Archives for category: Bias

Matt Viser of The Washington Post spoke to sources inside the Biden White House who had first-hand knowledge of President Biden’s five-hour interview with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur and his team. Viser reports that Biden’s associates were shocked by the derogatory statements in Hur’s report, casting doubt on Biden’s mental competence. They thought the meeting went well. From the report, it appears that Hur asked questions about dates and details that caught Biden off-guard, and Hur used Biden’s uncertainty to demean his intelligence.

As you read the reporting from people who were in the room, it appears that Hur asked “gotcha” questions (do you remember what you did six years ago? And do you remember the exact date? And what about that memo from 2009? Do you know which box it is in? Who put it there?)

Viser wrote:

President Biden had just spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the morning of Oct. 8, agonizing over how to rescue hostages taken by Hamas in its bloody attack the previous day, pledging American assistance, and weighing a volatile situation that threatened to spiral out of control in the Middle East.

Shortly after they hung up, the president’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, and White House counsel Ed Siskel arrived at the White House. The group walked down one flight of stairs to the Map Room, where Biden was to be interviewed by special counsel Robert K. Hur, who for nine months had been investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Those five hours and 10 minutes of interviews, unfolding over two days, would turn out to be momentous. But at the time, few foresaw how they would blow up four months later — not because of their content, but because Hur would repeatedly deride Biden’s memory during their time together. In a long-awaited report issued this week, Hur declined to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents but cast doubt on his memory, threatening to upend Biden’s pursuit of reelection by dwelling on perhaps his biggest political liability.

Hur’s description of Biden’s demeanor as that of a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” would infuriate Biden’s aides, who saw it as sharply at odds with what occurred as the president sat for voluntary questioning, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions. Hur cited the president’s ostensible memory problems in concluding that he would have trouble convincing a jury that Biden had willfully mishandled classified documents.

In the view of Biden’s team, the interviews proceeded in a routine, even dry, manner, as prosecutors asked Biden where he bought a particular file cabinet and how certain boxes were packed.

Biden himself was focused at the time on more immediate and world-shaking matters, having just made a round of phone calls to U.S. allies that would affect the roiling situation in the Middle East.

Biden and his attorneys even discussed postponing the interview, but they ultimately decided against it. They had already blocked off two days on the president’s schedule and, with the investigation already dragging on much longer than anticipated, were eager to put it behind them. They never contemplated resisting Hur’s request for the interview, figuring Biden had little to hide and would benefit from being transparent, according to members of his legal team.

Inside the White House, workers had converted a space on the first floor into a secure setting where classified information could be discussed. Long tables were brought into the Map Room, which takes its name from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of the space to consult maps and track the progress of World War II. It is also the room where, in 1998, President Bill Clinton testified to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr about his role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Biden and Hur sat across from each other, each with about four aides. Bottles of water sat on the table. Biden was flanked by Bauer to his right and Siskel to his left. Hur, who would be asking the questions, was accompanied by his deputy Marc Krickbaum, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, and several FBI agents.

The session started roughly on time, a rarity for the perennially late Biden. Hur introduced himself, noted the presence of a tape recorder that would be recording the session, listed everyone in the room, and began matter-of-factly interrogating the president.

The topics were straightforward, according to the people familiar with the matter and Hur’s later report, tracking years-old movements of boxes full of documents, including those that were packed up as Biden finished his vice-presidential term. Hur asked how documents were packed and shipped, and by whom. Biden was asked when he purchased specific file cabinets and what he stored in them.

There were a few moments when one side or the other cracked a modest joke, with a mood more conversational than confrontational. But the subject matter, and the tone, was mostly dry and factual, according to the people.

In some cases, Hur or his assistants would ask Biden to confirm that the handwriting on certain documents was his own — including on a folder that contained “Afganastan,” a misspelling that prosecutors later said repeatedly showed up in Biden’s writing dating back to the 1980s.

The president’s team had spent significant time preparing Biden to discuss his role in handling the documents, as well as his views on the propriety of keeping notecards where he had jotted down classified information, assuming that was what Hur was interested in. They did not anticipate that the president’s ability to recall dates or other details would figure into the questioning, let alone form such a devastating element of Hur’s report.

“Christ, that goes back a way,” Biden said at one point, reviewing a folder that read “Pete Rouse,” a longtime Senate staffer who was later an aide to President Barack Obama.

Biden at times told Hur he had limited knowledge of how the documents ended up where they did. He was asked at one point how a binder labeled “Beau Iowa” ended up in a well-worn box in his garage that also contained sensitive government material. Beau Biden, the president’s son, died of brain cancer in 2015.

“’Somebody must’ve, packing this up, just picked up all the stuff and put it in a box, because I didn’t,” he said, according to Hur’s report.

Hur later recounted that Biden could not remember exactly what year his vice-presidential tenure began or ended, citing that as evidence his memory was “significantly limited.” The president’s allies forcefully reject that characterization.

At some point, the discussion turned to the year when Beau died; Hur later reported that Biden could not recall the year with specificity. Biden has angrily denied not knowing when his son passed away, adding that it was not Hur’s business to ask such a question in the first place.

It is unclear exactly how Beau Biden came up during the interview, but some classified documents were found intermingled with photos of Beau and condolence notes that were received after his death. Investigators also reviewed Biden’s notebooks, some of which included “entries about purely personal subjects, such as the illness and death of his son, Beau,” they later reported. Beau also came up as they asked about his post vice-presidential pursuits, which included the Cancer Moonshot.

In addition, investigators explored the use of classified materials for Biden’s book “Promise Me, Dad,” which covered the aftermath of Beau’s death, though they concluded that no secret material made it into publication.

After several hours of questioning on Oct. 8, the two sides came to a stopping point and finished for the day. Later that afternoon, a live band could be heard from outside the White House as the president and first lady Jill Biden hosted a barbecue for staffers of the executive residence and their families.

The next day was Columbus Day, a Monday and a federal holiday. In the morning, Biden met with his senior national security advisers to continue discussing the situation in Israel. They were especially concerned about Iran and its proxies seizing advantage of the unstable situation and the possibility that the conflict could spread and engulf the broader Middle East.

One senior administration official involved in the Israel response, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions, said they had no idea that Biden had also been sitting for the special counsel interviews in the midst of the international crisis.

Biden planned that afternoon to speak with close allies of the United States, in hopes of sharing information and coming up with a joint position and strategy. But first, around midday, it was time to continue the meeting with the special counsel and his team. The two sides again filed into the Map Room, where the setup was the same as the day before.

One line of inquiry that afternoon involved a memo that Biden had sent to Obama in 2009 about Afghanistan — a classified document that Biden took from the White House and was later found in his garage, sitting in a damaged cardboard box near a dog crate, a broken, duct-taped lamp, and synthetic firewood. Biden had a copy of the memo, the special counsel later said, because he viewed it as a key piece of evidence showing that he was right to argue within the Obama administration for a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, a recommendation Obama nonetheless rejected.

