — why that’s not a violation of my expectation of privacy.
Snyder responded with an incredible metaphor for how Facebook sees your use of its services — legally, at least:
Let me give you a hypothetical of my own. I go into a classroom and invite a hundred friends. This courtroom. I invite a hundred friends, I rent out the courtroom, and I have a party. And I disclose — And I disclose something private about myself to a hundred people, friends and colleagues. Those friends then rent out a 100,000-person arena, and they rebroadcast those to 100,000 people. I have no cause of action because by going to a hundred people and saying my private truths, I have negated any reasonable expectation of privacy, because the case law is clear.
And there it is, in broad daylight: Using Facebook is a depressing party taking place in a courtroom, for some reason, that’s being simultaneously broadcasted to a 100,000-person arena on a sort of time delay. If you show up at the party, don’t be mad when your photo winds up on the Jumbotron. That is literally the company’s legal position.
Again and again, Snyder blames the targets of surveillance capitalism for their own surveillance:
This is why every parent says to their child, “Do not post it on Facebook if you don’t want to read about it tomorrow morning in the school newspaper,” or, as I tell my young associates if I were going to be giving them an orientation, “Do not put anything on social media that you don’t want to read in the Law Journal in the morning.” There is no expectation of privacy when you go on a social media platform, the purpose of which, when you are set to friends, is to share and communicate things with a large group of people, a hundred people.
At one point Chhabria asked, seemingly unable to believe Snyder’s argument himself, “If Facebook promises not to disseminate anything that you send to your hundred friends, and Facebook breaks that promise and disseminates your photographs to a thousand corporations, that would not be a serious privacy invasion?
Snyder didn’t blink: “Facebook does not consider that to be actionable, as a matter of law under California law.”
Facebook’s counsel did seem to concede one possibility for the existence of privacy on Facebook: someone who uses Facebook completely contrary to the way it’s designed and to the way it has always been marketed. “If you really want to be private,” Snyder proposed to the court, “there are people who have archival Facebook pages that are like their own private mausoleum. It’s only set to [be visible by] me, and it’s for the purpose of repository, you know, of your private information, and no one will ever see that.” So these are your possible valid legal statuses as a Facebook user: You’re either plugged into the 100,0000-person perpetual surveillance Coachella or living in a digital “mausoleum.” But if you ever decide to fling open the doors of your private data crypt and, say, share a little content on Facebook with friends, as the company has been pushing us for the past 13 years, Snyder says you’re out of luck:
Once you go to friends, the gig is over because you’ve just gone — taken a hundred people and pronounced your personal likes and dislikes. In fact, the very act of liking something and showing your friends that you like something is a non-private act. It’s the whole premise of Facebook and social media, is to render not private your likes, your dislikes, your expressions. When I tag someone in a photo, it’s to tell people, not keep private, that I’m sitting on a park bench with John Smith. So it’s the opposite of private when you do that.
Facebook’s stance that if one truly wants to keep something private, they should keep it far from Facebook is odd — odder, still, given the fact that the company publishes an extremely detailed privacy policy, perhaps only meant for those huddling in private mausoleums where such a principle still exists.
“Facebook was built to bring people closer together,” reads the start of the company’s “Privacy Principles.” “We help you connect with friends and family, discover local events and find groups to join.”
Not mentioned is that if you do any of that, it’s Facebook’s official opinion that you’ve “negated” your claim to any privacy whatsoever. The list of principles reads like a bad joke after studying Snyder’s courtroom theorizing: “We design privacy into our products from the outset” seems hard to reconcile with “Once you go to friends, the gig is over.” It’s similarly hard to take “We give you control of your privacy” seriously after hearing, through Snyder, that because Facebook users “shared the information … you’ve lost control over the information and its subsequent disclosure.”
