The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face

This Alex Parenne piece made it onto my queue, aka backlog a couple of weeks ago. Then I saw it on Chris Hayes last night. The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face. It makes a couple of points I really agree with (ah confirmation bias). The first is how right wing media broke the Republican party:

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.

That, broadly, explains the dysfunction of the Obama era, post-Tea Party freakout. Congressional Republicans went from people who were able to turn their bullshit-hose on their constituents, in order to rile them up, to people who pointed it directly at themselves, mouths open.

Now, we have a president whose media diet defines his worldview, interests, and priorities. He is not one of the men, like most of those Tea Party members of Congress, whose existing worldview determined his media diet—who sealed himself off from disagreeable media sources. He is, in fact, something far more dangerous: a confused old man who believes what the TV tells him.

The second is how the two parties behave:

Here’s the real, non-ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats:

Democrats by and large are convinced that no one actually supports their agenda, and they devote a not insignificant amount of time and political capital to explaining to their own constituents why they cannot pursue goals that a majority of them support. (“I supported single payer since before you were born,” says Nancy Pelosi, who has the legislative and leadership record of someone who may support single payer but clearly doesn’t actually expect it to happen in our lifetimes.)

Conservatives, especially those who came up during the Obama era, have, more or less, the opposite problem: They’ve convinced themselves that their agenda is hugely popular and that everyone supports them.

There’s actually been some research on this: Politicians—both liberal ones and conservative ones—believe that the electorate is more conservative than it actually is. Conservative politicians believe the electorate is much more conservative than it actually is. Once you learn this, suddenly a lot of things about how elected officials act make more sense.

The most important major divide among Congressional Republicans isn’t between moderates and conservatives, or establishment and anti-establishment politicians, but between those who know that their agenda is hugely unpopular and that they have to force it through under cover of darkness, and the louder, dumber ones who believe their own bullshit. And for those loud, dumb members, egged on by a media apparatus that has trained its audience to demand the impossible and punish the sell-outs who can’t deliver, those more tactical members are cowards and RINOs.

Jonathan Chait wrote Republicans Are Going to Wish Hillary Clinton Won

Imagine what the political world would look like for Republicans had Hillary Clinton won the election. Clinton had dragged her dispirited base to the polls by promising a far more liberal domestic agenda than Barack Obama had delivered, but she would have had no means to enact it. As the first president in 28 years to take office without the benefit of a Congress in her own party’s hands, she’d have been staring at a dead-on-arrival legislative agenda, all the low-hanging executive orders having already been picked by her predecessor, and years of scandalmongering hearings already teed up. The morale of the Democratic base, which had barely tolerated the compromises of the Obama era and already fallen into mutual recriminations by 2016, would have disintegrated altogether. The 2018 midterms would be a Republican bloodbath, with a Senate map promising enormous gains to the Republican Party, which would go into the 2020 elections having learned the lessons of Trump’s defeat and staring at full control of government with, potentially, a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Instead, Republicans under Trump are on the verge of catastrophe. Yes, they are about to gain a Supreme Court justice, no small thing, a host of federal judges, and a wide array of deregulation. Yet they are saddled with not only the most unpopular president at this point in time in the history of polling, but the potential for a partywide collapse, the contours of which they have not yet imagined. The failure of the Republican health-care initiative was a sobering moment, when their early, giddy visions of the possibilities of full party control of government gave way to an ugly reality of dysfunction, splayed against the not-so-distant backdrop of a roiled Democratic voting base. They have ratcheted back their expectations. But they have not ratcheted them far enough. By the time President Trump has left the scene, what now looks like a shambolic beginning, a stumbling out of the gate, will probably feel like the good old days.

Josh Barro walked through why Tax reform doomed like healthcare reform.

The Journal's well-reported story amounts to this: President Donald Trump would like to sign a tax reform bill, but he and his aides have no vision for what the tax reform bill should say.

"Broadly, Mr. Trump wants a simpler tax code and lower business tax rates to stimulate investment and spur manufacturing," according to the WSJ.

That all sounds nice. But substantially everyone in Washington claims to be in favor of a simpler tax code that imposes lower rates on a broader tax base. Republicans and Democrats say this all the time, and yet, tax reform does not get done.

