JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: What Are You Guys Doing?! AP Offers Tasteless Obituary of George H.W. Bush.
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QUESTION ASKED:
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
MONICA LEWINSKY: “If you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesn’t want to answer.”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: MSM Claims, Without Evidence, That White House Acosta Tape Was ‘Doctored.’
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Why did nobody mention that Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s wife is a billionaire heiress?
As Jim Treacher has said:
Update: Leftists Lose Their Minds, Bash The New York Times After Beto O’Rourke Exposé.
NEW JERSEY STAR LEDGER EDITORIAL HEADLINE: Choke it down, and vote for Menendez.
Found via Dan McLaughlin, who tweets, “The level of moral compromise involved in supporting Menendez is pretty well illustrated by this headline.”
That the paper’s online slogan is “True Jersey” is a nice added touch. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: NBC Knew That Third Kavanaugh Accuser’s Claim Was Trash In September.
Related: “Oh cool — TIME sat on that Avenatti ‘white male’ quote since June 25.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC Reporter Gushes to Beto: ‘You’re a Rock Star!’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: When CNN’s Don Lemon melts down over what his fellow CNN anchor dubbed “the m-word,” the Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis responds, “You’re making a point. Are you the moderator or the host or arguing a liberal talking point?”
It’s the latter. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
THE MEDIA & THE MOB: Responding to a Washington Post reporter, who as Twitchy notes, “does the Republicans pounce angle on the out-of-control Kavanaugh mob,” Rod Dreher writes:
Here’s the thing: though there is no question that the GOP, like Democrats, play to the anxieties of its base — this is normal politics — there really were, and are, mobs out to get conservatives.
Conservatives didn’t just imagine the anti-Kavanaugh protesters filling the halls of Congress, harassing GOP senators. Conservatives aren’t imagining campus mobs shouting down conservatives. Republican political consultants didn’t invent the mob at Middlebury College last year that chased Charles Murray off of campus, and physically injured a (liberal) professor who was his host. Nor did the GOP conjure the Yale mob that abused the Christakises over Halloween costumes in 2016.
And on and on. More to the point, Republicans did not invent the mob-like behavior of the news media in the Kavanaugh affair. In the last 24 hours, I’ve heard from three friends — two Democrats, and one anti-Republican independent — who have written to express profound concern about this political moment, and the behavior of the liberal mob. One of the Democrats — no fan of Trump or Kavanaugh — told me that her party has lost her over all this. The independent told me he hasn’t voted GOP in 30 years, but that may change this November, because of the “malice” (his word) on the left. And the third remains a devoted Democrat, but he is agonizing over the demons now taking over his political side, and worries if they can ever be reined in.
In “After Kavanaugh,” Kevin Williamson adds, “The Democrats have created an environment that will render ordinary political discourse almost impossible for years to come:”
This has been shameful, and there should be a reckoning.
That reckoning will not come from the New York Times or from the faculty of the Yale Law School. And it will not come from mind-killed partisans who will believe — or at least pretend to believe — anything that justifies and facilitates their pursuit of power. “She sounded credible to me!” they say. People who are telling us what we want to hear often do. That isn’t good enough — and this cynical smear campaign cannot be allowed to go unanswered. Everybody likes to think that they would have had the good sense and spine to stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee.
But as the Democrats in rodential retreat go slinking sideways away from this failed attempt at character assassination, what will we do? Not only in November, but after? They would very much like to make this election about Donald Trump, but this has very little to do with the president. They tried to do the same thing to Mitt Romney that they tried with Brett Kavanaugh, and they would have done the same thing if it had been President Romney naming a new justice.
If you don’t punish a political party for this, what do you punish one for?
Indeed. And how does the media recover from their role in the anti-Kavanaugh debacle? The Washington Free Beacon notes that Joe Scarborough(!) “issued a pointed challenge to editors across the country:”
“I challenge New York Times reporters this morning — not reporters, editors — I challenge Washington Post editors, I challenge Wall Street Journal editors, I challenge editors across America, write that story. What happened with Dr. Ford’s agreement with a congresswoman, with Dianne Feinstein? Why did they leak that story? And more importantly, look at yourself and ask yourself the question, why didn’t we report on this in real time when you sure as hell would have reported on it if [Sen. Chuck] Grassley (R., Iowa) and his office had done the same thing?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense — or as “Comfortably Smug” tweets, “Journalists are the most insidious of paid protesters.”
UPDATE: Forget ‘boobs’! CNN’s Brooke Baldwin now clutching her pearls over ‘the M word.’
ASSOCIATED PRESS COMPARES KAVANAUGH-FORD HEARING TO 9/11, JFK ASSASSINATION.
Curious historic omission, however:
As Jim Treacher has said:
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
THEY’RE NEVER THIS CURIOUS ABOUT DEMOCRATS — SEE, E.G., KEITH ELLISON. Media, ABC, PBS use Facebook to beg other Kavanaugh accusers to talk, ‘Truth will emerge.’ But remember when the NYT crowdsourced people to go through Sarah Palin’s hacked emails? Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
UPDATE: Ellison accuser releases 2017 medical document saying she feared ‘retribution.’
News media: Who?
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: After Dismissing Potential Bias as a ‘Conspiracy Theory,’ CNN Doesn’t Cover Leaked Google Tape.
It’s the “news they kept to themselves,” to coin a phrase.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Byron York: New York Times profile of Bruce Ohr looks a lot like a well timed defense brief.
It’s like in The Verdict, where James Mason’s “Prince of Darkness” character arranges favorable newspaper and TV profiles for the doctors who basically killed Paul Newman’s client, just before the case goes to trial.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: CBS News Changes Robert “Beto” O’Rourke NFL Player Protest Headline After Backlash.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: The Liberal Media Narrative Is Immune to Facts.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JOURNALISM: Media Ignores Fact That Cops And NBC Reporter Were Attacked At Charlottesville.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the silence makes perfect sense.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Nancy Pelosi on MSNBC: One of NBC’s Priorities Is to ‘Undermine My Prospects as Speaker.’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and the subtext of her statement — that because she’s a Democrat, NBC should be acting as her PR agents — makes perfect sense.
MARC THIESSEN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Explain the Chinese spy, Sen. Feinstein.
Imagine if it emerged that the Republican chairman of the House or Senate intelligence committee had a Russian spy working on their staff. Think it would cause a political firestorm? Well, this month we learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for about 20 years, was listed as an “office director” on payroll records and served as her driver when she was in San Francisco, all while reporting to China’s Ministry of State Security through China’s San Francisco Consulate. The reaction of the mainstream media? Barely a peep.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the silence makes perfect sense.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Media glosses over Dianne Feinstein’s Chinese spy.
THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF ASKING CATS NOT TO BE OBSESSED WITH LASER POINTERS: Please, Please, Please Stop Reporting on Viral Receipt Stories.
Readers of these stories aren’t looking for evidence that some guy is an open bigot. They’re looking for evidence that millions of people are secret bigots, people who live in places like Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, small-town New Jersey, etc.
