TO COMMENT CLICK HERE
Worthless Media
WELCOME TO WORTHLESS MEDIA WHERE THE FAILURE OF REAL JOURNALISM IS
EXPOSED
february 15, 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)
*Fox & Friends host says he hasn’t washed hands in 10 years: ‘Germs are not a real thing — I can’t see them’
*Carlson: Abrams "is telling Americans they must hate their neighbors for the color of their skin"
*Fox News goes after newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist agenda
*Fox News legal analyst loses it over latest Russia bombshells — and calls for ‘rogue’ FBI to be disbanded
*Sinclair Broadcasting gets slammed after airing ‘anti-vaxx propaganda’ produced by an Obama-hating journalist
At least one Sinclair Broadcasting station aired a segment questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
*Tomi Lahren claims SNL’s Jane Curtin is on a murderous anti-GOP campaign for ‘half the country to die’
*The View’s Abby Huntsman blames Democrats for government shutdown — and Whoopi sets her straight
*‘We left our galaxy’: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade flubs report on NASA probe that’s inside our Solar System
fox is pro - nazi!!!
Fox News Bans Ad For Documentary About American Nazi Rally in 1939
Matt Novak - gizmodo
2/14/19
Fox News has refused to air an ad for the short documentary film A Night at the Garden, according to a new report from the Hollywood Reporter.
The 7-minute movie, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, explores the terrifying day on February 20, 1939 when thousands of American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The CEO of Fox News reportedly claims that an ad for the anti-Nazi movie is “not appropriate for our air.”
The 30-second ad, titled “It Can Happen Here,” was supposed to run during the Sean Hannity Show earlier this week. The title of the ad is a reference to the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis which predicted a rise of fascism in the United States during the 1930s. But Fox News apparently doesn’t want anti-Nazi content on its channel.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
The ad was bought to air during Monday night’s edition of Sean Hannity’s primetime show through a local advertising buy on Charter Communication’s Spectrum service in Los Angeles, but was precluded by breaking news — coverage of President Trump’s rally in Texas.
The film’s distributor, Field of Vision, then decided to purchase a national spot on Hannity’s show, but was rebuffed by the network, which controls national advertising.
“It’s amazing to me that the C.E.O. of Fox News would personally inject herself into a small ad buy just to make sure that Hannity viewers weren’t exposed to this chapter of American history,” the film’s director told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement.
Fox News sent Gizmodo a strange statement after this article was first published.
“The ad in question is full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines,” Marianne Gambelli, president of ad sales at Fox News, told Gizmodo in a statement emailed by Fox News PR.
The media relations person also stressed to Gizmodo that “no other national network has taken the ad.”
You can watch the TV ad that was banned below to judge for yourself whether the ad is “disgraceful.” And you can watch the full 7-minute Oscar-nominated film on Vimeo.
We’ve looked at a lot of Nazi history here on the Paleofuture blog over the past few years. Like how American PR pros helped sell the Nazis to Americans, how the Nazis kept a list of powerful friends in Los Angeles, how America’s top Nazi sued Warner Bros. for libel, and how the publisher of the L.A. Times was buddying up with Nazis during the 1930s.
The Nazis movement in the U.S. was a very real thing and it’s terrifying to see the parallels to today. As just one recent example, a man wearing a MAGA hat assaulted a BBC cameraman this week at one of President Donald Trump’s neo-fascist rallies in El Paso, Texas. President Trump often calls the media “fake news” as a way to rile up his supporters.
“I covered endless Trump rallies in the run-up to the election and since - and there is a pattern,” the BBC’s North America editor explained yesterday.
“The attacks on the media are hugely popular with his supporters. They are every bit as much a part of his ‘set’ as Honky Tonk Woman and Satisfaction are part of a Rolling Stones concert. You just can’t imagine it not happening.”
Trumpism isn’t literal Nazism. But it doesn’t have to be in order to create dangerous conditions in the United States. It can happen here. And Sean Hannity knows that better than most people.
The 7-minute movie, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, explores the terrifying day on February 20, 1939 when thousands of American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The CEO of Fox News reportedly claims that an ad for the anti-Nazi movie is “not appropriate for our air.”
The 30-second ad, titled “It Can Happen Here,” was supposed to run during the Sean Hannity Show earlier this week. The title of the ad is a reference to the 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis which predicted a rise of fascism in the United States during the 1930s. But Fox News apparently doesn’t want anti-Nazi content on its channel.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
The ad was bought to air during Monday night’s edition of Sean Hannity’s primetime show through a local advertising buy on Charter Communication’s Spectrum service in Los Angeles, but was precluded by breaking news — coverage of President Trump’s rally in Texas.
The film’s distributor, Field of Vision, then decided to purchase a national spot on Hannity’s show, but was rebuffed by the network, which controls national advertising.
“It’s amazing to me that the C.E.O. of Fox News would personally inject herself into a small ad buy just to make sure that Hannity viewers weren’t exposed to this chapter of American history,” the film’s director told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement.
Fox News sent Gizmodo a strange statement after this article was first published.
“The ad in question is full of disgraceful Nazi imagery regardless of the film’s message and did not meet our guidelines,” Marianne Gambelli, president of ad sales at Fox News, told Gizmodo in a statement emailed by Fox News PR.
The media relations person also stressed to Gizmodo that “no other national network has taken the ad.”
You can watch the TV ad that was banned below to judge for yourself whether the ad is “disgraceful.” And you can watch the full 7-minute Oscar-nominated film on Vimeo.
We’ve looked at a lot of Nazi history here on the Paleofuture blog over the past few years. Like how American PR pros helped sell the Nazis to Americans, how the Nazis kept a list of powerful friends in Los Angeles, how America’s top Nazi sued Warner Bros. for libel, and how the publisher of the L.A. Times was buddying up with Nazis during the 1930s.
The Nazis movement in the U.S. was a very real thing and it’s terrifying to see the parallels to today. As just one recent example, a man wearing a MAGA hat assaulted a BBC cameraman this week at one of President Donald Trump’s neo-fascist rallies in El Paso, Texas. President Trump often calls the media “fake news” as a way to rile up his supporters.
“I covered endless Trump rallies in the run-up to the election and since - and there is a pattern,” the BBC’s North America editor explained yesterday.
“The attacks on the media are hugely popular with his supporters. They are every bit as much a part of his ‘set’ as Honky Tonk Woman and Satisfaction are part of a Rolling Stones concert. You just can’t imagine it not happening.”
Trumpism isn’t literal Nazism. But it doesn’t have to be in order to create dangerous conditions in the United States. It can happen here. And Sean Hannity knows that better than most people.
Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt
ADAM JOHNSON - fair
2/9/19
The Trump administration’s now completely overt effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had a very successful public relations effort this week, as major Western media outlets uniformly echoed its simplistic, pre-packaged claim that the Venezuelan government was heartlessly withholding foreign aid:
All of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same script: Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out of refusal to relinquish power,” preferring to starve “his own people” rather than feed them. It’s a simple case of good and evil—of a tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed a starving population.
Except three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented to a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish narrative being advanced by US media.
(1) Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,” earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United Nations warned the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR stunts. As Washington Post contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out, the transparent cynicism of these efforts was preemptively warned about by the groups actually charged with keeping starving people fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour, 2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela(Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed, as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week doubled its budget to do so. We have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than willing to work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive PR victories for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s not just Maduro—as the Western media are presenting it—who opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and Red Cross. Why do none of the above reports note this rather key piece of information, instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a sadistic, power-hungry madman?
(2) Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open for years.
It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016.
According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?
The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.
This point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle to win over Western liberals for further military escalation, the superficial matters a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked up a gimmicky visual metaphor, and almost every outlet uncritically passed it along, often making factually inaccurate assumptions along the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and CIA coordinating the effort knew very well they would make.
(3) The Venezuelan government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US would use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current Venezuela operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years ago.
From the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New York Times article on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to Contras” (8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr. Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements by Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s Nicaraguan humanitarian assistance office, who said he had twice ordered planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras on aid planes at Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid the US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold War playbook, or some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two at State. It’s literally the exact same person in charge of the operation who we know—with 100 percent certainty, because he admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a cover to smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same tricks, the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor. And the US media is stripping it of all this essential context, presenting these radical regime-change operators as bleeding heart humanitarians.
The same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad campaigns on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have mysteriously taken at face value everything the Trump White House and its neoconservative allies have said in their campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The self-aggrandizing “factchecking” brigade that emerged to confront the Trump administration is suddenly nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical PR strategy to delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthrow.
- Tensions Rise as Venezuela Blocks Border Bridge in Standoff Over Aid (CNN, 2/7/19)
- Maduro Blocks Critical Aid Sent to Venezuela (CNN, 2/7/19)
- Aid Arrives at Venezuela Border as US Demands Maduro Let It In(ABC News, 2/7/19)
- Venezuela Crisis: Pompeo Demands Aid Corridor Opened (BBC, 2/7/19)
- The US Says Maduro Is Blocking Aid to Starving People. The Venezuelan Says His People Aren’t Beggars. (Washington Post, 2/8/19)
- Humanitarian Aid Arrives for Venezuela — But Maduro Blocks It(NPR, 2/8/19)
All of the above articles—and scores more like it—repeated the same script: Maduro was blocking aid from the US “out of refusal to relinquish power,” preferring to starve “his own people” rather than feed them. It’s a simple case of good and evil—of a tyrannical, paranoid dictator not letting in aid to feed a starving population.
Except three pieces of key context are missing. Context that, when presented to a neutral observer, would severely undermine the cartoonish narrative being advanced by US media.
- Both the Red Cross and UN warned the US not to engage in this aid PR stunt.
- The bridge in question is a visual metaphor contrived by the Trump administration of little practical relevance.
- The person in charge of US operations in Venezuela has a history of using aid as a cover to deliver weapons to right-wing mercenaries.
(1) Not only has the international aid community not asked for the “aid,” earlier this week, both the International Red Cross and United Nations warned the US to explicitly not engage in these types of PR stunts. As Washington Post contributor Vincent Bevins pointed out, the transparent cynicism of these efforts was preemptively warned about by the groups actually charged with keeping starving people fed:
Red Cross Warns US About Risks of Sending Aid to Venezuela (PBS NewsHour, 2/1/19):
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the United States about the risks of delivering humanitarian aid to Venezuela without the approval of security forces loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.