So which is true, then? Are we to believe Orin Snyder when he says Facebook privacy is an oxymoron and that showing something to even a small group of friends completely forfeits your right to privacy, or Mark Zuckerberg when, this past March, he wrote, “We’ve worked hard to build privacy into all our products, including those for public sharing.” These statements can’t both be true, and yet they appear to originate from the same company, albeit from two separate sides of its mouth. Perhaps Snyder is right when he tells the judge that the litigation isn’t really about just Facebook, but rather, the “Complaint is really a Complaint about ubiquitous sharing on social media platforms. … They don’t like it because when you go on a social media platform and share your information with a hundred people, you’ve lost control. And that creates anxiety, and that creates concern.” It will be interesting to watch Facebook confront this public dread in multiple ways at once, as if originating in completely different dimensions, apologizing for their misdeeds in media tours while denying any wrongdoing in the relative privacy of court.
Neither Facebook nor Orin Snyder responded to a request for comment. Plaintiff’s counsel declined to comment.
But only months after Zuckerberg first outlined his “privacy-focused vision for social networking” in a 3,000-word post on the social network he founded, his lawyers were explaining to a California judge that privacy on Facebook is nonexistent.
The courtroom debate, first reported by Law360, took place as Facebook tried to scuttle litigation from users upset that their personal data was shared without their knowledge with the consultancy Cambridge Analytica and later with advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign. The full transcript of the proceedings — which has been quoted from only briefly — reveal one of the most stunning examples of corporate doublespeak certainly in Facebook’s history.
Representing Facebook before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria was Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who claimed that the plaintiffs’ charges of privacy invasion were invalid because Facebook users have no expectation of privacy on Facebook. The simple act of using Facebook, Snyder claimed, negated any user’s expectation of privacy:
There is no privacy interest, because by sharing with a hundred friends on a social media platform, which is an affirmative social act to publish, to disclose, to share ostensibly private information with a hundred people, you have just, under centuries of common law, under the judgment of Congress, under the SCA, negated any reasonable expectation of privacy.
An outside party can’t violate what you yourself destroyed, Snyder seemed to suggest. Snyder was emphatic in his description of Facebook as a sort of privacy anti-matter, going so far as to claim that “the social act of broadcasting your private information to 100 people negates, as a matter of law, any reasonable expectation of privacy.” You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more elegant, concise description of Facebook than “the social act of broadcasting your private information” to people. So not only is it Facebook’s legal position that you’re not entitled to any expectation of privacy, but it’s your fault that the expectation went poof the moment you started using the site (or at least once you connected with 100 Facebook “friends”).
Judge Chhabria was skeptical of Snyder’s privacy nonexistence argument at times, which he rejected as treating personal privacy as a binary, “like either you have a full expectation of privacy, or you have no expectation of privacy at all,” the judge put it at one point. Chhabria continued with a relatable hypothetical:
If I share [information] with ten people, that doesn’t eliminate my expectation of privacy. It might diminish it, but it doesn’t eliminate it. And if I share something with ten people on the understanding that the entity that is helping me share it will not further disseminate it to a thousand companies, I don’t understand why I don’t have — why that’s not a violation of my expectation of privacy.
Snyder responded with an incredible metaphor for how Facebook sees your use of its services — legally, at least:
Let me give you a hypothetical of my own. I go into a classroom and invite a hundred friends. This courtroom. I invite a hundred friends, I rent out the courtroom, and I have a party. And I disclose — And I disclose something private about myself to a hundred people, friends and colleagues. Those friends then rent out a 100,000-person arena, and they rebroadcast those to 100,000 people. I have no cause of action because by going to a hundred people and saying my private truths, I have negated any reasonable expectation of privacy, because the case law is clear.
And there it is, in broad daylight: Using Facebook is a depressing party taking place in a courtroom, for some reason, that’s being simultaneously broadcasted to a 100,000-person arena on a sort of time delay. If you show up at the party, don’t be mad when your photo winds up on the Jumbotron. That is literally the company’s legal position.
Again and again, Snyder blames the targets of surveillance capitalism for their own surveillance:
This is why every parent says to their child, “Do not post it on Facebook if you don’t want to read about it tomorrow morning in the school newspaper,” or, as I tell my young associates if I were going to be giving them an orientation, “Do not put anything on social media that you don’t want to read in the Law Journal in the morning.” There is no expectation of privacy when you go on a social media platform, the purpose of which, when you are set to friends, is to share and communicate things with a large group of people, a hundred people.
