Today's Must-Read: The Press as King-Maker

A commentary by Eric Bohlert, via Digby, that crystallizes a number of thoughts I've been having about our"free, independent, adversarial press". Here's one key part:

For readers of the New York Times, this development might come as a surprise, since the paper’s message this spring has leaned heavily on the idea Biden is struggling. Specifically, the newspaper has been obsessed with portraying Biden as stuck in his Delaware basement during a pandemic, broadcasting out messages, unable to counter the savvy Trump.

Indeed, the message from the Times has been that “perilously passive” Biden is “grappling,” “uncertain,” “tentative,” “cloistered,” “stuck at home,” and “struggling with basic technical difficulties,” while Democrats are “worried” and “perplexed.”

The storyline is that Biden became a spectator while Trump was running the campaign show. Today, that narrative has proven to be dead wrong and it ought to be buried.

This is a perfect example of the press firmly clinging to the idea that Democrats are in a constant state of confusion and that Trump and Republicans can easily outmaneuver them. (See: Dems in Disarray.) And preferred media narratives are hard to break.

Read the whole thing.

Compare and Contrast

I'm not really making any decisions on Democratic presidential candidates at this, although I will probably vote for Buttigieg in the primary -- he's smart and he knows what questions to ask.

That said, this article is illuminating on the differences between Buttigieg and the other contenders, in this case Elizabeth warren. A sample of Buttigieg's responses:

Jake Tapper: Let me just ask you, some of your Democratic opponents including senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who I’ll be talking to shortly, called the strike a “assassination.” They say it’s an assassination. Do you believe it was an assassination?

Pete Buttigieg: I am not interested in the terminology. I’m interested in the consequences and I’m interested in the process. Did the president have legal authority to do this? Why wasn’t Congress consulted? It seems like more people at Mar-a-Lago heard about this than people in the United States Congress who are a coequal branch of government with a responsibility to consult. Which of our allies were consulted? The real-world effects of this are going to go far beyond the things that we’re debating today and we need answers quickly.

I like the way Buttigieg cuts through the press' attempts to frame the discussion and gets to the core issues.

Read the whole thing -- it's not all that long.

With thanks to commenter Lazycrockett at Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: What Independent Press?

This morning's "Must-Read" is a comment thread (for which, unfortunately, Disqus won't give me a link, so you get the whole thing here), courtesy of commenter billbear1961:

From Political Wire:

disqus_lWwzrwNaw6 17 hours ago

Margaret Brennan on CBS pulled off the same little trick George did at ABC: in her interview with Liz Cheney, she struggled to get Cheney to say something critical about Donald's timing, or to acknowledge that "some might say" there's something an eency weency bit racist about how "some interpret" Donald's tweets, while allowing Cheney to get away unchallenged with vile, incendiary lies about what the four Democratic representatives actually said.

No challenge at all from Brennan on that ground. None.

Disgraceful: but over the last quarter century or so, this kind of journalism is how the Republican Party has taken total power.

I was horrified, although not even remotely surprised, by the extent to which George Stephanopoulos let the odious Mercedes Schlapp get away with suggesting that a) the old orange goon had denounced the chant but b) the representatives had indeed said terrible, anti-Semitic, anti-American things.

George challenged Mercedes a little bit on the idea that Donald had immediately denounced the chant, although that line of questioning got muddy as Schlapp pulled the usual Frank Luntzed agitprop routine, but he let stand without challenge the outrageous, incendiary, and deeply false suggestion that any of the four had said anything remotely anti-Semitic, inflammatory, or anti-American.

He let it stand, as one knew he would---most of the press establishment has decided the hair to split involves Fat Donald's reaction time, and whether Fat Donald really means it, and not the toxic, dangerous content of the allegations the Republican Party is making against these women, which may yet lead to bloodshed and death. It would be so impolite to force the Republicans to deal with that one.

This is not only open racism and fascism, but it's based on easily disprovable right wing agitprop, Frank Luntz mantras, and Murdoch Big Lies.

Yet the national press still equivocates about calling Donald a racist ("some say," "critics charge"), and still will not explode the lies about what the four members of Congress actually said.