***
UN Warns Against Politicizing Humanitarian Aid in Venezuela(Reuters, 2/6/19):
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations warned on Wednesday against using aid as a pawn in Venezuela after the United States sent food and medicine to the country’s border and accused President Nicolas Maduro of blocking its delivery with trucks and shipping containers.
Indeed, as Bevins also noted, the Red Cross has long been working with local authorities inside Venezuela to deliver relief, and just last week doubled its budget to do so. We have ample evidence the Maduro government is more than willing to work with international aid when it’s offered in good faith, not when it’s a thinly veiled mechanism to spur civil war and contrive PR victories for those seeking to overthrow the government. It’s not just Maduro—as the Western media are presenting it—who opposes the US aid convoy; it’s the UN and Red Cross. Why do none of the above reports note this rather key piece of information, instead giving the reader the impression it’s only the stance of a sadistic, power-hungry madman?
(2) Despite dozens of media outlets giving the impression (and sometimes explicitly saying) that the Venezuelan government shut down an otherwise functioning pathway into the country, the bridge in question hasn’t been open for years.
It’s true the Venezuelan government appears to have placed an oil tanker and cargo containers on the bridge to prevent incursion from the Colombian side, but the other barriers, as writer and software developer Jason Emery noted, have been in place since at least 2016.
According to La Opinion (2/5/16), after its initial construction in 2015, the bridge has never been open to traffic. How can Maduro, as the BBC suggested, “reopen” a bridge that was never open?
The reality is BBC and other Western media were just going along with the narrative pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, not bothering to check if their primary visual narrative was based on a bad faith, context-free PR stunt.
This point is a relatively superficial one, but in a long term PR battle to win over Western liberals for further military escalation, the superficial matters a lot. Rubio and the Trump administration cooked up a gimmicky visual metaphor, and almost every outlet uncritically passed it along, often making factually inaccurate assumptions along the way—assumptions the Trump State Department and CIA coordinating the effort knew very well they would make.
(3) The Venezuelan government has an entirely rational reason to suspect the US would use humanitarian aid as a cover to smuggle in weapons to foment armed conflict: The person running quarterback for Trump on the current Venezuela operation, Elliot Abrams, literally did just that 30 years ago.
From the first two paragraphs (emphasis added) of a 1987 AP/New York Times article on Elliott Abrams, “Abrams Denies Wrongdoing in Shipping Arms to Contras” (8/17/87—h/t Kevin Gosztola):
Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ”strictly by the book.”
Mr. Abrams spoke at a news conference Saturday in response to statements by Robert Duemling, former head of the State Department’s Nicaraguan humanitarian assistance office, who said he had twice ordered planes to shuttle weapons for the Contras on aid planes at Mr. Abrams’ direction in early 1986.
It’s literally the same person. It’s not that Maduro is vaguely paranoid the US, in general, would dust off its 1980s’ Contra-backing Cold War playbook, or some unspecified assumption about a higher-up or two at State. It’s literally the exact same person in charge of the operation who we know—with 100 percent certainty, because he admitted to it—has a history of using aid convoys as a cover to smuggle in arms to right-wing militias.
It’s all playing out right now, in real time. The same actors, the same tricks, the same patently disingenuous concern for the starving poor. And the US media is stripping it of all this essential context, presenting these radical regime-change operators as bleeding heart humanitarians.
The same US media outlets that have expressly fundraised and run ad campaigns on their image as anti-Trump truth-tellers have mysteriously taken at face value everything the Trump White House and its neoconservative allies have said in their campaign to overthrow the government of Venezuela. The self-aggrandizing “factchecking” brigade that emerged to confront the Trump administration is suddenly nonexistent as it rolls out a transparent, cynical PR strategy to delegitimize a Latin American government it’s trying to overthrow.
Private Eyes Detail Inner Workings of National Enquirer ‘Blackmail’ Machine
Threatening to reveal Jeff Bezos’ “dick p*ck” was just the latest strong-arm tactic. “The nice way of calling it was quid pro quo,” one veteran said, “but really it was blackmail.”
Lachlan Markay, Asawin Suebsaeng, Maxwell Tani - daily beast
02.08.19 8:51 PM ET
It may have shocked the world when the publisher of the National Enquirer allegedly tried to use nude pictures to coerce Jeff Bezos. But it came as no surprise to three veterans of the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.
“The threats, the blackmail, that’s their business model,” one former National Enquirer staffer told The Daily Beast.
That model burst out into public view on Thursday night when Bezos—the world’s richest man, the founder of Amazon, and the owner of The Washington Post—published emails from AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard that threatened the release of a “d*ck pick” if the Post didn’t relent in its investigation of AMI.
It was a familiar moment to Paul Barresi, a private investigator who spent years working on jobs for AMI and other tabloids. “The National Enquirer had some people who would go to a celebrity and say, ‘unless you give in to a one-on-one interview that would amount to a fluff piece with us, we’re going to report XYZ,” he said. “The celebrity would then acquiesce to their demand.”
“The nice way of calling it was quid pro quo, but really it was blackmail,” Barresi said. “I know that the same methodology is practiced today,” he added. “Obviously it's practiced, because they did it” to Bezos.
And Daniel “Danno” Hanks, who said he worked as an on-contract investigator for the Enquirer “off and on” for 40 years, used the phrase “war of blackmail” to describe the AMI empire’s ethos.
“I’ve known this newspaper’s tactics for years, and I’d rather the truth be told,” Hanks said.
“The Enquirer had a list of which attorneys worked for which celebrities, and if someone approached [the tabloid] for a story, they would approach the attorneys and say, ‘Make us a better offer,’” Hanks said.
Hanks, who was recently released from prison for involvement in a gambling and drug organization (Hanks claims he was duped into it), added that those Hollywood or celebrity lawyers often asked Enquirer investigators to do investigative work and “trash runs” for them.
“They would have a particular name, and we would track that person down, and once we did that information would be turned over to [the celebrity’s] lawyer,” he said.
AMI did not respond to a request to comment for this story, but the company said in a statement on Friday that it “believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.” The company has not been prosecuted for any crimes related to the blackmail claims made by its former investigators.
However, the supermarket tabloid company’s bag of dirty tricks is well-chronicled and includes catch-and-kill operations: paying for an exclusive interview only to bury it, as a favor to an ally or after using the dirt to convince a celebrity to play ball with them.
As The Daily Beast reported last year, the National Enquirer offered to pay for an interview with one of Bill Cosby’s accusers in 2005, then allegedly turned over the file to the comedian in exchange for an exclusive sit-down with him. The Los Angeles Times has reported that in 2003, the Enquirer paid a woman $20,000 for an exclusive about an alleged affair with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then never ran it and made Schwarzenegger a consultant for AMI magazines.
Most infamously, AMI has admitted it paid ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 in hush money for her story of an affair with Donald Trump, which never saw the light of day, and AMI reportedly also tried to buy off Italian model Ambra Battilana after she accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of groping her. (According to Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, Howard collected and turned over damaging information about Rose McGowan to Weinstein to help him discredit her rape claim.)
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 that two years earlier, AMI obtained photographs that showed golf star Tiger Woods having an affair. They didn’t run a story in the National Enquirer; instead, they cut a deal with Woods to appear on the cover of Men’s Fitness, an AMI title.
AMI’s strong-arm tactics aren’t limited to celebrities and public figures; it sics high-paid lawyers on journalists who try to shine a light on its practices.
Ronan Farrow tweeted Thursday night that he and another prominent journalist who was reporting on AMI’s cozy relationship with Trump last year “fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI.”
And while The Daily Beast was in the middle of reporting on a Bezos-funded investigation into how his texts wound up in the Enquirer’s hands, AMI threatened Beast reporter Lachlan Cartwright—an AMI veteran—with a $5 million lawsuit, and accused The Daily Beast of so-called “tortious interference”—messing with an AMI contract.
AMI exec Dylan Howard individually threatened the Associated Press with legal action over a story the wire service published accusing him of sexual misconduct, according to former AP editor Ted Bridis and one other source with direct knowledge.
Separately, when the Associated Press was preparing a story that would reveal AMI had effectively paid hush money to a source accusing Trump of fathering an illegitimate child, AMI hired the powerful law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to apply, in Birdis' words, “a continuous amount of pressure to get us to abandon our reporting.”
Ultimately, the Associated Press’ story ran, but only after months of delays. An AP spokesperson told The Daily Beast the wire service did not initially publish the story because editors believed it did not meet the company’s standards.
Two sources with knowledge said lawyers, acting on behalf of AMI, also threatened legal action against the Wall Street Journal when the paper attempted to report on AMI’s role in keeping the Trump love child rumors under wraps.
Aggressive lawyers like Boies Schiller Flexner and Lanny Davis—who also happens to now represent former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—were tools of intimidation, according to those sources.
Boies Schiller did not respond to requests to comment for this story. After it was first posted, Davis said that “my main representation involvement with AMI—I forget the date. More than a year ago I think.” He recalled that “I started the meeting with the AP editor, two reporters and their lawyer, which was on the record, that it was not my intent to persuade AP not to run the story or to threaten any legal action. I never threatened a tortious interference case. The threat may have come from another AMI law firm. In any event, I consider such a threat ridiculous if it occurred.”
Separate from attorneys, the private investigator was another weapon in the AMI arsenal.
Hanks described Barresi as a one-time Enquirer “bagman” who knew how to work “the streets” and had a “very persuasive way of talking to people.” He said if someone was approached by Barresi, he could also hint about dirt the Enquirerhad found on them, especially if they weren’t pliable to hush money.
Barresi, according to Hanks, has “audio tapes of various attorneys and…reporters saying, like, ‘I’ll trade you that celebrity for that one,’ or ‘If you let this one slide, I’ll give you this other one.’”
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Barresi confirmed the existence of the tapes, which he said be obtained from Jim Mitteager, a one-time AMI reporter who surreptitiously recorded extensive behind-the-scenes meetings during his time at the Enquirer and the Globe, a tabloid acquired by AMI in 1999, two years after Mitteager’s death.
Barresi provided The Daily Beast with an audio clip of one such meeting in 1994 between Mitteager and notorious Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano, in which the two plotted to blackmail actress Whoopi Goldberg in exchange for spiking a Globe story about rumors that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Barresi described himself as Pellicano’s fixer, and said his work on behalf of the now-imprisoned PI often entailed what he described as “blackmail” on behalf of AMI publications and others in the Hollywood tabloid industry.