This is because, in practice, "simpler" means eliminating tax preferences that benefit various constituencies. When the specifics of "simplicity" get laid out, tax reform plans start to draw a lot of opposition.

He then expands on these four points:

• The White House does not like Paul Ryan's plan
• The White House does not have its own plan
• The White House does not know what its coalition is to enact tax reform
• All the White House knows is it wants Trump to sign a tax reform law

It's easy to extrapolate these points to every other issue. Matthew Yglesias does it, Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is vaporware that’s never going to happen.

Donald Trump’s rambling, incoherent remarks on federal infrastructure spending during a wide-ranging interview with Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have set headline writers abuzz with the desire to extract some kind of meaning and news value from his comments. “Trump says infrastructure plan could top $1 trillion,” wrote Marketwatch, while Reuters reports that “Trump says he may use his $1 trillion infrastructure plan as a political incentive.” The Times reporters who conducted the interview — both New Yorkers like Trump, and veterans of the city hall beat — wrote it up as a local story: “Trump Weighs Infrastructure Bill but Keeps New York Up in the Air.”

The truest line in any of this comes from Haberman and Thrush themselves, who observe that Trump’s “knowledge of complex policy issues can sometimes be lacking.”

And to the extent that that’s news, it’s the only actual news Trump made on infrastructure. His remarks make it clear that he doesn’t know anything about the substance of the issue or about the relevant congressional procedures. He doesn’t appear to be familiar with the related provisions of his own administration’s budget, and he isn’t putting in the time to lay the political groundwork for any legislation. The trillion-dollar infrastructure plan doesn’t exist except as a line of rhetoric.

Martin Longman comments on Chiat's post saying Washington Monthly | Trump is Failing for Same Reason That Boehner Failed.

In truth, however, almost no Washington Republicans voted for Trump in the primaries. The elite conservative intelligentsia never saw Trump as fit for office, nor did they see him as an ideologically acceptable conservative. They had reconciled themselves to a Clinton presidency and were gearing up to win the battle over the autopsy of Trump’s campaign. Most of them did not want Trump to win and we’re relieved that the polls indicated that he had no chance to win.

Chait is correct that rank-and-file Republican voters largely stayed with Trump, meaning that they “brought disaster upon their country.” This led Trump to make a fatal miscalculation. He thought he won with a partisan vote so he should be able to govern with an exclusively partisan coalition. That was incorrect because his victory was a victory over both parties, and the Washington Establishment didn’t accept him irrespective of which party they represented.

Trump needed a bipartisan coalition from the moment he saw the surprising Electoral College results, and he had a major repair job to do if he was going to find any space on the left after insulting every ethnic and minority group in the country, running an explicitly racist campaign, and being exposed as a sexual predator. That was the moment when he needed to begin an aggressive pivot in both his style and rhetoric and in his legislative proposals.

At least at the outset, he had some alternatives. He might have tried to gain support for a legislative agenda that, while distinct from his campaign promises, was consistent with it in spirit. There were coalitions of Democrats who might have helped him figure out an alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership or ways to renegotiate NAFTA. He could have had support for an infrastructure bill that looked a lot like what President Obama had called for for years. Repeal and replace could have been softened into something less vindictive and more constructive. He could have consulted the Democrats on appointments to key administrative and cabinet positions.

In the end, this would have probably broken the House of Representatives in ways I have been advocating that it break ever since John Boehner discovered that he had to rely on Democratic votes to pass appropriations bills, pay the government’s debts, and keep the government’s doors open. Just as with Boehner, Trump’s true House majority would always have to be bipartisan if it were to be a majority at all.

Something is breaking American politics, but it's not social media

Ezra Klein writes about a new study Something is breaking American politics, but it's not social media:

Their approach is simple. Using data from the American National Election Survey, they compare the most web-savvy voters (the young, where 80 percent used social media in 2012) and the least web-savvy voters (the old, where fewer than 20 percent used social media in 2012) on nine different tests of political polarization. The measures cover everything from feelings about political parties to ideological consistency to straight-ticket voting, and the data shows how polarization changed among these groups between 1996 and 2012. The results? On fully eight of the nine measures, ‘polarization increases more for the old than the young.’ If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook?