Media outlets that fall for receipt stories don’t just misinform their audience, they do so in a way that damages our nation’s social cohesion.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll understand why they view this as a feature, not a bug. As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
And with the exception of a few brief time-outs in the culture war for pesky interludes such as WWII and 9/11, it has been ever thus.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: New York Daily News Announces Mass Layoffs To Staff Via Email, Ashe Schow writes at the Daily Wire:
Tronc, which owns NYDN, sent an email to staff Monday morning announcing it would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by the Daily Beast’s Max Tani.
“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email said.
* * * * * * * *
The biggest cut was editor-in-chief Jim Rich, who foreshadowed the layoffs in an ominous tweet Monday morning.
Rich tweeted, “If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.”
No, there is another option. It’s entirely possible to believe that journalists should be a watchdog on politicians, without resorting to material such as this:
UPDATE: It’s easy enough already to think of the Daily News as Democratic operatives with bylines, but Andrew Cuomo wants to make it official: Cuomo Offers to Bail Out Daily News with State Money. Pardon the pun, but this is the money quote: “These layoffs were made without notifying the State or asking for assistance.”
“Notifying the state.”
SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” STUMBLES: The future of the Democratic Party has no idea what “occupation of Palestine” means, but certainly likes using it.
That puts Democrats who are rushing to get behind [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez in a bind, however. Will the news media start asking them about the “occupation of Palestine” in places like Indiana, West Virginia, and Ohio? Or how about even in New York, where Kirsten Gillibrand practically sprained an ankle attempting to embrace Democratic Socialism after Ocasio-Cortez’ surprise win? Does the Akin Rule apply to anyone else other than Republicans?
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll know the answer is, “No. Next question?”
FAKE NEWS: Nikki Haley compels Washington Post reporter to take down tweets, add correction.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed a statement to Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, that no more than 250,000 Americans are in “extreme poverty.” The statement was made by the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.
“But as so many have pointed out,” Twitchy adds, “isn’t it strange that when a reporter gets something wrong, it’s always something intended to make the Trump administration look bad, uninformed, or uncaring? Why is it that mistakes in reporting never go the other direction?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES DOING BATTLEFIELD PREP FOR NOVEMBER, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Associated Press Provably on a Mission to Slander Trump Administration.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Freaked Out Americans Desperately Seek to Escape the News.
Just think of the news as being produced by desperate freaked out Democratic operatives with bylines, and the above headline from Bloomberg Media makes perfect sense.
(Classical reference in headline.)
I do think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it does all make sense.
LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT HYSTERIA: A Census Bureau memo warns that the inclusion of a citizenship question will hurt the “quality” of the 2020 count.
Just think of the media as being Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF OLD MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND THEIR ANGER MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Media Melts Down After Trump Calls On The Daily Caller.
VIRGINIA DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN AD: After 9/11 The Greatest Threat To America Lived In A Cave. Now He Lives In The White House. “If the party roles were reversed here, this is a three-day firestorm. As it is, it’s more of a curio for the media. Which makes sense, since many of them doubtless agree with Dan Helmer’s point.”
You know what? I do think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it does all make sense.
ONCE AGAIN OBAMA CLAIMS ‘I DIDN’T HAVE SCANDALS:’ Why is the media still not challenging Obama’s absurd claims of being “scandal-free?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and the logic is plain.
WHAT DID OBAMA KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? Obama spied on Trump’s campaign. Where’s the outrage?
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.
Related: Clapper: It’s ‘A Good Thing’ FBI Was Spying On Trump Campaign.
THE SHAMEFUL, UNETHICAL SMEARING OF JORDAN PETERSON: The psychologist and intellectual might be controversial, but he’s not ‘enabling Jew hatred.’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Astonishingly, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is still #1 most read on Amazon.
Think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
STEPHANOPOULOS GOTTA STEPHANOPOULOS. Stephanopoulos to Brokaw Accuser: You ‘Angered’ a Colleague I ‘Admired.’
George Stephanopoulos is still working hard to defend powerful men accused of sexually harassing women. The former Bill Clinton operative turned Good Morning America co-host on Thursday interrogated Linda Vester, the woman who accused Brokaw of unwanted sexual advances and groping. Stephanopoulos, who stood by Clinton as numerous women accused him, lectured Vester: “Tom Brokaw is pretty angry.”
He then questioned her honesty in relating the accusations: “[Brokaw] describes you as a colleague who has trouble with the truth. Are you absolutely convinced that everything you remember about that incident, those incidents with Tom Brokaw are what happened?”
Stephanopoulos seriously wondered why Vester didn’t trust NBC to investigate what NBC new about Brokaw.
The guild always protects its own, just as Brokaw and the later Peter Jennings defended Dan Rather in October of 2004. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives* with bylines, and it all makes sense.
* To be fair, Stephanopoulos makes that comparison extremely easy.
DAILY CALLER EXCLUSIVE: How Buzzfeed’s ‘Data-Monster’ Leveraged User Data To Fuel Super PACs, Target Voters.
BuzzFeed partnered closely with multiple Democratic and anti-Trump super PACs in 2016 to target its own users with dozens of political advertisements that were not in accordance with its own policies, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Former BuzzFeed Vice President Rena Shapiro, who led the website’s native political advertising team during the 2016 election, described candidly in a pair of unearthed interviews how she partnered closely with political groups to create ads that harnessed the data BuzzFeed collects on its audience of over 650 million people to solve their “ultimate need, which is to get elected, to get their message out there, or to canvas people together to create impact around a cause.”
Plus:
BuzzFeed raised eyebrows in June 2016 when it announced it had canceled a $1.3 million advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee due to disagreements with then-candidate Donald Trump’s “offensive statements.”
Doing business with any group that supports Trump, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said after canceling the RNC ad buy, would be “hazardous to our health.”
And:
BuzzFeed’s advertising business demonstrated in 2016 that by refusing to work with pro-Trump political groups it had skin in the political game. But Smith, the website’s editor-in-chief, insists that its news coverage of the president is rooted in the facts. He said in January that the website would have treated a Hillary Clinton presidency the same way they’re treating Trump’s.
But juxtaposing BuzzFeed’s critical coverage of Trump to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, suggests otherwise.
BuzzFeed’s coverage of Obama was “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic,” according to a 2016 analysis by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group.
At this point I probably don’t have to remind you to think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: AP Shamed Into Naming One Dem’s Party in DC Anti-Semitism Controversy.
EXCESSIVE DRINKING CAN LEAD TO BLACKOUTS. OR IN SOME RARE CASES, MEDIA BLACKOUTS. Oh My: National Review Finally Asks, “Does Hillary Clinton Drink Too Much Alcohol? And Did the Media Cover This Up?”
That’s also from the Washington Post, which treated this “meme” like swamp-fever conspiracy theorizing.
Despite a reporter covering her letting us know she likes to drink, and despite an email from Palmieri instructing the staff to “sober her up.”
No one in the media asked the obvious follow-up questions or treated this as anything more than a silly internet conspiracy theory meme.
Combine that quote, and all the pictures of Hillary enjoying a cocktail or five (see below) with what didn’t get reported, and you have a genuine scandal — only partly about Hillary’s level of alcohol consumption.
Mostly, it’s about what the press knew but decided to hide from the public.
I know I’m writing this in a humorous way, but this is actually a question I’ve had for two years, and I’ve never seen the media touch it.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
ANALYSIS: CORRECT. Thank God You Don’t Live in the Mind of a Journalist!
