Main Stream media not holing the evil Trumpzi administration to the same standards as with President Joe Biden

 

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’ (IOW already reflects all known information and expected) published in The Guardian by Margaret Sullivan.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential.

Trump is a sleety sleepy criminal 🥱  

Trump's insane screeds on his ❗ social media posts are unhinged. He falls asleep in meetings. He proudly proclaims he’s not thinking “even a little bit” about Americans’ personal finances in talks with Iran. And he lies constantly about the supposed success of the war with Iran he started for no good reason.  (To quote Joseph Heller in Catch 22: "From now on I will think only about myself". 🤢) 

That’s just the start, of course, when it comes to Donald Trump’s disastrous second presidency. There’s the ruination of the Kennedy Center, the building of a ballroom (or bunker?) to replace the White House East Wing, and the wrecking ball that the Trump-aligned supreme court has taken to the voting rights of Black Americans. There’s the endless self-dealing and the abuse of the justice department’s intended purpose.

And yet, the mainstream media doesn’t make much of any of that, not in any sustained way.

The shocking excesses and corruption of Trump 2.0 are “priced in”.

These outrages, for the most part, are largely treated as, well, Trump being Trump.

It’s as if much of big media has decided that it’s too much trouble to focus, in any sustained way, on developments that would have resulted in weeks of headlines, if not impeachment and conviction, in the pre-Trump era. And certainly in the President Biden era.

“I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79-year-old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all,” one observer, Jamesetta Williams, put it succinctly on X/ (formerly Twitter).

Next month, Trump turns 80. He functions with no apparent restraints, and it seems doubtful that the situation will improve any time soon.

Some extreme outrages do rise to the surface, provoking a raised eyebrow or two.

The New York Times gave its lead news position in print the other day to his “anti-weaponization fund” of 💲1.8bn. It’s intended to use taxpayer money to compensate his allies – maybe including the January 6, convicted criminal rioters who attacked police officers – for being prosecuted by an earlier iteration of the US justice department.

Reporters quoted Donald K Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog organization, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history”. And a sub-headline made a carefully distanced reference to “critics” who call this a slush fund.

Ah, the critics. There they are again.

The mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story, depicting it as politics as usual – no cause for alarm or sustained coverage. The NBC evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on, focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, the California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan. And Fox News, home to the fervid Maga base, offered cursory coverage both on the air and online, giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers who voiced their objections, but mostly handing the network’s microphone to Trump allies such as JD Vance and the loyalist acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

Granted, there have been a few recent pieces about Trump’s apparent physical and mental decline, including one by Jonathan Lemire in the Atlantic. He acknowledged that Trump hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for his age-related decline as Biden did, and pointed out “questions about his health and increasingly erratic behavior”.

But it didn’t get all that much attention. Nothing does.

One of the problems, of course, is that there’s just so much.

Journalists get geared up to cover one outrage – $1bn for ballroom security! – when another one comes along: $1.8bn for the slush fund!

And ever onward.

Now he’s dissing Americans’ worries about their family budgets, but that fades as he schmoozes the next authoritarian dictator, or threatens “a friendly takeover of Cuba”.

“Flood the zone with shit,” was the way former Trump aide Steve Bannon once described the media strategy. It’s turned out to be a highly effective technique.

One almost can’t blame overwhelmed citizens for wanting to hide their heads in the sand, despite the extraordinary dangers of doing so.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential. Also, not really unhappy since Trump provides constant outrage, which makes for news, and then he moves on

They do, too.

Often, it falls to independent voices – not associated with corporate media – to say the obvious, loud and clear.

Terry Moran, formerly of ABC News and now on Substack, called the slush fund “plunder” in a recent post, and urged mainstream media to stop using “weasel words”, like unusual or controversial, to report on it. Moran called an associated development, the shielding of the Trump family’s entire tax history from scrutiny, for all time, as “breathtakingly corrupt”.

You won’t hear THAT on the evening news or in the rest of mainstream media.
By the time you read this, they’ll already have moved on. 💢

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture.

The "No Conway Zone": an echo opinion

Don't give Kellyanne Conway the opportunity to lie: call for a "No Conway Zone"

This opinion by Margaret Sullivan* was published in The Oregonian

Lies are coming at the American public in torrents -- raining down on them everywhere they turn.  (MaineWriter: Beginning in the White House!)