Barresi, a former adult film actor, even wrote a memoir about his exploits, and titled the book Hardcore: Porn Star to Hollywood Fixer.
Barresi described himself as Pellicano’s “field guy,“ and a “real-life Ray Donovan.” Barresi said Pellicano would find damaging information about his own clients and acquaintances, feed it to a tabloid, then tell the client the tabloid would kill the story for a one-on-one interview.
“He would use that as a way of lighting a fire and then going back like the fire chief and putting the fire out,” Barresi said of Pellicano, who is jailed on a wiretapping conviction.
More often than not, the tactic worked. Barresi could only recall a couple of celebrities who didn’t cave when presented with the damaging material that he and Pellicano had fed to the tabloid press.
Hanks said in the old days, most big names wouldn’t dream of trying to fight the Enquirer, but times appear to be changing.
“It used to be that a celebrity or any kind of famous businessman like Bezos would cringe at the thought of something ending up in the Enquirer,” he said. “But as time goes on by, they realize that people are more angry at the Enquirer than they are at them, for exposing someone’s dirty laundry. And I think Jeff Bezos is just the kind of guy who said, ‘I’ve had it. I’m not going to let myself be a victim’… and decided to fight back.”
“This guy has got some balls,” Barresi said of Bezos, “because he’s standing up to them.”
“The threats, the blackmail, that’s their business model,” one former National Enquirer staffer told The Daily Beast.
That model burst out into public view on Thursday night when Bezos—the world’s richest man, the founder of Amazon, and the owner of The Washington Post—published emails from AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard that threatened the release of a “d*ck pick” if the Post didn’t relent in its investigation of AMI.
It was a familiar moment to Paul Barresi, a private investigator who spent years working on jobs for AMI and other tabloids. “The National Enquirer had some people who would go to a celebrity and say, ‘unless you give in to a one-on-one interview that would amount to a fluff piece with us, we’re going to report XYZ,” he said. “The celebrity would then acquiesce to their demand.”
“The nice way of calling it was quid pro quo, but really it was blackmail,” Barresi said. “I know that the same methodology is practiced today,” he added. “Obviously it's practiced, because they did it” to Bezos.
And Daniel “Danno” Hanks, who said he worked as an on-contract investigator for the Enquirer “off and on” for 40 years, used the phrase “war of blackmail” to describe the AMI empire’s ethos.
“I’ve known this newspaper’s tactics for years, and I’d rather the truth be told,” Hanks said.
“The Enquirer had a list of which attorneys worked for which celebrities, and if someone approached [the tabloid] for a story, they would approach the attorneys and say, ‘Make us a better offer,’” Hanks said.
Hanks, who was recently released from prison for involvement in a gambling and drug organization (Hanks claims he was duped into it), added that those Hollywood or celebrity lawyers often asked Enquirer investigators to do investigative work and “trash runs” for them.
“They would have a particular name, and we would track that person down, and once we did that information would be turned over to [the celebrity’s] lawyer,” he said.
AMI did not respond to a request to comment for this story, but the company said in a statement on Friday that it “believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos.” The company has not been prosecuted for any crimes related to the blackmail claims made by its former investigators.
However, the supermarket tabloid company’s bag of dirty tricks is well-chronicled and includes catch-and-kill operations: paying for an exclusive interview only to bury it, as a favor to an ally or after using the dirt to convince a celebrity to play ball with them.
As The Daily Beast reported last year, the National Enquirer offered to pay for an interview with one of Bill Cosby’s accusers in 2005, then allegedly turned over the file to the comedian in exchange for an exclusive sit-down with him. The Los Angeles Times has reported that in 2003, the Enquirer paid a woman $20,000 for an exclusive about an alleged affair with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then never ran it and made Schwarzenegger a consultant for AMI magazines.
Most infamously, AMI has admitted it paid ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 in hush money for her story of an affair with Donald Trump, which never saw the light of day, and AMI reportedly also tried to buy off Italian model Ambra Battilana after she accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of groping her. (According to Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, Howard collected and turned over damaging information about Rose McGowan to Weinstein to help him discredit her rape claim.)
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 that two years earlier, AMI obtained photographs that showed golf star Tiger Woods having an affair. They didn’t run a story in the National Enquirer; instead, they cut a deal with Woods to appear on the cover of Men’s Fitness, an AMI title.
AMI’s strong-arm tactics aren’t limited to celebrities and public figures; it sics high-paid lawyers on journalists who try to shine a light on its practices.
Ronan Farrow tweeted Thursday night that he and another prominent journalist who was reporting on AMI’s cozy relationship with Trump last year “fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI.”
And while The Daily Beast was in the middle of reporting on a Bezos-funded investigation into how his texts wound up in the Enquirer’s hands, AMI threatened Beast reporter Lachlan Cartwright—an AMI veteran—with a $5 million lawsuit, and accused The Daily Beast of so-called “tortious interference”—messing with an AMI contract.
AMI exec Dylan Howard individually threatened the Associated Press with legal action over a story the wire service published accusing him of sexual misconduct, according to former AP editor Ted Bridis and one other source with direct knowledge.
Separately, when the Associated Press was preparing a story that would reveal AMI had effectively paid hush money to a source accusing Trump of fathering an illegitimate child, AMI hired the powerful law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to apply, in Birdis' words, “a continuous amount of pressure to get us to abandon our reporting.”
Ultimately, the Associated Press’ story ran, but only after months of delays. An AP spokesperson told The Daily Beast the wire service did not initially publish the story because editors believed it did not meet the company’s standards.
Two sources with knowledge said lawyers, acting on behalf of AMI, also threatened legal action against the Wall Street Journal when the paper attempted to report on AMI’s role in keeping the Trump love child rumors under wraps.
Aggressive lawyers like Boies Schiller Flexner and Lanny Davis—who also happens to now represent former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—were tools of intimidation, according to those sources.
Boies Schiller did not respond to requests to comment for this story. After it was first posted, Davis said that “my main representation involvement with AMI—I forget the date. More than a year ago I think.” He recalled that “I started the meeting with the AP editor, two reporters and their lawyer, which was on the record, that it was not my intent to persuade AP not to run the story or to threaten any legal action. I never threatened a tortious interference case. The threat may have come from another AMI law firm. In any event, I consider such a threat ridiculous if it occurred.”
Separate from attorneys, the private investigator was another weapon in the AMI arsenal.
Hanks described Barresi as a one-time Enquirer “bagman” who knew how to work “the streets” and had a “very persuasive way of talking to people.” He said if someone was approached by Barresi, he could also hint about dirt the Enquirerhad found on them, especially if they weren’t pliable to hush money.
Barresi, according to Hanks, has “audio tapes of various attorneys and…reporters saying, like, ‘I’ll trade you that celebrity for that one,’ or ‘If you let this one slide, I’ll give you this other one.’”
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Barresi confirmed the existence of the tapes, which he said be obtained from Jim Mitteager, a one-time AMI reporter who surreptitiously recorded extensive behind-the-scenes meetings during his time at the Enquirer and the Globe, a tabloid acquired by AMI in 1999, two years after Mitteager’s death.
Barresi provided The Daily Beast with an audio clip of one such meeting in 1994 between Mitteager and notorious Los Angeles private investigator Anthony Pellicano, in which the two plotted to blackmail actress Whoopi Goldberg in exchange for spiking a Globe story about rumors that she had been diagnosed with cancer.
Barresi described himself as Pellicano’s fixer, and said his work on behalf of the now-imprisoned PI often entailed what he described as “blackmail” on behalf of AMI publications and others in the Hollywood tabloid industry.
Barresi, a former adult film actor, even wrote a memoir about his exploits, and titled the book Hardcore: Porn Star to Hollywood Fixer.
Barresi described himself as Pellicano’s “field guy,“ and a “real-life Ray Donovan.” Barresi said Pellicano would find damaging information about his own clients and acquaintances, feed it to a tabloid, then tell the client the tabloid would kill the story for a one-on-one interview.
“He would use that as a way of lighting a fire and then going back like the fire chief and putting the fire out,” Barresi said of Pellicano, who is jailed on a wiretapping conviction.
More often than not, the tactic worked. Barresi could only recall a couple of celebrities who didn’t cave when presented with the damaging material that he and Pellicano had fed to the tabloid press.
Hanks said in the old days, most big names wouldn’t dream of trying to fight the Enquirer, but times appear to be changing.
“It used to be that a celebrity or any kind of famous businessman like Bezos would cringe at the thought of something ending up in the Enquirer,” he said. “But as time goes on by, they realize that people are more angry at the Enquirer than they are at them, for exposing someone’s dirty laundry. And I think Jeff Bezos is just the kind of guy who said, ‘I’ve had it. I’m not going to let myself be a victim’… and decided to fight back.”
“This guy has got some balls,” Barresi said of Bezos, “because he’s standing up to them.”
Fox Host Insists Trump Can't Be A Crook Because He's Lost Money
Outnumbered co-host Melissa Francis insisted that Trump couldn't be trying to use his office to enrich himself, and therefore Congress has no need to investigate him, because Forbes reported he'd lost money since announcing his run for the presidency.
By Heather - crooks & liars
2/08/19 6:17am
We all knew the talking heads over on State-Run TV, a.k.a. Fox "news" were going to immediately go on the attack as soon as Democrats started announcing their hearing schedules and, heaven forbid, taking their oversight responsibility seriously, instead of acting like their Republican counterparts have for the last two years, and doing nothing but running cover for this corrupt administration.
Trump took to Twitter to whine about Rep. Adam Schiff, accusing him of "Unlimited Presidential Harassment" because the Congressman plans to investigate any alleged foreign influence over Trump, among other things, and the crew on this Thursday's Outnumbered were right there with him, complaining about how unfairly he's being treated, and with co-host Melissa Francis coming up with this doozy as to why the Democrats in Congress should leave poor old Trump alone:
FRANCIS: I just want to point up for the record, here, because these facts are from the folks over at Forbes, and in my financial reporting capacity, I know these guys are darn accurate to the point of making people feel comfortable at times. They estimate that the president's licensing business has lost $50 million, that the Trump condo towers are down 33% from their highs, that overall hotel revenue is down $30 million, all since president Trump announced. Three of his major hotels have been stripped of their branding because it is so polarizing. In other words, he has lost more than a billion dollars as a result of becoming president. And when Adam Schiff says he wants to see if he is using the office to profit --
NAPOLITANO: Where is he going?