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their need to generate chaos starts to make sense.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Newspapers Care Much More About Bashing Sinclair Than Criticizing an Unconstitutional Attack on Free Speech.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Reminder: The press blamed Christian conservatives for the Pulse nightclub shooting. It was a vicious smear.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt Is Trump’s Biggest Asset. That’s Why The Left Wants Him Gone.
Mollie Hemingway:
There are poor ways, average ways, and shrewd ways to tackle the constitutional problems that arise from the administrative state. Many Republicans either don’t realize the problems of an unelected bureaucracy’s power, or fail to combat those problems effectively. Pruitt is in the final category, demonstrating competency and a devotion to rule of law. And he has the courage that so many of his GOP peers lack, not being intimidated by the normal media frenzy that intimidates other Republican appointees.
Recently, a coordinated attempt to oust him has taken shape, as this liberal TV producer notes:
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and… you know the rest.
The most charming of which might have been Bill Kristol, about whom Hemingway notes, “this week tweeted his desire for Michelle Obama to run and defeat Donald Trump, said Pruitt was a parody of sycophancy for supporting a conservative deregulatory agenda.”
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Journalism is Dead.
Journalists weren’t interested in that, or anything else associated with the memo. They, like McMullin, couldn’t care less about government abusing its power as long as it does it against people they don’t like. We saw this play out with the IRS scandal during the Obama administration – the media ignored it as long as they could, talked about it for a quick minute, then returned to repeating the lie that Obama’s tenure was “scandal-free.”
Were Trump not President, were the Oval Office occupied by any of the other candidates who ran in 2016, the story would be nearly the same. There might not be the personal ferocity or sense of urgency, but the simmering contempt would still be there and it would still dominate the actions of these people.
They don’t care. Journalism is dead. It didn’t die of natural causes, it was murdered by its practitioners in the name of attacking Republicans, in particular Donald Trump.
Huh — seems like it was just last month that half the MSM were telling us all to go see Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Post.
SARAH HOYT: CNN is a Trump-hate-aholic and it’s Time for an Intervention.
Just think of CNN as Democratic operatives with bylines and it..nahh, they’re waaay too crazy for it to all make sense.
UPDATE: As appropriate for anything CNN-related, the link was initially an epic fail. It should be working now.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: The Media Has a Very Different Attitude Toward Donald Trump’s Health Than Hillary Clinton’s (Video).
HEY, IF THE DNC-MSM CAN REHAB DAN RATHER, WHY NOT KATIE? Katie Couric’s Return to Broadcasting Proves that Lying Is Okay If You’re Lying About the Right Thing:
I want to believe this one-off appearance for the Olympics is the last time we’ll see Couric, but that would make little sense. To me, this feels like more of a trial run to see how well she’s received by the public. I refuse to believe they couldn’t find anyone else to report on the Olympics. Someone with a much cleaner record.
Either way, it would appear journalistic integrity means little to the mainstream media. If you touch a woman inappropriately you’re gone — at least that’s how it is now that it’s a hot issue — but flat out lie about innocent people in order to push your agenda, and you’re still camera-worthy.
Just think of the media as Democratic party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
#METOO: A TAINTED NBC DRAWS SCRUTINY WITH ITS ILL-ADVISED OPRAH WINFREY TWEET.
Media and political circles are excited Monday following a barnburner of a speech this weekend from Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul most responsible for amplifying anti-vaccination theories, mainstreaming self-help “spiritualism” and launching the careers of infamous quacks Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
President Trump has proven already that even carnival barkers can be elected President of the United States, so the 2020 presidential buzz coming off of Winfrey’s address Sunday evening at the 75th Golden Globes isn’t that insane.
NBC, however, stepped in it even before the noted media proprietor delivered her prepared remarks.
“Nothing but respect for OUR future president,” the network’s official Twitter account said in a since-deleted tweet that referred both to a joke told by Golden Globes host Seth Meyers and a separate pro-Trump tweet that went viral last year.
No reason to merely think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines when they’re tweeting out stuff like this:
As Kyle Smith writes in an article today titled, “Golden Globes Fiasco: Hypocrisy, Preening, No Self-Awareness:”
NBC, Oprah: The juxtaposition of those two brands is too perfect to pass without notice. If your memory stretches back even three months, you’ll recall that it was NBC that quashed a series of blockbuster scoops by its correspondent Ronan Farrow that, when he finally was forced to take them to The New Yorker, reported that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist. By coincidence, the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, moonlights as a screenwriter who wrote Jackie — the kind of arty, Oscar-bait fare that Weinstein often produced and shepherded to Oscar glory (or at least Golden Globes semi-glory).
Of course, we’ve seen such rabid boosterism from NBC and the rest of the DNC-MSM for a tyro presidential candidate before:
I assume the combination of NBC’s tweet, Oprah’s award speech, and the DNC’s tweet earlier on Sunday night praising nothing but women candidates was all more or less coordinated as part of her official kickoff, or at the least testing the waters, of her presidential bid. But as I said earlier today, it seems like a poor branding decision for Oprah to associate herself so closely with Hollywood’s Weinstein fiasco.
Speaking of which: “Juanita Broaddrick To Oprah: ‘Funny, I’ve Never Heard You Mention My Name.’”
Ouch.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: The Sudden Hazing of Lindsey Graham: The media loved him when he rebuked Trump. Not so much now, when he questions the DOJ’s and FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: A deafening media silence on the Obama-Hezbollah scandal.
Politico published a jaw-dropping, meticulously sourced investigative piece this week detailing how the Obama administration had secretly undermined US law-enforcement agency efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah. The effort was part of a wider push by the administration to placate Iran and ensure the signing of the nuclear deal.
Now swap out “Trump” for “Obama” and “Russia” for “Iran” and imagine the eruption these revelations would generate. Because, by any conceivable journalistic standard, this scandal should’ve triggered widespread coverage and been plastered on front pages across the country. By any historic standard, the scandal should elicit outrage regarding the corrosion of governing norms from pundits and editorial boards.
Yet, as it turns out, there’s an exceptionally good chance most of your neighbors and colleagues haven’t heard anything about it.
Days after the news broke, in fact, neither NBC News, ABC News nor CBS News — whose shows can boast a collective 20 million viewers — had been able to find the time to relay the story to its sizeable audiences. Other than Fox News, cable news largely ignored the revelations, as well.
Most major newspapers, which have been sanctimoniously patting themselves on the back for the past year, couldn’t shoehorn into their pages a story about potential collusion between the former president and a terror-supporting state.
Democracy dies in darkness.
BOB CORKER ON THE MEDIA: I Have Empathy for Trump Now.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he has a “newfound empathy” for President Trump’s criticism of the media after a report that he’d benefit from a provision in the final GOP tax bill went viral.
“I told (Trump) that I’d had a healthy respect for the media and I deal with them all the time, and, you know, to attack the media has not been something I’ve done,” Corker said on Fox News.
“I’ve never ever in my life used the work ‘fake news’ until today. I actually understand what it is the president has been dealing with,” he continued.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Deceitful Bias in The New York Times.