Biden told Hur that he had stayed up late on Thanksgiving, writing by hand the only memo that he ever sent solely to Obama and no one else in the government, Hur’s report said.
“I was trying to change the president’s mind, and I wanted to let him know I was ready to speak out … and to really, quite frankly, save his ass,” Biden told the special counsel during the Oct. 9 interview.

He initially told Hur that he was not aware he had kept the memo after his vice presidency ended in January 2017. Asked a follow-up question, he responded, “I guess I wanted to hang on to it for posterity’s sake. I mean, this was my position on Afghanistan. And it later became discussed …. It became discussed inside the foreign policy establishment that I was recommending it.”

Emerging from the interview, Biden and his team felt the sessions had mostly gone as expected. It never occurred to them that Hur’s final report would provide scathing descriptions of Biden’s ostensible memory lapses, making his conclusions politically explosive even as he concluded that no charges were merited against Biden for mishandling classified documents.

The shock of Biden’s lawyers is evident in a letter they wrote in response to the report.
“At the outset of the interview, you recognized that the questions you planned to ask ‘relate to events that happened years ago,’ but nonetheless expressed your hope that the president would ‘put forth [his] best efforts and really try to get [his] best recollection in response to the questions we ask,’” Biden’s attorneys wrote. “It is hardly fair to concede that the president would be asked about events years in the past, press him to give his ‘best’ recollections, and then fault him for his limited memory.”

All that, however, was in the future. For the moment, Biden’s lawyers felt the interview had gone as well as could be expected.

And Biden had more urgent issues.

Immediately after the interview concluded, he walked to the Oval Office to meet with his national security team and call European counterparts. He also called Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) who was in Israel, to check on him and see if there was anything the White House could provide.

That night, the White House was illuminated in blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, to express solidarity with an ally that had just lost more than 1,000 citizens to a terrorist attack and was about to launch a long, deadly war. Biden, according to a person close to him, had retired to the residence that night to work on a speech he would deliver the next day.

Yasmeen Abutaleb, Perry Stein and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.

Matt Viser is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in October 2018, covering the midterms and the 2020 presidential election before moving over to the White House to cover President Biden’s administration. He was previously deputy chief of the Washington bureau for the Boston Globe.

Categories Bias, Biden, Elections, Justice

Marcy Wheeler: Hur’s Witch Hunt Comes Up with Nothing

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2024 //

121

Marcy Wheeler, at her Empty Wheel blog, submits the nearly 400-page Robert K. Hur report to a close textual analysis and concludes that his long-winded effort to find evidence of Biden’s criminality produced nothing other than his gratuitous and mean-spirited comments about Biden’s mental health. The full post is not reproduced here. Open the link to finish it.

She begins:

In the middle of his explanation for why he believed that Joe Biden had willfully retained classified records pertaining to Afghanistan but that he couldn’t prove that beyond a reasonable doubt, Special Counsel Robert Hur admitted that jurors “who are unwilling to read too much into” what Hur describes as an 8-word utterance would find his case lacking.

But reasonable jurors who are unwilling to read too much into Mr. Biden’s brief aside to Zwonitzer–“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”–may find a shortage of evidence to establish that Mr. Biden looked through the “Facts First” folder, which is the only folder known to contain national defense information. These jurors would acquit Mr. Biden of willfully retaining national defense information from the “Facts First” folder.

I’m puzzled how this is not a confession that he, Hur, was really reading too much into two file folders the FBI found in a box in Biden’s garage.

Indeed, that’s what two bizarre chapters in his story are, Hur the novelist, spinning a story about this box because, he admitted much earlier, this is the best he’s got.

As explained in Chapter Eleven, the strongest case for criminal charges against Mr. Biden relating to the Afghanistan documents would rest on his retention of the documents at the Virginia home in 2017.

The only other retained documents he even considered charging were Biden’s diaries, which Biden seems to have kept under the Presidential Records Act’s exclusion of diaries from the definition of Presidential Records (though Hur included a picture of Biden taking notes in one of these notebooks during a key meeting in the Situation Room, so that notebook, at least, was a Presidential Record).

(3) The term “personal records” means all documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President. Such term includes–

(A) diaries, journals, or other personal notes serving as the functional equivalent of a diary or journal which are not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business;

To sustain his claim that those notebooks represented willful retention that he couldn’t prove, Hur got in a squabble about the precedent set by Ronald Reagan’s diaries, which similarly included classified information, but which weren’t charged even after they bcame key evidence in the Iran-Contra investigation. Biden had a precedent to rely on, and so Hur didn’t charge.

So left with only the box in the garage to appease the Republicans, Hur worked backward from this reference in a conversation Biden had with his ghost writer in 2017, the 66-word utterance on which he built a 388-page report:

So this was – I, early on, in ’09-I just found all the classified stuff downstairs-I wrote the President a handwritten 40-page memorandum arguing against deploying additional troops to Iraq-I mean, to Afghanistan-on the grounds that it wouldn’t matter, that the day we left would be like the day before we arrived. And I made the same argument … I wrote that piece 11 or 12 years ago. [my emphasis]

Only Hur didn’t call it a 66-word utterance. He called it an 8-word utterance, repeating those bolded eight words 23 times in the report without mention of the 40-page memorandum that Biden mentioned in the same sentence. Only once did he provide the full context.

Biden’s attorneys argued that given that Biden mentioned it in the very same sentence, it’s more likely that Biden was referring to that memo than two folders of documents found in a box in Biden’s garage.

We believe that an accurate recitation of the evidence on this point would recognize the strong likelihood that the President was referring in the recording to his private handwritten letter to President Obama — the one mentioned on this recording immediately after the eight words that you are focused on — rather than the marked classified Afghanistan documents discovered in the Wilmington garage.

There were drafts of the memo — which Biden wrote over Thanksgiving in 2009 in an attempt to dissuade President Obama from surging more troops into Afghanistan — in the box in the garage, but the FBI found the hand-written memo itself stored elsewhere in Biden’s Wilmington home. It too had classified information in it, but Hur treated it like the diaries it was found in, something Biden wrongly treated as a personal document.

Because these documents on Afghanistan were the only thing he had, Hur went to some length to spin a story that might be consistent with Biden finding those documents in a rental house in Virginia in early 2017 and, just weeks after having sent other marked classified documents back to the Naval Observatory, deciding to keep them.

Part of that involved telling two stories, which narratively collapse events from 2017 with the discovery of the documents in question, to provide motive.

Hur’s first attempt suggested that Biden willfully retained these documents to help write his book, Promise Me, Dad, on which he was working with the ghost writer to whom he mentioned classified documents.