At one point Chhabria asked, seemingly unable to believe Snyder’s argument himself, “If Facebook promises not to disseminate anything that you send to your hundred friends, and Facebook breaks that promise and disseminates your photographs to a thousand corporations, that would not be a serious privacy invasion?
Snyder didn’t blink: “Facebook does not consider that to be actionable, as a matter of law under California law.”
Facebook’s counsel did seem to concede one possibility for the existence of privacy on Facebook: someone who uses Facebook completely contrary to the way it’s designed and to the way it has always been marketed. “If you really want to be private,” Snyder proposed to the court, “there are people who have archival Facebook pages that are like their own private mausoleum. It’s only set to [be visible by] me, and it’s for the purpose of repository, you know, of your private information, and no one will ever see that.” So these are your possible valid legal statuses as a Facebook user: You’re either plugged into the 100,0000-person perpetual surveillance Coachella or living in a digital “mausoleum.” But if you ever decide to fling open the doors of your private data crypt and, say, share a little content on Facebook with friends, as the company has been pushing us for the past 13 years, Snyder says you’re out of luck:
Once you go to friends, the gig is over because you’ve just gone — taken a hundred people and pronounced your personal likes and dislikes. In fact, the very act of liking something and showing your friends that you like something is a non-private act. It’s the whole premise of Facebook and social media, is to render not private your likes, your dislikes, your expressions. When I tag someone in a photo, it’s to tell people, not keep private, that I’m sitting on a park bench with John Smith. So it’s the opposite of private when you do that.
Facebook’s stance that if one truly wants to keep something private, they should keep it far from Facebook is odd — odder, still, given the fact that the company publishes an extremely detailed privacy policy, perhaps only meant for those huddling in private mausoleums where such a principle still exists.
“Facebook was built to bring people closer together,” reads the start of the company’s “Privacy Principles.” “We help you connect with friends and family, discover local events and find groups to join.”
Not mentioned is that if you do any of that, it’s Facebook’s official opinion that you’ve “negated” your claim to any privacy whatsoever. The list of principles reads like a bad joke after studying Snyder’s courtroom theorizing: “We design privacy into our products from the outset” seems hard to reconcile with “Once you go to friends, the gig is over.” It’s similarly hard to take “We give you control of your privacy” seriously after hearing, through Snyder, that because Facebook users “shared the information … you’ve lost control over the information and its subsequent disclosure.”
So which is true, then? Are we to believe Orin Snyder when he says Facebook privacy is an oxymoron and that showing something to even a small group of friends completely forfeits your right to privacy, or Mark Zuckerberg when, this past March, he wrote, “We’ve worked hard to build privacy into all our products, including those for public sharing.” These statements can’t both be true, and yet they appear to originate from the same company, albeit from two separate sides of its mouth. Perhaps Snyder is right when he tells the judge that the litigation isn’t really about just Facebook, but rather, the “Complaint is really a Complaint about ubiquitous sharing on social media platforms. … They don’t like it because when you go on a social media platform and share your information with a hundred people, you’ve lost control. And that creates anxiety, and that creates concern.” It will be interesting to watch Facebook confront this public dread in multiple ways at once, as if originating in completely different dimensions, apologizing for their misdeeds in media tours while denying any wrongdoing in the relative privacy of court.
Neither Facebook nor Orin Snyder responded to a request for comment. Plaintiff’s counsel declined to comment.
Fox News Stars Begin Pushing Rumors About Joe Biden’s Health
Baseless claims about Biden’s medical fitness have quietly taken hold on Fox. At a time when TV news stars make similar claims about Trump and Clinton, this may be the new normal.
Justin Baragona - Daily Beast
Published 06.10.19 5:12AM ET
One month after Joe Biden announced his run for president, several Fox News stars have already begun quietly pushing rumors that the 76-year-old ex-veep is in poor health.
Since the end of May, Fox Business Network and Fox News star Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery and Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity have speculated on-air, on at least four separate occasions, that the current Democratic presidential frontrunner is secretly dealing with health issues, often comparing his condition to illness-related conspiracy theories the network pushed about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
The Biden rumor-mongering seemingly began May 29, during the broadcast of Fox News’ afternoon gabfest The Five. While assessing Biden’s candidacy, Kennedy claimed to know Democratic operatives engaged in a whisper campaign about Biden’s health.