John Stossel’s latest video for Reason TV:
Just think of the Times as being almost entirely staffed by Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
COKIE ROBERTS: OH, WE ALL KNEW TO AVOID GETTING IN AN ELEVATOR WITH REP. CONYERS. “Speaking on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ Cokie Roberts made a startling admission: ‘every female in the press corps knew’ to avoid being in an elevator with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), and has apparently known about this ‘for years.’ Conyers has been accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has stepped down from the House Judiciary Committee.”
Naturally, the press (in this case, the House of Stephanopoulos) covered for Conyers “for years.” Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
QUESTIONS THAT NOBODY* IS ASKING: Why Have Liberals Been Such Horrendous Hypocrites on Women’s Rights?, asks Roger Simon.
* Well, at least nobody at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among numerous others. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their omertàs all make sense.
BYRON YORK: How pundits got key part of Trump-Russia story all wrong.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
GLENN GREENWALD: Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That are False.
Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.
On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.
The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.
The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement.
I used to think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and that did make everything make more sense. But now I just think of them as fake newsies.
LARRY O’CONNOR: Why Won’t Media Demand Dems Condemn Antifa?
Democrats have been all over cable and network news over the past several weeks as they participate in the tag team pile-on of any Republican who dares to show the slightest support of President Trump. Where are Wolf and Mika and Don and Anderson and George and Chuck and all the rest confronting these Democrats, boxing them in and challenging them to condemn, in no uncertain terms, the Antifa thugs once and for all?
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines providing cover for Democratic operatives with baseball bats, and it all makes sense. Although to be fair, more Democrats (the kind with D after their names) are coming around to condemning Antifa all own their own.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is ‘identity liberalism’ killing the Democratic party?
Humanities professor Mark Lilla has a new book out titled “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics”… If you want a sense of how the left is responding to this thesis, you can turn to this contentious interview at Slate. Author Isaac Chotiner seems to be doing his best to undermine Lilla’s argument and, more specifically, to make the case that everything comes down to racism. Lilla’s position is that this assumption is blinding Democrats to seeing a more nuanced view of the problem:
John Sexton of Hot Air goes on to quote a wide swatch of Lilla’s interview, but I want to drill down to this moment, which sums up just how unreceptive Lilla’s intended audience of fellow leftists will be to his message:
[Lilla:] When you ask them about identity issues, the people who are not voting for us, and ask them about what they perceive as political correctness, they respond. You only have to look at polls about this, and it’s a great recruiting tool for the right. Now, unless you assume that all of white America is racist and lost and cannot be saved—
Chotiner: Only about half, yeah.
“So Lilla is saying people on the right are responding to the left’s obvious contempt for them and Chotiner’s reply is to label half of them are racist, which is sort of making Lilla’s point,” Sexton adds after quoting more of the interview.
Slate is the last journalistic redoubt of the Graham family, who owned the Washington Post and Newsweek for decades, before offloading, in recent years, the latter for $1 and the former in return for Jeff Bezos’ pocket change. One of the reasons why their publications managed to turn a large investment into a smaller one is the smugness of their journalists, one of whom wore a “Yeah, I’m in the Media, Screw You!” button to the GOP’s 1992 convention.
And if anything, the smug cloud over both the DNC and its operatives with bylines has grown much, much larger. As William Voegeli concludes in his review of Lilla’s book at City Journal (titled “Liberals, Shipwrecked,” which is also well worth your time to read in full), “Lilla’s hope for a future liberalism that will forge ahead and surmount identity politics seems naïve.”
And how.
I THINK THEY’VE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD WITH THAT ONE: 47% say media blocking Trump’s agenda, helped Obama.
The public appears to agree with President Trump that the media is out to get him and stop his agenda.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey on the day Trump was railing against the media found that 47 percent believe the media is blocking his administration from scoring successes.
The public appears to agree with President Trump that the media is out to get him and stop his agenda.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey on the day Trump was railing against the media found that 47 percent believe the media is blocking his administration from scoring successes.
More and more people are realizing that if you think of the press as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, it explains nearly everything.
JOURNALISM AS NARRATIVE CONTROL: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
We’ve been hearing a lot about “right-wing violence” lately. If we’re to believe our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters, there’s a Klansman on every street corner and a Nazi under every bed. There’s nothing more terrifying than a “white nationalist” who lives in his mom’s basement, which is why it’s okay for feral Antifa children to beat these guys up and drench them with balloons filled with piss. It’s “self-defense.”
But what happens when an act of violence is irrefutably motivated by left-wing ideology? What happens if, for example, a Bernie Bro named James T. Hodgkinson shoots at a bunch of congressmen for the explicit reason that he hates Republicans and wants them dead? How do we fit that into the preferred narrative?
We can’t. There’s no way. So we just leave it out entirely.
Well, for certain values of “we.” But it’s sad to see this even from the WSJ. Plus:
If James T. Hodgkinson had been a Trump supporter who shot and almost killed a Democratic congressman for political reasons, he’d be the most infamous man in America. But now, just two months after his attempt to murder a group of Republican lawmakers, he’s not even worth mentioning.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the press is sad that Hodgkinson didn’t succeed.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. Even at the WSJ, it seems.
THE ROT RUNS DEEP: The Ever-Burgeoning House Democrat IT Scandal.
Had it been the RNC that had allowed this mess, it would be the front-page story, day after day. Instead we’re talking about statues and false charges of racism.
“Democratic operatives with bylines,” indeed.
TRUMP AND THE MEDIA LOVE MUD WRESTLING:
Trump is right to complain about how he never gets any credit for doing the right thing because the media and the rest of his critics are always waiting to pounce on him for doing the wrong thing.
All I could think was: The media have lost their collective mind. They used to be content to just tell us what to think. Now, in the era of Trump, they go further and tell us not to trust what we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears.
Trump does a superb job of getting in his own way, and turning every policy disagreement into a junior high school fistfight.
Still, the last few days have been excruciating for me. Not because I have any affection for Trump or neo-Nazis or white supremacists. I don’t. The country would be better off without the lot of them. However, I have become quite fond of journalism.
I sure miss it.
Me too. Note that this syndicated column by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is running in the San Francisco Chronicle, which buried its editors’ videotaped interview with Obama in January of 2008 in which he vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, instead of putting his words in giant 72 point type on its front page the next day. A serious presidential candidate vowing to wipe a major industry should be major news no matter what your political leanings or your views on environmentalism. Its omission by the Chronicle served as a stark reminder that long ago, old media morphed into Democratic operatives with bylines, who merely produce content as a side function of their main goal of keeping their team in power and accumulating more of it.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Emails show Washington Post, New York Times reporters unenthusiastic about covering Clinton-Lynch meeting.
SHOCKER: One Year Later, Journalists Exposed By WikiLeaks Carry On As Before. “One year after WikiLeaks began publishing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that exposed prominent journalists as partisans, many of those journalists are continuing their careers without, it seems, any serious consequences.” Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines.
Their bosses do. . . .
DAVID HARSANYI: So-Called Fact Checkers Keep Butchering The Facts About Obamacare.
“Fact checking” has evolved from an occasionally useful medium to an exercise in revisionism and diversion. Take The Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler’s recent article titled “President Trump’s mangled ‘facts’ about Obamacare.” Headline readers might assume it’s just Trump doing what Trump does most of the time. I almost passed myself. Yet it turns out that all these supposedly “mangled” contentions about Obamacare are, at the very least, debatable assertions.