FRANCIS: It seems pretty clear he's not.
FAULKNER: Even if he was trying, it's not working.
NAPOLITANO: So here's the problem for the president. If the government wants to investigate somebody for a potential criminal event, they want to start the investigation, they have to have a kernel of evidence. What we call articulable suspicion. They have to be able to articulate a state of facts that is criminal.
Congress doesn't need that. Congress has written laws that allow it to investigate anybody for anything. We talked during the break. They famously investigated Roger Clemens over the content of his urine. Where is that the constitution? There is no limit to what the Congress wants to investigate.
In my opinion, the Democrats want to run a shadow investigation alongside of Mueller's. Mueller, cannot under the law, reveal what he finds until he files documents in court. The Democrats can conceal -- any member of Congress -- conceal or reveal whatever they want. Mrs. Pelosi said this morning, "I think most Americans want to see the president's tax returns." That is not a basis to invade his privacy. He has the same right to privacy as everybody else. But the Democrats are going to do it.
So the crew that cheered on Fast & Furious, the fake IRS "scandal," Benghazi, and every other drummed up faux "scandal" during the Obama years now hates Congressional overreach. That's rich.
You've also got to wonder if Francis actually read the title of that Forbes article.... or if she just assumes none of the viewers over on Fox will. Here is it: How Trump Is Trying—And Failing—To Get Rich Off His Presidency.
And of course no one on the panel bothered to discuss the fact that enriching himself isn't the only thing Schiff and the Democrats are concerned with. They also didn't discuss the fact that there could be God knows how many shady deals that have gone on that we just don't know about yet.
Expect the lies and attacks to grow louder and the excuses to grow more absurd as Democrats continue to do their job and expose this corrupt administration.
Trump took to Twitter to whine about Rep. Adam Schiff, accusing him of "Unlimited Presidential Harassment" because the Congressman plans to investigate any alleged foreign influence over Trump, among other things, and the crew on this Thursday's Outnumbered were right there with him, complaining about how unfairly he's being treated, and with co-host Melissa Francis coming up with this doozy as to why the Democrats in Congress should leave poor old Trump alone:
FRANCIS: I just want to point up for the record, here, because these facts are from the folks over at Forbes, and in my financial reporting capacity, I know these guys are darn accurate to the point of making people feel comfortable at times. They estimate that the president's licensing business has lost $50 million, that the Trump condo towers are down 33% from their highs, that overall hotel revenue is down $30 million, all since president Trump announced. Three of his major hotels have been stripped of their branding because it is so polarizing. In other words, he has lost more than a billion dollars as a result of becoming president. And when Adam Schiff says he wants to see if he is using the office to profit --
NAPOLITANO: Where is he going?
FRANCIS: It seems pretty clear he's not.
FAULKNER: Even if he was trying, it's not working.
NAPOLITANO: So here's the problem for the president. If the government wants to investigate somebody for a potential criminal event, they want to start the investigation, they have to have a kernel of evidence. What we call articulable suspicion. They have to be able to articulate a state of facts that is criminal.
Congress doesn't need that. Congress has written laws that allow it to investigate anybody for anything. We talked during the break. They famously investigated Roger Clemens over the content of his urine. Where is that the constitution? There is no limit to what the Congress wants to investigate.
In my opinion, the Democrats want to run a shadow investigation alongside of Mueller's. Mueller, cannot under the law, reveal what he finds until he files documents in court. The Democrats can conceal -- any member of Congress -- conceal or reveal whatever they want. Mrs. Pelosi said this morning, "I think most Americans want to see the president's tax returns." That is not a basis to invade his privacy. He has the same right to privacy as everybody else. But the Democrats are going to do it.
So the crew that cheered on Fast & Furious, the fake IRS "scandal," Benghazi, and every other drummed up faux "scandal" during the Obama years now hates Congressional overreach. That's rich.
You've also got to wonder if Francis actually read the title of that Forbes article.... or if she just assumes none of the viewers over on Fox will. Here is it: How Trump Is Trying—And Failing—To Get Rich Off His Presidency.
And of course no one on the panel bothered to discuss the fact that enriching himself isn't the only thing Schiff and the Democrats are concerned with. They also didn't discuss the fact that there could be God knows how many shady deals that have gone on that we just don't know about yet.
Expect the lies and attacks to grow louder and the excuses to grow more absurd as Democrats continue to do their job and expose this corrupt administration.
Fox News Host Accuses Women Of Having 'Recreational Abortions' If They Don't Let Fetuses Die In Womb
A host on Fox News claimed over the weekend that women are having "recreational abortions" in their final trimester.
By David - crooks & liars
1/27/19 11:22am
A host on Fox News claimed over the weekend that women are having "recreational abortions" in their final trimester of pregnancy.
After Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law allowing late-term abortions in New York, Fox News host Katie Pavlich spoke to Dr. Omar Hamada, who incorrectly insisted that there is never a reason to abort a fetus in the third trimester.
"So this New York abortion law which allows abortion up til the day before birth is, essentially, a recreational abortion bill," Pavlich opined.
"I thought it was a travesty," Hamada said of the New York law. "You know, there are some reasons that we will end a pregnancy in the first trimester or other reasons in the second trimester, but there's absolutely no reason to end a pregnancy so that the child dies in the third trimester."
According to the doctor, women should wait for their fetus to die instead having third-trimester abortions.
"Remarkably there's a group of female physicians and nurses who have come out very hard, trying to threaten my career," Hamada explained. "I've gotten some death threats, which I don't really take seriously."
"I think that's just a common method that the left uses, they want to invalidate and destroy," he continued. "There's no desire for common ground."
Hamada predicted that the new legislation would "increase the number of abortions that are done in the state of New York."
While 99% of abortions occur in the first 21 weeks of pregnancy, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that there are reasons a woman might be forced to terminate in the third trimester.
“Abortions that occur at this stage in pregnancy are often the result of tragic diagnoses and are exactly the scenarios wherein patients need their doctors, and not obstructive politicians,” says Stanford Dr. Jennifer Conti told the Guardian. “Asking a woman to carry a fatally flawed pregnancy to term is, at the very least, heartbreaking. I’ve often heard women say that they chose to end such pregnancies because of unselfish reasons: they couldn’t bear the thought of putting their fetus through even more pain or suffering.”[...]
After Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law allowing late-term abortions in New York, Fox News host Katie Pavlich spoke to Dr. Omar Hamada, who incorrectly insisted that there is never a reason to abort a fetus in the third trimester.
"So this New York abortion law which allows abortion up til the day before birth is, essentially, a recreational abortion bill," Pavlich opined.
"I thought it was a travesty," Hamada said of the New York law. "You know, there are some reasons that we will end a pregnancy in the first trimester or other reasons in the second trimester, but there's absolutely no reason to end a pregnancy so that the child dies in the third trimester."
According to the doctor, women should wait for their fetus to die instead having third-trimester abortions.
"Remarkably there's a group of female physicians and nurses who have come out very hard, trying to threaten my career," Hamada explained. "I've gotten some death threats, which I don't really take seriously."
"I think that's just a common method that the left uses, they want to invalidate and destroy," he continued. "There's no desire for common ground."
Hamada predicted that the new legislation would "increase the number of abortions that are done in the state of New York."
While 99% of abortions occur in the first 21 weeks of pregnancy, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that there are reasons a woman might be forced to terminate in the third trimester.
“Abortions that occur at this stage in pregnancy are often the result of tragic diagnoses and are exactly the scenarios wherein patients need their doctors, and not obstructive politicians,” says Stanford Dr. Jennifer Conti told the Guardian. “Asking a woman to carry a fatally flawed pregnancy to term is, at the very least, heartbreaking. I’ve often heard women say that they chose to end such pregnancies because of unselfish reasons: they couldn’t bear the thought of putting their fetus through even more pain or suffering.”[...]
AP wipes Iran-Contra pardons from Bill Barr's record: Another win for conventional wisdom
Isn't it relevant that Trump's AG nominee helped a president use the pardon power to cover up possible crimes?
SAM HUSSEINI - salon
JANUARY 22, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
A president facing a major scandal, just as the highest-profile trial is about to begin, pardons the indicted or convicted officials around him to effectively stop the investigation that’s closing in on his own illegal conduct.
Donald Trump soon? We’ll see. But this actually describes what President George H.W. Bush did in 1992.
The Iran-Contra scandal revealed, among other things, that the Reagan-Bush White House had secretly sold missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, using the proceeds to fund right-wing forces fighting the leftist Nicaraguan government in violation of U.S. law.
On Christmas Eve 1992, just as the indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was about to face trial, Bush pardoned him and five others, including former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. The New York Times (12/25/92) reported this as “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Averting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up.'”
The attorney general for Bush who approved the pardons, William Barr, is now being nominated for the same position by Trump. Is this background relevant? Though current news columns are rife with speculation that Trump might likewise protect himself by pardoning his indicted or convicted associates, the dominant U.S. news wire service doesn’t seem to think so.
In “Barr as Attorney General: Old Job, Very Different Washington,” Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker made no mention whatsoever of the Iran-Contra pardons. Rather than seriously examine the trajectory of presidential power and accountability, Tucker framed the story, as the headline indicates, as a stark contrast between the gentlemanly Bush and the “twice-divorced” Trump:
Serving Trump, who faces intensifying investigations from the department Barr would lead, is unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush.
The false implication is that Bush did not himself face intensifying investigations from Lawrence Walsh, who operated out of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel. The misleading comparison is compounded by Tucker describing Trump as “breaking with the practice of shielding law enforcement from political influence” and ousting Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “not protecting him in the Russia investigation” — as if Barr didn’t have direct experience in the first Bush administration with imposing political influence on law enforcement to protect a president from investigation.
Instead, Tucker cites Barr’s supporters calling him “driven by his commitment to the department” and “very much a law-and-order guy.” (The praise for the new head of the department Tucker regularly covers marks his article as a “beat-sweetener,” a long and unfortunate tradition of journalists’ making their jobs easier by sucking up to sources.)
This deceptive piece was apparently picked up by literally thousands of media outlets. A search of “unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush” produces more than 2,400 results.