The press is allowing the Republicans' Big Lie campaign to stand unchallenged.

The real disgrace is that the press is refusing to correct the record: refusing to point out, again and again, as often as it takes, that the Congresswomen didn't say any of the things the Republicans claim they said. This filthy Republican lie is hardening into fact because the press doesn't want to "take sides" and correct the record.

billbear1961

And this is ME speaking--just as the corporate-FASCIST press have, in effect, abandoned the children in the concentration camps, they are helping Trump and the GOP endanger the lives of the "Squad" be refusing to call them out for the LIES they are spreading about what these women have said.

And that pretty much echoes my thoughts on how the press is a failure.

Today's Must-Read: It's the Press, Stupid!

Rebecca Traister takes a hard look at the man -- and they are almost all me -- who will be framing the optics of the 2020 election, and it ain't pretty:

In past weeks, the curtain has officially been raised on the vast and diverse field of candidates for the Democratic nomination, many of them politicians who would not have been seen on a presidential debate stage — and never in these numbers — even a decade ago. Six of the 25 declared candidates are not men; six of them are not white; there is one openly gay man and one Jew who’s also a democratic socialist. During the first round of debates, several candidates made efforts to speak Spanish that, while performative, reflected an overdue acknowledgment that they were speaking to a broader swath of the country than the moderate white men in diners to whom so much Democratic messaging has been directed for decades. Beyond their representational expansion, many of the candidates are offering up compelling, progressive policy ideas: pushing the party into fights for single-payer health care, subsidized child care, free college, a Green New Deal, a stronger commitment to reproductive justice and a push for more humane immigration policies.

But we’re also getting our first real taste of the punditry that will frame this next year and a half, and so far, it is the opposite of fresh, diverse, or forward-thinking. Rather, the analysis coughed up by some of the nation’s loudest and most prominent talking heads sounds familiar and stale. The dispiriting truth is that many of those tasked with interpreting our politics are — in addition to being extremely freaked out by the race they’re covering — totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them.

She names names. Read it all.

With thanks to commenter Gustav2 at Joe.My.God.

Guess What's In the News Today?

And yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. . . .

I couldn't resist:

Here's an interesting take on the rationale behind the wall impasse:

(And if you thought it was the "breaking news" about Trump being a Russian asset -- we knew that.)

Today's Must-Read: Don't Believe, Part II (Update)

As a follow-up to this post from yesterday, I ran across this article this morning that points up just how malignant not only Republicans are in their messaging, but how pretty much everyone in Washington, or writing about Washington, or commenting on Washington, falls into the same traps:

In a recent New York Times interview, Ocasio-Cortez mentioned how hard it is to find affordable housing in Washington; conservative pundits alternated between laughing at this and dismissing it as spin. Judy Miller, on Fox: “I think what she’s talking about is all of the money in Washington, all of the wealth in Washington, all of the power—and a little, simple person like her from New York can’t find a place to live. It is a brilliant political line.”

The author goes on to comment on how easy it is to weaponize hypocrisy.

This one's really hard to excerpt -- read the whole thing. It's not that long, and makes some good points. (Although the author does buy into the "protest" mischaracterization of Ocasio-Cortez' demonstration at Pelosi's office.)

With thanks to commenter SoCalGal20 at Joe.My.God.

Update: Whoopi Goldberg takes down Eddie Scarry, the commentator who first criticized Ocasio-Cortez' clothes.

Today's Must-Read: Don't Believe What Republicans Say You Believe

Today's "Must-Read" is a long string of tweets from John Stoehr which details one of the biggest mistakes the left has made over the last thirty years -- taking what the right says we believe as gospel. Here's the start:

2. One of the biggest obstacles in the history of American liberalism has been this tendency among liberals to accept as true things liberalism’s enemies say about it and them.

— (((John Stoehr))) (@johnastoehr) November 14, 2018

4. The “protest,” as it was called, was organized by an advocacy group aiming to raise awareness about climate change and to advocate for more green-energy jobs.

— (((John Stoehr))) (@johnastoehr) November 14, 2018

6. The 29-year-old Latina has been stumping for liberal candidates across the country, making liberal arguments in unapologetically liberal ways. That she spoke with activists demanding action from leading liberals should have come as no surprise to anyone any time anywhere.