A report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and obtained by The Washington Post, made that breathtakingly clear over the weekend. The intentional spreading of disinformation on every platform -- from Facebook all the way to PayPal -- should frighten everyone who cares about democracy.

One place that truth can prevail is in the reality-based news media, where editorial judgment comes into play.

That means it's more important than ever not to give falsehoods a megaphone there.

Which brings us to Chris Cuomo's 39-minute interview on Thursday with Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump's top dissembler.:

"CNN's Chris Cuomo and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway get in a heated debate over anti-Trump bias from the network. Cuomo said that his viewers actually get "frustrated" with him because they think he has a problem of being "too balanced."

"They expect you to be anti-Trump, your viewers," Conway said to Cuomo.

"No, they’re actually get frustrated with me because they think we're too balanced on this show," Cuomo responded. "They don't want me to have you on. They don’t want me to have anyone from the administration. Trust me."

It should have been no surprise that Conway -- who coined the immortal phrase “alternative facts” in early 2017 -- blithely spun her way through the interview.

In her usual never-been-wrong tone, she waved away the undeniable facts about the pre-election hush-money payments made to two women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, who say they had been sexually involved with Trump.

"Christopher, in April of 2018, Donald J. Trump, the president, and everybody else were told about the payments," she said.

This, of course, is straight-up false -- and Conway knows it, which makes it a lie. After all, in an audio recording from August 2016 (made public this summer), Trump and his then-fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen are discussing one of the payments.

A New York Times fact-check branded Conway's statement false: Her assertion "that the president did not know about these payments until this year is not credible, given the audio recording, news reports and statements from Mr. Trump's current lawyer."

Even George Conway, Conway’s husband (and frequent political opposite), seemed to fact-check his wife. He tweeted: “Given that Trump has repeatedly lied about the Daniels and McDougal payments -- and given that he lies about virtually everything else, to the point that his own former personal lawyer described him as a “f****ing liar” -- why should we take his word over that of federal prosecutors?”

Cuomo's CNN colleagues smacked him around, with Don Lemon leading the way, and with Brian Stelter devoting time to the Cuomo/Conway shoutfest on his "Reliable Sources" show Sunday.

Perhaps most absurd among Conway's declarations was her objection to Cuomo's referring to Trump as a liar, although she wouldn't repeat the term. "You're saying he's not telling the truth. That's a slur. That's a slur."

It may not be pretty to hear, but it's undeniable: Trump very, very often doesn't tell the truth. (The falsehood count is more than 6,000, says The Post's Fact Checker.)

No, it's not a slur to state the facts. But it is a shame to give liars a megaphone. So it's time (actually, well past time) for the mainstream media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone. And that goes far beyond banning her, or any particular adviser, from cable interview shows.

The news media continue - even now when they should know better - to be addicted to "both sides" journalism. In the name of fairness, objectivity and respect for the office of the presidency, they still seem to take Trump - along with his array of deceptive surrogates - at his word, while knowing full well that his word isn't good.

When major news organizations publish tweets and news alerts that repeat falsehoods merely because the president uttered them, it's the same kind of journalistic malpractice as offering a prime interview spot to Kellyanne Conway.

This is how NBC News spread the news of Trump's reaction to recent legal developments that were extraordinarily negative - maybe devastating - to him:

(Lie!) NEW: "Totally clears the President. Thank you!" President Trump asserts in a tweet after new Cohen and Manafort case filings.

(Lie!) Reuters and the Associated Press did much the same: "BREAKING," said the AP's tweet: "White House says Cohen, Manafort filings offer nothing new or damaging about Trump." (The AP later deleted its tweet, and explained that it lacked context.)

Citizens, meanwhile, seem to be catching on. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 62 percent of Americans think Trump has been untruthful about the investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Given all of this, the responsibility to bear down on reality is greater than ever.

When news organizations hand a megaphone to lies -- or liars -- they do actual harm. What the president himself says must be reported, of course, but only within the context of what we know.

To state it without immediate, adjacent reference to factual reality is to enter the Kellyanne Zone.

In an era rife with disinformation - and American democracy teetering on a precipice -- that’s the wrong place to be. 

*Margaret Sullivan is a columnist for The Washington Post