Kessler, for example, doesn’t approve of this Donald Trump statement: “Americans were told that premiums would go down by $2,500 per year. And instead, their premiums went up to levels that nobody thought even possible.” Other than the hyperbole (“nobody thought even possible”), this statement is substantively true.
Kessler’s ostensive debunking of the “premiums are soaring” claim is really just a confirmation that premiums have indeed risen, augmented by an argument that it wasn’t Obamacare’s fault. Kessler blames the vagaries of modern life and demographics—because these things apparently didn’t exist when Democrats were making their big unrealistic promises in 2009.
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll have it exactly right.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: How The Press Ignored Bill Clinton’s Foreign-Donation Scandal. “I’m glad the news media is pursuing the Trump–Russia scandal, but let’s not forget the differences between how they are covering Russia compared with how they reported a similar story — this one involving Communist China — that developed during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. . . . Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked — in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the Trump–Russia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money.”
They were in the tank for Bill Clinton nearly as much as they were in the tank for Obama and Hillary.
NEW FORMULA: Want instant clicks or buzz around your article or stage production? Play to the groundlings and cast Trump as the villain: “George Orwell Saw Donald Trump Coming: Review of ‘1984’. I don’t know how old this Daily Beast writer is, but I suspect he was still in high school when this was happening:
In 2011, Obama signed a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, specifically, provisions allowing roaming wiretaps and government searches of business records. Obama argued that the renewal was needed to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. However, the renewal was criticized by several members of Congress who argued that the provisions did not do enough to curtail excessive searches.
I know, research is hard, and it would have been too much work to find out that mass-spying was commonplace under the previous administration. At least, not when there’s a click-bait narrative to promulgate. Democratic operatives with bylines, indeed.
**UPDATE: I should have linked to this Obama ad using 1984 as a metaphor for Hillary.
JUST THINK OF THE AP AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE:
Hodgkinson also visited the office of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign he had worked on as a volunteer, and was in email contact with the two Democratic senators from his home state.
As conservative journalist and video maker John Tabin tweets, “Amazing how a simple switch in party affiliation can turn a headline into a minor detail” that was buried 11 paragraphs into an article astonishingly headlined, “FBI: Gunman who shot congressman had no target in mind.”
TRUE: Trump Didn’t Ruin the Media, Obama Did. “Obama was the first indicator that the media would simply refuse to cover stories they didn’t like about a politician they did. The media covered Clinton’s Chinagate and Travelgate. But they refused to cover the IRS scandal with the same level of vim as they would have under Bush; they downplayed the Obama administration’s involvement in the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation scandal; and members of the mainstream media openly mocked the right’s anger over the administration’s manipulation of the 2012 Benghazi terror attack. Obama had to be protected at all costs, including the cost of the media’s credibility. Meanwhile, the media savaged 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.”
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. The thing is, nobody much cares what party operatives have to say.
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: In January 2008, with video cameras rolling, far left presidential candidate Barack Obama told the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle that he would bankrupt any new coal-powered electrical plant. Since the Chronicle’s editors were (and are) Democrat operatives with bylines, rather than putting this news in giant headlines on the front page (i.e. “CANDIDATE OBAMA VOWS TO BANKRUPT NEW COAL-POWERED PLANTS”), the paper buried Obama’s quote in plain sight in the middle of a lengthy video of Q&As between the editors and Obama. It sat online for months until an enterprising video blogger spotted it and became an October surprise for Obama, though too little too late, alas. But as with Obama’s “spread the wealth around” socialist quip to Joe the Plumber also in October, anyone not completely in the tank for Obama at least knew what to expect when he took office in January of 2009.
This past Thursday, the Chronicle reported, via their AP feed:
Under a tent perched hundreds of feet above a freshly dug coal pit, about 200 miners, business leaders, and politicians celebrated amid the surge of enthusiasm for the industry. Mining headgear lay atop red, white, and blue table cloths labeled “Make Coal Great Again.”
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said the mine was part of an effort to bring back jobs and industry to the state. Pennsylvania awarded a $3 million grant for the project.
“We have not always capitalized on our standing as one of the world’s leaders in these resources, but we’re changing that,” Wolf said.
Trump has made reversing the decades-long decline in coal mining the central tenet of his environmental policy, blaming federal regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming carbon emissions for job losses in the industry. Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have targeted laws that protected waterways from coal waste and required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants. About a dozen protesters chanted in opposition to the mine at the opening.
Hardest hit (besides Barry himself), Democrats with bylines at the San Francisco Chronicle, who whiffed the biggest catch of the 2008 election for partisan reasons, and Hillary Clinton, who cackled gleefully in March 2016 that she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” if elected. Her quote was made in at a CNN town hall segment in Ohio, America’s “ninth largest coal producing state in 2013,” Big Government’s Michael Patrick Leahy wrote last year regarding Hillary’s devastating Kinsley-esque gaffe.
But then, I’m so old, I remember when Democrat presidential candidates vowed to create new jobs, not crush them.
JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
Shot:
Back in February, I was riding on the New York to DC shuttle and CNN’s own Jeff Zucker was seated in the row behind me with a woman I took to be a colleague or personal assistant. She was yelling loudly into her phone, loudly enough that the other passengers took note of it, at one point escalating her voice to say: “If they want war with CNN, they got it.” When we landed, I noted the likely inspiration for the call: the administration had offered Mike Pence to every network except for CNN.
—Ben Domenech, “CNN’s War On Trump Is Going Swimmingly,” yesterday.
Chaser:
The media brag that they now more or less run the Democratic agenda. Univision’s Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:
Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.
In other words, Ramos confessed that the Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape the news.
Fellow panelist and CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as such.
—Victor Davis Hanson, “Progressive Media & Democrats Form New Anti-Trump Party,” May 30th.
Hangover: Proud Sponsor of President Trump’s Nightly ‘Assassination’ — CNN’s Parent Company Time Warner:
In the next scene the Trumpian Caesar is attacked by the Senators and stabbed to death as an American flag hovers overhead, according to Sheaffer. “They had the full murder scene onstage, and blood was spewing everywhere out of his body.”
Among others, guess who proudly sponsors this nightly wish-fulfillment in the bloody, live and in person! assassination of the President of the United States of America?
Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.
“And keep in mind that this is the same CNN that led the charge to destroy the career of a rodeo clown for the sin of wearing an Obama mask,” John Nolte adds at the Daily Wire.
CAPITOL HILL DEMOCRATS’ PAKISTANI I.T. HACKERS: If This Were a Republican Problem, You Couldn’t Keep the Press Away.
If this was a scandal involving the Trump administration, the entire national media would be focused on it 24/7, with scoops and leaks gushing as hordes of top-drawer reporters chased a story that potentially connected government officials to major security breaches. But since the story involves Democrats, it’s apparently not that interesting to the mainstream press.
To be sure, there have been no charges and no convictions; it’s possible (as with the Trump-Russia scandal) that the wrongdoing may turn out to be relatively insignificant. But there’s enough black and oily smoke here that if this were a Republican problem, the MSM wouldn’t be able to get enough of it.