— (((John Stoehr))) (@johnastoehr) November 14, 2018

It goes on, and it's worth reading the whole string. (As it happens, Ocasio-Cortez told her group of "protesters" that the message to Pelosi was that they had her back in pushing strong climate policy; Pelosi, in her turn, welcomed the support. The whole "protest" thing came from -- ready? -- a spokesperson for Paul Ryan. Yeah -- that Paul Ryan.)

The right has proven to be past masters at controlling the dialogue in this country. Of course, it helps that they've managed to intimidate our "free, independent press" so thoroughly that they'll parrot whatever the GOP talking point du jour happens to be. Oh, and don't forget their staple "analysis": "both sides do it."

Via Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, who underscores what we're up against:

Retraining the press and progressives conditioned to accepting standard narratives may be almost as challenging as advancing climate change legislation in a company town.

"I've Got A Little List. . . ."*

Of course, the first thing you have to do is to compile the list:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

I wonder exactly what DHS means by "sentiment." Under this regime, it's way too easy to guess.

Via Joe.My.God. Joe also includes this reaction from Forbes:

Every day, journalists face serious consequences including physical violence, imprisonment and death. A few days ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched its annual Free The Press campaign to raise awareness about imprisoned journalists throughout the world.

On May 3, UNESCO will once again mark World Press Freedom Day “to inform citizens of violations of press freedom — a reminder that in dozens of countries around the world, publications are censored, fined, suspended and closed down, while journalists, editors and publishers are harassed, attacked, detained and even murdered.”

Meanwhile, the United States government, traditionally one of the bastions of press freedom, is about to compile a list of professional journalists and “top media influencers,” which would seem to include bloggers and podcasters, and monitor what they’re putting out to the public. What could possibly go wrong? A lot.

Whoever came up with this idea obviously wasn't twigging to the optics, which, given Trump's ongoing war with the legitimate press, are appalling. Especially since this is coming from Homeland Security.

Of course, when you control the executive and Congress and are busily packing the courts, maybe you don't need to worry about optics so much.

* In case you've forgotten, that's the opening line of the Lord High Executioner's aria from The Mikado. It continues "They never will be missed/No, they never will be missed. . . . "

Today's Must-Read: Trump's War on Democracy, Free Press Edition

This post from Digby is really pretty scary:

I'm glad to see someone of Tom Edsell's stature say this in such stark terms:

More than any president in living memory, Donald Trump has conducted a dogged, remorseless assault on the press. He portrays the news media not only as a dedicated adversary of his administration but of the entire body politic. These attacks have forced the media where it does not want to be, at the center of the political debate.

Trump’s purpose is clear. He seeks to weaken an institution that serves to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority. He has initiated a gladiatorial contest pitting the principle of freedom of the press against a principle of his own invention: freedom from the press.

This is not something Trump invented:

[Jay] Rosen observed that the history of right-wing attacks on the media extends back through Agnew’s speeches for Nixon to Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 and winds forward through William Rusher, talk radio, and of course Fox News, which founded a business model on liberal bias.

I don't find it surprising in the least that this is coming from the Republican side of the aisle. The GOP has become the resting place of the most retrograde elements in our society, the 27 or 28 percent who, in William F. Buckley's description, have always stood athwart the flow of history yelling "Stop!" -- except that they're yelling "Go back!"

And make no mistake -- the right has never been all that fond of democracy. All the progress made toward extending the right to vote, for example, has been made in spite of conservatives. (Remember that the likes of Tony Perkins consider working to preserve civil rights for all Americans a "radical agenda.")

At any rate, read Digby's whole post.

Footnote: And it's not just the press that's under attack -- it's anyone not considered a Trump loyalist. Which unfortunately includes most of the people in the executive branch who know what they're doing.

They're Not Even Pretending Any More

Via Joe.My.God., in the category of "Blatant, Shameless Liars" we have yet another White House shill spouting "alternative facts," and this one's a doozy:

Journalists lashed out at a White House spokesman on Saturday after the aide to President Trump claimed that news media and Democrats have caused more “chaos” than Russia.