“He is much more like Hillary Clinton, because if you talk to Democrats, who are working for different campaigns, all of the aggressive gossip whisperers—and this is where the action is happening in terms of opposition research—it’s people having a few drinks at a bar and whispering, ‘You know there is something wrong with the former vice president,’” she claimed. “But that’s what they are actively doing right now. And it is surprising because they are concerned with taking Biden down and getting their candidate out there.”
Co-host Jesse Watters, an avid Trump booster, pressed Kennedy to elaborate. “Don’t do it,” co-host Greg Gutfeld joked to Kennedy, acknowledging the danger in openly speculating about Biden being sick.
The innuendo seemed to go over the head of Watters, however, as he took it upon himself to explain “the gossip” about Biden as involving his support from black voters. Gutfeld laughed, remarking: “I don’t think that’s what Kennedy meant.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Hillary Clinton having a lumpy overcoat in 85-degree weather,” Kennedy explained, invoking a popular 2016 right-wing conspiracy theory fixated on a photo of Clinton wearing a wool jacket with a lump on the back while campaigning in warm weather.
“He looks healthy to me,” Watters—surprisingly—replied.
In the news business, it is considered irresponsible to spread baseless, potentially damaging rumors about public figures. Even Fox News briefly suspended Judge Andrew Napolitano in early 2017 after he made the unfounded claim on-air that British officials helped President Obama spy on the Trump campaign. Beyond news personalities, the American Medical Association considers it wholly unethical for physicians to speculate on public officials’ health without having personally examined them.
Nevertheless, early last week, while hosting her eponymous Fox Business Network show, Kennedy suggested Biden’s campaign staff may want to keep him “off a main stage” because he says “stupid things and he slurs,” adding that Biden “does look very tired.”
The following evening on her program, Kennedy went even further, once again invoking the conspiracy theory about Clinton’s overcoat to suggest Biden could be viewed as being in poor health.
“I think that it is a good move on Bernie’s part comparing Joe Biden to Hillary,” she said about Sanders saying that, in possibly picking Biden, Democrats might make “the same mistake” they did in nominating Clinton in 2016.
Sanders was referring specifically to how, in his estimation, there was and is a lack of energy and enthusiasm around both “establishment” candidates. And yet Kennedy suggested the comparison was health-related. “The more damage that [comparison] does, you go, ‘You know we haven’t seen Joe a lot, maybe he has hidden health issues, is always wearing an overcoat.’”
That same evening, during his top-rated prime-time Fox News show, Hannity—who regularly echoes Trump in calling the former vice president “Sleepy Joe”—also referenced Clinton to speculate about Biden’s health.
“Joe Biden’s tired,” he declared. “He does not have the energy for this. He’s not up for this challenge. They’re already hiding him like they hid Hillary. They don’t want him out there.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, said “These are baseless lies meant to stoke fear in their viewers. It has no place in our public discourse, and anyone amplifying it bears some responsibility for giving it legitimacy it most certainly does not deserve.”
But this not the first time cable-news stars have made similar unverified insinuations about a candidate.
In the summer of 2016, Fox News devoted copious amounts of airtime to conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s medical state. For an entire week in August, Hannity hosted segments in which he and a slew of guests analyzed out-of-context photos and videos while referencing Clinton’s 2012 concussion to claim the Democratic nominee was battling chronic illnesses, maladies, seizures, and critical neurological conditions. It didn’t take long for the Trump campaign to echo the claims.
At the time, even Newt Gingrich noted the recklessness in baselessly speculating about public figures’ health issues, calling it “junk medicine.” Additionally, he fretted: “Next you’re gonna get a left-wing psychiatrist explaining Donald Trump in negative terms."
And now since taking office, Trump himself has occasionally been the butt of such illness-related speculation.
CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter faced criticism when he wondered aloud in 2017 why more journalists don’t ask “uncomfortable questions” about the president’s mental state. “His actions have been described as unpresidential, unhinged, and sometimes even crazy,” Stelter said. “That word crazy can be interpreted several different ways. It gets said more in private than on TV.” And Stelter has been far from alone at CNN when it comes to questioning the president’s mental fitness.