I asked Gentzkow what he thinks might be part of the fuller picture. “I have two main hypotheses,” he replied. “One is stuff that has nothing to do with media at all but is structural, like increasing income inequality. The second is non-digital media, and cable TV and talk radio in particular.” The latter piece makes particular sense if you think about the fact that older Americans make up the base of both the cable and talk radio audiences. More than a third of talk radio listeners are over age 65, and half of Fox News’s audience is over age 68. As bad as getting your news from Facebook can be, it’s often far better than relying on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh.

2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners & Finalists

Here are the 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners & Finalists.

I don't understand how Peggy Noonan won. I read some of the samples they provided and I'm as unimpressed as I am with here Sunday morning TV appearances. "I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue." Seriously? I just cannot find a rhythm to her phrasing though I will give her credit for this: "better than Marco the moist robot".

Blue Feed, Red Feed

The Wall Street Journal produced Blue Feed, Red Feed. It shows “Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned ‘very liberal’ (blue, on the left) and ‘very conservative’ (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.”

If a news source appears in the left column, its links were frequently shared by Facebook users whom researchers classified as “very liberal,” based on self-described political leanings. In the right column are sources whose content was widely shared by Facebook users identified as “very conservative.”

The content is being pulled automatically from these sites’ public Facebook pages, once an hour using Facebook’s software developer tools (specifically, the Graph API).

We built this presentation because it’s hard to see these opposing views side by side. Facebook users who are curious about opposing viewpoints may be apprehensive about recording a like for a particular news source—an action which may be seen by other friends. (You can make likes private in Facebook user settings.) This tool gives people anywhere on the political spectrum the ability to see current discussions about newsworthy topics from both very conservative and very liberal viewpoints.

Joe Scarborough Claims Trump Asked About Using Nuclear Weapons Three Times in a Briefing

I'm no fan of Joe Scarborough but I saw a tweet this morning pointing to this segment from today's show:

Watch: What are some major concerns about Trump's handling of national security? Hayden and #morningjoe weigh in. https://t.co/FyFoSmJlJI

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 3, 2016

"A foreign policy expert, international level, went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point, 'if we have them, why can't we use them?' ... Three times in an hour briefing why can't we use nuclear weapons."

It struck me as an odd thing to throw in as an aside, particularly from an anonymous source that apparently happened several months ago. I have all the same questions as the Washington Post, I have a few questions for ‘Morning Joe’…:

1. Exactly when did you find out about this information?
2. Was this conversation with your source off the record?
3. Who was the expert?!
4. How do you feel about your show’s take on Trump in 2015?

This is a frightful claim, intended to scare us (and make news) and it's completely unsourced and vague. It's bad journalism. It's not like there aren't real ways to knock Trump, there's no need to make stuff up, but you have to have evidence.

Edward R Murrow on McCarthy - March 9, 1954

David Mindich reminds us, For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment

After months of holding back, modern-day journalists are acting a lot like Murrow, pushing explicitly against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. To be sure, these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned to the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.

I'm not sure I agree that journalists are speaking up. Nancy LeTourneau adds in the Washington Monthly, Why Journalists Should Be Concerned About the Trump/Pence Ticket:

Trump began his attempts to silence the media by throwing Jorge Ramos out of a news conference for asking a question he didn’t like. That eventually turned into a blacklist of media outlets that were banned from his events. The list eventually grew to include Univision, Buzzfeed, Politico, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Des Moines Register and the Washington Post.

Perhaps even more disturbing is Trump’s proposal to loosen libel laws in order to make it easier for him to sue media outlets for reporting he doesn’t like. Callum Borchers explains how that could happen.

Finally, we add Mike Pence to the equation. As Governor of Indiana, he set up his own state-run news outlet to compete with the media.

This is a ramping up of what we saw from the last Republican administration – which brought us everything from Jeff Gannon as part of the White House Press Corp (how the hell did that happen?) to the “payola scandal” of taxpayer-funded commentators like Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus.

Regardless, Murrow's moment is worth remembering...

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'

Good night, and good luck.

House Democrats Stage a Sit-in on the House Floor on Gun Control

The Atlantic has some posts about House Democrats Stage a Sit-in on the House Floor on Gun Control. Rep John Lewis (D-GA) organized a sit-in on the House floor to get common sense gun control passes. Speaker Ryan had CSPAN turn off their cameras. Seems like a story right?