White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley made the comments during an interview on Fox News while responding to special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election.

“There are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media,” Gidley asserted on Fox News.

“[They] continued to push this lie on the American people for more than a year, and frankly Americans should be outraged by that.”

Actually, when you look at actual events, statements, etc., the ones who are causing the most chaos are -- you guessed it: Trump and his minions.

But it gets better. Maybe you should hide your irony meter -- it probably won't survive this one (via Towleroad):

And the White House also issued a statement: “We cannot allow those seeking to sow confusion, discord, and rancor to be successful. It’s time we stop the outlandish partisan attacks, wild and false allegations, and far-fetched theories, which only serve to further the agendas of bad actors, like Russia, and do nothing to protect the principles of our institutions. We must unite as Americans to protect the integrity of our democracy and our elections.”

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it?

How Times Have Changed

Here's a nice story that is perhaps more significant than you might at first think:

Two Army captains who met in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era of the military, became the first active-duty, same-sex couple to get married at West Point when they exchanged vows last weekend.

Capt. Daniel Hall, 30, and Capt. Vinny Franchino, 26, both Apache helicopter pilots, were married at the New York military academy’s picturesque chapel, the New York Times reported on Friday.

They're not the first same-sex couple to be married at West Point, but the first active-duty same-sex couple.

But what struck me is that, if you follow the link above, it will take you to Raw Story, reprinting an article from Newsweek, which references at article from the New York Times. It's not all that long ago that a story like this would have been ignored by the "mainstream" press -- unless there were a riot.

Today's Must-Read: Let's Beat Up on Hillary Again

Via Digby, this piece by Paul Waldman. Digby leads off thusly:

I'm going to change the channel and skip the tweets, posts and articles about Clinton's book because I'm sick to death of hearing the media demand that she don yet another hair shirt and flagellate herself for their amusement. I've never seen anyone in politics so relentlessly required to repeatedly debase himself before the media. It's beyond uncomfortable at this point. It's sick.

It's the latest chapter in the twenty-plus year old hate campaign against the Clintons, which I've been sick of forever.

Waldman:

Hillary Clinton’s book about the 2016 campaign, “What Happened,” won’t be out for a few weeks, but this morning a few brief excerpts from the audiobook were played on “Morning Joe.” And as usual, a great deal of the focus is on whether Clinton is taking sufficient responsibility for her defeat.

So we need to ask ourselves: Why is it so important to so many people that Clinton perform a ritual of self-abasement?

If you don’t recall a chorus of angry calls for Mitt Romney or John McCain or John Kerry or Al Gore to get down on their knees and beg forgiveness for their failures every time they appeared in public after losing their presidential elections, that’s because it didn’t happen. Only Hillary Clinton is subject to this demand.

And when she takes responsibility, as she has before, her words are carefully scrutinized to see if she’s being self-critical enough. When she said in May that she took responsibility for her loss but also pointed out that she would have won had James B. Comey not made that dramatic email announcement 11 days before the election — which is almost certainly true — the comments were greeted by a round of scolding from reporters who obviously felt that she was not sufficiently humbled.

At the risk of repeating myself, the press deserves as much credit for Trump's win as the Russians do -- maybe more.

At the Risk of Dating Myself

I'm old enough to remember when something like this just wouldn't happen. From The Guardian:

In the spring of 2016, Elijah Fischer called his insurance company to ask if his plan would cover a double mastectomy. A 27-year old Floridian and trans man, Elijah had mostly completed his gender transition, except he still had feminine breasts.
‘Move fast and break things’: Trump’s Obamacare failure and the backlash ahead
Read more

“I look down, and it’s not me,” Elijah recalled feeling. He felt foreign to himself. With summer approaching, he dreaded another season of avoiding the beach and kayaking with his wife, Brianna.

So it was a relief when his insurer, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, approved the surgery right away.

“Oh wow,” the couple said to each other, Brianna recalled. “That was easy. That was fantastic.”