MR. BIDEN’S SECOND BOOK, PROMISE ME, DAD, AND THE DISCOVERY OF CLASSIFIED AFGHANISTAN DOCUMENTS

Like many presidents, Mr. Biden has long viewed himself as a historic figure. Elected to the Senate at age twenty-nine, he considered running for president as early as 1980 and did so in 1988, 2008, and 2020. During his thirty-six years in the Senate, Mr. Biden believed he had built a record in both domestic and foreign affairs that made him worthy of the presidency.

In addition to the notebooks and notecards on which he took notes throughout his vice presidency, Mr. Biden collected papers and artifacts related to noteworthy issues and events in his public life. He used these materials to write memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber.

Only, that story didn’t work, because Promise Me, Dad wasn’t about Afghanistan, it was about Beau’s death and Biden’s subsequent decision not to run for President in 2016. And while Hur tried to fudge what surely was the result of a classification review, that book had no classified information in it.

Please open the link to finish this excellent exegesis of the Hur report.

Categories Bias, Biden, Elections, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Hur Report Was a “Political Hit Job”

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2024 //

Heather Cox Richardson confirmed my reaction to the Hur report. It rambles on repetitively and tediously for 388 pages. But a one-page summary would have told its central funding: classified documents— from the 1970s and from his Vice-Presidency (2009-2017), mostly in his hand-written notebooks—were found in his homes and offices, but there will be no charges against him because there is no evidence of a crime. Biden was completely exonerated. The report’s multiple references to Biden’s age, mental acuity, and memory were gratuitous.

The media takeaway, however, was purely political: Biden’s mental fitness to serve as President became the headline, not the fact that he was completely exonerated.

Should Merrick Garland have expected something different from a prosecutor who is a member of the Federalist Society and who previously was appointed by Jeff Sessions and Trump? Of course, the full report would have leaked, given the political background of its author.

Garland had the duty to review the voluminous and repetitive text before it was released. He could have decided that it should be condensed into a 1-3 page summary, as the investigation of Mike Pence’s documents was. But Garland was afraid it would leak so he didn’t touch it.

Richardson writes:

Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023 to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents before he was president, released his report. It begins: “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.” The Department of Justice closed a similar case against former Vice President Mike Pence on June 1, 2023, days before Pence announced his presidential bid, with a brief, one-page letter.

But in Biden’s case, what followed the announcement that he had not broken a law was more than 300 pages of commentary, including assertions that Biden was old, infirm, and losing his marbles and even that “[h]e did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” (p. 208).

As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”

Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their teams came out swinging against what amounted to a partisan hit job by a Republican special counsel. The president’s lawyers noted that it is not Department of Justice practice and protocol to criticize someone who is not going to be charged, and tore apart Hur’s nine references to Biden’s memory in contrast to his willingness to “accept…other witnesses’ memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”

They pointed out that “there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours. This is especially true under the circumstances, which you do not mention in your report, that his interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. In the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”

Nonetheless, they note, Biden provided “often detailed recollections across a wide range of questions, from staff management of paper flow in the West Wing to the events surrounding the creation of the 2009 memorandum on the Afghanistan surge. He engaged at length on theories you offered about the way materials were packed and moved during the transition out of the vice presidency and between residences. He pointed to flaws in the assumptions behind specific lines of questioning.”

They were not alone in their criticism. Others pointed out that Republicans have made Biden’s age a central point of attack, but Politico reported last October that while former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was publicly mocking Biden’s age and mental fitness, he was “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations.” Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America and Message Box noted that the report’s “characterizations of Biden don’t match those relayed by everyone who talks to him, including [Republicans].”

He explained: “There are few secrets in [Washington], and if Joe Biden acted like Hur says, we would all know. Biden meets with dozens of people daily—staffers, members of Congress, CEOs, labor officials, foreign leaders, and military and intelligence officials…. If Biden was regularly misremembering obvious pieces of information or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press. Washington is not capable of keeping something like that secret.”

But the media ran not with the official takeaway of the investigation—that Biden had not committed a crime—or with a reflection on the accuracy or partisan reason for Hur’s commentary, but with Hur’s insinuations. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that the New York Times today ran five front-page stories above the fold about the report and Biden’s memory….

As far back as 1950, when Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) insisted—without evidence—that the Department of State under Democratic president Harry Truman had been infiltrated by Communists, Republicans have used official investigations to smear their opponents. State Department officials condemned McCarthy’s “Sewer Politics” and the New York Timescomplained about his “hit-and-run” attacks, but McCarthy’s outrageous statements and hearings kept his accusations in the news. That media coverage, in turn, convinced many Americans that his charges were true.

Other Republicans finally rejected McCarthy, but in 1996, congressional Republicans frustrated by the election of Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Democrats’ subsequent expansion of the vote with the so-called Motor Voter law in 1993 resurrected his tactics. They launched investigations into two elections they insisted the Democrats had stolen. They discovered no fraud, but their investigation convinced a number of Americans that voter fraud was a serious problem.

There were ten investigations into the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed and several others wounded; Republican-dominated House committees held six of them. Kevin McCarthy bragged to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the Benghazi special committee was part of a “strategy to fight and win” against then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The strategy of weaponizing investigations went on to be central to the 2016 election, when Trump ran on the investigation of Clinton’s email practices, and to the 2020 election, when Trump tried to weaken Biden’s candidacy by trying to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say that Ukraine was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and the company he worked for.

Going into 2024, the House is investigating Hunter Biden, and while witness testimony and evidence has not supported their contention that President Biden is corrupt, the stench of the hearings has convinced a number of MAGA voters of the opposite.

And now the media appears to be falling for this strategy yet again.

Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen outlined how Biden’s performance disproves the argument that he is unfit for the presidency: “The thing about Biden’s memory,” Cohen wrote, “is that he’s presided over the addition of ~15 million jobs & 800k manufacturing jobs, 23 straight months of sub-4% unemployment, surging consumer sentiment, wages outpacing inflation, the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPs Act, PACT Act, infrastructure law, gun safety law, VAWA, codified marriage equality, canceled $136 billion in student loan debt for 3.7 million borrowers, bolstered NATO, and presided over electoral wins in ‘20, ‘22 and ‘23….”

It may be, though, that the report has been a game changer in a different way than Hur intended it. Hur’s suggestion that Biden does not remember when his son died seems to echo the moment in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings in which Senator McCarthy was trying to prove that the U.S. Army had been infiltrated by Communists. Sensing himself losing, McCarthy attacked on national television a young aide of Joseph Nye Welch, the lawyer defending the Army.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch demanded. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy didn’t, but Americans did, and they finally threw him off the public stage.

Biden supporters took their gloves off today, producing videos of Trump’s incoherence, gaffes, and wandering off stages, and noting that he mistook writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he sexually assaulted, for his second wife, Marla Maples, when asked to identify Carroll in a photograph. They also produced clips of Fox News Channel personalities Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters messing up names themselves on screen, and gaffes from Republican lawmakers.