MSNBC hosts, too, have speculated on the president’s mental and physical fitness. For example, for more than a year now, Trump’s ex-pal-turned-nemesis Joe Scarborough has repeatedly claimed the president is dealing with neurocognitive disorders.
In November 2017, the Morning Joe host relayed that “people close to him during the campaign told me he had early stages of dementia.”
In recent weeks, Scarborough has resuscitated these rumors, insisting last monththat those who know Trump are worried that he has “pre-dementia” and is in “mental decline.”
Since the end of May, Fox Business Network and Fox News star Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery and Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity have speculated on-air, on at least four separate occasions, that the current Democratic presidential frontrunner is secretly dealing with health issues, often comparing his condition to illness-related conspiracy theories the network pushed about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
The Biden rumor-mongering seemingly began May 29, during the broadcast of Fox News’ afternoon gabfest The Five. While assessing Biden’s candidacy, Kennedy claimed to know Democratic operatives engaged in a whisper campaign about Biden’s health.
“He is much more like Hillary Clinton, because if you talk to Democrats, who are working for different campaigns, all of the aggressive gossip whisperers—and this is where the action is happening in terms of opposition research—it’s people having a few drinks at a bar and whispering, ‘You know there is something wrong with the former vice president,’” she claimed. “But that’s what they are actively doing right now. And it is surprising because they are concerned with taking Biden down and getting their candidate out there.”
Co-host Jesse Watters, an avid Trump booster, pressed Kennedy to elaborate. “Don’t do it,” co-host Greg Gutfeld joked to Kennedy, acknowledging the danger in openly speculating about Biden being sick.
The innuendo seemed to go over the head of Watters, however, as he took it upon himself to explain “the gossip” about Biden as involving his support from black voters. Gutfeld laughed, remarking: “I don’t think that’s what Kennedy meant.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Hillary Clinton having a lumpy overcoat in 85-degree weather,” Kennedy explained, invoking a popular 2016 right-wing conspiracy theory fixated on a photo of Clinton wearing a wool jacket with a lump on the back while campaigning in warm weather.
“He looks healthy to me,” Watters—surprisingly—replied.
In the news business, it is considered irresponsible to spread baseless, potentially damaging rumors about public figures. Even Fox News briefly suspended Judge Andrew Napolitano in early 2017 after he made the unfounded claim on-air that British officials helped President Obama spy on the Trump campaign. Beyond news personalities, the American Medical Association considers it wholly unethical for physicians to speculate on public officials’ health without having personally examined them.
Nevertheless, early last week, while hosting her eponymous Fox Business Network show, Kennedy suggested Biden’s campaign staff may want to keep him “off a main stage” because he says “stupid things and he slurs,” adding that Biden “does look very tired.”
The following evening on her program, Kennedy went even further, once again invoking the conspiracy theory about Clinton’s overcoat to suggest Biden could be viewed as being in poor health.
“I think that it is a good move on Bernie’s part comparing Joe Biden to Hillary,” she said about Sanders saying that, in possibly picking Biden, Democrats might make “the same mistake” they did in nominating Clinton in 2016.
Sanders was referring specifically to how, in his estimation, there was and is a lack of energy and enthusiasm around both “establishment” candidates. And yet Kennedy suggested the comparison was health-related. “The more damage that [comparison] does, you go, ‘You know we haven’t seen Joe a lot, maybe he has hidden health issues, is always wearing an overcoat.’”
That same evening, during his top-rated prime-time Fox News show, Hannity—who regularly echoes Trump in calling the former vice president “Sleepy Joe”—also referenced Clinton to speculate about Biden’s health.
“Joe Biden’s tired,” he declared. “He does not have the energy for this. He’s not up for this challenge. They’re already hiding him like they hid Hillary. They don’t want him out there.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, said “These are baseless lies meant to stoke fear in their viewers. It has no place in our public discourse, and anyone amplifying it bears some responsibility for giving it legitimacy it most certainly does not deserve.”
But this not the first time cable-news stars have made similar unverified insinuations about a candidate.
In the summer of 2016, Fox News devoted copious amounts of airtime to conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s medical state. For an entire week in August, Hannity hosted segments in which he and a slew of guests analyzed out-of-context photos and videos while referencing Clinton’s 2012 concussion to claim the Democratic nominee was battling chronic illnesses, maladies, seizures, and critical neurological conditions. It didn’t take long for the Trump campaign to echo the claims.
