PRESS SUPPRESS 3
719
see DN
see media bias BS and soc media bias BS
see coastal elite
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see BLM 2 200 incidents, pepper balls, cs gas?
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many journo killed Gaza
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omg
an 10 25
Republican Party officials are now using their “connections” to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.
That’s what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation.
The piece published Thursday examines how Newby, a born-again Christian who was elected to the bench in 2004, believes he was called by God to exact what he calls “biblical justice.”
Over the past two decades, Clark wrote that Newby has “turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power” and “driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.”
Newby’s most significant contribution has been the landmark decision that legalized partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, a state that had long had some of the strongest laws in the country against partisan redistricting.
The change led the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to draw up wildly slanted maps that netted the GOP an additional six seats in the US House of Representatives in 2024, handing the party a national trifecta at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, which has allowed him to wield extraordinary power almost totally free of oversight from Congress.
It’s just one of the ways, Clark said, that “Newby has provided a blueprint for conservatives to seize most of the nation’s state supreme courts, which have increasingly become the final word on abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights.”
The report drew from more than 70 interviews with those who know Newby professionally and personally. But he was unable to get in contact with Newby himself.
“I reached out to Newby multiple times during the course of my reporting and was even escorted out of a judicial conference while trying to interview him,” Clark wrote on social media. “The court’s communications director and media team also didn’t respond to detailed questions.”
When Clark attempted to contact Newby’s daughter for comment, he instead received an ominous message from that aforementioned communications director, Matt Mercer.
Mercer ranted that ProPublicawas waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”
He continued: “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration, and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would stronglysuggest dropping this story.”
As Clark pointed out, “He bolded and underlined ‘strongly,’ in case we missed his point.”
After the story, which made note of Mercer’s threat, was published, Mercer then doubled down on social media, urging Trump to “feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper,” referencing the president’s near-total stripping of funds from the foreign aid agency.
Trump has issued an executive order slashing federal funds for media organizations supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, like NPR and PBS, in response to critical coverage of his administration. But it’s not entirely clear how he would actually go about doing such a thing to ProPublica,which does not receive government dollars but instead subsists on private grants and donations.
At any rate, Mercer’s messages were widely perceived as a not-so-veiled attempt to coerce ProPublica into ceasing its inquiries.
Travis Fain, a freelance reporter who previously worked for Raleigh’s NBC News affiliate, WRAL, expressed disbelief at Mercer’s belligerence on social media: “Well, there you go,” he said. “The North Carolina Republican Party officially threatens journalists now.”
Wiley Nickel, the former Democratic US House representative for North Carolina’s 13th District, lamented that it was “not normal” for a party official to “threaten ProPublica with retaliation from Trump” for writing a profile about another GOP official.
Despite the threats, Clark says “ProPublica persisted” with the story that Mercer “warned [it] not to tell.”
“I’m always amazed when grown-ups with jobs say things like this to journalists,” said Jessica Huseman, a former ProPublica reporter. “Like, do you think that’s gonna do anything but make us more eager to publish the story?”
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5/15/24 kpfa 7 am BET ucla gaza students coord attack threat 2 days before GUK ; leave our kids alone anti drag; kkk pol pro zion but anti-semite
4 Bruin student joutno targeted /hurt
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an 5 24
over Memorial Day Weekend, former President Donald Trump used his Truth Social platform to post video of one of his supporters angrily shouting at MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.
In the video, Scarborough is seen talking on a smartphone while a man yells at him, "He'll get rid of all you f*****g liberals. You liberals are gone when he f*****g wins. You f*****g blowjob liberals are done."
Scarborough isn't a liberal. The MSNBC host is a Never Trump conservative and a former GOP congressman, but he is — along with attorney George Conway, The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and The Bulwark's Bill Kristol — one of Trump's most scathing critics on the right.
In the video, Scarborough is smiling while talking on his smartphone and doesn't appear to be disturbed or shaken by the man.
But journalist Greg Sargent, in an article published by The New Republic on May 28, warns that Trump's willingness to post the video underscores his pattern of threatening the media.
"Some will give Trump the benefit of the doubt," Sargent explains. "Surely, Trump thought the video was funny. Surely, he only intended his MSNBC nemesis as the target. Surely, calling a person or group 'done' is just a figure of speech. And Scarborough doesn't appear to feel threatened by the guy in the video. He was just a crank, right?"
Sargent continues, "But the news here isn't this one man's anger at Scarborough, it's that Trump elevated it. And moments like these require context: This one should be placed alongside Trump's other recent threats, such as his vow that news organizations will be 'thoroughly scrutinized' if he wins, his promise to persecute his 'vermin'-like political foes, and his threat to prosecute a range of enemies without cause. Looked at this way, is it really a leap to suggest that Trump is broadcasting the idea that liberals should feel threatened en masse by a second Trump term?"
READ MORE:**'Champion of white supremacy': Columnist says Trump's 'noxious bigotry' reveals 'true mindset'**
Trump's threat to use the federal government to formally "investigate" the media if he defeats President Joe Biden in November, Sargent warns, have "taken a truly dangerous turn."
"Enough of the MAGA sanitization already," Sargent writes. "If Trump voters are sticking with him through all these things, we should be asking whether these factors are key drivers of some of this support — not credulously treating them as self-evidently incidental to it."
READ MORE:['Womp womp': CIA lawyer explains why popular claim about Jack Smith's Trump FL case is 'not true'
*Greg Sargent's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.
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ymail pfaw 5 24
Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series that serves to remind us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.
This week’s Trumptastrophe focuses on former President Trump’s rocky relationship with social media. Indeed, although social media was one of the very tools responsible for his rise to prominence within the Republican Party, Trump and right-wing conservatives often attack social media companies when their content is removed or flagged for violating each platform’s policies regarding what they consider to be acceptable content. This stormy relationship has led to conservatives calling for the weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission if Trump were to be reelected so they can penalize companies unwilling to allow their lies and misinformation to be broadcast to their users:
On May 27, 2020, Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down.” Trump was angry about Twitter putting fact-checking notes on two “potentially misleading” tweets in which he made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud.
Just one day after his threat, Trump signed an executive order that Human Rights Watch called “a profound attack on online freedom of expression globally” by targeting “companies that displease government.” The order included typically Trumpian whining about his tweets having been flagged as inaccurate. At a press event announcing the order, he complained even more, calling fact-checks a form of “political activism.”
The day after Trump issued his executive order, he used his Twitter account to warn that he would deploy the military against people protesting George Floyd’s killing by a police officer, and threatening, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter labeled it with a notice saying it violated the platform’s rules against glorifying violence.
Four years later, Trump and his advisers are vowing that if he gets back into power, he will “come after” big tech companies and media outlets whose moderation policies and political coverage he doesn’t like.
Trump complained in 2020 that social media companies were silencing conservative voices, a frequent complaint from right-wing figures. There was never much substance to the claim, and it is particularly ridiculous now that X/Twitter under the leadership of Trump fan Elon Musk has proudly re-platformed the disinformation-spewing former president, along with far-right figures who promote white nationalism, antisemitism, and other forms of extremism.
Trump’s 2024 campaign team is in fact deploying a “troll army” to attack his enemies on social media. Right Wing Watch noted earlier this year that Trump’s trolls are led by an “overtly racist, unapologetically misogynistic, and gleefully amoral” online activist called Brenden Dilley.
Trump’s 2020 executive order charged the Commerce Secretary with asking the Federal Communications Commission to define standards for evaluating whether social media companies were applying “good faith” in moderating content, and threatened companies with legal action. It sought to ban federal agencies from advertising on platforms deemed to be biased against conservatives. In response, one FCC commissioner said Trump wanted to turn the commission into “the president’s speech police.”
The White House told reporters that some of the ideas in Trump’s order grew out of a “social media summit” Trump held the previous summer with a clown car of far-right online personalities. At that event, Trump gave what The New York Times called “his own unique interpretation of the First Amendment,” saying it’s “not free speech” if “you see something good and then you purposedly write bad.” Afterward, he told supporters that tech companies were, like “the FAKE NEWS media,” an “enemy of the people.”
You don’t have to be part of the MAGA movement to have concerns about the power wielded by huge tech firms and the influence of their platforms and algorithms. Protecting free speech and preventing harm and harassment are a complicated balancing act. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that tech companies could not be sued by family members of a victim of an ISIS terror attack for having failed to keep ISIS content off their platforms. There have been bipartisan calls in Congress to revisit regulation of tech platforms.
In response to current congressional efforts to do away with provisions contained in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protect tech companies from liability for what others publish on their platforms and protect them against legal action for moderating content, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote this month that “Section 230 is about free expression” and warned that repealing the section without a clear alternative in place would “threaten user’s free expression rights and exacerbate the very problems some in Congress seek to solve.” New America has suggested alternatives for addressing online harms.
Trump and his advisers don’t seem that interested in policy nuance. Trump adviser and far-right ideological warrior Steve Bannon has called the people who run tech companies “evil” and “sociopaths.” Attacking “big tech” and the media are reliable ways to get applause at MAGA gatherings.
Trump’s allies at Project 2025 vow that under a likeminded president, they will seize control of any sources of independence in the executive branch that might slow the imposition of the president’s will. Project 2025’s policy agenda says its top priority for the FCC will be “reining in Big Tech,” which they accuse of trying to “drive diverse political viewpoints from the town square.” And, in a show of Trumpian contempt for checks and balances, Project 2025 calls on the FCC to issue an order interpreting Section 230 differently than courts have.
As Bruce Maiman noted in a HuffPost column, “Control of all federal branches would mean control of the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television, radio and internet companies. You can imagine an effort to neutralize the power of a media that routinely has exposed Trump’s well-documented lies and improprieties.” Indeed, it doesn’t take much imagination when you have Trump advisers threatening to “come after” the media, and Trump himself vowing to “come down hard” on MSNBC and “make them pay for their illegal political activity.”
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yikes trump = offense = fascism
AN 12 23 thom 3
if Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.
Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans, include:
Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.
Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.
Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.
His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.
In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”
In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.
All of this is just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in a second term.
In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:
“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”
Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”
In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:
“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”
Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.
In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, if they can take both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”
Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.
Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.
First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.
“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information,” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.
He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:
“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”
In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.
They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.
Orbán’s rightwing buddies could buy the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.
Trump wants to do the same here in the US.
When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”
Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.
Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.
Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and III Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.
In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies. As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day this year:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda.
Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.
The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).
Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.
After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.
It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.
It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.
Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.
He tried to do this in the last months of his presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.
The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his presidency.
The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of people who’d recently been freed from slavery.
After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.
Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined in using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.
He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.
He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 7 years.
This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.
In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”
While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.
Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts and everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”
The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner. A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.
For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation attacking another nation simply to seize their land, resources, and people.
It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.
Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.
The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.
Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.
If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.
Triple check your voter registration, especially if you live in a Red state where the voter purges have already begun, and make sure everybody you know is registered to vote.
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an 2 23
NewsNation correspondent Evan Lambert was released from custody late Wednesday night hours after he was arrested outside of a press conference held at East Palestine Elementary School by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R), who was discussing evacuation orders stemming from last week's freight train derailment.
Videos of the incident were posted on Twitter.
"Lambert was giving a live report during NewsNation’s *Rush Hour* when he was told by law enforcement personnel at the news conference to be quiet," NewsNation explained. "Lambert finished the live report but was then asked to leave by authorities, who tried to forcibly remove him from the event. The charges Lambert is facing are disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing."
READ MORE: 'Freedom for Assange and journalism are at stake': Belmarsh Tribunal comes to DC
Preston Swigart, a photographer who was accompanying Lambert, told NewsNation that DeWine's briefing started more than two hours late and that officers removed Lambert after he refused to cease broadcasting.
"From their standpoint, he didn’t obey orders when he was told to stop talking," Swigert recalled, per Morrisville, North Carolina outlet ABC11. "Gymnasiums are echoey and loud and sound kind of carries, so I’m guessing that they just didn’t like the fact that there was sound competing with the governor speaking, even though it was all the way at the other end of the room."
NewsNation affiliate reporter Megan Lee recounted what she witnessed.
"It seems like there was some type of physical altercation toward Evan," she said. "And then, I remember hearing Evan say like, 'this is assault,' or something. Honestly, I was in so much shock that they were trying to not let him do his job — it was shocking to me."
NewsNation Washington Bureau Chief Mike Viqueira corroborated Lee's account.
"I was watching the press conference stream … and the only thing I heard that was disruptive was when this altercation with the police — which apparently they have instigated — was unfolding," Viqueria said. "I did not hear anything of Evan’s voice when he was quietly speaking on live television. … As his boss, as his colleague, as a fellow journalist, it’s really infuriating."
Viqueira also published a statement once Lambert was released.
"We are relieved that Evan Lambert is safe and headed home for a much-needed respite. We never want to lose sight of the fact that Evan was in Ohio to provide up-to-the-minute reporting about a tragic train accident that has impacted thousands of lives," " said Viqueira. "Evan handled this unfortunate situation with true professionalism, and we appreciate his commitment as a journalist whose goal is to report stories that are fair and unbiased. On a positive front, I just spoke with Evan a short time ago and he was calm, cool, collected, and already talking about his next assignment."
DeWine maintained that he did not witness anything and expressed dismay over what occurred.