Senior communications advisor for the Biden-Harris campaign T.J. Ducklo released a statement lambasting Trump for a speech he gave tonight in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying: “Tonight, he lied more than two dozen times, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and placated suingvthe gun lobby weeks after telling parents to ‘get over it’ after their kids were gunned down at school. But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows.”

But it was Biden who responded most powerfully. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he told reporters. “How in the hell dare he raise that…. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” And when asked about Hur’s dismissal of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden responded with justified anger: “I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been President. I put this country back on its feet.”

Categories Bias, Biden, Elections, Trump

Michael Tomasky: The Rightwing Takeover of the Media

By dianeravitch

January 22, 2024 //

Writing in The New Republic, Michael Tomasky describes how the rightwing has deftly invested in buying up media properties, even those that lose money. They play the long game, Tomasky argues, while Democrats and liberals ignore the reality of media control. Sinclair has been so successful in rural areas that Democratic candidates don’t have a chance. He wonders whether Democratic big wheels will ever catch in.

I subscribe to The New Republic. So should you.

He writes:

You have no doubt seen the incredibly depressing news about the incredibly depressing purchase of The Baltimore Sun by the incredibly depressing David Smith, chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media empire best known for gobbling up local television news operations and forcing local anchors to spout toxic Big Brother gibberish like this.

The Sun was once a great newspaper. I remember reading, once upon a time, that it had sprung more foreign correspondents into action across the planet than any American newspaper save The New York Times and The Washington Post. It had eight foreign bureaus at one point, all of which were shuttered by the Tribune Company by 2006. But the Sun’s real triumphs came in covering its gritty, organic city. And even well after its glory days, it still won Pulitzers—as recently as 2020, for taking down corrupt Mayor Catherine Pugh, who served a stretch in prison thanks to the paper.

Smith wasted no time in showing his cards during his first meeting with the staff Wednesday. He was asked about a comment he made to New York magazine back in 2018, when he said, “Print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble.” (“Dribble”? Let’s hope he won’t be on the copy desk.) Did he feel that way about the Sun specifically? “In many ways, yes,” Smith said, adding that he wants the paper to emulate the local Fox affiliate, which is owned … by Sinclair.

But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night….”

The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.

And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.

I’ve been in the trenches of this fight for many years. Back in the George W. Bush era, the late Rob Stein, a Democratic insider and good friend of mine, mapped for the first time the conservative infrastructure in a PowerPoint presentation that became such a hot ticket in Washington liberal circles that The New York Times Magazine did a story about it. He showed, from looking over conservative groups’ 990s (because they were mostly all nonprofits), how much was spent on policy development, how much on field operations, how much on youth training, and how much on media. I don’t remember the numbers, but the media figure was high.

Much of this spending was coordinated. Murdoch’s empire didn’t count, because his properties were for-profit, as was The Washington Times. But a lot of the nonprofit spending was directed by a handful of anointed movement leaders, and they made certain that a big chunk of money was spent on media.

I used to try to argue, whenever I was lucky enough to get the ear of one of our side’s rich people for five minutes, that we needed to build an avowedly liberal media infrastructure. I was told that they just weren’t that interested. They had other priorities. They were concerned with the issues. They weren’t prepared to lose all that money, and for what?

For what? Ask Viktor Orbán. He knows. Ask Rupert. Why has he held onto the New York Post? News Corp., the parent company, makes a profit. But the Post loses kajillions. Nobody knows how much, but here’s an estimate from 12 years ago that put the paper’s losses at $60 to $120 million a year.

So why does he keep it? Because it’s worth every penny. It gives him power. The Post’s editors know how to use its front page and its news pages to shape discourse. Where did last fall’s New York crime scare come from, the one that had Westchesterites convinced they dare not set foot in the city, and which elected all those Republican members of Congress? From the Post, that’s where.

I used to be told sometimes, “Yes, but we have The New York Times, The Washington Post …” Really? No, not really. Sure, they endorse Democrats mostly. And sure, much of their social and cultural coverage proceeds from liberal assumptions. They, and almost all of the mainstream media, will not write a story today suggesting, for example, that undocumented immigrants across America should be rounded up en masse and deported. This has been a hard-won reality forged by many activists and intellectuals over many years, and it is a good thing.

But it isn’t capital-P Politics. On capital-PPolitics, The New York Times and The Washington Post often let liberals down. I was having these arguments, as I said, back when Dubya was president, and he and his vassals were ginning up their phony case for invading Iraq. Which newspaper published the infamous “aluminum tubes” story charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking material that could only be used in nuclear centrifuges? The Times, on its front page on a crucial Sunday in the fall of 2002, as Bush officials spent the day fanning out onto the political chat shows touting the article.

It was false. Eventually, the Times itself debunked the story—but in 2004, well after the war had started. And as for the Post, that liberal paper’s editorial page was one of the most important promoters of the Iraq invasion in all of American media. (Speaking of the unreliability of liberal media outlets at that time, it would be evasive of me not to mention The New Republic’s own fervent support of the war, but that wasn’t me; I was helming The American Prospect at the time, and we opposed it.)

I used to say to people: What we need is a full-throated liberal tabloid in Washington—a Washington version of the New York Post that would use its front pages and its news columns to promote embarrassing stories and scandals about Bush administration officials, evangelical grifters, and other prominent right-wingers. It would be agenda-setting. It would have some juicy gossip columns and a great sports section because a tabloid newspaper has to. And most of all, it would have done the vital work of connecting liberal values to a proletarian tabloid sensibility.

Everyone I mentioned this to laughed in my face, and maybe you are too. But Phil Anschutz didn’t laugh. He started a conservative tabloid right around the same time I was saying our side should start a liberal one. And what’s happened? I suppose he’s lost money, although I don’t really know. But The Washington Examineris a respected property (it gave up on print in 2013, but that was fine; by then it was an established presence). I see its people on cable news, and it has produced some legit stars like Tim Alberta. It has influence, I assume its reporters have Hill press credentials, and I don’t see anybody laughing at it…

And now let’s return our thoughts to Sinclair. How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today…

What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.

Categories Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Republicans, Trump

The Text Messages Between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

By dianeravitch

January 12, 2024 //

The text messages between Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, show how determined Ginni Thomas was to keep Trump in office. She was certain that Democrats were stealing the election. She urged Meadows to listen closely to lawyer Sidney Powell. She urged Meadows to “release the kraken,” Powell’s words. Even when Meadows told her that Powell had no evidence of voter fraud, Ginni Thomas was undeterred.

Note: Sidney Powell subsequently claimed that no reasonable person would believe what she said about the election. When indicted in Atlanta for lying about the election, she pleaded guilty. But Ginni Thomas believed her. This suggests that Ginni Thomas is not a “reasonable person.”