At the time, even Newt Gingrich noted the recklessness in baselessly speculating about public figures’ health issues, calling it “junk medicine.” Additionally, he fretted: “Next you’re gonna get a left-wing psychiatrist explaining Donald Trump in negative terms."
And now since taking office, Trump himself has occasionally been the butt of such illness-related speculation.
CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter faced criticism when he wondered aloud in 2017 why more journalists don’t ask “uncomfortable questions” about the president’s mental state. “His actions have been described as unpresidential, unhinged, and sometimes even crazy,” Stelter said. “That word crazy can be interpreted several different ways. It gets said more in private than on TV.” And Stelter has been far from alone at CNN when it comes to questioning the president’s mental fitness.
MSNBC hosts, too, have speculated on the president’s mental and physical fitness. For example, for more than a year now, Trump’s ex-pal-turned-nemesis Joe Scarborough has repeatedly claimed the president is dealing with neurocognitive disorders.
In November 2017, the Morning Joe host relayed that “people close to him during the campaign told me he had early stages of dementia.”
In recent weeks, Scarborough has resuscitated these rumors, insisting last monththat those who know Trump are worried that he has “pre-dementia” and is in “mental decline.”
Trump wanted his cut of the scam!!!
Trump booster taken off Fox News after he angered the president: report
June 3, 2019
By Travis Gettys_ Raw Story
Fox News has banished an employee from the airwaves after he angered President Donald Trump.
David Bossie, the head of the conservative Citizens United activist group and former Trump deputy campaign manager, had regularly appeared on Fox News until the network stopped booking him to appease the president, reported The Daily Beast.
Trump was infuriated by reports that Bossie had raised millions by aligning with the president but spending very little of those funds on political activity.
Three sources told The Daily Beast that Fox News kept Bossie off the air because its opinion programming is designed not to anger the president, who is a regular viewer and frequent booster.
Trump’s campaign sent out an official statement denouncing Bossie’s activity, and Fox News and Fox Business employees raised ethical concerns about the fundraising.
A Fox News source made clear they had no evidence the White House or the Trump campaign had formally requested Bossie be taken off the air, but this person was told Trump’s allies at the network felt it was best to keep him from appearing on TV until the president had cooled off.
A Daily Beast analysis found Bossie had not appeared on Fox News or Fox Business since April 30, just before the reports surfaced about his fundraising.
He had appeared at least twice a week during that same month, and his opinion columns had appeared about once a week on FoxNews.com — until May 1, when his last column was published there.
A Fox News spokeswoman denied the sources’ claims as “not accurate,” but declined to be more specific, and Bossie declined to comment.
Bossie was suspended last year for two weeks for telling a black Democratic strategist on-air, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind!”
David Bossie, the head of the conservative Citizens United activist group and former Trump deputy campaign manager, had regularly appeared on Fox News until the network stopped booking him to appease the president, reported The Daily Beast.
Trump was infuriated by reports that Bossie had raised millions by aligning with the president but spending very little of those funds on political activity.
Three sources told The Daily Beast that Fox News kept Bossie off the air because its opinion programming is designed not to anger the president, who is a regular viewer and frequent booster.
Trump’s campaign sent out an official statement denouncing Bossie’s activity, and Fox News and Fox Business employees raised ethical concerns about the fundraising.
A Fox News source made clear they had no evidence the White House or the Trump campaign had formally requested Bossie be taken off the air, but this person was told Trump’s allies at the network felt it was best to keep him from appearing on TV until the president had cooled off.
A Daily Beast analysis found Bossie had not appeared on Fox News or Fox Business since April 30, just before the reports surfaced about his fundraising.
He had appeared at least twice a week during that same month, and his opinion columns had appeared about once a week on FoxNews.com — until May 1, when his last column was published there.
A Fox News spokeswoman denied the sources’ claims as “not accurate,” but declined to be more specific, and Bossie declined to comment.
Bossie was suspended last year for two weeks for telling a black Democratic strategist on-air, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind!”
The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
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https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
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