CNN, MSNBC and FNC aren't showing it. WTF?

Snowden interview: Why the media isn't doing its job

The Columbia Journalism Review has a really nice Snowden interview: Why the media isn't doing its job. "THE TOW CENTER for Digital Journalism’s Emily Bell spoke to Edward Snowden over a secure channel about his experiences working with journalists and his perspective on the shifting media world. This is an excerpt of that conversation, conducted in December 2015. It will appear in a forthcoming book: Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State, which will be released by Columbia University Press in 2016."

Can John Oliver Get Americans to Care About Encryption?

The Atlantic reports in, Can John Oliver Get Americans to Care About Encryption? about the research they did for their 18 min segment last night:

According to some of the people who were consulted for the show, John Oliver’s team spent weeks speaking to technology experts and advocates. They reached out to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation, as well as independent experts like Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was featured in the episode.

Given Oliver’s conclusions, it wasn’t surprising that the technology community seemed very happy with how the episode turned out. ‘John Oliver and his team have a track record of distilling complex subjects into easy-to-understand and hilarious explainers, and their recent piece on encryption is no different,’ said Ross Schulman, the senior policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute. ‘It was a complete and accurate analysis of the many reasons backdoors in our devices are a horrible idea.’"

If a freaking comedy show can do this, why can't a real news show? Jon Stewart showed up real news shows by being able to pull up old clips highlighting hypocrisy within a day when no one else could. I've finally seen some news programs doing this with Trump, so that ability has propagated. Clearly 60 Minutes does extensive research, but why is it that even on 24 hours news networks there is just no time ever in a week to show anything of any depth. MSNBC has gutted their once good weekend morning shows to be political horserace coverage all the time (except for prison shows) so you can always here some mostly uninformed talking head talk about the meaning of the latest poll or extoll extemporaneously on the latest gaff.

While I wasn't a huge fan of Samantha Bee on The Daily Show, I love her new show Full Frontal which is weekly and seems to be somewhere between Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Oliver's show. Chris Hayes says he gets the question all the time from fans of when he was on (his old weekend show) Up about why (his current weeknight show) All In doesn't cover things in as much depth. He says it wouldn't be possible to do that in a daily format. It could be with more staff and I think MSNBC is currently wasting his demonstrated talent in such a format.

Trump and the News Media

Here's Matt Taibbi from a couple of weeks ago, How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable. Entertaining as Taibbi always is.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average.

It's been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of 50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that's been a huge factor in his rise. But racism isn't the only ugly thing he's dragged out into the open.

Trump is no intellectual. He's not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn't learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they've all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

Here's the thing:

Trump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say. And yet the press congratulated the candidate stuffed with more than $100 million in donor cash who really did take five whole days last year to figure out his position on his own brother's invasion of Iraq.

Why do the media hate Trump? Progressive reporters will say it's because of things like his being crazy and the next Hitler, while the Fox types insist it's because he's "not conservative." But reporters mostly loathe Trump because he regularly craps on other reporters.

And when Rubio gets exposed in the debate as a talking haircut, a political Speak n' Spell, suddenly the throng of journalists who spent the past two weeks trying to sell America on "Marcomentum" and the all-important "establishment lane" looks very guilty indeed. Voters were supposed to take this seriously?

Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press's role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they're going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.

I think too one nice thing about supporting Trump, he doesn't ask you for money. Every other candidate, if you like them, starts relentlessly asking you for money. And if you give, they want more. Trump on the other hand, is free.

Bill Moyers posted this story by Neal Gabler, Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years. "The shocking story isn't the rise of Donald Trump but how the GOP slowly morphed into a party of hate and obstruction."

But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.

Do you remember these headlines: “Republicans Oppose Civil Rights”; “Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance”; “Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits”; “Republicans Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights”; “Republicans Call Climate Change a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases”? No, you don’t remember, because no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.

I don’t think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they don’t take sides. They’re neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox News and MSNBC.

Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent health care costs skyrocketing – both of which are screamingly false. I am not holding my breath.