As Consortium News founder Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra story for AP, would later write in a review of Walsh’s book "Firewall: Inside the Iran/Contra Cover-Up":
The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.
Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.
Parry, who died a year ago, left AP after many of his stories on Iran/Contra were squashed.
After I criticized AP on Twitter for the omission, a later piece by Tucker, co-written with Michael Balsamo, noted perfunctorily in the 16th graph: “As attorney general in 1992, [Barr] endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal.”
(A search on “as attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal” produced a mere 202 results.)
While much of the media obsesses over every bit of “Russiagate,” some breathlessly anticipating the next revelation will surely bring down the Trump presidency, it’s remarkable how little interest there is in the trajectory of presidential power.
Rather, much of the establishment media has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate officials from both Bush administrations, including the elder Bush himself when he died last month. (One exception to the generally hagiographic coverage of his death was Arun Gupta’s “Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran/Contra Scandal”— in The Intercept, 12/7/18.) Indeed, Trump naming Barr just after George H.W. Bush’s funeral could be seen as a jiu-jitsu move: How could anyone object to his nominating the AG of the just-sainted Poppy Bush? It’s as though Trump were saying, “If you all like him so much, I’ll have what he had.” See the Institute for Public Accuracy news release, “Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail.”
AP's actions also fit into the institution-protecting mode of what Parry derided as the “conventional wisdom” — which in its current formulation depicts Trump’s authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of U.S. politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.
Donald Trump soon? We’ll see. But this actually describes what President George H.W. Bush did in 1992.
The Iran-Contra scandal revealed, among other things, that the Reagan-Bush White House had secretly sold missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, using the proceeds to fund right-wing forces fighting the leftist Nicaraguan government in violation of U.S. law.
On Christmas Eve 1992, just as the indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was about to face trial, Bush pardoned him and five others, including former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. The New York Times (12/25/92) reported this as “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Averting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up.'”
The attorney general for Bush who approved the pardons, William Barr, is now being nominated for the same position by Trump. Is this background relevant? Though current news columns are rife with speculation that Trump might likewise protect himself by pardoning his indicted or convicted associates, the dominant U.S. news wire service doesn’t seem to think so.
In “Barr as Attorney General: Old Job, Very Different Washington,” Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker made no mention whatsoever of the Iran-Contra pardons. Rather than seriously examine the trajectory of presidential power and accountability, Tucker framed the story, as the headline indicates, as a stark contrast between the gentlemanly Bush and the “twice-divorced” Trump:
Serving Trump, who faces intensifying investigations from the department Barr would lead, is unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush.
The false implication is that Bush did not himself face intensifying investigations from Lawrence Walsh, who operated out of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel. The misleading comparison is compounded by Tucker describing Trump as “breaking with the practice of shielding law enforcement from political influence” and ousting Attorney General Jeff Sessions for “not protecting him in the Russia investigation” — as if Barr didn’t have direct experience in the first Bush administration with imposing political influence on law enforcement to protect a president from investigation.
Instead, Tucker cites Barr’s supporters calling him “driven by his commitment to the department” and “very much a law-and-order guy.” (The praise for the new head of the department Tucker regularly covers marks his article as a “beat-sweetener,” a long and unfortunate tradition of journalists’ making their jobs easier by sucking up to sources.)
This deceptive piece was apparently picked up by literally thousands of media outlets. A search of “unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush” produces more than 2,400 results.
As Consortium News founder Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra story for AP, would later write in a review of Walsh’s book "Firewall: Inside the Iran/Contra Cover-Up":
The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.
Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.
Parry, who died a year ago, left AP after many of his stories on Iran/Contra were squashed.
After I criticized AP on Twitter for the omission, a later piece by Tucker, co-written with Michael Balsamo, noted perfunctorily in the 16th graph: “As attorney general in 1992, [Barr] endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal.”
(A search on “as attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush’s pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal” produced a mere 202 results.)
While much of the media obsesses over every bit of “Russiagate,” some breathlessly anticipating the next revelation will surely bring down the Trump presidency, it’s remarkable how little interest there is in the trajectory of presidential power.
Rather, much of the establishment media has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate officials from both Bush administrations, including the elder Bush himself when he died last month. (One exception to the generally hagiographic coverage of his death was Arun Gupta’s “Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran/Contra Scandal”— in The Intercept, 12/7/18.) Indeed, Trump naming Barr just after George H.W. Bush’s funeral could be seen as a jiu-jitsu move: How could anyone object to his nominating the AG of the just-sainted Poppy Bush? It’s as though Trump were saying, “If you all like him so much, I’ll have what he had.” See the Institute for Public Accuracy news release, “Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail.”
AP's actions also fit into the institution-protecting mode of what Parry derided as the “conventional wisdom” — which in its current formulation depicts Trump’s authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of U.S. politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.
In avoidable error, CBS takes heat for the lack of black voices on its campaign team
Memo to news organizations: Race will be a big part of the story in 2020.
SAM FULWOOD III - thinkprogress
JAN 14, 2019, 2:53 PM
Executives at CBS News hoping to commemorate the newly minted “boots on the ground” team of reporters and producers handpicked to cover the 2020 presidential campaign, instead drew withering attacks over the weekend because none among the announced eight-member team journalists or quartet of producers were black Americans.
A broad array of media observers — including a prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives — rightfully complained that CBS’s failure to include any African Americans among its core campaign staff didn’t bode well for comprehensive coverage of the racial issues that are almost certain to arise during the 2020 campaign. In particular, it seems likely that there could be a number of black candidates that figure prominently among the large and diverse group seeking the Democratic nomination.
Last week, one white journalist covering Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) — who is expected to join the Democratic presidential primary fray — suffered a humbling moment when her lack of facility with black Greek letter organizations created a firestorm on Twitter, after she referred to the celebrated “skee-wee” call of Harris’ Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. sisters as a “screech.” As The Root’s Michael Harriott opined, the incident was a prime example of why “we need more black journalists.”
Beyond that, such an oversight is all the more glaring because President Donald Trump built his successful 2016 presidential run by appealing to voters with racist themes — a tactic he is widely expected to return to in his reelection bid. What’s more, issues related to suppression of black voters figured prominently in the 2016 campaign and may well reappear in the next presidential voting cycle.
Christopher Isham, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, said in an news release announcing the appointments that the journalists formed the network’s “boots on the ground for the 2019-2020 election cycle.” The so-called “political embed unit” is a prestigious role among political journalists because they travel with the various candidates, develop deep sources among staffers, and are likely to rise in stature and visibility as various candidates run the cross-country maze of primary and general election campaigns.
While CBS officials said other journalists would be announced later as on-air correspondents for the campaigns, it acknowledged no African-American reporters were among this first set of staffers. Among the eight reporters and four producers, four are persons of color: Musadiq Bidar, a native of Afghanistan, Alex Tin, Jack Turman and Stephanie Ramirez.
CBS’s failure to include any black journalists among this elite corps drew attacks after associate producer Ben Mitchell tweeted his pride over the network’s announcement.
Expressing dismay that CBS News didn’t staff its campaign team with an awareness that race would be a big-issue feature of the upcoming political season, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), denounced CBS News in a weekend tweestorm, calling the staffing “Unacceptable in 2019.”
Due to Ocasio-Cortez’s huge Twitter base — she has more than 2.3 million followers — and the knee-jerk opposition she engenders among right-wingers, the freshman congresswoman’s comments drew immediate responses, which in turn brought greater attention to the CBS decision.
Naturally, there was quite a bit of disdain over CBS’s decision from black journalists who have long complained about being shut out of prominent roles in the industry.
To be sure, the campaign for the White House 2020 is just getting started and there’s ample room for the news outlets to gear up properly. And as CBS News noted in an earlier news release, its Washington news desk operations are headed by Lorna Jones, who is African-American. Nevertheless, in terms of getting off to a grand start of a campaign season that will require the perspectives of black journalists to make it fully scrutable, CBS failed to impress or persuade a large bloc of its viewers that it has the chops to recognize — let alone cover — an important part of this national story.
A broad array of media observers — including a prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives — rightfully complained that CBS’s failure to include any African Americans among its core campaign staff didn’t bode well for comprehensive coverage of the racial issues that are almost certain to arise during the 2020 campaign. In particular, it seems likely that there could be a number of black candidates that figure prominently among the large and diverse group seeking the Democratic nomination.
Last week, one white journalist covering Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) — who is expected to join the Democratic presidential primary fray — suffered a humbling moment when her lack of facility with black Greek letter organizations created a firestorm on Twitter, after she referred to the celebrated “skee-wee” call of Harris’ Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. sisters as a “screech.” As The Root’s Michael Harriott opined, the incident was a prime example of why “we need more black journalists.”
Beyond that, such an oversight is all the more glaring because President Donald Trump built his successful 2016 presidential run by appealing to voters with racist themes — a tactic he is widely expected to return to in his reelection bid. What’s more, issues related to suppression of black voters figured prominently in the 2016 campaign and may well reappear in the next presidential voting cycle.
Christopher Isham, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, said in an news release announcing the appointments that the journalists formed the network’s “boots on the ground for the 2019-2020 election cycle.” The so-called “political embed unit” is a prestigious role among political journalists because they travel with the various candidates, develop deep sources among staffers, and are likely to rise in stature and visibility as various candidates run the cross-country maze of primary and general election campaigns.
While CBS officials said other journalists would be announced later as on-air correspondents for the campaigns, it acknowledged no African-American reporters were among this first set of staffers. Among the eight reporters and four producers, four are persons of color: Musadiq Bidar, a native of Afghanistan, Alex Tin, Jack Turman and Stephanie Ramirez.
CBS’s failure to include any black journalists among this elite corps drew attacks after associate producer Ben Mitchell tweeted his pride over the network’s announcement.
Expressing dismay that CBS News didn’t staff its campaign team with an awareness that race would be a big-issue feature of the upcoming political season, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), denounced CBS News in a weekend tweestorm, calling the staffing “Unacceptable in 2019.”
Due to Ocasio-Cortez’s huge Twitter base — she has more than 2.3 million followers — and the knee-jerk opposition she engenders among right-wingers, the freshman congresswoman’s comments drew immediate responses, which in turn brought greater attention to the CBS decision.