If you listen to the text exchanges, you are likely to conclude that Justice Thomas must recuse himself from any case brought to the Supreme Court about the 2020 election. He is not impartial.

This message was tweeted by Denver Riggleman, a former Republican Congressman from Virginia who served as a technical advisor to the January 6 Committee.

Denver Riggleman⁦‪@RepRiggleman‬⁩On the 3-year anniversary of #Jan6, I read aloud all 29 texts between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows.

It’s a reminder of the delusion that fueled the J6 attack- all the way to the top. Listen to the Bourbon texts because you’ll need a drink. youtu.be/UeDqnuSlrCA?si… via ⁦‪@YouTube‬⁩ 1/6/24, 9:12 PM

Categories Accountability, Bias, Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

David Wallace-Wells: The Headlines Are Wrong! U.S. Students Outperformed Their Peers in Rest of World on PISA Test

By dianeravitch

December 15, 2023 //

The news media keep a set of stock headlines at the ready whenever national or international test scores are posted: SCORES DECLINE! U.S. STUDENTS FAILING! A SPUTNIK MOMENT! OUR SCHOOLS ARE FAILING!

All these cries of “failure” feed the phony narrative of the privatization movement. Organizations funded by rightwing billionaires promote the idea that students will get higher scores in charters or voucher schools (we now know that this claim is not true, that charter schools are no better (and often worse) than public schools, and that vouchers subsidize wealthy families and do not save poor kids.

It is a fact that U.S. students have never performed well on international tests, as I explained in my book REIGN OF ERROR. Since the 1960s, when the first international tests were administered, our scores on these tests were mediocre to awful. Nonetheless, our economy has outperformed nations whose students got higher scores decades ago.

Now for the good news.

The latest international test scores were released a few days ago, and scores went down everywhere due to the pandemic. David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for The New York Times, reported that even with dropping scores, U.S. students outperformed the rest of the world!

He writes:

By now, you’ve probably registered the alarm that pandemic learning loss has produced a “lost generation” of American students.

This self-lacerating story has formed the heart of an indictment of American school policies during the pandemic, increasingly cited by critics of the country’s mitigation policies as the clearest example of pandemic overreach.

But we keep getting more data about American student performance over the last few years, and the top lines suggest a pretty modest setback, even compared to how well the country’s students performed, in recent years, in the absence of any pandemic disruption.

Now, for the first time, we have good international data and can compare American students’ performance with students’ in peer countries that, in many cases, made different choices about whether and when to close schools and whether and when to open them.

This data comes from the Program for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in almost 80 countries typically every three years — a long-running, unimpeachable, nearly global standardized test measure of student achievement among the world’s 15-year-olds in math, reading and science.

And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

The performance looks even stronger once you get into the weeds a bit. In reading, the average U.S. score dropped just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. Across the rest of the O.E.C.D., the average loss was 11 times as large. In Germany, which looked early in the pandemic to have mounted an enviable good-government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Britain, the country most often compared with the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many metrics, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the darling of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.

In science, the United States lost three points, about the same decline as the O.E.C.D. average and still above the level Americans reached in 2016 and 2013. On the same test, German students lost 11 points, and British and Swedish students dropped five; performance by students in Iceland fell by 28 points.

In math, the United States had a more significant and worrying drop: 13 points. But across the other nations of the O.E.C.D., the average decline from 2018 to 2022 was still larger: 16 points. And in historical context, even the 13-point American drop is not that remarkable — just two points larger than the drop the country experienced between the 2012 and 2015 math tests, suggesting that longer-term trajectories in math may be more concerning than the short-term pandemic setback. Break the scores out to see the trajectories for higher-performing and lower-performing subgroups, and you can hardly see the impact of the pandemic at all.

Of course, the Program for International Student Assessment is just one test, with all the limitations of any standardized measure. It is not good news, in general, if the world is struggling academically. And none of this is an argument for American educational excellence or never-ending remote learning or a claim there was no impact from closures on American kids or a suggestion that the country’s schools should have stayed closed as long as they did.

It is simply a call to assess the legacy of those closures in the proper context: a pandemic that killed 25 million people globally and more than a million in the United States and brought more than a billion children around the world home from school in 2020. In the 18 months that followed, American schools were not choosing between universal closures and an experience entirely undisturbed by Covid-19. They were choosing different ways of navigating the pandemic landscape, as was every other school system in the world. A good first test of whether the country bungled school closures is probably whether peer countries, in general, did better. The test scores imply that they didn’t.

So why do we keep telling ourselves the self-lacerating story of our pandemic educational failure?

One reason could be that while some state-level testing data shows no correlation between school closures and learning loss, some analysis of district-level data has shown a closer correlation. But this suggests that learning loss is not a national problem but a narrower one, requiring a narrower response.

Another is that testing is blind to other markers of well-being. Chronic absenteeism, for instance, is up significantly since before the pandemic and may prove a far more lasting and concerning legacy of school closure than learning loss. And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national mental health emergency — language that has been echoed by the American Medical Association.

But while American teenagers have reported higher levels of emotional distress in several high-profile surveys, here, too, the details yield a subtler picture. In the first year of the pandemic, according to a study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, 17 percent fewer American teens made mental-health visits to emergency rooms than in the year before; in the second year, they made nearly 7 percent more. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of teenage girls reporting persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness rose from 47 percent in 2019 to 57 percent in 2021 — a concerning rise, though only slightly larger than the six-point increase from 2017 to 2019. The number of male teens reporting the same barely grew, from 27 percent to 29 percent, having risen much faster from 2017 to 2019.

Each of these data points should probably be understood in the context of mental health surveys of older Americans, such as the General Social Survey, which found that the percentage of American adults describing themselves as “very happy” fell from 31 percent in 2018 to 19 percent in 2021 and those describing themselves as “not too happy” nearly doubled to 24 percent. It is hard to disentangle the effects of school closure here from the experience of simply living through an anxious and disruptive time. To judge by the bleakest standard, youth suicide declined during the period of school closure and returned to prepandemic levels only after schools reopened.

Overall, American adults lost some confidence in the country’s school system in those years, with national approval dropping from 50 percent to 42 percent. But the drop is not from current parents of kids in school, whose approval rose throughout the pandemic, according to Gallup, from 72 percent in 2020 to 73 percent in 2021 to 80 percent in 2022. (Other recent surveys, including ones from Pew and The Times, have found similar postpandemic parental approval, between 77 percent and 90 percent.) Instead, as Matt Barnum suggested on ChalkBeat, the decline has been driven by the perspective of people without kids in those schools today — by childless adults and those who’ve opted out of the public school system for a variety of personal and ideological reasons. [Ed.: bold added]

Could we have done better? Surely. We might have done more to open all American schools in the fall of 2020 and to make doing so safe enough — through frequent pooled and rapid testing, more outdoor learning and better indoor ventilation, among other measures — to reassure parents, 71 percent of whom said that summer that in-person school was a large or moderate risk to their children and a majority of whom said that schools should remain closed until there was no Covid risk at all. We could have provided more educational and emotional support through the darkest troughs of the pandemic and probably been clearer, throughout the pandemic, that the risk of serious illness to individual kids was relatively low.