Just think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
ANN ALTHOUSE CORRECTS JAKE TAPPER:
The Constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press not just for reporters, but for everyone. And the Constitution guarantees due process for the criminally accused. Someone who would “strongly condemn a politician committing assault on a reporter” might also demonstrate a love of constitutional values by refraining from assuming that a particular individual accused of committing a crime is guilty. The hesitation to condemn Gianforte — I believe, even though I averted my eyes from yesterday’s swarming and feasting — had to do with a fear that an audiotape was being exploited and possibly distorted to raise a sudden frenzy just as an election was occurring.
You talk about courage, but jumping into a frenzied mob isn’t a mark of courage. Show me everyone who without hesitation condemned Gianforte, and I’d like to know whether he or she either: 1. Wanted the Republican to lose the election, or 2. Was afraid of getting attacked for endorsing violence. Is there anyone left? Show me the man or woman of true courage.
You can forgive people for believing that any last-minute pile-on directed at at GOP candidate is probably a hoax, because it’s so often the case — and the news media, functioning as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, are not to be counted on for accuracy.
OF COURSE NOT. THEY’RE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES. Eddie Scarry: Trump Can’t Win The Press.
The mania over James Comey’s firing would carry more weight if the press didn’t behave this way every time President Trump signed an order, wrote a tweet or flushed a toilet.
Political commentators, news organizations and lawmakers on both sides had been calling for Comey’s ousting for months for his bizarre, inconstant approach in conducting the sensitive investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails and then Trump’s election campaign.
But now that he’s gone, the media act like America just lost its favorite uncle.
Everyone is now used to the simple fact that no matter what he does, Trump cannot win the press. And that’s why no one should look to it for an indication of whether he’s doing anything right.
Depending on what mood the Washington media wake up in on any given day, Trump is either dumb and expected to screw up (i.e. Charles Blow wittily referring to Trump in every column as “president” in quotes) or it’s, Hey, why isn’t he doing everything like a normal president? Constitutional crisis!
Most of them don’t actually seem to know what a “constitutional crisis” is, but then, most of them couldn’t pass a simple quiz on the Constitution.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Cruelty of Blue:
Years of false promises, years of “compassionate government”, years of ignoring arithmetic, comes to this: Puerto Rico in the grip of a massive, man-made disaster. . . .
This could have been avoided by sensible and timely cuts, by turning a deaf ear to public sector union demands for wages and salaries, by a series of small but definite steps away from the blue model, welfare state governance. But the press, certainly including the NYT which is now reporting the disaster, would have attacked any politicians taking these steps as “harsh”, or “cruel to the poor”.
Now Puerto Rico is in a deeper hole, with much more suffering than any of the moderate cuts would have imposed.
Unfortunately, a number of cities and states on the mainland are walking down the Puerto Rican highway toward bankruptcy and disruptive adjustment. There, the liberal press is still hailing the politicians who are willing to plunge their cities and states into chaos for the sake of popularity: the press often calls them bold, innovative and visionary. They have a lot of ideas about the things they want to do with other peoples’ money, while people who insist that budgets must be cut, and that pension obligations be met, are still being attacked for everything from racism to sadism.
It’s as if the press is just a bunch of Democratic operatives with bylines, who care nothing for truth or the greater good of society if it threatens Democratic priorities.
NOT SO IMPRESSIVE: The Media’s First 100 Days.
Reporters are spending the day prattling about how short President Trump has come up in his first 100 days, but why should they have all the fun?
In that same 100 days, a new Morning Consult poll released Friday said that more people are trusting of the White House than the media to tell them the truth.
The poll also said that more than half of Americans think the media are out of touch and that 48 percent think the media have been harder on him than on past presidents. (The other 52 percent must not recall the time Julie Pace of the Associated Press asked Obama in 2014 if he had a good night’s sleep.)
What’s the opposite of “success?”
Everyone knew Trump, a celebrity businessman with no political experience, would be on a steep learning curve after his surprise win in November, so that he hasn’t passed any major legislation in 100 days means nothing.
The press, however, isn’t new to this and it’s done worse in the same amount of time. But even after two years of journalists confessing they “missed something” in Trump’s rise, the national papers, networks and news websites have done nothing different and even when they have, it’s been dumb.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and it all makes sense.
THIS IS CNN: CNN Publishes Locations of Town Halls, Aiding Democrat Activists.
Democrat operatives with bylines.
BECKET ADAMS: In First Big Test of the Trump Era, Media Fails Miserably. “After months of post-election chest thumping about how they could not be cowed by the powerful, reporters have reacted with a mix of yawns and giggles after the State of California announced it would pursue criminal charges against two activists who went undercover and investigated Planned Parenthood’s practice of salvaging and distributing body parts scrounged from the remains of aborted fetuses.”
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it all makes sense.
NO, BECAUSE THEY’RE DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Would journalists support congressional investigation of Obama surveillance of … journalists?
IF IT WEREN’T FOR FAKE NEWS, WOULD THEY HAVE ANY NEWS AT ALL? CNN and MSNBC did zero work fact-checking Democratic senator’s bogus claim.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
ANDREW MALCOLM: The truth about Trump’s worrisome war on media.
President Trump let slip the secret during his first news conference. Here’s what he told shouting reporters trying to trip him:
“I’ll tell you something, I’ll be honest — because I sort of enjoy this back-and-forth. And I guess I have all my life.”
As do his supporters and a good number of detractors, who’ve turned Trump appearances and his press secretary’s news briefings into TV ratings hits on cspan.org and cable.
Enough Americans have witnessed or perceived media misinterpretations and bias to enjoy seeing its elite members handed back some guff, even crudely. And there’s now a vibrant, imperfect social media on 24-hour online patrol.
Meanwhile, media members who blithely passed along Obama’s serial lies about, among many things, keeping your doctor and health plan under ObamaCare, are now on Alpha Alert for Trump untruths, visibly relishing each one.
The Washington media needs to stop whining, get off their high horse and do the jobs they chose, reporting accurately what a president says now and putting it in true context to what he said last year or last night.
It isn’t whining — it’s anger. And it may be with us a while, because the Democratic-Operatives-with-Bylines lost big in November, and the second stage of grief is the most difficult one to get through.
KURT SCHLICHTER: President Trump Has Been Far Too Nice To The Mainstream Media.
It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha.” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.
The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.
The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them the “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”
Read the whole thing.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Spicer: Media doesn’t treat Trump with respect, cheers on Democrats.
The media doesn’t treat President-elect Donald Trump with the proper respect, the man set to be the next White House spokesman said in an interview with The Hill.
Sean Spicer, a longtime GOP operative and strategist for the Republican National Committee, criticized a media landscape that he said mocked Trump even as it cheers on Democrats.
While he said the media seems to understand that Trump represents a larger movement after his presidential win, his remarks reflected longstanding antipathy on the part of the Trump team on how the businessman has been treated.
“There’s some positive aspects here and there, but largely it still continues to not treat him with the respect that he deserves,” Spicer said.
“I think for a lot of folks inside the beltway, and inside pundit-world, they don’t fully appreciate the understanding that he has of where the American people are,” Spicer continued. “They continue to mock him in ways, when it frankly just shows the lack of understanding of that they have of where the American people are and what they think.”