"It has always been my practice that if I’m doing a press conference, someone wants to report out there and they want to be talking back to the people back on channel, whatever, they have every right to do that," the governor said. "If someone was stopped from doing that, or told they could not do that, that was wrong. It was nothing that I authorized."
Lambert, meanwhile, defended the importance of press freedom.
"I'm doing fine right now. It's been an extremely long day," he said. "No journalist expects to be arrested when you're doing your job, and I think that's really important that that doesn't happen in our country."
Watch below or at this link.
"stop, sir': New video shows Ohio national guard commander 'shove' reporter — calling self-defense claim into question
An East Palestine, Ohio National Guard general aggressively shoved a NewsNation reporter before officers arrested him during live coverage of a press conference in response to the...
boing 1 23
No suggestion has been made that Amelia Ferrell Knisely, formerly with West Virginia Public Broadcasting, published anything false or libelous. And yet she was fired last month after reporting on the alleged abuse of people with disabilitiesat West Virginia's foster care and psychiatric facilities. The AP isn't shy about making clear what happened:
In a statement, Knisely said her news director told her the order came from WVPB Executive Director Butch Antolini, former communications director for Republican Gov. Jim Justice. Antolini has served as executive director since 2021, when his predecessor was ousted after Justice overhauled the agency's governing board. Justice has tried unsuccessfully to eliminate state funding for WVPB in the past and was accused of appointing partisan operatives to the board. WVPB receives around $4 million a year in state funding.
https://boingboing.net/2022/12/23/tik-tok-kept-financial-times-reporter-under-surveillance.html
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intercept coming for you
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/07/italy-giorgia-meloni-journalists/
https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-elon-musk-suspending-journalists-you-will-get-no-sympathy-me
https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-benny-johnson-people-suspended-twitter-claim-be-reporters-they-are-not
https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/kari-lake-threatens-to-reform-the-media-if-she-is-elected-governor-of-arizona.html
https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/trump-repeats-prison-rape-threat-against-journalists-has-plans-to-brutally-imprison-significant-numbers-of-reporters-says-rolling-stone.html
amy w 12 22 ff ceo
The Art of "Creative Confrontation" Is Alive and Well
Back in the 1970s, legendary Mobil VP Herb Schmertz pioneered the art of bullying journalists or, as he called it, "creative confrontation." If journalists weren't covering Mobil's point of view, or he thought they were being too critical of Mobil, he called them up and let them know. And he let their bosses, and their bosses' bosses know too. Sometimes he threatened to pull advertising. Once he cut The Wall Street Journal off from any information at all—press releases, comments from executives, even quarterly earnings reports.
It looked exactly like what the American Petroleum Institute and Shell tried to do to Hiroko Tabuchi, the New York Times's climate accountability reporter,once in response to a (now-deleted) tweet in which she referenced the shared history of the fossil fuel industry and white supremacy, and again in response to a story about the American Chemistry Council, which counts several oil majors as members, lobbying against regulations in Kenya that would limit the ability of American companies to sell single-use disposable plastic there. If it were only a group of smug flaks congratulating themselves for sending "nastygrams" and saying things like "Let's work on taking away their birthdays next," it would be easy to dismiss as clownish theatrics. But there's quite a bit of evidence that it works. Not just in the 70s and 80s, but today. After telling Tabuchi, in response to her tweet, "we're done," Shell publicist Curtis Smith forwarded his email to her colleague, Clifford Kraus, who he obviously considers a friend, with a note, to which Kraus replied "I obviously can't comment, but you wrote what you felt and that is good."
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Rep Ro Khana (D-Ca), who co-chairs the committee and helped spearhead the investigation, thinks it also worked to pull Tabuchi off of certain types of climate stories. After covering the Committee's hearings on climate disinformation for a year, he says, "Hiroko's not covering it anymore. She's been taken off. So, you know, unfortunately, Big Oil succeeds sometimes when they engage in this kind of bullying."
What this exchange also reveals is the extent to which the API coordinates not just messaging strategy, but also execution, for the industry. After instructing the communications directors for all the oil majors not to engage with Tabuchi on Twitter, Meg Bloomgren, API's senior vice president of communications, explains that she has sent emails to three of Tabuchi's bosses, as well as to the Associate Managing Editor of Standards, about her conduct.
"I encouraged them to do the right thing in addressing Ms. Tabuchi's completely baseless link and offensive accusation," Bloomgren writes. "I also noted that in the meantime, any calls from Ms. Tabuchi to our industry, its executives, or the 10 million workers it supports will likely go unreturned." It's a move straight out of the Schmertz playbook.
Social license to operate is still a big priority...
CIA, Carter Page
Operation Whistle Pig
In 2017, Jeffrey Rambo, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent working for the National Targeting Center, investigated Watkins, other journalists including Martha Mendoza, and NGOs while on an assignment to combat forced labor in the Congo. The operation was called "Whistle Pig" and in addition to its own database trawling[46] it got the CBP’s Counter Network Division to provide information about Watkins' mother and brother and links to their public profiles, as well as details of Watkin's domestic and international travel. Rambo met Watkins under the fictitious name Jack Bentley, but Watkins obtained his real name from a credit card receipt. Watkins perceived Rambo's approach as a threat.[47]
In 2021, Watkins said: “I’m deeply troubled at the lengths CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic sources and dig into my personal life.”[48] A few days later, CBP launched an investigation.[49]
wiki 7 22
The National Targeting Center (NTC) is a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It is based in Sterling, Virginia.[1] The NTC observes air traffic and trade activities,[2] gathers and vets intelligence, and is empowered to send e-mails requesting that U.S. citizens be detained and questioned.[3]
The National Targeting Center includes several divisions, including: NTC-Cargo, NTC-Passenger, Counter-Network, and National Targeting Center – Investigations (NTC-I). The latter was established in 2013.[4]
The NTC was initially established in 2001; its original name was Office of Border Security.[5]
In 2017, the NTC approached journalists "as part of a broader effort to get reporters to write about forced labor around the world as a national security issue." The journalists included Ali Watkins and Martha Mendoza.[6]
In 2021, CBP launched an investigation of the NTC's targeting of journalists, members of Congress, and others.[7]
russia/ putin
7 yrs for murder, 15 for saying war; alt radio bd TV, only pulitzer prize (last yr) novaya gazetta still running 3/22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/russia-facebook-putin/
New York Times recently obtained memos written by an attorney for the far-right group Project Veritas. But on Thursday, November 18, Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court, according to Reuters, blocked the Times from publishing some of the materials on Veritas that it obtained — and the publication is vowing to fight back.
In a statement on Wood's decision, Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet complained, "This ruling is unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent. When a court silences journalism, it fails its citizens and undermines their right to know. The Supreme Court made that clear in the Pentagon Papers case, a landmark ruling against prior restraint blocking the publication of newsworthy journalism. That principle clearly applies here. We are seeking an immediate review of this decision."
Back in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled against the Nixon Administration's efforts to prevent the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers — a U.S. Department of Defense history of the United States' activities in Vietnam from 1945-1967. But the Burger Court, in New York Times Co. v. United States, ruled 6-3 in favor of the Times. The three dissenters were Burger, Justice Harry Blackmun (a Nixon appointee) and Justice John M. Harlan (appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955).
Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has been vehemently critical of Wood's decision. In an official statement, Brown warned, "This is the first prior restraint entered against the New York Times since the Pentagon Papers, and it is an outrageous affront to the First Amendment."
Founded by far-right activist James O'Keefe in 2010, Project Veritas has drawn a great deal of criticism for editing videos in misleading ways and for its sleazy efforts to discredit Democrats and media organizations.
1st amend??
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-doj-secretly-seized-nyt-reporters-phone-records-report/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/trump-north-korea/
AP reporter fired for BDS in college after hit by wfb, thefed, fox
jorno pushed over stone railing? CNN sucks then trashed gear, we bum rushed it was beautiful, noose made from cable]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol/
many pix lnx twt vid?
'Murder the media': Photographers release terrifying video of the mob attack outside the Capitol gates
‘This is horrifying’: Videos show injured officers being evacuated after clashes with Trump supporters
Aysha Qamar and Daily Kos January 09, 2021
As violent Trump supporters terrorized the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, members of Congress were not the only people they were looking to intimidate. These terrorists also targeted journalists and press under Donald Trump's message of declaring the news and media an "enemy of the people."
"Murder the media," was written on a door of the Capitol while terrorists took over and attacked a group of reporters. In one incident John Minchillo, a photographer of the Associated Press, was attacked by a mob of Trump supporters outside the Capitol building. The violent incident was captured on video and shared by another photographer on Twitter. Local photographers and reporters were present at the break of the horrific violence that took place Wednesday. Footage shared on social media depicts the consequences of words bigots like Trump use to incite violence on communities and spaces.
"Please use this moment to reflect on the importance of journalism as a conduit between us. We tell stories. That's our mission. We have the privilege to shepherd moments over time and space. Please subscribe to your hard working local papers, support their vocation," Minchillo replied to the video of his attack being shared on Twitter.
(WARNING: This story contains violent video, photos, and language that may not be suitable for all readers.)
In a thread of photos posted on Twitter, BuzzFeed News reporter Paul McLeod captured photos of equipment left behind by the Associated press after crowds attacked reporters. According to McLeod, one man yelled "We are the news now, as a crowd damaged the equipment. McLeod also reported that a noose was fashioned from a camera cord and hung from a tree.
The Associated Press confirmed that its equipment had been stolen and destroyed and noted that none of its staff members had been injured.
In another video posted on Twitter, the terrorists again attempted to target individuals they thought were from CNN. While it is unclear whether the journalist was from CNN, the fact that these journalists were assaulted is not okay.
But the violent Trump allies were not the only ones after journalists on Wednesday.Reporters for The Washington Post were shortly detained by police while reporting on Tuesday night, following a pattern of law enforcement officials arresting reporters for doing their work throughout this year.
The reporters arrested were identified as Zoeann Murphy and Whitney Leaming. The two shared on Twitter that they were safe after quickly being released. "I have heard from so many journalist friends/colleagues who were at or around the Capitol today that they are 'fine'. This is a lie," Leaming tweeted. "They are not fine but they push aside their physical safety and mental health to focus on the story at hand [because] one of the most important rules of journalism is that the story is not about you. Just please remember that and maybe not threaten their life, I beg you."
According to The New York Times, media officials were threatened and surrounded for hours, those inside the Capitol building were forced to find shelter in secure locations to avoid assault. A reporter with The Los Angeles Times recalled her experience hiding in the House gallery during an armed standoff.
Sarah D. Wire of The Los Angeles Times wrote:
I heard a ruckus behind me and turned and saw a dozen reporters being ushered into the gallery from press offices. Then police shut and locked the doors. Police interrupted the proceedings to announce that tear gas had been deployed in the rotunda.
A staff member handed me an evacuation hood, a cumbersome plastic bag that filters out tear gas and chemicals. She told me to pass it and others down the row until everyone had one. Reporters were not the only ones in the gallery. Staff members were monitoring the proceedings. More than a dozen lawmakers had also taken seats in the public galleries overlooking the House floor. Now we were locked in the room together.
The rioters driven by Trump's hate clearly had no fear of police involvement. CBS News reporter Chip Reid, who has worn protective gear he last wore while covering conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, noted thata rioter told him law enforcement officials would not protect journalists. "There were no police around us—we were on our own," Reid said. "We high-tailed it out of there."
Of course, Trump later addressed the crowd in a video statement Wednesday but continued on his claims that the election has been "stolen." The video removed by many social media outlets including Facebook and Twitter is predicted to incite further violence. As Trump continues to target anyone who calls out his lies, his zombies continue to ready for battle.
"Rioters at the Capitol called for violence against members of the news media, destroyed news equipment and verbally harassed journalists as the 'enemy of the people's—actions that not only pose a dire threat to those working tirelessly to bring information to our communities, but also to the press freedom that is a bedrock value of our nation," Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.
"These actions are the direct result of years of this language stoking fear and hate for one of our most vital institutions. Our free press is crucial to democracy, and indeed, one of the pillars that will help keep it standing beyond this moment."
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aha this is part of trearing down noms/instititions
date?
no lnx
What if the right-wing media wins?
Conservative critics of the press want more than just a louder voice. They want The New York Times and The Washington Post to go away.
It was a sweltering July afternoon in the swamp, and a small group of well-dressed, conservative college students from across the country—the next generation of Megyn Kellys, George Wills, and Tucker Carlsons—was filing into an auditorium at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington, DC, headquarters. They had come to study at the feet of Breitbart News Washington editor Matt Boyle, a zealous prophet of the new right-wing media. Boyle’s sermon was not about how to break into the mainstream media and steer the national news agenda toward conservative aims—it was about the end days of journalism itself. And he was not about to skimp on the fire and brimstone.
“Journalistic integrity is dead,” he declared. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.” Standing behind a mahogany podium in a baggy dark suit, Boyle preached with the confidence of a true believer. In a stuttering staccato, he condemned the nation’s preeminent news outlets as “corrupted institutions,” “built on a lie,” and a criminal “syndicate that needs to be dismantled.” Boyle and his compatriots were laboring to usher in an imminent—and glorious—journalistic apocalypse. “We envision a day when CNN is no longer in business. We envision a day when The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible.”