But we could do better now, too, by sidestepping pandemic blame games that require us both to exaggerate the effect of school closures on educational achievement and the degree to which policymakers, rather than the pandemic, were responsible.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Education Reform, Failure, Fake News, Hoax, International, Standardized Testing

Dana Milbank: The 3 Stooges Plan to Impeach Biden

By dianeravitch

December 11, 2023 //

Jim Jordan and his fellow MAGA-ts are determined to impeach President Biden as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. They have no reason for impeachment; Biden has committed no crime, unlike Trump, who invited an insurrection. Dana Milbank says that Jordan and his crew are the Three Stooges of American politics.

He writes:

After House Republicans’ caucus meeting in the Capitol basement this week, Speaker Mike Johnson gave the media an update on his release of thousands of hours of security footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The release had been slowed, Johnson explained, because “we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day, because we don’t want them to be retaliated against — and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”

It was as clear a statement as there could be on where the new speaker’s allegiance lies: protecting those who sacked the Capitol from being brought to justice for their crimes. Johnson (La.) was openly siding with the insurrectionists and against the United States government he swore an oath to defend.

The Justice Department already has the undoctored footage, as Johnson’s spokesman later acknowledged, so, presumably, the speaker is trying to prevent members of the public from identifying anyone in the violent mob (“persons who participated in the events of that day”) that law enforcement might have overlooked. Sure, they attacked the seat of government in their bloody attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, but let us respect their privacy! After all the yammering from the right about transparency, Johnson is manipulating the footage — not to protect the Capitol’s security but to protect the attackers.

Hours after aligning himself with the insurrectionists, Johnson went to break bread with the Christian nationalists. At the Museum of the Bible, he gave the keynote address to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group whose founder and leader, Jason Rapert, has said, “I reject that being a Christian nationalist is somehow unseemly or wrong.”

At the group’s meeting in June, one of the speakers noted with approval that “the American colonies imposed the death penalty for sodomy.” Confirmed speakers and award recipients for the gathering Johnson addressed included: a man who proposed that gay people should wear “a label across their forehead, ‘This can be hazardous to your health’”; a woman who blames gay marriage for Noah’s flood; and, as the liberal watchdog Media Matters reported, various adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians.
Reporters were kicked out of this week’s event before Johnson spoke but, before the event, Rapert called Johnson “an answer to prayer,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Alex Thomas reported.

Err, was that a prayer for the branding of gay people?

Rapert’s organization also promotes the pine-tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has been embraced by Christian nationalists, was among the banners flown at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — and, by total and remarkable coincidence, is proudly displayed outside Johnson’s congressional office.

Former speaker Kevin McCarthy this week became the 31st lawmaker in the House to announce his retirement, as members of both parties stampede to exit the woefully dysfunctional chamber. McCarthy, the California Republican who spent most of 2023 saying “I do not quit,” will quit this month, with a year left in his term.

Freshman Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) decried the “brain drain” in his party — veteran Republicans Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Michael Burgess (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) are among those on the way out — although, in fairness, there wasn’t a whole lot of brain in the first place. Of more immediate concern to Republicans is a vote drain: After the expulsion of George Santos (N.Y.) and McCarthy’s resignation, the GOP, paralyzed with a four-vote majority throughout this year, will have just a two-vote majority.

McCarthy, announcing his departure in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, reflected: “It often seems that the more Washington does, the worse America gets.” By this standard, he should be delighted with the current Congress. Famously unproductive during his tenure as speaker, it is now doing almost nothing.

U.S. funds for Ukraine’s defense will run dry by the end of the month, leaving the invaded country vulnerable to a Russian takeover. But Johnson said he won’t take up Ukraine support in the House unless Democrats pay a ransom: a nonnegotiable demand that they swallow House Republicans’ entire wish list of border policies. That obstinance has blown up negotiations in the Senate, where Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) calls Johnson’s position “not rational,” Punchbowl News reported.
Johnson has likewise stalled military aid to Israel, which commands overwhelming bipartisan support, by making another unrelated ransom demand: Democrats must repeal legislation that gave the IRS more clout to go after wealthy tax cheats. Johnson has also bottled up attempts to fund the government after next month by failing to agree to the overall spending number that Senate Republicans and House and Senate Democrats have all accepted.

In rare cases when Johnson does try to do something productive, his fellow Republicans denounce him. After a double flip-flop, the speaker finally blessed a compromise with Senate Democrats on the annual National Defense Authorization Act, including a temporary extension of the 9/11-era FISA 702 surveillance authority. “Outrageous … a total sell-out,” protested Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.). Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) told the Messenger’s Lindsey McPherson this was “strike two and a half — if not more” against Johnson.

The new speaker has even managed to divide the chamber on a matter where there had been virtually no disagreement: the need to denounce the recent rise in antisemitism. The House Education Committee held one of the best hearings of the year this week, in which the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT disgraced themselves by suggesting, in response to questions by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and others, that their students should feel free to run around calling for the genocide of Jews.

It was an entirely different picture on the House floor, where Republicans brought up the latest of several resolutions condemning antisemitism. This resolution, however, declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” a dubious proposition equating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. A group of Jewish Democrats, arguing that “the safety of Jewish lives is not a game,” urged colleagues to vote “present” in protest — and 92 of them did. But for Republicans, it was a game: After the vote, the National Republican Campaign Committee, the House GOP’s political arm, put out a statement saying “extreme House Democrats just refused to denounce the … drastic rise of antisemitism.”
Alas, for the NRCC, the one genuinely antisemitic act from the episode came from Republican Rep. Tom Massie (Ky.), who suggested in a post on X that Congress placed “Zionism” above “American patriotism.”

Still, it would be unfair to suggest that House Republicans have been entirely unproductive during Johnson’s tenure. They have continued to censure each other at a record-setting pace. This week, it was Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s turn. What grave constitutional offense had been committed this time? The New York Democrat had pulled a fire alarm in one of the House office buildings in September.

“If extreme MAGA Republicans are going to continue to try to weaponize the censure,” Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) said on the House floor on Wednesday, “going after Democrats repeatedly, week after week after week because you have nothing better to do, then I volunteer: Censure me next! … That’s how worthless your censure effort is.”

The race to censure has become a competitive sport among Republicans. After McCormick recently got a vote on his motion to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) before Greene got a vote on her motion to censure Tlaib, Greene accused her fellow Georgian of “assault,” Politico’s Olivia Beavers reports. McCormick said he shook Greene by the shoulders in a “friendly” gesture.
And censure is just a warm-up for the main event. Next week, House Republicans plan to vote to authorize a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden. You see, they believe they have finally found the smoking gun that proves Biden guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors: He helped his son buy a pickup truck in 2018.