Spicer also criticized what he said are “countless examples” of the media cheering on Democrats.
“There are countless examples of the media engaging — overtly or covertly — cheering on Democrats and there’s no accountability. But it’s also not even frowned upon,” he said.
No, it’s cheered on by their fellow Democratic Party operatives with bylines.
WELL, YES: Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free’ Administration Was Actually Riddled with Scandals.
No one can forget the disturbing onslaught of Obama cult products circa 2008/2009: the Obama flags, perfume, soap, soda pop, basketballs, clocks, flip-flops, soap-on-a-rope — you name it. Obama’s smiling mug was slapped on practically every product you could think of — including even sushi! — and his devoted cultists snatched it up.
Then there were the children singing Obama songs of praise, Obama’s lavish birthday bashes, and his unearned Nobel Peace Prize. While most of “Obamamania” dissipated over the ensuing years, there were still occasional reminders that he still had a very fervent and devoted following — mostly, it turned out, in the mainstream media.
For the entire eight years of Obama’s presidency, we witnessed an obsequious MSM that only very reluctantly reported negative news about their hero, dropping problematic stories like a hot potato at the first opportunity. Thus, Obama’s many scandals became old news in a matter of weeks.
Think of them as Kool Aid-drinking Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
FAKE NEWS: ABC News continues to “normalize” Donna Brazile as DNC chair.
Why is Jonathan Karl interviewing Brazile in the first place? And if he’s going to do that, how does one sit there and politely rehash the last election with her without poking the obvious elephant in the room? It has been 62 days since CNN severed their ties with Donna Brazile over the fact (no longer an “allegation”) that she cheated during one of the Democratic presidential primary debates and attempted to cheat during a second one in Flint, Michigan. And yet ABC News is inviting her to sit down for a casual New Years Day chat like any other political analyst.
There is not one reputable media outlet in the country who is even attempting to suggest that Brazile didn’t cheat or attempt to cheat on Hillary Clinton’s behalf during the primary. Even Brazile herself refuses to say that she’s innocent, instead preferring to insist that she will not be persecuted as if she were Jesus Christ or something.
I keep hearing media outlets complaining when any of their competitors provide coverage of Donald Trump in terms of his policy proposals, cabinet nominations and all the rest. The major charge they level is that these journalists are somehow “normalizing” Trump’s presidency. That’s a rather insulting phrase, since Trump actually won and must now be evaluated by the job he does. But isn’t it somehow worse to keep introducing Donna Brazile as the interim chair of the DNC and allow her to continue commenting on politics? Isn’t this an act of “normalizing” someone as the head of one of our two major parties while she’s known to have attempted to do more to directly tamper with an election than the Russians did? And where is the media outrage at the DNC for not removing this person who is known to be corrupt? All I’m hearing is crickets on that score.
We’re witnessing the “normalization” of a known cheat… a dishonest actor who was caught red handed attempting to corrupt a presidential election. This person has remained as the interim head of the Democratic Party for more than two months since being definitively exposed. And ABC News continues to propagate the fantasy that all is well and there’s nothing particularly notable about the situation.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: 9 times the media attacked Trump supporters.
There probably isn’t one particular thing that paved the way for a billionaire businessman-turned-reality TV star with no government experience to become the next president of the United States.
But reporters and political commentators took turns pointing to nearly every possible lead to explain what “created” Donald Trump: the Tea Party, CNN, talk radio, the Republican Party and the Left, among them.
Perhaps most notable was the blame placed on voters for exercising their right to select the next leader.
Here are nine times, in no particular order, the national media blamed the voters for Trump’s rise to the White House.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. And a lot of people have figured it out.
FAKE NEWS: “Not a single journalist exposed in Wikileaks was punished. Some were promoted. All will get awards.” Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. That’s how their colleagues and bosses think of them. . . .
ANALYSIS: TRUE. ‘Fake News’ Is The Legacy Media Shaking Down Facebook.
Robert Tracinski:
An overview of studies on the fake news phenomenon indicates that Facebook’s critics have it completely backward. People don’t form their political preferences by reading fake news, they seek out fake news to support their political preferences. That goes for both sides, mind you, but given the organizations Facebook has tapped to deal with this issue, I have a feeling that in the new system one side is going be flagged way more often.
Yet for readers of those stories, gaining the official disapproval of Facebook is going to be like being “banned in Boston.” For the right audience, it’s a selling point: “Read the news Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to hear!”
That’s why Facebook doesn’t just leave it to users to make their own choices. Instead, flagged stories will be harder to find in Facebook news feeds and won’t be able to promote themselves with advertising. Given how “fact checkers” have played favorites with their ratings, there is a massive incentive for them to abuse this power simply to suppress facts and interpretations that support the other side of the political debate.
That’s kind of baked into the whole idea. After all, nobody was all that bothered by “fake news” until they thought it produced an election result they didn’t like. Then it suddenly became an issue. So from the very beginning, this push to suppress “fake news” is motivated by a desire to suppress undesirable political outcomes.
If you think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, it all makes sense.
KYLE SMITH: Keep crying wolf about Trump, and no one will listen when there’s a real crisis.
It’s contrary to the laws of nature for a tabloid writer to tell the gentry media not to go berserk. It’s like a cat telling his owner to stop coughing up hairballs or Iron Man asking Captain America to be less arrogant. Here at The Post, our mission statement does not include understatement. We provide journalistic Red Bull, not Sominex.
Nevertheless, a word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week and a half, and it’s revolting to watch.
For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again. . . . Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.
Plus:
Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as ‘Democratic operatives with bylines’ is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back. . . . This fall WikiLeaks confirmed everything conservatives have been saying about the media for more than 20 years. CNN, you have been busted. You allowed Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile to get hold of town-hall questions in advance and help Hillary Clinton prep with them. . . . John Harwood, New York Times/CNBC reporter and Republican debate moderator, you have been busted. You asked John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, for questions you could pose to Jeb Bush in an interview.
Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist and longtime phony “nonpartisan” political reporter, you have been busted. You reached out to DNC flack Eric Walker and asked for help putting together a “Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump” story.
Not only are you evidently an undercover Democratic Party operative who should be drawing checks from the DNC instead of from The WaPo, you’re a tired hack who can’t even come up with his own column ideas without assistance.
Ouch. The truth hurts.
KEEP CRYING WOLF ABOUT TRUMP, AND NO ONE WILL LISTEN WHEN THERE’S A REAL CRISIS, Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:
Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as “Democratic operatives with bylines” is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back.
In November 2008, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said readers who complained about shallow coverage and pro-Obama bias were “right on both counts,” publishing tallies that proved the paper had been far more critical of Obama’s opponent Sen. John McCain than of Obama. A few weeks later, “Game Change” co-author Mark Halperin said the media showed “extreme pro-Obama coverage” in a “disgusting failure.”
In 2012, The New York Times’ public editor Arthur Brisbane said the paper “basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008” and cited a study that showed the Times’ coverage had been far more approving of Obama than it had been of President Reagan and both Presidents Bush.
In January 2008, NBC’s Brian Williams was honest enough to point out that the network’s reporter covering Obama had said, “It’s hard to be objective covering this guy.” Williams immediately demanded the reporter be fired for admitting to being unable to do his job.
Just kidding: Williams praised the reporter, calling him “courageous.”