Squint at the Trump era, and it’s easy to see a conservative media in crisis. Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed the fall of Bill O’Reilly, the ouster (and death) of Roger Ailes, prominent conservative outlets from Fox News to Breitbart to The Wall Street Journal op-ed page erupt in upheaval and infighting, Milo Yiannopoulos lose his book deal, and Tomi Lahren lose her job at The Blaze (only to land at Fox). Look closer, though, and you’ll see that much of that drama was simply a function of the outlets’ increased political power (and the heightened scrutiny that’s followed)—a bit of routine turbulence accompanying the unprecedented ascent of the right-wing media.
[ICYMI: You might’ve seen the Times‘s Weinstein story. But did you miss the bombshell published days after?
While Donald Trump’s rise may have, as Politico’s Eliana Johnson recently wrote, “scrambled the pecking order” on the right—elevating Breitbartesque populists over the conservative intellectuals at the Journal and The Weekly Standard—the conservative media complex as a whole is bigger, stronger, and more influential today than it’s ever been. And with so many of its most powerful members now pursuing a scorched-earth assault on America’s journalistic institutions, it’s worth considering what they hope it will look like once they’re done burning down our villages, desecrating our temples, and howling at our lamentations.
Boyle said his goal was simple: “The full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media.” Breitbart played up his speech on its homepage that day, but the remarks barely registered in broader media circles. The site and its staff have become known for this kind of bluster, and most journalists have taught themselves to tune it out. Maybe we ought to be paying closer attention.
THERE IS A LONG TRADITION in Republican politics of seeking to discredit journalism. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater’s press secretary distributed gold pins to reporters that read “Eastern Liberal Press.” Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, in 1969 railed against the “closed fraternity of privileged men” who ran the national news broadcasts. Nixon’s presidency was ultimately felled by reporters, but the critique lived on.
In the decades since, charges of liberal bias (some of them valid, others less so) have practically become an official plank of the GOP platform. The subject has inspired scores of books, countless talk-radio rants, and the creation of an entire cable news empire whose slogan—“Fair and Balanced”—was coined as a condemnation of its competitors.
Crucially, though, for most of that period conservatives maintained a civic-minded rationale for their project. They said they believed in the importance of nonpartisan journalism; in the necessity of a strong, independent press that provided the citizenry with an accurate account of the day’s events. Ultimately, they claimed, they were practicing tough love—offering their criticisms in the spirit of reform.Bernard Goldberg—a CBS News veteran whose tell-all book Bias entered the conservative canon as soon as it was published in 2001—captured this sentiment during a segment on The O’Reilly Factor.“We all know that you can’t live in a free country without a free press,” Goldberg told host O’Reilly. “But you know what else? You can’t live in a free country for long without a fair press. We need a strong mainstream media. That’s why you and I criticize it.”
Of course, some of this stated concern for the Fourth Estate and its lack of objectivity has been disingenuous. But there was value even in the playacting.By paying lip service to the ideal of “fair and balanced” news, conservatives helped sustain the post-WWII consensus that our modern democracy works best with a robust nonpartisan press functioning as the common denominator.
It was Donald Trump who dropped this pretense.Rather than conceal his true meaning with earnest pleas for a fairer press, he fired off tweets casting the media as “enemy of the American people.” Rather than feign reverence for the First Amendment, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to make suing journalists easier. At campaign rallies, he would keep reporters confined to metal press pens, and lead his crowds in a ritualistic booing. As someone who covered dozens of those events, I always thought I could tell when he was going through the motions with his press-bashing, and when he really meant it. During particularly bad news cycles, his voice would take on a growling quality, and he’d punctuate his standard stump-speech line with an extra exclamation: “Absolute scum. Remember that. Scum. Scum. Totally dishonest people.”
Trump’s histrionics were always strategic. He was able to successfully undermine months of critical coverage and dutiful fact-checking by casting reporters as villains. Each time his campaign was in trouble, the candidate escalated the culture war on the press. By the end of the election, we were not just biased or corrupt—we were dangerous, conspiratorial, part of a shadowy globalist cabal. Just days after Trump was sworn into office, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times, “You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party?.?.?.?.?The media’s the opposition party.”
Bannon’s first move after being dismissed from his White House posting was to huddle with the billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer who has backed his right-wing populist media crusade. On the afternoon of his firing, he said in a statement to Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, “If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents—on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America.”
IT DOESN’T REQUIRE AN OVERLY ACTIVE IMAGINATION to picture the post-apocalyptic news landscape that so many conservatives seem to be working toward. Media fragmentation accelerates to warp speed. Agenda-driven publishers—be they professionally staffed websites or one-man YouTube channels—churn out narrowly tailored news for increasingly niche audiences. There’s still plenty of factual reporting to turn to when you want hurricane updates or celebrity news, and adversarial investigative journalism doesn’t quite go out of style. But it’s easier than ever for news consumers to ensconce themselves in hermetically sealed information bubbles and ignore revelations that challenge their worldviews. For most people, “news” ceases to function as a means of enlightenment, and becomes fodder for vitriolic political debates that play out endlessly on social media. (Like I said, it’s not hard to imagine.) Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own personal Pravdas—benefit most in this brave new world.
This is, of course, a worst-case scenario. But is it really so far-fetched? Already, many of the nation’s most important outlets—the publications and networks that comprise the core of American journalism—have seen their audience shrink and splinter; their credibility plummet among vast swathes of the public; and their financial futures turn bleak. If The New York Times and ABC News were to shut down or, more likely, dwindle into shells of their former selves, would they be replaced with new mega-outlets that share their resources, their reach, and their editorial values? It’s possible. But it seems just as likely that they wouldn’t be replaced at all.
“This whole idea of media objectivity is relatively new,” says Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor at large who founded and runs the right-wing website Daily Wire. Like other conservatives I talked to, he envisions a return to the media conventions of centuries past, when news was delivered largely by the organs of parties and ideological movements. “At the founding, it was a bunch of partisan press going after each other.” If Shapiro had his way, the news would be a polemical free-for-all and media outlets would give up any pretense of non-partisanship. He dismissed the Pulitzer-winning fact-check site PolitiFact as a “leftist outlet,” and generally rejected the idea that any news organizations should be held up as “grand arbiters of truth and falsity.” The very notion, he says, is “anti-democratic.”
“Basically, I think we ought to get away from drawing strict boundaries around ‘journalism,’” Shapiro told me. He pointed to James O’Keefe, a conservative activist who is famous for producing secretly recorded (and often selectively edited) videos that purport to expose the sins of academia, the media, and the government. “Is he an activist?” Shapiro asks. “Yes. Does he commit journalism? Yes. Is he a journalist? Well, it depends on whether he’s committing acts of journalism in that moment.”
Ann Coulter, the vociferously pro-Trump pundit and author, echoed these sentiments in our email exchange. She told me that virtually all news coverage of the president by the “elite” media—a group she says includes not just The Washington Post and NBC, but also many old-line conservative publications—has been dishonest, frivolous, and pack-like. “Chuck Todd agreeing with Jeff Flake about what a barbarian Trump is isn’t news!” Coulter says. “I guess what I’d like, in my ideal world, is that we all start arguing about issues and ideas.”
I asked her if there was any room in that vision for news outlets that play a neutral, referee-like role—contributing to the debate only by adding facts and debunking falsehoods. Coulter seemed uninterested in the question. The publications that have tried to serve that function, she contends, have become “too screechy and inaccurate,” and have rightly lost the public’s trust. “No serious person would trust either the NYT or WaPo’s ‘FACT CHECK’!”
[ICYMI: Former gossip columnist says there’s one fact about his past relationship with Trump that’s tough to admit
The concept of an obstinately objective press has been under assault in America for some time now, of course, and not just from the right. Critics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue persuasively that news outlets do a disservice to their audiences when they coat their journalism in a sheen of artificial neutrality. Better to aim for transparency, the argument goes—to be honest about where you’re coming from, and to then strive for fairness and open-minded engagement. But there is a considerable difference between the proponents of this theory and those who cynically celebrate the “weaponization of information” and the rise of “alternative facts.”
The so-called marketplace of ideas only works when reality serves as a regulating force. For constructive debates to take place in a society like ours—and for national consensus to emerge on any given question—it’s essential we start from a broadly agreed-upon set of basic facts. Who will provide them if the mainstream media collapses into a melee of warring partisan publications?
LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN JULY, I met withMatthew Continetti, editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, in a pizzeria on the ground floor of the Watergate—the DC office complex that stands today as a concrete brutalist monument to the most iconic journalistic triumph of the 20th century. Continetti is not a bomb-thrower by nature. He is polite and cerebral and meticulous about his diction—often pausing for several seconds to consider his words before answering a question. On the day we met, he had just come from George Washington University, where he teaches a class on the history of the intellectual conservative movement.
Continetti grew up in the middle-class suburbs of northern Virginia with parents whom he describes as not “particularly political.” His conversion to conservatism came at Columbia University, while studying Plato’s Republic during an undergrad class on political philosophy. It was around this same time that he decided to pursue journalism, writing articles for the student newspaper as well as for a conservative national magazine called Campus. Aspiring journalists who lean to the right often face a choice as they prepare to enter the industry: try to carve out a career in the mainstream press, or follow the well-trod path into conservative media? Continetti opted for the latter—working as anintern at National Review while he was attending Columbia, and becoming a star writer at The Weekly Standard after graduating. (In 2012, hemarried Anne Kristol, the daughter of Bill Kristol, the magazine’s founder.)
The site Continetti edits today contains a fair amount of trolling—a running series of Kate Upton clickbait; winking headlines like “Greatest Living President Is Also Fantastic Painter”—but it has also earned a reputation for real-deal journalism. Its reporters run down leads, work their sources, call for comment, and issue corrections when necessary. If a partisan press really is the future, we could do worse than the Free Beacon.
I hoped Continetti might have a more optimistic outlook on the world after the mainstream media’s demise. But as we spoke, he was unremittingly bearish on the prospect that any 21st-century outlet could win the trust of a broad, diverse cross-section of news consumers. “One of the reasons there’s no common denominator in media is there’s really no common denominator in American life,” he told me. “As a general rule, we are a divided society. We have very real disagreements about values, about what’s important.”[ --> choice of "facts"]
I couldn’t help but interject: Shouldn’t facts be the common denominator? I asked, painfully aware that I was exhibiting the kind of journalistic sanctimony that the Free Beacon regularly ridicules.
Continetti exhaled, patiently, and shook his head. “I think the problem you describe is unsolvable,” he told me. “People are going to believe what they want. It’s not my job to tell them what to believe. It’s my job to edit a site that provides new information and adds value every day. Certainly, there are many people, like Howard Dean, who say it’s ‘fake news.’ But OK, I’m not going to control what Howard Dean thinks. He has every right.”A smirk appeared on Continetti’s face. “And I don’t believe a word he says, either.”
IN MANY WAYS, Donald Trump was the perfect candidate to channel the conservative media—the talk radio id personified and plopped onto a debate stage. As someone whose status as a perpetually aggrieved media critic long predated his conversion to conservatism, Trump quickly discovered that rank-and-file Republican voters were an enthusiastic audience for his gripes about the press.[recycled newt debate riposte?] And as Trump worked to reinvent himself as a Republican political celebrity, he naturally took his cues from the popular right-wing media. His first major foray into conservative politics was as the world’s most famous “birther,” championing a conspiracy theory that was gaining steam on talk radio and right-wing blogs. Later, as a candidate, he punctuated his stump speeches with stories he’d read on Breitbartand parroted the talking points he’d picked up watching Fox & Friends.
Trump did face real opposition in the primaries from the conservative intelligentsia. Kristol and New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat were early and outspoken critics, while National Review published an entire anti-Trump issue in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. But those with the loudest megaphones—people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—saw Trump’s affection for them and their tribe, and rewarded it by providing the kind of boosterism that Mitt Romney would have sold one of his sons for.
And so, when Trump won in 2016, it wasn’t just a victory for him and his campaign. It was a coup for the conservative media, whose destructionist attitude toward the mainstream press can now be found at virtually every level—from the hosts of Fox News, to the ascendant internet personalities of the alt-right. “Nothing is grander, nothing is more glorious, nothing is more satisfying, nothing is sweeter, nothing is more validating, nothing is better for America than the death of the mainstream media’s political power,” John Nolte crowed in the Daily Wire the day after the election.
The Gateway Pundit flatly declared, “The mainstream media is your enemy.” And Infowars captured the sentiment by featuring an editorial cartoon depicting right-wing media figures as asteroids hurtling toward earth where news-network dinosaurs await their “extinction.”
In a decidedly dystopian spin on service journalism, some in the conservative media have begun providing their audiences with how-to guides for finishing off the journalistic establishment. Limbaugh told his listeners they should stop consuming news from the mainstream press altogether. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he assured them. “And as a bonus, I’ll nuke it!” Hannity urged his viewers to start targeting individual journalists—and their bosses—on social media. And the alt-right bloggerRoosh Valizadeh has called for a coordinated campaign of bullying aimed at reporters. “Make them appear as ‘uncool’ salarymen in the eyes of the public,” he wrote. “Mock their appearance, their mannerisms, and their weaknesses.”