They have become the Three Stooges of the House’s Biden investigations: Jim, Jason and James, stepping on rakes and getting hit by falling flowerpots as they try to make a case for their predetermined outcome of impeaching the president. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is Moe, thundering and blundering in his repeated failures to prove Biden’s “weaponization” of the government. Jason Smith, the in-over-his-head chairman of Ways and Means, is Larry, brainlessly reciting whatever script is in front of him. And Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is Curly, perpetually getting a pie in the face when the “evidence” he produces is immediately debunked.

“BREAKING,” Comer announced on social media this week, with two siren emojis. “Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.” This was evidence that the president “knew & benefitted from his family’s business schemes.” But it turned out the payments, for all of $1,380 each, were repayments for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck Biden helped his son Hunter buy at a time when the younger Biden was broke because of his drug addiction.

Their act is so weak that these stooges have already gone into reruns. Last week, Jordan’s “weaponization” panel held a hearing on supposed censorship at Twitter — the same topic of a hearing he had in March, with two of the same witnesses. This week, Smith’s committee had a hearing with the same two IRS “whistleblowers” who already testified about the Hunter Biden case before that panel, as well as before the Oversight Committee, earlier this year.

Comer, after seeing his allegations refuted in hearing after disastrous hearing, has said he doesn’t want to have any additional public sessions. He prefers the safety of closed-door depositions, from which he can selectively leak misleading tidbits.

Last week, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said his client would be happy to testify publicly before Congress. “We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public,” he wrote. “We therefore propose opening the door.” But Comer immediately rejected the offer, and he and Jordan are now threatening to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for insisting on public, rather than closed-door, testimony.

Their desire for secrecy is perfectly understandable, given the absence of evidence against the president. Last week, Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo asked a Republican member of Comer’s Oversight panel, Lisa McClain (Mich.), whether investigators had been able to “identify any actual policy changes” that Biden made related to his family’s business dealings. “The short answer is no,” McClain replied.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

This week, the three stooges assembled in the echoey lobby of the Longworth House Office Building for a “media availability” on the impeachment inquiry. Smith alleged that the Bidens moved “an unimaginable sum of money” (actually, between $10 million and $20 million, compared with multiple billions of dollars similarly received by Trump family members from foreign interests). Comer repeated his allegation about the “monthly payments” made to Biden, again omitting that they were for Hunter’s pickup truck.

The three suddenly hustled away. “No questions?” Washington Examiner’s Reese Gorman called after them. “I thought this was a press conference.”
Smith then gaveled in the Ways and Means Committee to hear once more from his “whistleblowers.” His first order of business: to close the meeting to the public and the media.
The ranking Democrat, Richard Neal (Mass.), made a motion for the hearing to remain open to the public. “You’re not recognized,” Smith replied.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) asked to debate the Republicans’ motion to kick out the public. “It’s not debatable,” Smith shot back.

Republicans repelled the Democratic attempts at transparency in party-line votes; Smith ordered the room cleared of journalists and spectators. Republicans said they would release a transcript “upon completion of our meeting,” but it didn’t come out that day, or the next.

Their fevered efforts to hide from the public make it clear House Republicans have lost the plot in their attempt to implicate Biden. But will they impeach him anyway? Certainly! Woop, woop, woop, woop, woop, woop.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Biden, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Columbia Journalism Review: Yes, There Is Bias in the Mainstream Media

By dianeravitch

November 28, 2023 //

Researchers at the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review conducted a study of the election coverage on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post and concluded, despite the protests of editors, that the pre-election coverage in recent years was not objective. Their biggest complaint was that the newspapers reported the Presidential campaign as a horse race instead of informing readers about real policy differences between the candidates. But there was another kind of bias at work: The New York Times published ten front-page articles about Hillary Clinton’s emails in the months before the election, which turned out to be a phony issue.

The article begins:

Seven years ago, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media analysts rushed to explain Donald Trump’s victory. Misinformation was to blame, the theory went, fueled by Russian agents and carried on social networks. But as researchers, we wondered if fascination and fear over “fake news” had led people to underestimate the influence of traditional journalism outlets. After all, mainstream news organizations remain an important part of the media ecosystem—they’re widely read and watched; they help set the agenda, including on social networks. We decided to look at what had been featured on the printed front page of the New York Times in the three months leading up to Election Day. Of a hundred and fifty articles that discussed the campaign, only a handful mentioned policy; the vast majority covered horse race politics or personal scandals. Most strikingly, the Times ran ten front-page stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server. “If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues,” we concluded, “they would not have learned much from reading the Times.”

We didn’t suggest that the election coverage in the Times was any worse than what appeared in other major outlets, “so much as it was typical of a broader failure of mainstream journalism.” But we did expect, or at least hope, that in the years that followed, the Times would conduct a critical review of its editorial policies. Was an overwhelming focus on the election as a sporting contest the best way to serve readers? Was obsessive attention to Clinton’s email server really justified in light of the innumerable personal, ethical, and ultimately criminal failings of Trump? It seemed that editors had a responsibility to rethink both the volume of attention paid to certain subjects as well as their framing.

After the 2022 midterms, we checked back in, this time examining the printed front page of the Times and the Washington Post from September 1, 2022, through Election Day that November. As before, we figured the front page mattered disproportionately, in part because articles placed there represent selections that publishers believe are most important to readers—and also because, according to Nielsen data we analyzed, 32 percent of Web-browsing sessions around that period starting at the Times homepage did not lead to other sections or articles; people often stick to what they’re shown first. We added the Post this time around for comparison, to get a sense of whether the Times really was anomalous.

It wasn’t. We found that the Times and the Post shared significant overlap in their domestic politics coverage, offering little insight into policy. Both emphasized the horse race and campaign palace intrigue, stories that functioned more to entertain readers than to educate them on essential differences between political parties. The main point of contrast we found between the two papers was that, while the Postdelved more into topics Democrats generally want to discuss—affirmative action, police reform, LGBTQ rights—the Times tended to focus on subjects important to Republicans—China, immigration, and crime.

By the numbers, of four hundred and eight articles on the front page of the Timesduring the period we analyzed, about half—two hundred nineteen—were about domestic politics. A generous interpretation found that just ten of those stories explained domestic public policy in any detail; only one front-page article in the lead-up to the midterms really leaned into discussion about a policy matter in Congress: Republican efforts to shrink Social Security. Of three hundred and ninety-three front-page articles in the Post, two hundred fifteen were about domestic politics; our research found only four stories that discussed any form of policy. The Post had no front-page stories in the months ahead of the midterms on policies that candidates aimed to bring to the fore or legislation they intended to pursue. Instead, articles speculated about candidates and discussed where voter bases were leaning. (All of the data and analysis supporting this piece can be found here.)

