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Margaret Sullivan: ABC News Should Not Have Settled with Trump for $15 Million

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
20

Margaret Sullivan, the last public ombudsman for The New York Times, wrote on her blog that ABC News was wrong to settle with Trump for $15 million for “defaming” him. On television, ABC’s George Stefanopolous said that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. Trump said that was wrong and malicious because he had been found guilty of “sexual assault,” not rape.

She points out that when she was chief editor of The Buffalo News, the paper had a longstanding policy of fighting every claim of defamation or libel. They did so to discourage future lawsuits and send a message: we will vigorously oppose lawsuits. If you sue, prepare for a long battle.

Trump’s lawyers claimed that Stephanopoulos was wrong to say that Trump was found guilty of rape and that he had defamed Trump. ABC settled before trial and agreed to pay $15 million for the future Trump Presidential Library and $1 million for Trump’s legal fees.

Media experts were stunned. Not only did ABC abandon its First Amendment defense, but it abandoned a viable claim that Stephanopooulos was right to use the language he did.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Carroll defamation case, said:

“The finding Ms. Carroll failed to prove she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the N.Y. Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’. Indeed, as the evidence at trial… makes clear, the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

By settling–and at such a hefty price–ABC has encouraged Trump and other politicians to continue to sue journalists and their employers.

Sullivan believes ABC might well have won if they continued to fight:

ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement. 

As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual. News organizations generally don’t settle “because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.”

Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect. As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as “part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.”

Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing. 

But loyalty and kowtowing isn’t the job of the press, which is supposed to represent the public in holding powerful people and institutions accountable.

After his victory, Trump threatened to sue the Des Moines Register for posting a poll before the election that showed Biden beating him in Iowa. He also threatened to sue Bob Woodward, “60 minutes,” and the Pulitzer Prizes. This is the mischief that ABC News unleashed.

Last night Trump’s lawyers sued the Des Moines Register for publishing Ann Seltzer’s poll. The implications are frightening. The media publishes polls frequently during campaigns. They may be right, they may be wrong. If they are wrong, will candidates sue them for “election interference”? How did Trump suffer any damages by publication of that poll? He won Iowa by 13 points.

Win or lose, Trump has a strategy: to strike fear in the hearts of every journalist who dares to write critically about him.

Be sure to read Jeff Tiedrich’s condemnation of ABC’s capitulation. He attributes the deal to Disney’s overriding principle: “Protect the mouse.”

Categories Elections, Ethics, Injustice, Media, Trump

Publisher of LA Times Will Use “Bias Meter” to Tell Both Sides of Stories

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2024 //
17

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, recently revealed that the newspaper would employ a technology that will tell “both sides” of every story. Journalists are outraged by the implication that their stories are biased. After the publisher’s decision to prohibit an endorsement in the Presidential race, the chief editor of the editorial board resigned, followed by others.

At that time, the published defended

The New York Times reported:

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, said on Thursday that he planned to introduce a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage as part of his campaign to overhaul the publication.

Dr. Soon-Shiong, who in October quashed a planned presidential endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris from The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board, said in an interview that aired on Scott Jennings’s podcast “Flyover Country” that he had begun to see his newspaper as “an echo chamber and not a trusted source.”

He previously said he planned to remake the paper’s editorial board and add more conservative voices. He has asked Mr. Jennings, a CNN political commentator and a Republican strategist, to join it.

Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought The Times in 2018, said on the podcast that he had been working with a team to create the so-called bias meter using technology he had been building in his health care businesses.

On news and opinion articles, “you have a bias meter so somebody could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he explained in the interview. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically — the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story, and then give comments.”

He said he planned to introduce the tool in January.

Dr. Soon-Shiong’s latest comments set off immediate pushback from the L.A. Times Guild, which represents journalists at the paper.

“Recently, the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples,” the union’s leadership said in a statement on Thursday. The union said all Times staff members abided by ethics guidelines that call for “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”

In the comments that followed the article, many ridiculed the idea of the “bias meter.” One imagined an article that reported on an earthquake rated 9.5, which said that people feared that the earthquake would cause massive destruction of lives and property; those seeking a different perspective would press the bias meter to read an article saying that most people were not afraid of a 9.5 earthquake and say it’s no big deal.

Categories Bias, Ethics, Freedom of the Press, Los Angeles, Media

People Are Fleeing Twitter, Choosing BlueSky. I Am Too!

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
27

The day after the election, I opened an account at social media site BlueSky. I intend to abandon my Twitter account in a few weeks. I had over 140,000 followers on Twitter, but I don’t know how many are bots. On BlueSky, I have picked up 2,000 followers and expect to see the number rise. I know that every one of them is a real person.

I’m not the only one. According to the New York Times, one million people joined BlueSky since the election. Twitter claims 50 million in the U.S., over 500 million worldwide. BlueSky, founded by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter pioneer, has 14.7 million.