It would be easy to dismiss all this as performative, and ultimately harmless, trolling. But if the Trump era has taught us anything, it should be that these elements of the conservative media are not to be underestimated. In 2016, they conquered the Republican Party. Now they’re coming for the press.
Mainstream’s right turn
Today’s right-wing media world didn’t surface overnight. Below, a timeline of its development.
—Pete Vernon
Magazine editor William F. Buckley, Jr. (Online Library of Law and Liberty)
1947
Henry Regnery founds conservative book and magazine company Regnery Publishing. William F. Buckley Jr. later advises him: “I would recommend that you state that in your opinion an objective reading of the facts tends to make one conservative and Christian; that therefore your firm is both objective and partisan in behalf of these values.”
Clarence Manion (State Archives of Florida)
1954
Clarence Manion begins the Manion Forum radio show, of which he bragged, “Every speaker over our network has been 100 percent Right Wing?.?.?.?.?You may rest assured, no Left Winger, no international Socialist, no One-Worlder, no Communist will ever be heard over the 110 stations of the Manion Forum network.”
1964
So frequently does Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign complain about bias in the coverage of his candidacy that his press secretary jovially hands out pins that read “Eastern Liberal [ELITE] Press” to the reporters on the campaign plane.
1969
Vice President Spiro Agnew gives a televised speech complaining about how President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War policies are covered by the press. “Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the Government in Washington,” he says, “but in the studios of the networks in New York.”
1973
Nixon supporters dismiss the Watergate scandal as a witch hunt by a liberal media. “Watergate,” says Senator Jesse Helms, “became the lever by which embittered liberal pundits have sought to reverse the 1972 conservative judgment of the people.”
1988
The Rush Limbaugh Show quickly becomes one of the country’s most popular syndicated radio programs. “In those days the mainstream liberals had a media monopoly,” Limbaugh later says. “Nobody did political talk, let alone conservative political talk.”
1996
Announcing the Fox News Channel, its chief executive Roger Ailes says the 24-hour news network “would like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking?.?.?.?.?We just expect to do fine, balanced journalism.”
2004
Dan Rather steps down as CBS Evening News anchor after memos in a CBS report alleging George W. Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard are revealed by conservative bloggers as fakes.
2009
Andrew Breitbart announces that his eponymous website will launch a “Big Journalism” vertical [?] with the intention to “fight the mainstream media?.?.?.?who have repeatedly, and under the guise of objectivity and political neutrality, promoted a blatantly left-of-center, pro-Democratic Partyagenda.”
2016
Donald Trump makes attacks against journalists a hallmark of his presidential campaign. He bans a number of outlets from attending his rallies and events. Less than a month after taking office, Trump refers to the media in a tweet as “the enemy of the American People!”
[ICYMI: The first reporter to arrive at Vegas gunman’s house has covered the story in many ways–except one
McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously a reporter for BuzzFeed News, where he covered two presidential campaigns, and before that he wrote for Newsweek. He is the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/julian-assange-press-shows-little-interest-in-media-trial-of-century/
no lnx pix guk
Julian Assange: Press shows little interest in media ‘Trial of Century’
Alan MacLeod and FAIR September 26, 2020
Labeled the media "trial of the century," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition hearing is currently taking place in London—although you might not have heard if you're relying solely on corporate media for news. If extradited, Assange faces 175 years in a Colorado supermax prison, often described as a "black site" on US soil.
The United States government is asking Britain to send the Australian publisher to the US to face charges under the 1917 Espionage Act. He is accused of aiding and encouraging Chelsea Manning to hack a US government computer in order to publish hundreds of thousands of documents detailing American war crimes, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The extradition, widely viewed as politically motivated, has profound consequences for journalists worldwide, as the ruling could effectively criminalize the possession of leaked documents, which are an indispensable part of investigative reporting.
WikiLeaks has entered into partnership with five high-profile outlets around the world: the New York Times, Guardian (UK), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain). Yet those publications have provided relatively little coverage of the hearing.
Since the hearing began on September 7, the Times, for instance, has published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20). There have been no editorials and no commentary on what the case means for journalism. The Times also appears to be distancing itself from Assange, with neither article noting that it was one of WikiLeaks' five major partners in leaking information that became known as the CableGate scandal.
Guardian: 'Politicising' and 'weaponising' are becoming rather convenient arguments
Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman (9/9/20) turned a reader's question about "liv[ing] in a time of so much insecurity" into a bizarre rant against Julian Assange and his partner, Stella Moris.
The Guardian, whose headquarters are less than two miles from the Old Bailey courthouse where Assange's hearing is being held, fared slightly better in terms of quantity, publishing eight articles since September 7. However, perhaps the most notable content came from columnist Hadley Freedman (9/9/20).
When asked in an advice article: "We live in a time of so much insecurity. But is there anything we can expect from this increasingly ominous-looking winter with any certainty?" she went on a bizarre tangential rant ridiculing the idea that Assange's trial could possibly be "politicized," also crassly brushing off the idea that his young children would never see their father again, and never answering anything like the question she was asked. Holding people to account "for a mess they could have avoided," she notes, "is not 'weaponizing' anything — it is just asking them to do their jobs properly." She also claimed that believing Assange's trial was politicized was as ridiculous as thinking antisemitism claims were cynically weaponized against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which, she meant to suggest, was a preposterous idea. This was not an off-the-cuff remark transcribed and published, but a written piece that somehow made it past at least one editor.
Like the Times, the Guardian appeared to be hoping to let people forget the fact it built its worldwide brand off its partnership with WikiLeaks; it was only mentioned in a forthright op-ed by former Brazilian president Lula da Silva (9/21/20), an outlier piece.
The Guardian should be taking a particularly keen role in the affair, seeing that two of its journalists are alleged by WikiLeaks to have recklessly and knowingly disclosed the password to an encrypted file containing a quarter-million unredacted WikiLeaks documents, allowing anyone—including every security agency in the world—to see an unredacted iteration of the leak. In 2018, the Guardian also falsely reported that Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort had conducted a meeting with Assange and unnamed "Russians" at the Ecuadorian embassy (FAIR.org, 12/3/18). And, as former employee Jonathan Cook noted, the newspaper is continually being cited by the prosecution inside the courtroom.
Der Spiegel: Mögliche Höchststrafe: 175 Jahre Knast
Der Speigel's headline (9/7/20) reads: "Maximum Sentence: 175 Years in Prison."
There were only two articles in the English or French versions of Le Monde (9/7/20, 9/18/20) and only one in either of Der Spiegel's English or German websites (9/7/20), although the German paper did at least acknowledge its own partnership with Assange. There was no coverage of the hearings in El País, in English or Spanish, though there was a piece (9/10/20) about the US government thwarting a Spanish investigation into the CIA spying on Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London—accompanied by a photo of a protester against his extradition.
The rest of corporate media showed as little interest in covering a defining moment in press freedom. There was nothing at all from CNN. CBS's two articles (9/7/20, 9/22/20) were copied and pasted from news agencies AP and AFP, respectively. Meanwhile, the entire sum of MSNBC's coverage amounted to one unclear sentence in a mini news roundup article (9/18/20).
Virtually every relevant human rights and press freedom organization is sounding the alarm about the incendiary precedent this case sets for the media. The Columbia Journalism Review (4/18/19), Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation note that the government includes in its indictment regular journalistic procedures, such as protecting sources' names and using encrypted files—meaning that this "hacking" charge could easily be extended to other journalists. Trevor Timm, founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the court this week that if the US prosecutes Assange, every journalist who has possessed a secret file can be criminalized. Thus, it essentially gives a carte blanche to those in power to prosecute whomever they want, whenever they want, even foreigners living halfway around the world.
The United Nations has condemned his persecution, with Amnesty International describing the case as a "full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression." Virtually every story of national significance includes secret or leaked material; they could all be in jeopardy under this new prosecutorial theory.
President Donald Trump has continually fanned the flames, demonizing the media as the "enemy of the people." Already 26% of the country (including 43% of Republicans) believe the president should have the power to shut down outlets engaging in "bad behavior." A successful Assange prosecution could be the legal spark for future anti-journalistic actions.
Yet the case has been met with indifference from the corporate press. Even as their house is burning down, media are insisting it is just the Northern Lights.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-and-republicans-have-now-spent-nearly-60-million-on-lawyers-for-the-president
as evidence mounts that the Donald Trump campaign is going broke, you might be wondering just how the heck a presidential incumbent could manage to churn through a nine-figure amount of donations and be coming up short only weeks after its own national convention.
We don’t know, but this might be a clue: The New York Times and Campaign Finance Institute counted up the latest totals of just how much Republican “donation” money is being spent not on Trump’s campaigning, but Trump’s lawyers. The new total? At least $58.4 million. Trump, his allies, and the Republican National Committee have spent nearly $60 million, since 2015, on Dear Leader’s lawyering.
Yikes.
The *Times*‘ report makes it clear that this level of legal spending is absolutely not normal. In addition to defending Trump from the Russia probe and the near-countless sexual harassment and corruption scandals surrounding him, Trump has also used donor cash to file lawsuits against ex-campaign and White House staff members who he says broke “nondisclosure” agreements and to file lawsuits against major news outlets after they published damaging opinion columns about him, thus turning the supposed legal fund into a slush fund for settling Trump’s personal vendettas.
if you’re thinking Trump is bilking small-dollar donors out of their money, with all these legal bills: yes and no. The Trump campaign has provided some of the money, but a large chunk is coming from the Republican National Committee’s legal “recount account” fund, an established party fund that is allowed to accept donations far in excess of normal campaign contribution limits. That means it’s funded by some of the richest Republicans in America.
Oh, but don’t worry. The Times reports that a National Republican Committee spokesperson “rejected” the notion that wealthy Republicans are pouring money into the legal slush fund in an attempt to “influence” Trump.
So this is all very interesting, but it’s not immediately clear that you can blame the party pissing away nearly $60 million on Trump’s personal defenses, scandals and vendettas for its apparent new money woes. It does seem a risky choice, however, for the party to be so freely spending money intended to fight election-related legal issues only months before a presidential election that (shudder) stands a very good chance of being litigated to hell and back, if Trump has his way.
Then again, the lesson of 21st-century America is that the nation’s fabulously rich have, literally, All The Money. There doesn’t seem to be any upper limit on how much money fascist-friendly but tax-averse Trump allies are willing to send his way. And as top Republican donors like Louis DeJoy keep demonstrating, don’t assume they’ll be letting petty things like federal laws block them from giving however much the conservative “movement” needs.
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to be fair, WH sez will colect and pt out inaccuracies, which is SOP fair, but they haven't yet?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-house-threatens-journalist-with-a-dossier-over-report-exposing-trumps-self-dealing/
no lnx twt
white House threatens journalist with a ‘dossier’ over report exposing Trump’s self-dealing
Written by Alex Henderson August 27, 2020
During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would “completely isolate” himself from the Trump Organization if elected president. But the Washington Post and other media outlets have done a great deal of reporting on the many ways in which Trump’s properties — from Mar-a-Lago in South Florida to his hotels and golf resorts around the world — have profited from his presidency. Some of that reporting can be found in an article that was written by reporters David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow and published by the Post on Thursday morning, and one of the article’s revelations is thata White House spokesman resented the Post’s investigation so much that he was willing to threaten Fahrenthold with a “dossier.”
In a written statement to the Post, the journalists report, Deere said: “The Washington Post is blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization, and it must stop. Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people.”
In that statement, Deere insisted that Trump has “turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company, though he was not required to, (and) has sacrificed billions of dollars.” But Fahrenthold, Dawsey and Partlow, in their article, make it abundantly clear how much Trump’s businesses have profited from Trump’s presidency.
“Trump has now visited his own properties 270 times as president, according to a Washington Post tally — with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel,” the Post reporters explain. “Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis.”
One of the Trump Organization’s profitable customers, according to Fahrenthold, Dawsey and Partlow, has been the U.S. Secret Service.
“New federal spending documents obtained by the Post via a public-records lawsuit give more detail about how the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service — a kind of captive customer, required to follow Trump everywhere,” the reporters note. “In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily ‘resort fees’ to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and, in another instance, asked agents to pay a $1300 ‘furniture removal charge’ during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland.”
The Post journalists observe that Trump can cause his businesses to profit — at the expense of U.S. taxpayers — merely by setting foot in them.
“The most frequent way Trump is known to have helped his properties has been just to visit them, with the vast, big-spending presidential entourage in tow,” they explain.
Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post, “One would think that if he was trying to completely isolate himself from his businesses, he wouldn’t talk about his business — he wouldn’t promote his business, he wouldn’t go to his businesses…. (But) his businesses have been a constant presence in his presidency. No, the idea that he was going to isolate himself completely — it’s been quite the opposite.”
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attempted break-in at reporter home
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-911-call-transcript-shows-the-results-of-tucker-carlsons-threats-to-reporters
dn 720
Press Freedom Group Condemns Morocco For Arresting Journalist Omar Radi
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cross listed to new legal suppression:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-trump-campaigns-legal-strategy-includes-suing-a-tiny-tv-station-in-northern-wisconsin/
Trump campaign’s legal strategy includes suing a tiny TV station in northern Wisconsin
Meg Cramer, Katherine Sullivan / WNYC, Pro PublicaJuly 23, 2020
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign…
This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.