In reality, it was just the start of a battle with Anthem that would stretch for more than nine months. The company backtracked, and revealed that Elijah’s policy specifically excluded “services and supplies related to sex transformation”. There were fraught phone calls and fine print before finally, Elijah contacted the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about filing a discrimination claim.

It's not that the story is marked by a lack of sensationalism, or anything like that. It's that it was published at all. When I was a young man (I still am, actually, according to everything but the calendar), you would have had to pick up your local version of The Advocate or Windy City Times to read a story like that. We -- and by "we" I mean the whole LGBT complex -- weren't "mainstream." I've noticed more and more coverage of "gay news" in mainstream outlets -- Crooks and Liars, TPM, even Hullabaloo, and Hullabaloo's focus is politics, period.

We've come a long way, baby.

Today's Must-Read: The Speech: Digging Deeper

Digby again, who starts off with the press reaction to "The Speech":

In the hours leading up to President Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night the news networks were giddy with excitement. They had been told by a “senior White House official” in a private luncheon with news anchors that the president was now in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. This seemed to signal a major reset in the administration’s agenda and the media outlets couldn’t have been more thrilled.

Nobody knew whether that proposal would be part of the big speech but there was a lot of feverish speculation that Trump was planning to surprise the country with a long-awaited “pivot.” As we all know now, he didn’t mention any such possibility in the speech. It looks like the whole thing was just a ruse to fool the media into giving Trump big props in the run-up to the event.

CNN’s Sara Murray reported yesterday that the administration basically told the news anchors what they wanted to hear, what Trump officials believed “would give them positive press coverage for the next few hours.” She added that a “senior administration official” had admitted it was “a misdirection play.” Said John King:

It does make you wonder; so we’re not supposed to believe what the senior-most official at the lunch says — who then they allowed it to be the president’s name says — we’re not supposed to believe what they say? Maybe we shouldn’t believe what they say.

I don't have a lot of confidence left in the press, especially the Washington press corps: they've been so desperate for "access" since Reagan that they'll swallow anything the administration feeds them and spew it back out as "news." I think they should do what one commentator suggested when Sean Spicer barred major outlets from his "gaggle": Get off their butts and go out and do some digging for their stories. You know -- like real journalists.

Digby goes on to examine an element that has been part of Trump's campaign from the very beginning and, in spite of what you may have heard, is still central to his "vision". This image pretty much says it:

Read her piece. It's chilling.

Today's Must-Read: Trump's "Presidential" Speech

Everyone (well, most everyone) is falling all over themselves giving The Hairpiece credit for his speech to the Houses of Congress, even given the travesty of his treatment of Carryn Owens, widow of Navy SEAL William Owens who was killed in that pointless raid in Yemen. Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice actually looks at the substance:

Earlier this week, before he bowled over shallow pundits by delivering a speech that would have been panned if delivered by literally any other president, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends to hold forth on a favorite topic:

Well, look, you know, it just seems the other side, whenever they are losing badly, they always pull out the race card. And I’ve watched it for years. I’ve watched it against Ronald Reagan. I’ve watched it against so many other people. And they always like pulling out the race card.

This was pure projection. Trump plays the race card constantly, and has all of his public life. He has fomented racial hatred and profited from racist business practices for decades. In the 1980s, Trump famously took out a full-page ad in the NYT to call for the execution of the innocent nonwhite teenagers in the “Central Park jogger” case — and doubled down on that during the campaign, even though the teenagers in question were exonerated years ago.

She elaborates, and she's right -- racism in its various forms has been the basis of Trump's whole campaign and his presidency to date.

Read the whole thing.

(And please note: Betty Cracker is one of my favorite bloggers anywhere, no matter what she's writing on. She reminds me of me.)

Coda: Also, this.

From "Not Reported" to "Underreported" to ?

I daresay you've read about The Hairpiece's latest wild fantasy -- that are just oodles of terror attacks around the world that the press hasn't reported on because reasons. Washington Post, via Joe.My.God.:

Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

Of course, that got -- mmm, moderated:

In a press availability on Air Force One, Spicer tried to soften Trump’s comment. Terror attacks had been “under reported,” not “unreported.” He continued, according to the pool report:

“He felt members of the media don’t always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered. Protests will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn’t necessarily get the same coverage. He’s doing what he can to protect this nation and protect our people. And that’s why I think sometimes the polls don’t reflect what you see on the media. You see a wide degree of support for the president’s policies to protect this country, to create jobs, to grow the economy. And yet a lot of those stories and success that he’s had – in a mere two and a half weeks in office – aren’t exactly covered to the degree to which they should be.”