In 2016, the media didn’t even pretend it wasn’t working in Hillary Clinton’s interests.
Read the whole thing.
TIME-WARNER-CNN-HBO SPOKESMAN BILL MAHER PRETENDS TO APOLOGIZE FOR CRYING WOLF AT BUSH, McCAIN AND ROMNEY:
This is a remarkable mea culpa from Bill Maher on how he treated Republican nominees before Trump. pic.twitter.com/xIzt9Rj91S
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 5, 2016
In response, Iowahawk adds:
For anybody who can’t understand why their attacks on Trump just won’t stick:https://t.co/FldVcvSExh
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016
.@JeffiBelcher @sahilkapur When the VP of the US told black voters Romney was for the return of slavery, the entire rhetorical wad was shot.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016
Fun with Twitter searchhttps://t.co/wAKKGpiWVj
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 5, 2016
But then, long before Trump came along, the previous president or GOP candidate, who received brickbats and worse from the left is magically rehabilitated to bash the current nominee. Rinse and repeat, going back to Eisenhower and Goldwater.
This past July, Jonah Goldberg explored “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.”
Last night, responding to Maher, Stephen Kruiser wrote, “As he points out [in the above clip], Maher gave a cool million to the Obama campaign in 2012 to prevent Mitt Romney from being elected. In the last few weeks before the election, Democrats were portraying Romney (the man they now describe as honorable) as a sexist animal abuser who gave a woman cancer. Check back in four years to see if they’ve really learned anything about crying wolf.”
Similarly, file this prediction from Twitter user Chris Antenucci away for future reference: “Bill Maher and most liberals in 2020: ‘This year’s nominee, Rubio, is making Trump look like a moderate. He’s a radical on abortion.’”
That’s a remarkably safe bet. We’re seeing lots of mea culpas from the media and its critics about how badly it blew its reporting this year and how deeply it was in the tank for the Democratic nominee. But they could virtually be rewrites of the same faux apologies we’ve seen at the conclusion of every presidential election since at least 2004. And yet, “unexpectedly,” the MSM just never seems to learn from them, do they?
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
WELL, YES: Joe Battenfeld: Comey’s not the problem, the media is the problem. “A powerful public official errs on the side of transparency and disclosure and how does the media react? Outraged. Indignant. Defensive. These are our supposed public watchdogs. The ones whose job is to expose what taxpayer-funded officials and politicians don’t want you to know.”
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Politico Reporter Gets Caught AGAIN Sending A Story To A Clinton Staffer For Approval.
RIGGED, BY DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Donna Brazile’s debate question flap boosts ‘rigged’ narrative. “’Trump has stressed over and over again that the press is not just biased, but that parts of it have become effectively adjuncts of the Democratic Party,’ said Boston College political science professor Dennis Hale. ‘This certainly feeds that story.’” Ya think? If I were a Bernie fan, I’d be livid.
THINK OF THEM — AND ALL THEIR COLLEAGUES — AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: No Consequences From Media Peers for Reporters Caught Colluding With Hillary: Colleagues yawn while star reporters like Thrush and Leibovich cooperate with Clinton campaign. Now, anybody engaged in similar cooperation with Trump — or any Republican — would be made a pariah, of course.
ANN ALTHOUSE: Robby Mook’s sleight of hand about the Democratic operatives who manufactured violence at Trump rallies. “That doesn’t get the DNC off the hook. Why were these people hired? They did something, and then they were hired. Were they hired because they’d shown what kind of dirty tricks they were capable of?”
Of course they were. The Democrats send people to manufacture violence at Trump rallies, then their operative-with-bylines friends in the media cluck their tongues at how Trump is “manufacturing violence.”
Plus: “Mook sounds so guilty there. He’s mad that any video exists (because it hurts his candidate), and he’s also telling us not to make any inferences about anything that isn’t proved by video. Again, I’m thinking: They did something bad before they were agents of the DNC, so why did the DNC hire them and what did they do?”
Well, he sounds guilty because he is guilty. And he’s angry that the video means that even his allies in the press have to take some notice.
BUT OF COURSE: Ashe Schow: Media focus on Trump’s problems at Al Smith dinner, but not Clinton’s.
The Hill’s Joe Concha is fast becoming one of my favorite media reporters. He attended Thursday night’s Al Smith dinner, and has written an article called “Al Smith Dinner I attended was different than one I read about.”
Concha laid out some of what we’ve all heard in the media today about the zingers told by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We’re also being told that Trump delivered some truly terrible jokes that resulted in boos and jeering.
But what isn’t being given as much attention — except from a couple outlets — is that Clinton was also booed at times, though not as often as Trump. The Guardian pointed out a couple of jokes from Clinton that received some cheers and boos.
“You notice there is no teleprompters here tonight, which is probably smart, because it may be you saw Donald … dismantle his own. Maybe it is harder when you are translating from the original Russian,” Clinton said.
“I have deep respect for people like Kellyanne Conway. She is working day and night for Donald, and because she is a contractor, he is probably not even going to pay her,” Clinton said in another joke that didn’t do very well.
Concha notes that all the attention being paid to the boos and jeers toward Trump leaves out some important context.
“Republicans — especially those named Trump — aren’t popular in New York, and certainly with the wine and cheese crowd at the Waldorf last night,” Concha wrote. “And even Clinton got some boos and awkward reactions.”
He added that the event raised $6 million for children, more than it had ever raised before.
So while Trump was predictably booed at an unfriendly event, the media ran with it in order to smear him. Further, they ignored this same group booing Clinton. And the media wonder why their trust with the American people continues to plummet.
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and his wife, a Democratic consultant, hosted a dinner party at their Washington D.C.-area home last year for Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.
Todd began his career working as a Democrat operative on the 1992 presidential campaign of “stolen valor” Congressman Tom Harkin; little has changed in that regard in his current job.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: What media bias? Journalists overwhelmingly donated to Hillary Clinton.
Late Sunday evening, Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza tweeted: “Let me say for the billionth time: Reporters don’t root for a side. Period.”
It was a hilariously ill-timed tweet, because Monday morning the Center for Public Integrity released its 2016 campaign analysis showing journalists giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Of the 430 people CPI identified as “journalists, reporters, news editors or television news anchors — as well as other donors known to be working in journalism,” 96 percent gave money to Clinton, according to federal campaign finance filings. Those 430 journalists gave $382,000 to Clinton and just $14,000 to GOP nominee Donald Trump. CPI identified just 50 journalists who gave to Trump (meaning 380 gave to Clinton.)
CPI noted that the law only obligates candidates to disclose the names of donors giving more than $200 in a single election cycle, meaning many more members of the media could have donated to either campaign, but in smaller amounts.
Cillizza followed up his earlier tweet by commenting on the CPI report: “Well this is super depressing. NO idea why any journalist would donate $ to politicians.”
CPI noted that even as many newsrooms have policies against donating to politicians (the New York Times is more vague, strongly suggesting that such donations would compromise the paper’s integrity), their reporters donated.
This isn’t an age of Trump thing among journalists, either. In 2012, every major media outlet donated heavily to President Obama compared to Mitt Romney (yes, even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News). The story was the same in 2008.
It’s a political monoculture, and that’s one reason for the rise of Trump.