Naturally, there was quite a bit of disdain over CBS’s decision from black journalists who have long complained about being shut out of prominent roles in the industry.
To be sure, the campaign for the White House 2020 is just getting started and there’s ample room for the news outlets to gear up properly. And as CBS News noted in an earlier news release, its Washington news desk operations are headed by Lorna Jones, who is African-American. Nevertheless, in terms of getting off to a grand start of a campaign season that will require the perspectives of black journalists to make it fully scrutable, CBS failed to impress or persuade a large bloc of its viewers that it has the chops to recognize — let alone cover — an important part of this national story.
STUDY: U.S. NEWSPAPERS ARE MORE THAN TWICE AS LIKELY TO CITE ISRAELI SOURCES IN HEADLINES THAN PALESTINIAN ONES
Murtaza Hussain - the intercept
January 12 2019, 4:30 a.m.
AT THE HEIGHT of the 2014 war between the Israeli military and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, the New York Times ran an article headlined, “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate.” It was an apparent reference to the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who had been killed in Israeli attacks by that point in the war. There was no question about who had killed them, yet the language shifted the subject to a “debate” about who was really responsible. A few weeks earlier, after an Israeli airstrike killed several Palestinian soccer fans, the Times ran the absurd title, “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup,” later amending the headline in the face of widespread disgust expressed on social media.
Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.
This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.
“The findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — one where Israeli narratives are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to Palestinians’ day-to-day reality have disappeared,” Owais Zaheer, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
The study, released this week, analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications — the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — employing Natural Language Processing, or NLP, techniques to analyze the massive database of headlines published over this period. NLP is a “Big Data” analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, the researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel-Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel-Palestine have been conducted before, the 416Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the conflict began.
The patterns identified seem to show a clear slant toward the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one from the 2014 New York Times story about civilian deaths in Gaza — that used the term “Israel says” — were 2 1/2 times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.” Since 1967, the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85 percent overall decrease in mention of the term “occupation” in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory has in fact intensified over this time. Mention of the term “Palestinian refugees,” meanwhile, has declined a stunning 93 percent. While subtle, a consistent disproportion in article headlines — which by default gives a greater airtime to one side or occludes certain key issues — can impact public perception.
The study also found that media attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States has tended to peak during periods of heightened violence. In a sense, this dynamic reflects how international news is generally covered in the United States. The key difference, however, is that the U.S. government is a vital player in helping maintain the status quo in Israel-Palestine through its provision of massive military aid and diplomatic support to the Israeli government.
Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in overall decline since the time of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords — a negotiated agreement between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. That decline says little about conditions on the ground. The hopes briefly raised by the Oslo Accords effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the then-obscure militant group Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians. Riding a wave of disillusionment, a new hard-line Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, took power in 1996. Since then, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank has expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken a hard line in favor of the Israeli government, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and unilaterally recognizing the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These measures have been taken over the objections of Palestinian leaders, but also some senior Israeli military officials who have warned that they could destabilize the region. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis meanwhile show no signs of reviving, despite repeated promises by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of an “ultimate deal” that will resolve the conflict.
Despite this grim political reality, there have been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue dividing liberals and conservatives in the United States, with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more evenhanded stance on the conflict. U.S. government policy has yet to reflect these shifts in public sentiment, with the Trump administration falling over itself to project an unprecedentedly hostile and uncompromising stance toward Palestinian claims. Hard-line supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning “hearts and minds” to punishing opponents: publishing blacklists of Palestinian activists, censoring public figures vocal about the conflict, and advocating for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods.
Nonetheless, people who have followed U.S. debate on the conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and popular sentiment.
“Although news coverage is not evenhanded and is still generally skewed towards the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States,” said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based progressive think tank. “We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past.”
Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.
This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.
“The findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue — one where Israeli narratives are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to Palestinians’ day-to-day reality have disappeared,” Owais Zaheer, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue.”
The study, released this week, analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict from five major American publications — the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — employing Natural Language Processing, or NLP, techniques to analyze the massive database of headlines published over this period. NLP is a “Big Data” analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, the researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel-Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel-Palestine have been conducted before, the 416Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the conflict began.
The patterns identified seem to show a clear slant toward the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one from the 2014 New York Times story about civilian deaths in Gaza — that used the term “Israel says” — were 2 1/2 times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as “terror,” appeared three times more than the word “occupation.” Since 1967, the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85 percent overall decrease in mention of the term “occupation” in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military’s occupation of Palestinian territory has in fact intensified over this time. Mention of the term “Palestinian refugees,” meanwhile, has declined a stunning 93 percent. While subtle, a consistent disproportion in article headlines — which by default gives a greater airtime to one side or occludes certain key issues — can impact public perception.
The study also found that media attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the United States has tended to peak during periods of heightened violence. In a sense, this dynamic reflects how international news is generally covered in the United States. The key difference, however, is that the U.S. government is a vital player in helping maintain the status quo in Israel-Palestine through its provision of massive military aid and diplomatic support to the Israeli government.
Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in overall decline since the time of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords — a negotiated agreement between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. That decline says little about conditions on the ground. The hopes briefly raised by the Oslo Accords effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the then-obscure militant group Hamas killed large numbers of Israeli civilians. Riding a wave of disillusionment, a new hard-line Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, took power in 1996. Since then, the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank has expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken a hard line in favor of the Israeli government, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and unilaterally recognizing the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. These measures have been taken over the objections of Palestinian leaders, but also some senior Israeli military officials who have warned that they could destabilize the region. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis meanwhile show no signs of reviving, despite repeated promises by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of an “ultimate deal” that will resolve the conflict.
Despite this grim political reality, there have been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue dividing liberals and conservatives in the United States, with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more evenhanded stance on the conflict. U.S. government policy has yet to reflect these shifts in public sentiment, with the Trump administration falling over itself to project an unprecedentedly hostile and uncompromising stance toward Palestinian claims. Hard-line supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning “hearts and minds” to punishing opponents: publishing blacklists of Palestinian activists, censoring public figures vocal about the conflict, and advocating for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods.
Nonetheless, people who have followed U.S. debate on the conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and popular sentiment.
“Although news coverage is not evenhanded and is still generally skewed towards the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States,” said Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based progressive think tank. “We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past.”
Fox's Tucker Carlson claims there is "more drug and alcohol abuse" in areas where women outearn men
"It's not propaganda from the evangelicals," Carlson claimed on his Fox News broadcast. "It's social science"
SHIRA TARLO - salon
JANUARY 3, 2019 10:45PM (UTC)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday claimed that, in areas where women outearn their male counterparts, there is "more drug and alcohol abuse" and "higher incarceration rates."
During a segment on his namesake show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the conservative cable news host complained about his show's chyron, which read "MEN IN DECLINE" — part of the latest installation of Carlson's "Men in America" broadcast that highlights the alleged challenges that American men face and stresses that women are fighting against oppression that could not exist.
Carlson, whose show lost more than a dozen advertisers in December after he claimed that immigrants make America "dirtier," proclaimed, "Male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals — and both of them are traditional employers of women."
"In many areas, women suddenly made more than men," he continued. "Now, before you applaud that as a victory for feminism, consider some of the effects."
Carlson then cited unnamed studies which purported that women "generally don't want to marry" men who earn less than them.
"Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don't," the Fox News host continued. "Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow: more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation."
"This is not speculation. It's not propaganda from the evangelicals. It's social science," Carlson contended. "We know it's true. Rich people know it best of all. That's why they get married before they have kids — that model works."
Carlson, who previously labeled feminism as the new "F-word," once stated that the patriarchy is dead and that feminists want men to suffer — a patently untrue distortion that appears designed to whip up his base. "The patriarchy is gone: Women are winning; men are failing," he said.
"'The patriarchy is thriving,' [our leaders] tell us. 'Men are in charge and they succeed precisely to the extent they thwart the progress of women,'" he once said. "'Society is a zero-sum equation in which a man's gain is a woman's loss. This is wrong and we must rectify it.' That's the message. It also happens to be the core assumption of second-wave feminism, which became popular 40 years ago just as many of our Baby Boomer leaders were coming of age."
"And, yet, none of those assumptions are true today," Carlson continued. "None of those assumptions are true today. America has changed completely. The patriarchy is gone. Women are winning. Men are failing."
Though it has been 100 years since women were granted the right to vote — and significant progress has since been made — gender inequality persists in the modern world. Working women still earn less than men for the same job. In 2018, the World Economic Forum said "the world still has a long way to go" when it comes to equal political and economic leadership, since the group started following the issue in 2006. The organization noted the global gender gap will take exactly 108 years to rectify, compared to 100 years last year, at the current rate of progress.
But modern-day feminism is not just about equal pay. It is about inclusion and fighting to equal rights for all American citizens. It is about dismantling society's gendered ideas about parenthood and mental health. It is about ending rape culture and adopting a sex-positive attitude. Ultimately, feminism is not about gender at all, as the movement seeks to demolish harmful gender stereotypes completely — an egalitarian goal that benefits everyone.
During a segment on his namesake show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the conservative cable news host complained about his show's chyron, which read "MEN IN DECLINE" — part of the latest installation of Carlson's "Men in America" broadcast that highlights the alleged challenges that American men face and stresses that women are fighting against oppression that could not exist.
Carlson, whose show lost more than a dozen advertisers in December after he claimed that immigrants make America "dirtier," proclaimed, "Male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals — and both of them are traditional employers of women."
"In many areas, women suddenly made more than men," he continued. "Now, before you applaud that as a victory for feminism, consider some of the effects."
Carlson then cited unnamed studies which purported that women "generally don't want to marry" men who earn less than them.
"Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don't," the Fox News host continued. "Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow: more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation."
"This is not speculation. It's not propaganda from the evangelicals. It's social science," Carlson contended. "We know it's true. Rich people know it best of all. That's why they get married before they have kids — that model works."
Carlson, who previously labeled feminism as the new "F-word," once stated that the patriarchy is dead and that feminists want men to suffer — a patently untrue distortion that appears designed to whip up his base. "The patriarchy is gone: Women are winning; men are failing," he said.
"'The patriarchy is thriving,' [our leaders] tell us. 'Men are in charge and they succeed precisely to the extent they thwart the progress of women,'" he once said. "'Society is a zero-sum equation in which a man's gain is a woman's loss. This is wrong and we must rectify it.' That's the message. It also happens to be the core assumption of second-wave feminism, which became popular 40 years ago just as many of our Baby Boomer leaders were coming of age."