And who gets to decide the degree to which they should be covered? Don't tell me -- let me guess!

As it happens, the White House has a list. A long list -- a yuuge list of terrorist attacks that were "not reported/underreported" by the media for probably nefarious reasons. And, funny thing about that list:

There’s a concept in interactions with the press called “working the refs.” The idea is that it’s worth paying attention to trying to shape the coverage you receive before you receive it by offering criticisms that hopefully push the media where you want. Trump’s point about the media not reporting on terror attacks wasn’t necessarily that he thought the media was burying stories — though it very well may have been. Spicer, at least, was smart enough to understand that this was an opportunity to get the media to run with a lengthy list of terror attacks that, he hoped, would reinforce Trump’s broader message that terror attacks were a constant threat that demanded a strong response. Spicer, in other words, hoped to work the refs. . . .

The list was rushed — “attacker” is misspelled repeatedly and there is incorrect information, such as the statement that multiple people were involved in the recent attack at Ohio State University. This wasn’t something that the White House was sitting on, waiting to raise as a legitimate critique of how the media approached an issue central to Trump’s presidency. It was, instead, an attempt to make lemonade.

(I have to admit to a certain amount of sympathy for Spicer: his job is to make an out of control idiot look good. That's gotta be stressful.)

As for the list itself:

The White House released on Monday a list of 78 terrorist attacks that the Trump administration claim were not sufficiently covered by the nation's press. The list, however, included some mass killings that were covered well enough to make their locales into symbols of anger and grief: Orlando and San Bernardino, Nice and Paris in France, and Brussels in Belgium.

Orlando didn't receive enough coverage? Excuse me?

And the list does not include the mass shooting at at African American church by Dylan Roof, or the Ottawa mosque shooting by Alexandre Bissonnette (a big fan of Donald Trump, as it happens).

Lemonade, indeed.

Today in Disgusting People: Making a President-for-Life (Update)

Kellyanne Conway has a permanent place in the "disgusting people" category, partly because she's such an unregenerate liar, and partly because she's working overtime to browbeat the press. Now she wants every reporter and commentator who criticizes Trump fired.

Conway went on to complain that last week, she went on three Sunday news shows to discuss Trump's policy proposals, but the only thing that got reported was her now-infamous statement about "alternative facts," and "not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for not covering the facts that matter."

"Who’s cleaning house?" Conway said. "Which one is going to be the first one to get rid of these people that said things that just aren’t true?

By that criterion, she should be the first to go. And "the facts that matter" -- that would be your "alternative facts," right?

It's an interesting strategy -- pretend that you actually have the standing to demand that the press cater to your bullshit, demand firings of journalists who show signs of independence, discredit the press at every opportunity.

Hey, it worked for Franco, Peron, Mussolini, Hitler, and every tin-pot strong man on the African continent.

Her boss, of course, is weighing in on this as well, specifically targeting the New York Times:

Somebody with aptitude and conviction should buy the FAKE NEWS and failing @nytimes and either run it correctly or let it fold with dignity!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2017

Click through to see the responses on Twitter. They're not positive. (And do note that since The Hairpiece started his anti-NYT campaign, subscriptions are up.)

This says what needs to be said:

Attacks on legitimate media that holds power to account is a routine precursor to the rise of authoritarianism. https://t.co/vGDqlNfjuy

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) January 29, 2017

The sad part is that the American press has set itself up for this. "As ye sow. . . ."

Update: On to Phase Two: siccing the Secret Service on the journalists.

So, Is This a Surprise? (Update)

You want the White House's real attitude toward a free and independent press? New York Times, via Joe.My.God.:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Let me start off by noting that the press is supposed to be the opposition. If anyone doesn't understand this country, it's Trump and his advisors. Or, let me say it this way: it doesn't matter whether they understand it or not, because they have no respect and no sympathy for our basic principles and values.