CBS CEO: “For Us, Economically, Donald’s Place in This Election Is a Good Thing”

The Intercept reports: CBS CEO: “For Us, Economically, Donald’s Place in This Election Is a Good Thing” "Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, celebrated Donald Trump’s candidacy for the second time on Monday, calling it ‘good for us economically.’ Moonves, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference at the Park Hotel in San Francisco, described the ‘circus’ of a presidential campaign and the flow of political advertising dollars, and stated that it ‘may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.’"

This is the current problem with the fourth estate, it has to be run as a business. The incentive is not to provide the most informative news, but the news that delivers the most money. When TV started and radio frequencies were given out, providing news was part of the bargain that the media had to give to make use of the public airwaves. Not so much anymore and news divisions are just another profit center. So this year we have at least one party, who's primary is being run a wrestling match and it's being covered as one as well. You get what you incentivize and we're doing that wrong.

The Most Undercovered Stories of 2015

"Around this time every year, BillMoyers.com asks reporters, editors and bloggers which key story they feel the mainstream media failed to cover adequately over the last 12 months. "

• The Most Undercovered Stories of 2015 (Part One)
• The Most Undercovered Stories of 2015 (Part Two)

Here are some that interested me:

• The social safety net reduced poverty by nearly half. "Census data released this year showed that in 2014 the safety net lifted 38 million people out of poverty. Without the safety net, our poverty rate would have been 27 percent instead of 15 percent. In 2012, the safety net literally cut poverty in half. That’s not losing: The War on Poverty has brought us halfway to where we want to be."
• Federal regulators won’t enforce campaign finance regulations. "Since 2009, the agencies tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws — notably those governing what super PACs and “social welfare” organizations can and cannot do to advance their political agendas — have, to varying degrees, been severely constrained from doing their jobs. Campaign finance watchdogs say they’re frustrated by their inability to get the FEC and the IRS to act on even airtight cases alleging campaign finance violations."
• Wall Street is putting trillions of America’s retirement savings into risky, secretive “alternative investments”
• The first presidential election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson secretly bought newspaper, ordered all hands to investigate judges he hated

This story from Boing Boing is crazy, Billionaire Sheldon Adelson secretly bought newspaper, ordered all hands to investigate judges he hated

No one knew who the mystery buyer of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was, just that $140m had changed hands under mysterious circumstances. But every reporter on the paper was ordered to drop everything and try to dig up dirt on three Clark County judges.

No one in management at any of the newspapers would admit that anything fishy was going on to the reporters who broke this story, James DeHaven, Jennifer Robison and Eric Hartley, who all write for the Review-Journal and were therefore investigating corruption on the part of their new bosses, which is a ballsy fucking move, given that the paper seems to have been purchased for the purpose of pursuing a personal vendetta against a local judge.

For more details see the source story from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Judge in Adelson lawsuit subject to unusual scrutiny amid Review-Journal sale.

All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.

Fact-checker Angie Drobnic Holan wrote in the NY Times All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others..

I found the following two paragraphs kind of depressing:

Today’s TV journalists — anchors like Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and George Stephanopoulos — have picked up the torch of fact-checking and now grill candidates on issues of accuracy during live interviews. Most voters don’t think it’s biased to question people about whether their seemingly fact-based statements are accurate. Research published earlier this year by the American Press Institute showed that more than eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking.

In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’ representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual claims.

Really? "Most voters don’t think it’s biased to question people about whether their seemingly fact-based statements are accurate." Isn't that what reporting is? And journalists are starting to do fact-checking because of click-throughs? Sigh, if that's what it takes.

As Krugman points out, the facts have a well-known liberal bias. I think this chart would have been clearer if the names had been color coded by party; lots of red up top and lots of blue down below.

Media attention to Trump, Kim Davis, Ann Coulter: Should we ignore outrageous candidates?

Dahlia Lithwick wrote Media attention to Trump, Kim Davis, Ann Coulter: Should we ignore outrageous candidates? "‘Stop posting about Kim Davis! You’re just encouraging her!’ ‘Why are you writing about Donald Trump at all? He feeds on this!’ The shark cat on the Roomba starts to look like the only permissible social commentary."