The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen.
Dozens of stations ran the ad. But the Trump campaign chose to sue just NBC-affiliate WJFW, which is owned by a relatively small company that only has two other local TV stations, both in Bangor, Maine. The campaign did not initially sue the political organization that produced the ad. That group later joined the case as a defendant.
The curious lawsuit is part of a larger, aggressive and exceedingly expensive legal operation by the Trump campaign that’s the focus of our latest “Trump, Inc.” podcast.
The campaign has spent over $16 million on litigation and other legal costs — more than any past presidential campaign and more than 10 times what presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has spent on legal services, according to disclosures.
Trump has long boasted about his penchant for filing lawsuits. The president and his businesses have reportedly filed over 2,000 lawsuits. After losing a 2006 defamation lawsuit against the journalist Tim O’Brien, Trump told the Post that he knew he couldn’t win, but he sued anyway. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” Trump said. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
As with other areas, Trump has taken his approach to running his personal life and business to the presidency.
Multiple media law experts told us that the suit against tiny WJFW has little chance of succeeding. Susan Seager, a media defense lawyer and adjunct professor at The University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said, “The courts are very deferential and very protective of opinions about public figures and political issues.”
So if Trump isn’t likely to win, what might he be trying to do? Matthew Sanderson, who served as counsel for Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney, said he thinks the Trump campaign is “engaging in scare tactics.”
“The reason in my opinion that the Trump campaign is filing these types of lawsuits is not necessarily to punish the Wisconsin station — they’re not going to be successful,” Sanderson said. “The reason they’re doing this is to send a message to the rest of the stations to be careful” about running anti-Trump ads.
Unlike many other states, Wisconsin doesn’t have a law that makes complainants pay for defendants’ legal costs if a defamation suit ends up being dismissed as frivolous.
Seager estimates that fighting a defamation lawsuit brought by a high-profile group like the Trump campaign could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000, just to go through the process of getting it dismissed.
We asked the Trump campaign and its lawyers about the suit and why they chose WJFW. They did not respond.
The TV station commented, through a lawyer, that “WJFW has no choice but to fight the Trump campaign’s attempt to bully a small-market broadcaster into surrendering its First Amendment rights. The public counts on local broadcasters, especially in an election year, to remain free to air criticisms of public officials.”
Of course, one critical difference between lawsuits Trump used to file in his business dealings and the ones his campaign is filing is that Trump no longer has to use his own money. His donors are picking up the tab.
Trump’s disclosures show his campaign has paid about $200,000 to the firm handling the Wisconsin case.
The campaign has also paid $3.3 million to the firm ofattorney Charles Harder, who specializes in high-profile reputation defense lawsuits.Harder is representing the Trump campaign in the three other defamation suits against media organizations. Harder is perhaps best known as the lawyer who successfully sued Gawker into bankruptcy on Hulk Hogan’s behalf while being surreptitiously funded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Another set of expenses in the disclosures is also interesting. It shows the Trump campaign spent $95,161 on “legal & IT consulting” paid to … “The Trump Corporation.” Neither the campaign nor Trump’s company responded to questions about those charges.
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Trump Inc at ProPublica
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-trump-it-ratcheting-up-his-dangerous-war-on-the-first-amendment/
no lnx
How Trump is ratcheting up his dangerous war on the First Amendment
Written by Bill Blum / Independent Media Institute April 24, 2020
Donald Trump is at war with the First Amendment and the free press. The war is on full display nearly every day in his rage-filled press conferences on the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he regularly condemns the “fake news” media and bashes reporters who dare to ask the slightest probative questions about his handling of the ongoing public-health crisis.
Trump’s war is also longstanding. And it is waged not only on television and in angry tweets and at campaign rallies (which have been put on hold because of the coronavirus), but also in courtrooms across the country in the form of defamation lawsuits designed to shame, silence and punish his critics.
The latest victim of the president’s intimidation-by-litigation strategy is TV station WJFW, an NBC affiliate located in Price County in the rural reaches of northern Wisconsin. On April 13, Trump’s principal reelection campaign committee—Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., headquartered in New York City—sued the station in the county’s circuit court. The suit alleges that the station had libeled the campaign and harmed the reputation of the president by airing an anti-Trump attack ad produced by Priorities USA Action, a pro-Democratic Super PAC.
Entitled “Exponential Threat,” the ad features audio and video clips of Trump downplaying the severity of the virus and disavowing any responsibility for his administration’s slow and incompetent response to the virus overlaid against a graph displaying the exponential rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. since January.
The lawsuit contends that the ad stitched together Trump’s statements about the virus in a false, misleading, deceptive and malicious manner to make it appear that he had called the virus a “hoax.” According to the complaint, Trump never termed the virus itself a hoax, but instead said at a rally in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 28, that the Democrats were perpetrating a hoax by politicizing his record on the virus.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of other recent threats made by the Trump campaign to take legal action against TV outlets in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania for broadcasting the same ad.
The president’s campaign committee has also been busy suing print media. In March, the committee sued the Washington Post for defamation allegedly arising from opinion columns written by journalists Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in June 2019 on the possibility of renewed foreign collusion in the 2020 election. And in February, Trump’s 2016 campaign committee sued the New York Times, claiming defamation stemming from an op-ed about Russian collusion written in March 2019 by Max Frankel, who had served as the paper’s executive editor from 1986-94.
Sadly, the president’s latest round of defamation revenge is part of a pattern that dates back to his formative days as a real-estate developer and publicity-seeking huckster in New York City.
As detailed in a 2016 study published by the Media Law Resource Center, Trump filed his first major libel suit in 1984, when he took the Chicago Tribune and architecture columnist Paul Gapp to court, claiming that he had sustained $500 million in damages as a result of an article Gapp had written, maligning Trump’s plans to build a 150-story skyscraper in lower Manhattan. The case was dismissed the following year after the presiding judge determined Gapp’s article was a constitutionally protected expression of opinion.
The Media Law Resource Center study also summarizes Trump’s failed defamation lawsuit against writer Timothy O’Brien and the Time Warner Book Group, Inc. Now a senior columnist with Bloomberg Opinion, O’Brien asserted in a 2005 book—TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald—that Trump wasn’t actually a billionaire. O’Brien’s estimate of Trump’s net wealth so rankled the future president that he demanded “a whopping $5 billion in damages.” Like the lawsuit against Gapp, the case was eventually dismissed.
In addition, the study chronicles Trump’s case against comedian Bill Maher. Trump targeted Maher in 2013 for a disparaging joke he told on NBC’s Tonight Show, in which he offered to donate $5 million to charity if Trump could prove he was not “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” After Trump sent a copy of his birth certificate to Maher and the comedian refused to pay up, Trump sued Maher for breach of contract in California. Trump voluntarily withdrew the case eight months later, however. Although his then-spokesperson, Michael Cohen, told Politico that Trump planned to amend and renew the lawsuit, he never did.
Like most of Trump’s past defamation forays, the president’s latest round of defamation lawsuits seems destined to crash and burn. The cases will falter for one simple reason: they are utterly devoid of legal merit.
Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, criticism of public officials is entitled to stringent First Amendment protections. As the great liberal Justice William Brennan wrote for a unanimous court in Sullivan, the Constitution embodies our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks…”
Public officials, Brennan instructed, must be precluded from recovering damages for allegedly defamatory statements related to official conduct unless they prove that the statements are made with “actual malice”—that is, that they are made with the knowledge that they are false or with “reckless disregard” of whether they are true or false.
In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court extended Sullivan’s “actual malice” holding to defamation lawsuits initiated by “public figures” and business entities that have obtained public-figure status, such as Trump’s political campaign committees.
Sullivan is one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential decisions, providing the press with the safeguards needed to keep the public informed and hold the rich and powerful to account. Among the court’s current members, only Clarence Thomas has gone on record to suggest that Sullivan be reconsidered.
Why, then, does the president persist? The answer, it appears, is purely political.
At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, in February 2016, Trump told a throng of cheering red-meat followers, “I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible. … If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”
And then he added, in a veiled reference to Sullivan:
“One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do, and we’re certainly leading, is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws so that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
As of now, the president is losing his war on the First Amendment and the free press. But as Trump’s improbable rise to power confirms, the future remains uncertain. If we have learned anything in the Trump era, it is that our constitutional rights can never be taken for granted.
Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/jerry-falwell-jr-s-warrant-for-journalists-came-from-liberty-universitys-own-police/
omg
no lnx
Jerry Falwell Jr.’s warrant for journalists came from Liberty University’s own police
Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
Written by Sarah K. Burris / Raw Story April 9, 2020
A right-wing commentator interviewed Jerry Falwell Jr. during his show Wednesday, where Falwell said that there were two arrest warrants open for reporters who came onto Liberty University’s campus.
Upon further examination of the warrant, the police officer who signed the warrant was Detective/Sgt. A.B. Wilkins 206 LUPD. The LUPD is not the Lynchburg Police Department nor is there a Sgt. or Detective A.B. Wilkins. It’s the police department under the authority of Liberty University.
Warrants are typically issued by a judge who directs an arresting officer to execute the warrant. No judge appears to have signed the warrant nor is there a judge mentioned, though the warrant does cite the Lynchburg, Virginia courthouse. The warrant also doesn’t appear to be certified by the clerk that it was submitted to the court. Clerks generally stamp documents when received.
The accused reporters, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis and a New York Times photographer Julia Rendleman were accused of trespassing on the campus. The warrant called it a “class 1 misdemeanor,” which, according to Virginia law “is punishable by up to 12 months in jail, a fine of up to $2,500, or both.”
The Liberty University Police Department boasts eight officers. It’s unknown if the Lynchburg Police Department would have been willing to issue a similar warrant for the arrest of the reporters.
You can see the public documents below:
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/furious-trump-fans-barrage-conservative-columnist-who-admitted-coronavirus-is-a-real-problem/
no lnx
Furious Trump fans barrage conservative columnist who admitted coronavirus is a real problem
Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story March 2, 2020
A conservative columnist who is generally a supporter of President Donald Trump recently found himself getting barraged by the president’s fans because he admitted coronavirus could be a real problem for the global economy.
As the New York Times reports, Republican Rob Maness recently wrote a column for the conservative LifeZette website that outlined potential negative economic impacts from coronavirus, including the disruption of supply chains.
“The most significant major concern in America is the impact on pharmaceutical supply,” Maness wrote in his column. “Large numbers of drugs used to treat serious medical conditions are manufactured or their key components are produced in China. Medicines such as antibiotics amoxicillin, doxycycline, penicillin and other’s availabilities will be impacted as China continues its lock-down of factory workers because 90% of their sourcing is in China.”
While this analysis was fairly straightforward in breaking down the economic risks of a viral pandemic, Maness tells the Times that many Trump supporters were furious with him for bringing up unwelcome facts.
“I got accused of being alarmist and trying to hurt the president,” he said. “I actually said the government’s doing a pretty good job.”
Trump spent the last few days attacking media coverage of the virus andaccused the Washington Post of being the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” after it published a devastating report showing his administration was scrambling to respond to the outbreak.
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not exactly punked?
https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-takes-bait-and-suspends-veteran-correspondent-over-bad-faith-right-wing-hit-job
2/26/20
ABC News suspended veteran correspondent David Wright on February 25 after he gave reasonable criticism of the network while being secretly recorded in a video later released by Project Veritas. The organization has a well-known reputation for videotaping media figures and progressive activists and releasing bad-faith, edited videos to push a right-wing agenda.
The video, which Project Veritas
on February 26 after teasing it the night before, features Wright offering criticisms of ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration and other political issues. It has clearly been edited to portray Wright’s comments in a negative light.
In the heavily edited video, Wright was critical of the broadcast news business model and suggested that the network still hasn’t figured out how to properly cover Trump. He claimed that ABC fails to give Trump credit for things he does right while also failing to “hold him to account”; chooses more exciting, “TV-friendly” stories over practical issues that matter to voters; takes Trump’s coverage bait in a way that enables him; and overcompensates for the false accusation from groups like Project Veritas that mainstream media pull for the Democratic Party.
Wright also complained that drama surrounding Trump dominates the news cycle and the “voters are poorly informed.” He criticized ABC’s “self-promotional” relationship with Disney, saying that the network often blends news with commercial interests: “You can’t watch Good Morning Americawithout there being a Disney princess or a Marvel Avenger appearing.”
Many of these comments are consistent with criticisms other journalists have made of political media in the age of Trump, and thus there was swift condemnation of ABC for its decision to suspend Wright.
Others were furious that Wright was suspended after he expressed support for progressive policies and said he considers himself a socialist, calling his suspension “absolutely outrageous” given a lack of progressive voices in mainstream media.
Project Veritas, founded by James O’Keefe, has a long history of secretly recording videos and then deceptively editing and releasing them in order to paint its subjects as negatively as possible and catch them in a “gotcha” moment. Veritas targets organizations that it claims have a “liberal” association, and its operatives often approach targets using a false name to coax information from them through casual conversations.
O'Keefe's goal is typically to obtain footage that can be edited in a way that embarrasses or delegitimizes targeted organizations, often seeking to expose “liberal bias” in the media. Past targets have included NPR, The New York Times, and CNN, and as a result, many news organizations are aware of Project Veritas’ motives when these videos are released.