And frankly, if the press were to really examine the way Trump became president, they'd have to admit their own complicity. Here's just one example:

I don't think we get to pretend anymore that there is a functioning media in this country. The nation's 'paper of record' is showing that they are fearful (not timid, damn it, but out-and-out cowardly) of publishing stories about our newly sworn-in president who entered office with a plethora of conflicts of interest and scandals, none of which the Times took all that seriously in their reporting prior to the election. But they will rationalize their inadequate reporting away as 'doing their job correctly' while democracy is being stolen from us by Putin.

Digby has a more detailed discussion.

This is interesting. It posits that in order to achieve Trump's foreign policy aims, the media and the intelligence community both have to be thoroughly discredited.  I'm guess that would be Bannon.

Her "this" is a very interesting article from The Atlantic on why Trump is taking on the press and the intelligence community. Worth a read.

Update: It's already started: journalists arrested for "felony rioting." And note the mainstream press' reaction:

While foreign and new media outlets such as The Guardian, Buzzfeed, City Lab, Daily Beast, and Huffington Post have reported specifically on the arrests of journalists (as has traditional outlet US News) most major media outlets in the United States have remained surprisingly silent. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and MSNBC have not reported on the arrests at all. Washington Post’s report on the episode was framed in a decidedly pro-police terms–complete with an apocalyptic burning limo (that, it should be noted, was set on fire after the arrests in question) and the ominous, conspiratorial headline: “Protesters who destroyed property on Inauguration Day were part of well-organized group”

It was a nice country while it lasted.

The "Press Conference", Part II

Digby highlights some deadly accurate comments from Deadspin:

Ethical guidelines exist for a reason. Norms exist for a reason.

The reason is not “Jerks who think they’re smarter than us trying to control our lives from on high.” The reason is that human history is long, and all of the mistakes that could possibly be made have been made, and at a certain point people figured out that following some common sense rules could prevent us from making the same dire mistakes over and over again. Mistakes that come from human nature. Mistakes like: allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to make money for themselves, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to squelch legitimate dissent, or allowing powerful people to use their powerful positions to flout the very ethical guidelines and norms that prior people in powerful positions established to keep people in powerful positions in check.

Read the whole thing. And then go on to this open letter from a Russian reporter, Alexey Kovalev, to his American colleagues:

“Congratulations, US media!” Kovalev wrote at Medium.com. “You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear.”

“We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now  — with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader  — so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang my bells. Not just mine, in fact  — read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times,” he went on.

Putin’s press conferences, Kovalev said, are annual media spectacles at which “Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s circus-like press conference on Wednesday, he said, showed that the former reality TV star is “apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook.”

I'd be more sanguine about this if it weren't for the for the fact that the American media have spent a few decades rolling over for those in power -- if they're on the right.

Maybe our "journalists" will finally wake up?

Today's Must-Read: The "Press Conference"

Also known as "The Daily Hissy Fit" with an invited audience. Charles P. Pierce's take (via Bark Bark Woof Woof):

What was beaming in from New York was nothing less than a genuine aspiring American dictator having what amounted to a very public tantrum. By the way, you knew it was a bag job when you saw that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago had brought in his own personal claque of hecklers and cheerleaders. (It should be noted for the record that the "fake news" chant is merely lugenpresse for the digital age.) And the first thing he did on Wednesday morning was intimate that it's the American intelligence community that is a bunch of fascists.

It gets better -- or, in this case, worse, I guess. Needless to say, read the whole thing.

And about the "revelations" that prompted the latest series of tantrums, it turns out they're old news. From Digby:

For the record, the intelligence agencies didn't leak this. It's been in the hands of the media for months, apparently. They just decided to eport on it because they found out that the intel bosses had briefed the president and Trump himself on it last Friday.

Now, knowing that, think about the media's treatment of Trump during the campaign knowing that they were aware of these rumors and probably snickering like schoolgirls over it.

And then recall their handwringing over Hillary Clinton failing to properly tell them the full details of her doctor's visits.

And here's an update, from Tom Sullivan.