Exit polls indicated that Democrats cared most about abortion and gun policy; crime, inflation, and immigration were top of mind for Republicans. In the Times, Republican-favored topics accounted for thirty-seven articles, while Democratic topics accounted for just seven. In the Post, Republican topics were the focus of twenty articles and Democratic topics accounted for fifteen—a much more balanced showing. In the final days before the election, we noticed that the Times, in particular, hit a drumbeat of fear about the economy—the worries of voters, exploitation by companies, and anxieties related to the Federal Reserve—as well as crime. Data buried within articles occasionally refuted the fear-based premise of a piece. Still, by discussing how much people were concerned about inflation and crime—and reporting in those stories that Republicans benefited from a sense of alarm—the Times suggested that inflation and crime were historically bad (they were not) and that Republicans had solutions to offer (they did not).

I urge you to open the link and read the article. It confirms what many of us suspected: the major media are all too easily sucked into the GOP narrative and parrot it. Expect to see a focus in the lead-up to the 2024 election that emphasizes inflation, crime, fears about Biden’s age, and every verbal slip up he makes, and every other reason either to abstain from voting or to vote for Trump. We will see, as we do already, a drumbeat of articles about why this group or that one will not vote for Biden (so far, I have seen such articles about the youth vote, the Black vote, the Hispanic vote, and the Muslim vote). It would be ironic if Muslims didn’t vote for Biden because of his support for Israel, since Trump tried to ban immigration from Muslim-majority nations and is openly nativist.

Will the major media allow Trump and his enablers again to set their agenda?

Robert Hubbell read this study and remarked that the major media are again treating the Presidential campaign as a horse race between Biden and Trump, as though it were a normal election. It’s not. Trump has already sketched the plans for his second term, and they are a recipe for enhancing his power and destroying his enemies.

Hubbell wrote:

I am going to take this opportunity to make a direct plea to journalists, producers, and editors in the news media who read this newsletter. I know you are out there because I hear from you when you feel that I unfairly bash the news media. I occasionally receive mistaken “reply-to-all” or forwarded emails to your colleagues that inadvertently include me. (Don’t worry; I delete them immediately.) (Hint: Do a Google search for “How to remove a name from autofill in an email address field.”)

Let me start with an olive branch. There are exceptional journalists doing great work every day. I cite them every day. They can’t please everyone all the time. They deserve our support and thanks—and forbearance for the occasional mistake. So here it is: Thank you to every journalist who is doing a tough job well in a news environment that is the equivalent of a war zone of disinformation.

Ignore my whining and carping; dismiss me as a crank if you want. But please ask yourselves whether the news reporting and editorial stances at your outlet are rising to this perilous moment in American history. Everyone—including you—knows in their bones that Trump is a unique threat to democracy. He is consciously emulating the worst dictators of the last century. His aides are leaking their plans to undermine democracy. That existential threat must be in every story you write. If you must, report on polls or horse races or political infighting but do so while acknowledging that one candidate seeks to destroy democracy while the other candidate seeks to operate within its confines.

I believe that Americans will prevail against the threat of MAGA extremism with or without the support of a free press rising to the challenge of this moment. But it would be easier—and victory would be more assured—if major media outlets did not treat Trump as just another candidate after his failed coup and incitement to insurrection.

Imagine if Hitler had survived WWII and then ran for re-election as Chancellor of Germany from a prison cell. Would any story be written that merely reported on polls discussing the level of voter support for Hitler versus his opponent? Or would every story include discussion of his fascist takeover of Germany, his war on Europe, and his attempt to exterminate the Jewish people? Why does Trump get a free pass in hundreds of articles a day that treat him as the legitimate political opponent of Joe Biden? How can any story be written that asks, “Is Biden too old,” without asking the more urgent question, “Will Trump end democracy in America.”

I have slipped back into offense when I meant to invite you to reflect on the balance and editorial position of your news organization. Tens of millions of Americans are hoping that you will get it right. You don’t have to defend Democrats or Joe Biden. But defending the Constitution and democracy is not partisan. The future of our democracy is partly in your hands. It should be a part of every story you write.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Hillary Clinton, Media, Trump

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch

September 12, 2023 //

Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

Why NEPC Will No Longer Use Twitter or Threads

By dianeravitch

August 30, 2023 //

The National Education Policy Center announced that it would no longer post on Twitter, nor would it open an account on Threads. I refuse to refer to Twitter as X because is a letter, not a name. NEPC is a trustworthy source of research about education.

I have faced the same dilemma. I have opened an account on several of the alternative social media sites but stayed with Twitter because I have almost 150,000 followers there. When they retweet, my posts go further.

This is what NEPC announced:

The decision to close the @NEPCtweet account was straightforward but not easy.

We truly valued NEPC’s 13 years on Twitter, sharing our work with our 7,500 followers and engaging in often-interesting discussions. Yet after the company’s change in ownership and shift in policies, our continued presence on Twitter (now “X”) became impossible. Disinformation and conspiracy theories, as well as bigotries of all sorts, have moved from tolerated to celebrated.

NEPC cannot, at this point, find a sensible alternative. We may still decide to open a Mastodon or Bluesky account, but their current limited reach and other constraints mean that active participation will have minimal benefits.

Meta’s new platform, Threads, presents a unique set of concerns. Because Threads is attached to Instagram, the Meta privacy policy is the Threads privacy policy. And it’s a “privacy nightmare”–the privacy policy is so weak that Meta can’t launch Threads in the EU.

We remain concerned that Threads and other Meta platforms are used by school-aged children and accordingly raise the sorts of privacy harms that NEPC has long investigated and condemned. NEPC has, for example, recently published analyses of the Summit Learning Platform and the Along platform, both of which are associated with Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

NEPC is committed to working with top scholars to provide a bridge between high-quality research and public deliberations about education policy and practice. Our mission statement reads in part: We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence and support a multiracial society that is inclusive, kind, and just. The social platform now known as “X” is the antithesis of these values.

Please visit us at nepc.colorado.edu. And if you haven’t yet done so, we hope you’ll sign up to receive our newsletters and publication announcements at https://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter-signup

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Billionaires, Data and Data Mining, Lies, Media, National Education Policy Center, Propaganda

The Inside Story: Biden Aides Who Attended Hur Interview Stunned by Report

Marcy Wheeler: Hur’s Witch Hunt Comes Up with Nothing

Heather Cox Richardson: Hur Report Was a “Political Hit Job”

Michael Tomasky: The Rightwing Takeover of the Media

The Text Messages Between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

David Wallace-Wells: The Headlines Are Wrong! U.S. Students Outperformed Their Peers in Rest of World on PISA Test

Dana Milbank: The 3 Stooges Plan to Impeach Biden

Columbia Journalism Review: Yes, There Is Bias in the Mainstream Media

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

Why NEPC Will No Longer Use Twitter or Threads

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WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

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