Wright has been a journalist with ABC for nearly 20 years, covering the White House and reporting from the Middle East and Europe. His reporting has earned him an Emmy and a Peabody Awardfor work related to Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, respectively.
The reasonable nature of Wright’s criticisms of a business model that prioritizes generating ratings over informing viewers, combined with Project Veritas’ well-known reputation and bad-faith tactics, make ABC’s decision to suspend Wright and reassign him from political reporting to “avoid any possible appearance of bias” concerning.
Conservative media outlets like Fox News and The Federalist and figures such as Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson have already pounced on the footage to advance the right-wing narrative that ABC is a biased source that does a poor job of informing viewers -- and by suspending Wright, the network has fallen for it too.
Update (5:45 p.m.):O'Keefe and Sean Hannity agreed that ABC News should not have suspended Wright[aUDIO]
O'KEEFE: This guy Wright is just being honest. He's just talking about how ABC's pushing Disney products on Good Morning America. He called himself a socialist. He calls Trump a bad name, the d-word, in this tape. He also seems to say that they don't give Trump credit -- they don't give him enough credit. He actually says this about Trump, that they don't give him enough credit for the things that he does right. So he's simultaneously kind of trashing Trump, calling himself a socialist, but also saying Trump does some good things and we don't talk about it, we don't care about voters, we don't cross the Hudson River, this guy says, to look at what voters care about. So he's just being honest, he's been suspended for being honest, and for that I think it was wrong to suspend him. I think he was just telling the truth, Sean.
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Well, I think so too.
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intercept 120
...Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBSto proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”
Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him....
The message was received loud and clear in the executive offices of the Times. While Bonner considers Punch Sulzberger, then the publisher of the Times, to have been “a great, great man,” he also recalls that he “supposedly said to [Times editor] Abe Rosenthal, ‘Who the hell is this guy down there that’s causing us all the trouble?’”
In August 1982, Rosenthal pulled Bonner out of Central America and back to New York for additional “training” in journalism. Bonner believes that Rosenthal made this decision not simply due to his El Mozote coverage, but because Rosenthal was a committed anti-communist who felt that Bonner was generally too sympathetic to the Salvadoran guerrillas and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Within the Times newsroom, says Bonner, “It was certainly perceived as if I were being punished. I had a reporter who told me, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to me.’ … There is no question that this had a chilling effect on the reporting out of Central America.”
This coincided with a period of Grand Guignol violence by the Salvadoran government and its allied death squads that’s truly beyond human comprehension. About 75,000 Salvadorans were killed during this time, the per capita equivalent of about 5 million Americans today. According to a later U.N. investigation, the government was responsible for 85 percent of the murders, all committed with U.S. arms and training.
For Bonner’s part, he quit the Times three years later in 1984. “When I told Abe I was leaving there were no tears shed,” he remembers. He eventually returned to work for the paper after Rosenthal’s retirement. Now 77, he owns a bookstore in Australia.
Meanwhile, the key personnel who squelched the story went on to greater and greater heights. Enders retired from government service and enjoyed a lucrative career on Wall Street. Abrams was later a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. Today, he is the special representative for Venezuela for the Trump administration.
Given how well pressure on the media worked with El Mozote, it’s no wonder that the U.S. right has used the same strategy over and over since. With the rise of conservative talk radio, and then Fox News, it’s become ever easier for politicians to simply ignore any inconvenient aspects of reality. Trump privately explained to journalist Leslie Stahl in 2016 that he strategically attacks journalism “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
Thus, while Bonner lived through a lot in 1981, he believes that “today it has gotten much worse.” Today, he says, “public officials simply lie with impunity,” and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/roy-moore-sues-right-wing-publication-for-reporting-sexual-misconduct-allegations/
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Roy Moore sues right-wing publication for reporting sexual misconduct allegations
Written by Alex Henderson January 29, 2020
One of the most stunning political events of 2017 occurred when Republican Roy Moore — who was inundated with sexual misconduct allegations involving teenage girls — lost to Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race. Although Alabama is a deeply Republican state that President Donald Trump is almost certain to carry in November, Moore was a badly flawed candidate; regardless, Moore is hoping to run against Jones again this year. And his response to negative publicity from the Washington Examiner is filing a $40 million lawsuit against the right-wing publication.
The Washington Examiner, although clearly conservative, has published a series of articles discussing the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore. In the lawsuit, a 2019 article by journalist Tiana Lowe for the Examiner is described as “libelous” and lacking a “factual basis.”
Legal reporter Jerry Lambe, in a January 28 article for Law & Crime, describes Moore’s lawsuit against the Examiner as full of holes.
“Moore’s complaint appeared to falsely convey the publicly available facts and drastically misconstrue the legal threshold required to prove defamation against a public person in claiming that the story exhibited a ‘reckless disregard for the truth,’” Lambe explains, adding that Lowe’s reporting “was based on more than a dozen allegations and witness statements covered by every major news outlet in the nation.”
On May 28, 2019, the Examiner published a blistering op-ed by Lowe headlined “If Alabamans Vote for Roy Moore, They Deserve Doug Jones.”
Lowe, in her op-ed, stressed, “If Alabamans willfully choose Moore this time, kneecaping their odds of winning the election, they will deserve every insult lobbed their way — and they will deserve every left-wing progressive Democratic vote cast in the Senate on their behalf by Doug Jones.”
Lowe’s description of Jones as a “left-wing progressive” is way off base; the Alabama senator is quite centrist, and philosophically, he has much more in common with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia than he does with staunch progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But Lowe speaks for many on the right when she says that nominating Moore to run against Jones a second time would be political suicide for the Republican Party, which may or may not lose control of the U.S. Senate in November.
Republican Bradley Byrne, who served in the Alabama State Senate in the 2000s, announced in February 2019 that he would be seeking the GOP nomination to run against Jones. Republican strategists have asserted that he would have an easier time defeating Jones than Moore.
Scott Wong
@scottwongDC
"I welcome [Judge Moore] to the race,” @BradleyByrne says, adding that Moore can't win the GOP nomination.
“I think people are very concerned that we Republicans lost a U.S. Senate seat because he was our nominee in 2017, and we don’t need to do that again." https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1133431343734501377 …
Scott Wong
@scottwongDC
JUDGE ROY MOORE to announce Senate bid soon? GOP rival @BradleyByrne says Moore camp is telling him to expect a JUNE launch #ALSEN https://thehill.com/homenews/house/445781-gop-candidate-expects-roy-moore-to-announce-senate-bid-in-june#.XO11CeRwf1g.twitter …
djt also has problem w/ uppity woman m kelley blood from everywhere
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-praises-pompeos-swear-filled-rant-to-an-npr-reporter-i-think-you-did-a-good-job-on-her/
==
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out at NPR reporter…
Trump hits NPR with veiled threat after Pompeo blow-up with reporter over Ukraine
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/facebook-took-down-posts-regarded-as-too-sympathetic-to-soleimani-free-speech-advocates-must-fight-back/
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Facebook took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Soleimani. Free speech advocates must fight back
Written by Ari Paul / Common Dreams January 15, 2020
Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated January 3 in a controversial US airstrike. The news website Coda (1/10/20) was credited with breaking the news, and Newsweek (1/10/20) also reported that:
Iranian journalists have reported the censorship of their Instagram accounts. Posts about Soleimani have disappeared from Instagram, which is currently the only operational international social media site within Iran.
According to the Facebook corporation, as quoted by CNN (1/10/20), removal of such posts is required by US sanctions; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which Soleimani was a commander, was designated as a terrorist organization by the US government in April:
As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.
One might rightly ask: What constitutes a post supportive of the late military commander? According to the CNN report, merely posting a photo of the general could get the Facebook authorities to take a post down.
The International Federation of Journalists condemned the censorship:
The measures have gone even further, and some accounts of Iranian newspapers and news agencies have now been removed from the social media platform. This poses an immediate threat to freedom of information in Iran, as Instagram is the only international social media platform currently still operating in the country.
The Washington Times (1/11/20) reported:
Ali Rabiei, a spokesperson for the Iranian government, complained from his Twitter account on Monday this week about the disappearance of social media discussions about Soleimani, accusing Instagram of acting “undemocratic and unashamed.”
Much of the coverage has centered on the fact that Instagram is one of the few social media networks not widely restricted in Iran—thus, the blackout serves as a way of censoring information going into Iran. In fact, the US government news agency Voice of America (1/7/20) reported that the Iranian government was clamping down on social media posts too critical of Soleimani, and NBC News (8/21/19) reported on how Iranians used networks like Instagram to skirt government regulation. (The irony here is thick.)
But this news has also gotten journalists and press advocates worried about what this means for free speech and the First Amendment in the United States. On the one hand, as a private company, Facebook is free to make its own rules about acceptable content. Yet if the network is removing content because it believes it is required to do so by law, that is government censorship—and forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.
Shayana Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told FAIR that while it was possible for the US government to restrict media companies from coordinating with sanctioned entities and providing “material support” to the IRGC, the US government cannot restrict Americans from engaging in what he called “independent advocacy.”
“Independent advocacy, as the law stands, can’t be banned,” he said. “For [Instagram] to remove every single post would mean it was pulling posts that are protected.”
The Washington Post (1/13/20) reported that free speech advocates were worried, with the director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it “legally wrong.” Others concurred:
Eliza Campbell, associate director at the Cyber Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, [said] that the existing laws had failed to keep up with online speech, calling it a field of law “that hasn’t been written quite yet.”
“The terrorist designation system is an important tool, but it’s also a blunt instrument,” she said. “I think we’re walking down a dangerous path when we afford these platforms—which are private entities, have no oversight, and are not elected bodies—to essentially dictate policy, which is what’s happening right now.”
Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, [said] that Facebook and Instagram are taking “a very aggressive position and it may not be sustainable.” He said it could result in Facebook removing any speech of any Iranian mourning Soleimani’s death and could represent a “harsh new precedent.”
Regardless of whether the government directed Facebook to take this action, the fact that a media company felt the need to do so is proof of a chilling effect on speech. Who, specifically, is to decide what is so unabashedly pro-Soleimani material that it violates US sanctions? Is an article that merely acknowledges that many Iranians mourned Soleimani and denounced his killing a violation? Is an anti-war editorial that doesn’t sufficiently assert Soleimani was “no angel” constitute such a crime? Could satirical material that facetiously supported the Tehran regime get censored? (The last item isn’t so hypothetical: A Babson College professor was fired for jokingly encouraging Iran to follow Trump’s lead by targeting US cultural sites.)
All of these questions, and all this ambiguity, should be enough evidence that this kind of censorship would be capricious and unfairly applied, and thus inappropriate in the face of free speech protections.
Free press advocates in the United States should think seriously in the coming days about how to respond. If sanctions can be invoked by a social media network to take down certain content, what is next? In order not to find out, we’ll need a concerted pushback to Facebook’s censorship from journalists and civil libertarians.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/sarah-palin-is-seeking-over-75000-in-damages-in-defamation-lawsuit-against-ny-times/
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Sarah Palin is seeking over $75,000 in damages in defamation lawsuit against NY Times
Written by Alex Henderson December 31, 2019
President Donald Trump isn’t the only Republican politician who has been highly critical of the New York Times: former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is another long-time critic —and on Monday, the 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee filed a 52-page amended complaint as part of her defamation lawsuit against the publication. Palin, according to Law & Crime, is seeking more than $75,000 in damages as well as “restitution in the form of the Times’ advertising revenues attributable to the” June 14, 2017 article that inspired the lawsuit.
On June 14, 2017, the Times published an opinion piece by its editorial board and discussed, among other things, Palin’s political activities in the early 2010s — when her political action committee, SarahPAC, released an ad that depicted crosshairs imposed over various Democratic politicians. One of them was Arizona’s Gabby Giffords, who was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the time. After the ad aired, Giffords was seriously injured in a January 8, 2011 attack in Tucson by gunman Jared Loughner.
In her lawsuit, Palin asserts that it was unfair for the Times to publish an editorial linking her to Loughner’s attack. The Times’ James Bennet is specifically mentioned in the lawsuit.
The filing on Monday states, “Gov. Palin brings this action to hold James Bennet and the Times accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Gov. Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011. Specifically, on June 14, 2017, the Times published an editorial authored in the name of its editorial board, which represents the “voice” of the Times, that falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011 mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona.”
Palin, Colin Kalmbacher explains in Law & Crime, first filed her lawsuit against the Times only two weeks after the June 14, 2017 editorial was published.
The filing on Monday also states, “Gov. Palin brings this action to hold James Bennet and the Times accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Gov. Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011. Specifically, on June 14, 2017, the Times published an editorial authored in the name of its editorial board (which represents the ‘voice’ of the Times) that falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona.”
Palin’s lawsuit also claims that the Times mentioned Loughner’s attack in order to divert attention from violence against Republicans — specifically, the June 14, 2017 attack in which sniper James Hodgkinson in Washington, D.C. seriously injured Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Palin’s lawsuit mentions that the Times, in 2017, identified Hodgkinson was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders — who, it should be noted, wholeheartedly condemned the attack and wished Scalise a speedy recovery.