Her argument is:

My objection was that if we—as consumers and producers and purveyors of news—decide that we will simply ignore the existence and arguments of every pundit, candidate, or religious dissenter to whom we object, it doesn’t in fact make them go away. It simply takes us out of the conversation. If I made it a policy to never post on Facebook or write articles about hugely popular public figures or movements simply because I don’t want to make them look more serious, or make their crazy worldview look legitimate, I would be elevating what we call “epistemic closure” to DEFCON 4.

This is precisely why we have a liberal media and a conservative media that cannot agree on even demonstrable facts. Because ignoring the other side is a legitimate form of political discourse.

While she has a point, I think she's missing something. It's possible to talk about the issues, even the issues that these attention seeking trolls bring up, without talking about the trolls themselves. It's possible to do a story about immigration without mentioning Trump.

It's also the case that it's possible to cover people like Kim Davis without being all-consuming about it. She'll have her 15 mins but, does every journalist have to cover her around the clock for two weeks? Does the top 20 minutes of every hour of cable news have to be devoted to her? Lithwick writes infrequently, maybe she could skip every other media circus or only write about a third of them. As she said, ignoring Ann Coulter works. Maybe the "absurd" media would serve us better by at least doing more ignoring.

What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

The New York Times writes What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

When Seymour Hersh wrote his article in May there was much debate as to the validity and I figured I'd let things settle before diving in too much. This seems a reasonable attempt to followup and dive in on some of the details. As it says:

Where does the official bin Laden story stand now? For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state, floating somewhere between fact and mythology. The writing of history is a process, and this story still seems to have a long way to go before the government’s narrative can be accepted as true, or rejected as false.

It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011.

The cult of Vice

I like the HBO show Vice, but after reading more about the parent company in the Columbia Journalism Review's The cult of Vice I like them a little less.

More Misinformation about Banking Regulation

James Kwak has a great post on More Misinformation about Banking Regulation. It begins:

‘Fed Tells Big Banks to Shrink or Else,’ the Wall Street Journal proclaimed in the headline of its lead story today.* If only.

What the Federal Reserve actually did is impose new, additional capital requirements for the largest banks. JPMorgan Chase, for example, will have to hold 4.5 percentage points more capital than it would have had to otherwise. This is clearly a good thing, since it means that the banks that could do the most damage to the financial system will be a little bit safer. But it is neither a complete solution, nor is it the draconian constraint that the banks and the Journal make it out to be.

For starters, the rule will have no effect on seven of the eight banks in question (JPMorgan is the exception), since they already have enough capital to meet the new requirements. That alone should let you know how significant a rule this is.

Even so, the Journal says that banks will have to decide ‘whether to pay the cost of new regulation, which will fall to the bottom line, or change their business models.’ This is not true."

I'm so tired of news stories being completely one-sided and often false. Kwok does a great service in describing things in depth and not shying away from explaining the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (which I hadn't heard of and now kind of understand). Why can't newspapers do this? Why can't 24 hour cable news networks find the time to do this?

Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago

Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago Kottke has "built a page where you can watch the CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first moon walk, 40 years to the second after it originally happened. Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary)."

Zero for 40 at Predicting Attacks: Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously?

Zero for 40 at Predicting Attacks: Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously? "On Monday, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that country was under a new 'heightened terror alert' from 'ISIL-inspired attacks' 'leading up to the July 4th weekend.' "

The threat was given extra credence when former CIA director—and consultant at DC PR firm Beacon Global Strategies—Michael Morell went on CBS This Morning (6/29/15) and scared the ever-living bejesus out of everyone by saying he “wouldn’t be surprised if we were sitting [in the studio] next week discussing an attack on the US.” The first piece of evidence Morell used to justify his apocalyptic posture, the “50 ISIS arrests,” was accompanied by a scary map on the CBS jumbotron showing “ISIS arrests” all throughout the US:

But one key detail is missing from this graphic: None of these “ISIS arrests” involved any actual members of ISIS, only members of the FBI—and their network of informants—posing as such. (The one exception being the man arrested in Arizona, who, while having no contact with ISIS, was also not prompted by the FBI.) So even if one thinks the threat of “lone wolf” attacks is a serious one, it cannot be said these are really “ISIS arrests.” Perhaps on some meta-level, it shows an increase of “radicalization,” but it’s impossible to distinguish between this and simply more aggressive sting operations by the FBI.