"And, yet, none of those assumptions are true today," Carlson continued. "None of those assumptions are true today. America has changed completely. The patriarchy is gone. Women are winning. Men are failing."
Though it has been 100 years since women were granted the right to vote — and significant progress has since been made — gender inequality persists in the modern world. Working women still earn less than men for the same job. In 2018, the World Economic Forum said "the world still has a long way to go" when it comes to equal political and economic leadership, since the group started following the issue in 2006. The organization noted the global gender gap will take exactly 108 years to rectify, compared to 100 years last year, at the current rate of progress.
But modern-day feminism is not just about equal pay. It is about inclusion and fighting to equal rights for all American citizens. It is about dismantling society's gendered ideas about parenthood and mental health. It is about ending rape culture and adopting a sex-positive attitude. Ultimately, feminism is not about gender at all, as the movement seeks to demolish harmful gender stereotypes completely — an egalitarian goal that benefits everyone.
Mainstream media’s pro-war posture hammered in veteran NBC reporter’s scathing resignation letter
Common Dreams - raw story
04 JAN 2019 AT 04:10 ET
In a biting resignation letter published in full by CNN on Wednesday, longtime NBC News reporter, commentator, and military analyst William “Bill” Arkin blasted the corporate media network for embracing U.S. “national security leaders and generals” while “ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one country in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.”
“I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
—William Arkin, former NBC News commentator
Reflecting on his past couple of decades working with the network--in addition towriting books and columns for major newspapers and serving as as military adviser to human rights and environmental groups—Arkin laments: “My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of [sync] with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.”
Noting in his 2,228-word memo that “the world and the state of journalism [are] in tandem crisis,” Arkin delivers a scathing critique of how NBC has responded to the foreign policy of President Donald Trump—whom he calls “an ignorant and incompetent impostor”—asserting that “in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself—busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”
However, Arkin also delivers a broader condemnation of the network’s coverage of the so-called War on Terror in the nearly 18 years since 9/11, and how it has helped produce a scenario in which “perpetual war has become accepted as a given in our lives.” He writes:
Seeking refuge in its political horse race roots, NBC (and others) meanwhile report the story of war as one of Rumsfeld vs. the Generals, as Wolfowitz vs. Shinseki, as the CIA vs. Cheney, as the bad torturers vs. the more refined, about numbers of troops and number of deaths, and even then Obama vs. the Congress, poor Obama who couldn’t close Guantanamo or reduce nuclear weapons or stand up to Putin because it was just so difficult. We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story. I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.
Characterizing himself as a “difficult guy” who spent much of his time at NBC challenging conventional narratives about war and nuclear weapons and arguing against hawkish U.S. foreign policy both on and off air, Arkin suggests the state of television news has worsened in the Trump era. He writes, “In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think—like everyone else does—that we miss so much.”
Summarizing his disagreements with the pro-war positions commonly bolstered by the network under the Trump administration, Arkin continues:
For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
Despite noting that “my time at NBC has been gratifying,” and thanking a few former colleagues by name, Arkin concludes, “I’m ever so happy to return to writing and thinking without the officiousness of editorial tyrants or corporate standards.” According to the memo, he is currently working on a novel about 9/11 and “a non-fiction book, an extended essay about national security and why we never seem to end our now perpetual state of war.”
The letter was welcomed by many critics of corporate media and American militarism—including The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald, who praised Arkin’s “scathing and unflinching” passages describing NBC and MSNBC “as pro-war propaganda outlets who exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies that are most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in Endless War, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so interferes in their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump.”
While pointing out that the pro-war posture of American corporate media network “has long been obvious, and deeply disturbing,” Greenwald notes, “Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become Ground Zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.”[...]
“I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
—William Arkin, former NBC News commentator
Reflecting on his past couple of decades working with the network--in addition towriting books and columns for major newspapers and serving as as military adviser to human rights and environmental groups—Arkin laments: “My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of [sync] with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.”
Noting in his 2,228-word memo that “the world and the state of journalism [are] in tandem crisis,” Arkin delivers a scathing critique of how NBC has responded to the foreign policy of President Donald Trump—whom he calls “an ignorant and incompetent impostor”—asserting that “in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself—busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”
However, Arkin also delivers a broader condemnation of the network’s coverage of the so-called War on Terror in the nearly 18 years since 9/11, and how it has helped produce a scenario in which “perpetual war has become accepted as a given in our lives.” He writes:
Seeking refuge in its political horse race roots, NBC (and others) meanwhile report the story of war as one of Rumsfeld vs. the Generals, as Wolfowitz vs. Shinseki, as the CIA vs. Cheney, as the bad torturers vs. the more refined, about numbers of troops and number of deaths, and even then Obama vs. the Congress, poor Obama who couldn’t close Guantanamo or reduce nuclear weapons or stand up to Putin because it was just so difficult. We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story. I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.
Characterizing himself as a “difficult guy” who spent much of his time at NBC challenging conventional narratives about war and nuclear weapons and arguing against hawkish U.S. foreign policy both on and off air, Arkin suggests the state of television news has worsened in the Trump era. He writes, “In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think—like everyone else does—that we miss so much.”
Summarizing his disagreements with the pro-war positions commonly bolstered by the network under the Trump administration, Arkin continues:
For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
Despite noting that “my time at NBC has been gratifying,” and thanking a few former colleagues by name, Arkin concludes, “I’m ever so happy to return to writing and thinking without the officiousness of editorial tyrants or corporate standards.” According to the memo, he is currently working on a novel about 9/11 and “a non-fiction book, an extended essay about national security and why we never seem to end our now perpetual state of war.”
The letter was welcomed by many critics of corporate media and American militarism—including The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald, who praised Arkin’s “scathing and unflinching” passages describing NBC and MSNBC “as pro-war propaganda outlets who exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies that are most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in Endless War, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so interferes in their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump.”
While pointing out that the pro-war posture of American corporate media network “has long been obvious, and deeply disturbing,” Greenwald notes, “Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become Ground Zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.”[...]
another black sellout helping racist!!!
Fox News guest: Food stamp recipients are "watching porn" instead of working
Republican columnist Star Parker told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday that food stamp recipients should be shamed
MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
JANUARY 2, 2019 6:38PM (UTC)
Star Parker, a conservative columnist who appeared on "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday, smeared food stamp recipients as layabouts who watch pornography and argued that they deserve to be publicly shamed.
"Remember now, what happened with the SNAP program, if you go back, even to the Bush Administration, prior to President Bush, there were like, food stamps," Star Parker, the founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday, according to a clip posted by Media Matters. "So they had this stigma about them, so people wouldn't want to be on even if they qualify. But now it's like an EBT swipe card, it's a debit card. So they take the shame out of it. The next thing you know you have an economic crash. And so during the time of Obama there were many, many more Americans — remember, most of our safety net programs are for — for you to get back on your feet."
After co-host Steve Doocy asked her whether this meant the program was meant to be short term, Parker confirmed this before reiterating that "so what the Trump Administration is saying is, come on guys, the economy’s doing good. Why are you still sitting around?"
Parker added, "People here in Washington, in particular, AEI [American Enterprise Institute], has done extensive studies on this to show that what they're calling them now are watchers. These guys are not working. They're watching. They're watching porn, they're watching TV, they're watching women, they're watching everything, but they're not working. And this is what this initiative is attempting to do, is to get them back into their own lives so that they can prosper."
Parker's analysis of the food stamp situation is a tad simplistic. For one thing, although the improving economy has contributed to the decline in the number of food stamp recipients, states have also been reinstating work requirements that some critics feel are unrealistic and unfair but which also contributed to the decline in recipients, according to Newsweek. Trump's Department of Agriculture is proposing to make it even harder for people to receive food stamps by prohibiting states from waiving one requirement — namely, that adults without dependents must work or participate in a job-training program for at least 20 hours each week to receive food stamps for more than three months out of every three years — unless those adults live in areas where unemployment is higher than 7 percent.
"Remember now, what happened with the SNAP program, if you go back, even to the Bush Administration, prior to President Bush, there were like, food stamps," Star Parker, the founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday, according to a clip posted by Media Matters. "So they had this stigma about them, so people wouldn't want to be on even if they qualify. But now it's like an EBT swipe card, it's a debit card. So they take the shame out of it. The next thing you know you have an economic crash. And so during the time of Obama there were many, many more Americans — remember, most of our safety net programs are for — for you to get back on your feet."
After co-host Steve Doocy asked her whether this meant the program was meant to be short term, Parker confirmed this before reiterating that "so what the Trump Administration is saying is, come on guys, the economy’s doing good. Why are you still sitting around?"
Parker added, "People here in Washington, in particular, AEI [American Enterprise Institute], has done extensive studies on this to show that what they're calling them now are watchers. These guys are not working. They're watching. They're watching porn, they're watching TV, they're watching women, they're watching everything, but they're not working. And this is what this initiative is attempting to do, is to get them back into their own lives so that they can prosper."
Parker's analysis of the food stamp situation is a tad simplistic. For one thing, although the improving economy has contributed to the decline in the number of food stamp recipients, states have also been reinstating work requirements that some critics feel are unrealistic and unfair but which also contributed to the decline in recipients, according to Newsweek. Trump's Department of Agriculture is proposing to make it even harder for people to receive food stamps by prohibiting states from waiving one requirement — namely, that adults without dependents must work or participate in a job-training program for at least 20 hours each week to receive food stamps for more than three months out of every three years — unless those adults live in areas where unemployment is higher than 7 percent.
Fox & Friends: Government Shutdown Okay Because Dems Want To 'Waste' Money On Single Payer
Trump's favorite morning show defended the indefensible this Saturday and used the Trump shutdown as an excuse to attack single payer healthcare.
By Heather - crooks & liars
12/22/18 7:32am
Despite the fact that Fox White House correspondent John Roberts actually called Trump out for flipping on his promise not to blame Democrats for the shutdown this Friday, everyone had to know that tiny dose of reality wasn't going to last, and his cheerleaders on the network would be falling right back in line in no time at all.
And that's exactly what viewers were treated to on Trump's favorite morning show this Saturday, with the hosts of Fox & Friends blaming the shutdown on Democrats, ignoring the fact that Trump said he wouldn't blame them and would take responsibility for it, and ignoring the fact that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for his ridiculous border wall.