The Palin filing states, “As early reports about the Hodgkinson shooting sparked speculation about whether his actions were motivated by liberal, anti-Republican political rhetoric, Mr. Bennet was outraged and decided to respond by reviving what he knew to be debunked speculation that Gov. Palin incited Loughner’s shooting. To do so, Mr. Bennet ignored his own knowledge of the facts surrounding the Loughner shooting, the well-known consensus, including within The Atlantic and the Times, that Gov. Palin’s political activities played no role in Loughner’s shooting, readily available information and articles about the Loughner shooting, and the most basic and fundamental tenants of ethical journalism.”
Bennet has stressed that he never said that Palin was directly responsible for Giffords’ shooting but rather, that he was making a point about the political environment in 2011.
==
==
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/19/headlines/cpj_25_journalists_killed_in_2019
Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 25 journalists were killed in 2019 and over 250 are in jail in relation to their work in countries around the world. The deadliest countries for journalists in 2019 were Syria and Mexico. The biggest jailers of journalists are China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
reporters detained at border, took their pix away? added them to dBase
Malta Prime Minister Resigns amid Probe of Journalist’s Murder
Three More Egyptian Journalists Arrested
==
wow, self censorship?!
see cunha NYT
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/i-was-fired-from-the-new-york-times-for-a-proposed-edit-that-was-deemed-unfair-to-trump-i-know-firsthand-about-the-papers-insidious-double-game/
too late?
c de v
:{
}:
Donald Trump and his spokespeople continue to engage instochastic terrorism. The most recent example: Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., perhaps Trump’s most avid congressional defender, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Monday that journalists are “assassins.”
Trump and his Republican Party are continuing their campaign to keep nonwhite people and other likely Democratic supporters from voting. This is part of a broader effort to undermine the human and civil rights of nonwhite people in America and around the world.
Public opinion polls and other research show that Donald Trump’s political cult remains extremely loyal to him. Fox News and other parts of the right-wing propaganda machine continue to distort reality in the president’s favor. Trump himself has now told almost 14,000 public lies. Trump’s hate-filled rallies continue to draw thousands of supporters, people who are being primed for political violence by the president’s rhetoric and other behavior.
==
indirect press suppress:
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-social-media-giant-pays-a-tiny-legal-fine-for-falsifying-video-data-that-news-media-relied-on-to-strategize/
error in metrics?
...
“The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,” an amended complaint stated.
The result of this “error,” willful or not, was that dozens of news sites shifted their editorial strategies to encompass more video content, particularly on Facebook. Often, this came at the detriment of print journalism, both in editors and writers. “We don’t really know how much damage was done ultimately to the industry — we can sort of see it in terms of the number of lay-offs and things like that — but it’s clearly by any stretch of the imagination it’s clearly a drop-in-the-bucket, it’s pocket change, to an outfit like Facebook,” John Stanton, co-founder of the Save Journalism Project, told Salon in an interview. Stanton, a former BuzzFeed journalist, was laid off around the time that Facebook’s ad metrics fraud was in effect.
Facebook has continued to argue that the contrived metrics were an innocent mistake.
...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/furious-former-white-house-official-blasts-trump-video-of-church-slaughter-mass-shootings-are-not-jokes/
former White House official blasts Trump video of church slaughter: ’Mass shootings are not jokes!’Tom Boggioni / Raw Story
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Furious former White House official blasts Trump video of church slaughter: ’Mass shootings are not jokes!’
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 14, 2019
A CNN panel was equally appalled and furious about a video that was shown at the conservative conference held at a hotel owned by Donald Trump that showed the president slaughtering church worshipers who represented CNN, NPR, MSNBC and Black Lives Matter in the “Church of Fake News.”
Speaking with hosts John Avlon and Alisyn Camerota, former President Bill Clinton communications director Joe Lockhart seemed visibly angry that it was shown at a conservative sanctioned event that featured Sarah Sanders and Don Trump Jr. as speakers.
Asked by Avlon, “Has there been anything remotly like this in American political history or something truly new and dangerous?”
“This is something truly new,” Lockhart responded. “We haven’t had the internet for that long of time, if you’re going over the sweep of history. that’s what allows this to be distributed widely. But we’ve had presidents who have denounced the media. We’ve had every president in the history of the country who has at times wanted to denounce them and probably had thoughts in their head about what they’d like to do.”
“But kept them inside their head,” Avlon prompted.
“This isn’t a case where some over-enthusiastic supporter did something,” Lockhart continued. “This is Nixonian in the sense that the campaign was sanctioning dirty tricks like Nixon did. Here the president is not blameless — he has retweeted these people’s memes. He has retweeted memes with things hitting CNN reporters in the head — they’re not funny.”
“What struck me from this video is this all happened in a church. The president — probably the biggest part of his base are churchgoers, evangelicals,” he added. “And they are now making fun of someone coming in and committing vicious murders in a church. I don’t care what the president does, he’s already lost his credibility on this. People who went to church yesterday who are going to wake up this morning and wake up and see the president and his supporters think it’s funny to commit violence in a church. ”
Watch below:
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russian-witness-thrown-from-a-window-after-his-name-was-exposed-by-trump-tower-lobbyist-emails
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Russian witness thrown from a window after his name was exposed by Trump Tower lobbyist: emails
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 4, 2019
According to a report from the Daily Beast, a witness who was taking part in a U.S. trial aimed at Russian corruption — and who fell from a window to his death — reportedly had his name exposed in emails connected to alleged pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign operative Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Emails uncovered by the Beast point the finger directly at Veselnitskaya, who met with Don Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2016 that became a major part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian involvement in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Noting the death of Nikolai Gorokhov, who was reportedly thrown from the window of a hotel in Moscow prior to appearing in a corruption trial, the Beast reports, “A cache of emails obtained by the Dossier Center, which is a Russian opposition organization based in London, exposes the depth of foreign asset entanglement in Trump’s America at the precise moment that the president’s dealings with Ukrainian officials threaten to pull the Department of Justice and State Department into an unseemly impeachment fight.”
The report goes on to state that “The cache of emails that detail Veselnitskaya’s legal campaign and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., were shared with The Daily Beast by the Dossier Center, which is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky,one of Putin’s most prominent exiled critics, ” before adding, “The emails cannot be independently verified by The Daily Beast via a digital signature but elements contained within them including cell phone numbers, bank details, planning, email addresses, and hearing dates can be confirmed by cross-checking with subsequent court papers, lobbyist filings and other reporting.”
“New emails from the same cache, which includes messages from and to Veselnitskya and her aide and translator Murat Glashev, shed light on Veselnitskaya’s lobbying and legal campaign against the Magnitsky Act and appear to suggest that it may have been carried out in breach of another U.S. law and court orders,” the report continues. “Some of the emails suggest the breaking of an order put in place by a New York court to protect the identity of Gorokhov, a Russian witness who testified in a sealed deposition. His evidence was hidden amid fears of reprisals back home.”
You can read more here.
bolso pals kill activist 1019
https://cpj.org/blog/2018/02/weinstein-blackcube-surveillance-claim-exposes-agg.php
Weinstein-BlackCube surveillance claim exposes aggressive tactics to kill a story
By Avi Asher-Schapiro/CPJ US Correspondent on February 7, 2018
Those with deep pockets can go to great lengths to push back against journalism they find objectionable. Billionaire Peter Thiel deployed a team of lawyers in a move that bankrupted the news site Gawker in 2016--and last month President Donald Trump's lawyers tried to block the publication of an unflattering book. But there's another, much less public, arena where the wealthy can combat unflattering reporting: the world of subterfuge-for-hire, where private investigators work to undermine a story before it's even made public.
In late 2017, the public was privy to a rare glimpse inside this world. Ronan Farrow, in a New Yorker exposé, reported that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner had enlisted a team of private investigators to push back against reporting into dozens of sexual assault and rape allegations against their client. One of the private investigation firms, BlackCube--an outfit staffed with former agents of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad--was ordered in a contract obtained by The New Yorker to "completely stop the publication" of an article critical of Weinstein. BlackCube ultimately failed. But, Farrow's report found, journalists investigating Weinstein at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York magazine, and their sources, were approached by undercover agents with fabricated backstories, as part of an elaborate effort to keep Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct secret.
Weinstein's spokespeople have denied the allegations against him and rejected claims that he tried to "suppress" any journalism. BlackCube has repeatedly insisted that it "applies high moral standards" to all of its work, and in an interview a member of its advisory board expressed regret for its relationship with Weinstein.
While there are no laws against lying to a reporter or their sources, or conducting public surveillance of or pushing embarrassing information about a journalist--as long as that behavior doesn't veer into libel or slander--the Weinstein story raised questions about how far some will go to kill a negative story--and what, if any, ethical and legal guardrails exist to protect journalists
Of course, the use of underhanded tactics to derail a reporter is nothing new. Bethany McLean, a business reporter who broke the Enron story in 2001, recalls receiving multiple phone calls from individuals who said they were potential sources. These calls, she told CPJ, amounted to sloppy sting operations: those on the other line would try to lure her into admitting she wanted to financially benefit from her own reporting--McLean said she assumed she was being taped.
For most reporters, however, pushback usually comes in the form of aggressive public relations firms or, on occasion, threatening letters from their subjects' lawyers. Weathering an undercover operation has not typically been part of a journalists' job description. George Freeman said that in nearly 30 years as a lawyer for The New York Times, he "can barely think of an example" of these tactics. He is now executive director of the independent advisory group the Media Law Resource Center. "Unfortunately, it's becoming less rare in the last couple years," he told CPJ. "And that's what's scary about it"
Subjects of journalistic scrutiny are, of course, entitled to defend themselves. And for those with the resources to do so, there are plenty of techniques that reporters with whom CPJ spoke said they have come to expect, including compiling publicly available information that could reveal a reporter's conflicts of interest, or a dossier of past reporting mistakes.
The Weinstein story revealed a more aggressive toolbox apparently used by private investigators: the impersonation of sources and hiring reporters as agents. Other cases involve deploying aggressive surveillance, and smearing sources or reporters by spreading potentially damaging personal information.
Before Weinstein, another high-profile case alleging attempts to suppress reporting focused on Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Ailes' biographer Gabriel Sherman, citing sources inside Fox, alleged that the executive used a portion of Fox's budget to pay for a "Black Room," where PR and surveillances operations against Ailes' perceived enemies--including reporters--were coordinated.
Ailes, who died in May, denied the allegations at the time. On the record, Fox executives insisted to Sherman that they had no knowledge of company money being spent on surveillance or online attacks against reporters.
But, Sherman said, sources inside of Fox told him a different story. "From my own reporting, inside Fox, I know Ailes had hired private investigators to have me surveilled," Sherman told CPJ. "It adds a level of psychological intimidation, if you know your subject has goons out there looking for you." Sherman recalled one particularly chilling incident while he was working on his biography of Ailes: he and his wife noticed a black SUV lurking outside a cabin they were renting--when they tried to approach the car, it peeled out and raced away.
Beyond laws against stalking, assault, and fraud, there's little to prevent the rich and powerful from deploying such tactics to suppress reporting they don't approve of, said Philip Segal, the founder of Charles Griffin Intelligence, a private investigations firm. Segal is an expert on investigative ethics and gives ethics seminars to state bar associations.
He said he believes private investigators should follow strict ethical guidelines and refrain from impersonation tactics. Investigators should not, he said, pay other journalists to gather intelligence for them, unless those reporters are prepared to broadcast that they are not working in their capacity as a reporter.
Getting a clear picture of the scope and breadth of these aggressive private investigations is difficult. "Out of a thousand cases, I'd say one or two involved a reporter," Randy Torgerson, the president of the United States Association of Professional Investigators, an organization with over 600 members, told CPJ.
And, when a reporter is the apparent victim of such an operation, it can be difficult to definitively trace the source. In the BlackCube case, Farrow was able to publish a copy of the firm's contract with Weinstein. But more often than not, obtaining such a document is not possible, leaving reporters with a mixture of circumstantial evidence, suspicion, and the assurances of their own sources.
Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at the Intercept, who has reported for a number of outlets about the sprawling political network funded by the conservative Koch brothers, said he suspects operatives working for the Kochs hacked his private account on the image hosting site Photobucket and circulated an image of him smoking marijuana as a teenager.
The image published by the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, in a post titled "High Times at The Intercept" that mocked the publication's decision to hire Fang, was taken from a password protected account, Fang said. The Free Beacon was co-founded by Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked as a crisis communications consultant for the Kochs.
Fang told CPJ he can't definitively prove who was behind the hack, but said that his reporting had been flagged by pro-Koch Brothers operatives before, including on a now-defunct website, KochFacts.com, that listed journalists writing critically on the Kochs' political activities.
...
In her book Dark Money, an investigation into the Koch's political network, New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer alleged that the brothers retained New York City Police Commissioner-turned private investigator Howard Safir to delve into her past. Mayer wrote that sources told her Goldfarb was involved in that work. She said she also discovered that a dossier erroneously accusing her of plagiarism was passed around conservative D.C. media circles--a reporter with the conservative Daily Caller website even contacted her editors at The New Yorker, accusing her of plagiarism. She was able to quickly refute the allegations before they were made public. The Koch Brothers have called Mayer's reporting inaccurate, but did not directly refute the accusations when contacted by The New York Times in 2016. Safir did not respond to CPJ's request for comment. This kind of treatment can be particularly chilling for reporters without the institutional backing of a major publication. Roddy Boyd, the president of the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, says that last year he was lured to London with a job offer, only to be pumped for information about his reporting on an insurance company AmTrust. "It was really shady," he told CPJ. "It makes you wonder; what won't they do." Some investigative campaigns however, have run into legal trouble. Back in 2006, the California Attorney General found that private investigators hired by Hewlett Packard to trace leaks to the press had targeted the phone records of nine journalists. Hewlett Packard's general counsel resigned and a court sentenced one of the investigators to three months in jail for identity theft. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, his lawyer David Boies expressed some regret. He said that he did not select the private investigators that Weinstein hired, or direct their work--although his signature appears on the BlackCube contract. "It was not thought through," Boies wrote in a public statement explaining his decision to facilitate Weinstein and BlackCube's relationship. "And it was a mistake. I take responsibility for that." There's no indication he or BlackCube broke any laws or will face any censure (although, The New York Times reported that BlackCube lacked the proper license to do business in New York)
dunno but jaylo headline banner
https://deadline.com/2019/09/rachel-maddow-msnbc-one-america-news-network-1202729817/
One America News Network, one of the rivals to Fox News for right-leaning viewers, filed a defamation claim against Comcast, MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on Monday, over Maddow’s claim that the conservative channel “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego (read it here) claims that the defendants retaliated against One America because its president, Charles Herring, called out MSNBC’s parent company. Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel. In an email to Comcast’s president of content acquisition, Gregory Rigdon, Herring had sought carriage on Comcast’s cable platforms and stated his concern that the cable giant “opposes including another conservative counter channel to counter MSNBC,” according to the lawsuit.
A week later, Maddow opened her show by telling her audience that OANN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda,” according to the lawsuit.
“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said in the July 22 segment.
Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess who represents OANN, said in a statement: “One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego. They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they’re going to answer for it in a court of law.”
Maddow made the claim after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.
But One America said in the lawsuit that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”
The lawsuit seeks more than $10 million in damages.
A spokeswoman for MSNBC did not immediately return a request for comment.
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old
Fighting back against public scrutiny, Koch Industries is relying on a small army of conservative bloggers, reporters, and lobbyists. Chief among them is John Hinderaker, a blogger at the “Powerline Blog.” However, in his now daily defense of the Koch brothers, Hinderaker has failed to disclose that his law firm counts Koch Industries as a major client.
Hinderaker has been on the war path defending Koch.He has tasked himself with sniping at ThinkProgress posts, spending the last few weeks defending forced-abortion lobbyist and Koch operative Tim Phillips, celebrating Koch’s self-interested propaganda against climate change science, and generally making juvenile swipes at yours truly, including posting my picture and calling me a “high school student.” In a bizarre rant defending “what a great company Koch Enterprises is,” Hinkeraker even claims ThinkProgress is being paid “millions of dollars by left-wing billionaires” to report on Koch Industries. But here’s what he didn’t say:
– Hinderaker Has A Disclosure Problem. Hinderaker is an attorney for the law firm Faegre and Benson. Despite his previous role handling “ethics and professional responsibility” for Faegre, he has failed to disclose in his Koch-friendly blogging that Koch is a major client for his firm. Faegre represented Koch Industries in cases related to Koch’s theft of oil (using the famed “Koch Method” of manipulating oil data) in Texas and North Dakota, in cases against Koch’s own employees regarding Koch’s speculative weather derivatives business and an environmental whistleblower case, and in a case against a Kochsubcontractor. In an ongoing case, Hinderaker’s firm represents Koch Industries in a class action suit brought by a group of plaintiffs regarding oil Koch allegedly stole from wells in Oklahoma. In addition, Hinderaker has defended the Bradley Foundation after we profiled the group and its support for Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI). Hinderaker never disclosed that he is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, a front that has received over $3 million from the Bradley Foundation.
Asked about his failure to disclose his firm’s financial relationship with Koch, Hinderaker told ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes today that he has no comment.
The Koch spin machine is much larger than just Hinderaker. Koch recently retained Orion Strategies, a PR firm run by Weekly Standard writers like Michael Goldfarb, Wilson Miller Communications, and PR consultant Ron Bonjean, as well as government affairs firms like Cove Strategies, Hunton & Williams, ADS Ventures, the Palmetto Group, and Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti. In addition to their communication consultants, Koch is being aided by the right-wing media investments they have made over the years.
As ThinkProgress has detailed, Koch funds a number of conservative media positions using grants distributed by the Phillips Foundation, a conservative journalism frontfunded by Koch charitable foundations, the Koch-owned Institute for Humane Studies, and the Charles Koch fellowship. Moreover, the top conservative media outlets are owned by close associates of the Koch brothers: the Daily Caller is owned by Foster Friess, a friend of the Koch brothers and attendee of secret Koch fundraising meetings; the Washington Examiner and the Weekly Standard are owned by Phil Anschutz, another oil billionaire and Koch meeting attendee. Predictably, these outlets are now attacking us:
– Koch-Funded Media Attacks ThinkProgress. In the last month, the Anschutz-owned Washington Examiner has published nine articles defending to honor of David and Charles Koch. Mark Tapscott, who previously wrote long love letters to Charles Koch, criticized ThinkProgress without disclosing that much of his career, which includes stints at the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, has been funded by Koch or Koch allies like Anschutz. The Examiner’s Tim Carney, a regular Koch meeting attendee, has dutifully defended his benefactors. Meanwhile, a writer for the Weekly Standard, who got his start with a Phillips Foundation grant, has promoted an odd theory that Koch Industries is a model company according to Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. In reality, Koch Industries was forced to submit to the EPA permit in question after a protracted struggle. After funding various conservative writers, using fronts or other means, the Koch Industries PR team is now blasting anti-ThinkProgress pieces out to the media. On the official Koch Industries Twitter feed, the shoddy writing ofHinderaker, Carney, and others is being promoted and forwarded to the public.
Longtime Republican pundit and Koch lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer was recently rehired to work for Koch Industries as a “Koch spokeswoman.” Last year, afterJane Mayer’s blockbuster article in the New Yorker about Koch’s political machine, Pfotenhauer placed a hit-piece in the Daily Beast against Mayer. The Daily Beast writer laterconfessed that both Pfotenhauer and David Koch contacted her to write the piece on Mayer. A mysterious opposition researcher again tried to shop around a hit piece against Mayer in January.
The Koch brothers are famously thin-skinned and afraid of honest media attention. The only lengthy interviews given by Koch Industries are through friendly conservative outlets like the National Review, FrumForum, or the Wall Street Journal (even in his only interview to the WSJ, Charles Koch spoke with an editorial board memberfunded by Koch groups). Indeed, during a family feud, the Koch brothers hired a team of lawyers and investigators to go after one another, and in one incident, caught private detectives rifling through their trash for information.
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/03/03/147953/bloggers-kneel-to-koch/
lee fang mar 3
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Jeffrey Epstein's efforts to silence press included a bullet on a reporter's doorstep, cat's severed head
Border Patrol Official Circulates Article That Deems Our Reporting on Secret Facebook Group a Threat
An official who directs a Border Patrol intelligence gathering center sent the article to all top intelligence officials and field offices. The article directly attacks a ProPublica reporter who revealed that agents were posting anti-migrant and misogynistic memes in group for current and former agents.
by Ginger Thompson July 12, 6:06 p.m. EDT
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
A senior Border Patrol official, who directs a key intelligence-gathering center, on Thursday circulated an inflammatory opinion article that blasted ProPublica’s reporting on a secret Facebook group for current and former agents and described the news organization as a threat to the agency and its members.
A link to the article, which specifically castigates ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson for his articles about the degrading posts in the group, was sent in an email to top intelligence officials at the agency’s headquarters in Washington and to field offices across the country. Sources said other supervisors then shared it widely with agents under their command.
The article was widely distributed by Michael E. Powell, director of the Customs and Border Protection’s Northern Border Coordination Center, and comes as the heads of the Department of Homeland Security, the CPB, which it oversees, and the Border Patrol have publicly condemned the Facebook posts and launched investigations into the group.
And the article raises questions about whether internally, agency officials may be having different reactions to the public exposure of anti-migrant and misogynistic posts by some of its agents. On Friday,The Intercept reported that Border Patrol head Carla Provost appeared to have once been a member of the group. She has not commented.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trumps-social-media-summit-was-a-complete-embarrassment-that-did-just-what-trump-wanted/
kos
On Thursday, Donald Trump unexpectedly folded on the question of adding a citizenship question to the census. After warning that he could absolutely put the issue in place with an executive order, Trump hauled out his attorney general and secretary of commerce, set up a podium in the Rose Garden, and did what he always does when not throwing insults—he whined. But Trump had the perfect audience for his “We tried to slip this in at the last minute, then ran out of time, so it’s all everyone else’s fault” complaint. Because on Thursday afternoon, Trump filled the Rose Garden with a collection of villainy and scum that would embarrass any Mos Eisley cantina.
The event was labeled as a “press conference,” but it was a very Trumpian press conference: one at which Trump took no questions, and one where the actual press was made to stand at a distance on the other side of ropes. That’s because all the chairs at this press conference were reserved for the internet’s most hateful: the alt-right pundits that were scraped up to attend Trump’s “social media summit.” That group didn’t try to ask Trump any questions. That’s not their role. Instead, they used this moment of access and historic location to join Trump in attacking the free press.
There was badge-wearing Nazi, and former Trump adviser, Sebastian Gorka threatening reporters. And there was professional 9/11 truther Mark Dice yelling at CNN. There was pundit, songwriter, and congressional candidate Joy Villa—a candidate in California, or New York, or possibly Florida, she hasn’t made up her mind yet—smirking at the media and informing them that their day, the day where people asked questions, expected answers, and checked those responses for truthfulness, is over.
These are the voices that Trump is trying to elevate. Voices that scream racism. Voices that scream hate. And,in the case of Dice, voices that scream that both Hollywood and the music industry are run by a combination of Illuminati and Satanists who hide spells in Super Bowl halftime rituals designed to blind the public to the existence of a worldwide gay conspiracy. And the Starbucks logo features a mermaid prostitute. And Katy Perry is a witch.
But the real purpose of Trump’s “social media summit” wasn’t to promote conspiracy theorists. It was to promote two of his own conspiracy theories.
The primary focus of Trump’s summit on social media was … how awful all the social media platforms are.Despite not just a lack of real evidence, but mountains of genuine counterevidence , Trump continues to push the conspiracy theory that “conservative voices” are being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms for nothing more than supporting Trump. As *The Washington Post*reported, Trump spent much of his time focused on telling the alt-right that they were the real victims of one of those conspiracies they love to write about.
“We have terrible bias. We have censorship like nobody has any understanding,” said Trump. This is the reason Trump believes his tweets get much less support than those of Barack Obama, who, three years out of office, continues to have far more followers than Trump. And, in fact, Trump did go on at length about ways in which he believes Twitter has suppressed his followers. But the actual fact is more likely that Trump doesn’t believe it anymore than Mark Dice believes that “monkey bars are racist.” It’s just a handy claim.
It’s handy to Trump in reinforcing his even bigger conspiracy theory. His “They’re all out to get me” theory. That’s the theory in which every honest investigator looking into his actions is part of the “deep state”; any honest reporter showing that Trump’s words aren’t true is spreading “fake news”; any judge following the law is part of the “swamp”; and every torch-carrying white supremacist is “good people.” Anyone, even someone who organized a boycott of a Star Wars movie because it was “feminist propaganda” (and yes, that’s Mark Dice again), is good people, so long as they support Trump.
This is the America that Donald Trump champions, and for a very good reason. Because when there is no authority for truth, the loudest voice wins. It really doesn’t matter if those voices are screaming hate. It doesn’t matter if they’re networks of screaming bots run by the Russian military. All that matters is that they’re screaming loud enough to drown out the press … which has to stand way back there, behind the ropes.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-says-the-reporting-of-the-mainstream-media-should-not-be-considered-free-speech/
cody f
At a White House event ostensibly organized to celebrate the value of free speech, President Donald Trump declared that one of the central pillars of the First Amendment should not actually be covered by the Constitution’s protections.
The Social Media Summit was convened, it seems, to gather some of the most absurd right-wing trolls who claim they are victims of companies like Facebook and Twitter who undermine free speech. These private companies, in fact, have no legal obligation to follow the principles of free speech, and many of the claims that conservatives are being suppressed on social media are baseless or patently false.
But in comments that couldn’t have been better scripted to reveal the utter hypocrisy of the right-wing on the topic of free speech, Trump said that the mainstream media coverage isn’t protected by the concept.
“They’re not using that brilliance and they’re not using what we gave them fairly,” he said of the social media companies. “And they have to do that. And we don’t want to stifle anything — we don’t want to stifle free speech —but that’s no longer free speech. See, I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech, either. Because it’s so crooked, so dishonest. So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you write something bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech. And you become very angry at it. But that’s not free speech.”
In fact, protections for the media are embedded in the fundamental right to free speech as outlined in the Constitution. The First Amendment prevents the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The principle of free speech doesn’t just cover the press when the president likes what reporters say. Indeed, reporting that public figures and government officials don’t like is the paradigmatic example of protected free speech in the United States.
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