Here's a rundown of the Trump-approved talking points being parroted in the segment above:
And if you weren't sure how your crazy right wing uncle was going to respond to the government shutdown, just look at the responses they read off at the end of the segment cheering it on.
It doesn't matter how much money is wasted, how many lies were told, how many promises were broken, they're making liberals angry and kicking the other side, and that's all that matters to Trump's base and his propagandized supporters who spend all their time watching State-Run TV.
And that's exactly what viewers were treated to on Trump's favorite morning show this Saturday, with the hosts of Fox & Friends blaming the shutdown on Democrats, ignoring the fact that Trump said he wouldn't blame them and would take responsibility for it, and ignoring the fact that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for his ridiculous border wall.
Here's a rundown of the Trump-approved talking points being parroted in the segment above:
- The shutdown is just fine because it's only part of the government and not all of it.
- It's "Hollywood and the media" painting this as a "Republican shutdown and "Democrats own this."
- Democrats don't want to tell anyone the truth about the fact that not all of the government is being shutdown.
- The government workers "will be just fine" because they'll get their money eventually.
- Democrats are the ones "lying" about a border wall being "expensive and ineffective," ignoring the fact that that's exactly how the Koch-funded Cato Institute described Trump's plan for a wall.
- It's okay to spend money on Trump's border wall because Democrats want to spend "trillions" on single payer healthcare, pretending that the money would be on top of what we spend now, rather than lowering the overall cost of healthcare.
- Trump is "his best messenger" and Americans "are not dumb" and can "see through the B.S."
- Spending on the wall is okay because Congress wants to spend money on coastal salmon recovery, an aquatic plant control program, international fisheries commissions and alternative energy research.
- Democrats only oppose the wall because "they hate Trump more than they care about the policy."
And if you weren't sure how your crazy right wing uncle was going to respond to the government shutdown, just look at the responses they read off at the end of the segment cheering it on.
It doesn't matter how much money is wasted, how many lies were told, how many promises were broken, they're making liberals angry and kicking the other side, and that's all that matters to Trump's base and his propagandized supporters who spend all their time watching State-Run TV.
Facebook Just Got Hit With a Massive Lawsuit. It Could Cost the Company Billions.
“Unfair and deceptive.”
TONYA RILEY - mother jones
DECEMBER 19, 2018 3:17 PM
DC Attorney General Karl Racine on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing the social-media giant of “unfair and deceptive” practices that violated consumer privacy and led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The first lawsuit of its kind in the United States, the move could result in billions of dollars’ worth of fines for the company and pave the way for states around the country to file similar complaints.
“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Racine said in a statement. “Today’s lawsuit is about making Facebook live up to its promise to protect its users’ privacy.”
In March, it was revealed that Facebook had allowed third-party access to an app, enabling political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of nearly 90 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica then used that data while working for the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
The lawsuit also comes on the heels of a New York Times report publishedTuesday night that revealed that those same data practices allowed at least 150 other companies to access consumer data, including Facebook users’ private messages. The sharing of data with third parties continued well past a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that required Facebook to disclose its data practices more transparently and improve its privacy practices. Racine says his office will be updating its suit to include the new allegations.
The lawsuit could take years to wind its way through the courts, but if it’s successful, Facebook could be on the hook for serious civil penalties under DC’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, a blanket law that allows for damages for a number of trade violations, including data security breaches. Under the law, a company can be fined up to $5,000 per violation. According to the DC attorney general’s estimates, as many as 340,000 District residents were affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident.
If the lawsuit is expanded to include more recently revealed violations, which gave parties ranging from Netflix to Russian search engine Yandex access to consumer data, fines could possibly reach into the billions of dollars and could top the nearly $1.7 billion fine Facebook is currently facing in the European Union, where consumer data protections are much more stringent. On Tuesday, Facebook settled for $450,000 a lawsuit brought by Washington state alleging the company had violated political advertising laws.
Federal lawmakers are also calling for reform, arguing that a series of new consumer privacy proposals slated to be introduced in Congress next year might imbue the FTC with the necessary powers to invoke meaningful penalties against the tech giant.
“When companies repeatedly lie to Congress and the American people about what they do with our messages, location, likes and everything else, Congress has a duty to do something about it,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a statement, touting his own legislation that would include prison time for CEOs who violate consumer privacy laws.
“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Racine said in a statement. “Today’s lawsuit is about making Facebook live up to its promise to protect its users’ privacy.”
In March, it was revealed that Facebook had allowed third-party access to an app, enabling political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of nearly 90 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica then used that data while working for the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
The lawsuit also comes on the heels of a New York Times report publishedTuesday night that revealed that those same data practices allowed at least 150 other companies to access consumer data, including Facebook users’ private messages. The sharing of data with third parties continued well past a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that required Facebook to disclose its data practices more transparently and improve its privacy practices. Racine says his office will be updating its suit to include the new allegations.
The lawsuit could take years to wind its way through the courts, but if it’s successful, Facebook could be on the hook for serious civil penalties under DC’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, a blanket law that allows for damages for a number of trade violations, including data security breaches. Under the law, a company can be fined up to $5,000 per violation. According to the DC attorney general’s estimates, as many as 340,000 District residents were affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident.
If the lawsuit is expanded to include more recently revealed violations, which gave parties ranging from Netflix to Russian search engine Yandex access to consumer data, fines could possibly reach into the billions of dollars and could top the nearly $1.7 billion fine Facebook is currently facing in the European Union, where consumer data protections are much more stringent. On Tuesday, Facebook settled for $450,000 a lawsuit brought by Washington state alleging the company had violated political advertising laws.
Federal lawmakers are also calling for reform, arguing that a series of new consumer privacy proposals slated to be introduced in Congress next year might imbue the FTC with the necessary powers to invoke meaningful penalties against the tech giant.
“When companies repeatedly lie to Congress and the American people about what they do with our messages, location, likes and everything else, Congress has a duty to do something about it,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a statement, touting his own legislation that would include prison time for CEOs who violate consumer privacy laws.
Here's what the media really means when they talk about the 'working class'
Mainstream media’s fetish for the “working class” seems to refer entirely to culturally conservative white folks
By John McCullough / FAIR - alternet
November 14, 2018, 5:52 AM GMT
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders. Piece after piece has been published in establishment outlets attempting to decipher the motivations of this racialized socioeconomic group, depicted as fighting from the Heartland against “cultural elites” on both coasts.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
Numerous articles on the 2018 midterm elections furthered this narrative. The New York Times spoke of white workers’ place in the Democratic electoral strategy:
Mr. Trump’s success among white working-class voters spanned much of the Midwest, powering victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio… . Here in Iowa and elsewhere, [Democrats] are also making appeals to small-town voters who went for Mr. Trump.
The Washington Post reported that Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath hoped that the endorsement of Joe Biden would bolster her chances with this demographic:
Biden is the Democrat who worries the president and his team the most because they fear he could cut into Trump’s working-class white support in several swing states.
The Atlantic explored Democratic candidates’ “burgeoning chances” with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt:
But the biggest explanation for the shifting numbers … is that the portions of the white working class hostile to Trump appear somewhat more likely to vote next month than those who support him.
If you’ve seen a piece on the impact of the working class on the midterm elections, it has most likely dealt specifically with working whites. But the media focus distorts the composition of this class, racially and otherwise. As Sarah Jaffe points out in the New Republic, “Only around 11 percent of the working class are white men in industrial jobs.” Americans who make their living by selling their labor (mostly in the service industry) are in fact disproportionately people of color, who are projected by the Economic Policy Institute to constitute an outright majority of the working class by 2032.
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, nonwhite members of this class are rarely talked about as such.
While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color — including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris and another by Alexis Okeowo — they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogeneous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pickup trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Aside from misrepresenting workers as predominantly white, media outlets often use the term “white working class” to refer to white voters who aren’t even working class by any common-sense definition. A recurrent media proxy for this demographic group is Americans who haven’t attended college, which the New York Times has treated as synonymous:
Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
While there is undeniably a relation between class and access to education, defining class only along this line replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. By this definition, a suburban millionaire could be counted as “working class” as a result of joining Dad’s company at 18 instead of going off to school. This fuzziness helps cast the “white working class” as the president’s reliable base: Many of them are not workers in any recognizable sense.
(It also helps explain why exit polls diverge on education and income: Fifty-five percent of respondents with college degrees – and 65 percent with advanced degrees – voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018, whereas 51 percent of people making $100,000-$200,000 a year, and 52 percent making over $200,000, voted for Republicans.)
This flawed conception of the “white working class” (not necessarily working, but definitely white) is brought to spurious life in the reporting of New York Post and Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. In a November 2017 piece for the Washington Examiner on the midterm implications of the narrow re-election of Kathy Dahlkemper, county executive of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Zito writes of the difficulty of Democratic candidates winning “in working-class regions” (read: white working-class regions) where, she says, such workers are moderate, pro-gun, pro-life voters in counties across the Great Lakes Rust Belt … [who] turned out to vote for Barack Obama twice and then later voted Donald J. Trump.
She explains that despite an incumbency advantage and a large number of registered Democrats, the sitting executive came very close to being voted out. Zito’s solution is to elect more conservative Democrats — “Democrats need the Kathy Dahlkempers of their party to win all kinds of races up and down the ballot” — despite starting her piece by pointing out that the incumbent just barely won.
This depiction of the working class as synonymous with small-town whites in the Rust Belt is politically convenient for Zito, who writes primarily for right-wing publications and has been a featured speaker at CPAC, the annual convention of the American Conservative Union. In addition to being downright inaccurate, her misleading depiction of “working-class” voters bears the implication that the only way for Democrats to win them is to lurch right on social issues, rather than to move left on economics and address their material concerns.
Media narratives of the political landscape leading to the 2018 midterm elections constructed an image of the “working class” in popular culture that actually depicts the white, comfortable, culturally conservative small-business class. This stands in the way of building a politics which simultaneously addresses issues of race, class and gender — which, as has previously been argued by FAIR, will be essential in building a progressive alternative.
In the current environment, it is imperative to remain wary of themes in media which whitewash the working class, render working people of color invisible and encourage the perception that racial and economic justice are at odds.
|
|
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
|
|
https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
|
|