BlueSky is growing now at the rate of 1 million new accounts daily.

The numbers go up every hour, as people seek a site that moderates content.

Elon Musk has changed Twitter for the worse. It’s overloaded with ads for Trump merch. His own tweets are ads for Trump. He has restored the accounts of Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and haters. Misinformation is rampant, especially since he fired all the content moderation group. “Let hatred and lies prevail” seems to be the Twitter motto.

I am now posting at BlueSky.

BlueSky is a welcoming community. The tone is friendly. Commenters are not angry. No nazis, racists, or misogynists. There are lots of historians, journalists, academics, familiar names.

People offer advice about how to navigate the site.

It has good vibes.

I don’t want to be part of Elon Musk’s world. I had to leave.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Media, Trump

Michael Tomasky: The Real Reason Trump Won

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2024 //
57

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic offers his view about why Trump won. I think it was because Putin intervened with hacking. Most think it was high prices, the cost of eggs and gasoline. Some say it was because Kamala had no agenda (I disagree). Some say it was her unwillingness to detach from unpopular Biden. Some say it was Biden’s fault for not dropping out a year earlier. Tomasky disagrees.

He wrote:

Item one: It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails). But in the late 1990s, and after the internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well, along with the internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting websites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, V.C.-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015–16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the postdebate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote aboutat the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia, in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it too has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the op-ed page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasyland. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun.Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or News Corp will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orbán told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro–abortion rights initiative and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and TikTok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Why Kamala Lost

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2024 //
18

Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.

There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat. 

But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing. 

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.” 

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged. 

Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” 

White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.” 

Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic  jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist HeatherLong said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years. 

As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.

U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs. 

Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020. 

This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!” 

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Media, Trump

Houston Chronicle Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2024 //
0

The Houston Chronicle is the newspaper with the second largest circulation in Texas, behind the Dallas Morning News. The Chronicle endorsed Kamala Harris. This is how you endorse a Democratic candidate in a Deep Red state.

Clawing out of the mud-caked aftermath of a deadly hurricane should be a solemn moment, even in this divided America. Scenes from Helene’s wrath in North Carolina — sedans flung like toy cars, living room couches marinated in floodwaters, towns reduced to war zone rubble — touch a nerve with Houstonians who lived through Harvey and other devastating storms.

These disasters take so much from us, but the aftermath brings hope. On a trip to North Carolina and Georgia, Vice President Kamala Harris worked a hot meal line and remarked at another point: “I think that in these moments of hardship, one of the beauties about who we are as a country is — is people really rally together and show the best of who they are in moments of crisis.”

In Houston, too, neighbors we’ve never met pull up with chainsaws and muck-and-gut gear, Cajun Navy volunteers deploy boats for rooftop rescues. Government makes itself useful, too, and leaders prioritize concern, clear communication and aid to those in need, above everything — including political stumping and tribalism.

Nearly all political leaders — regardless of party, geography or faith tradition — honor this ritual.

Not Donald Trump.

His visit to Helene-devastated areas was a vehicle to spread lies, inflame and divide. His claims that the Biden administration isn’t helping victims because they’re Republican or that FEMA has run out of money — “It’s all gone. They’ve spent it on illegal migrants.” — are baseless. They’ve been refuted by Republican officials and yet, they’re still stirring fear, anger and distrust that have led to threats against FEMA workers and confusion among vulnerable people about whether help is available and whether it can be trusted.

This is how Trump leads. He doesn’t. Even in a desperate hour of need, he exploits. Even from people who have lost everything, he takes.

It’s just one in a sea of examples showing why we believe Trump is unfit for a second term in the White House, and why this editorial board endorses Kamala Harris for president of the United States.

Many who are firmly in Trump’s camp won’t be swayed, we know. Some are fatigued by dire warnings about his threat to democracy. They’re less concerned in this election with abstract notions of patriotism than with how to pay the rent in a vulturous housing market or how to feed the kids when inflation has eaten the grocery budget. We understand Trump’s star power, the kernel of truth in some of his outrageous diatribes and the sense of community he’s built among Americans who feel their grievances have never been adequately addressed.

But we ask those with a shred of doubt to open your minds to inconvenient truths. We ask you to resist the temptation to dismiss the former president as some kind of redeemable shock jock — erratic, entertaining but not really dangerous.

And understand this: A man who will exploit a deadly hurricane will exploit you. A man with six bankruptcies and millions owed that he may not have the cash to pay is trying to win the White House in part to stay out of the poor house. He will not do any better with our economy. The inflation you’re feeling wasn’t invented by Joe Biden. It’s an aftershock of the global pandemic, it hurt wallets all over the world, and it’s finally easing off. As for Trump’s economy as president, rose-colored glasses are doing a number on us. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts didn’t grow the economy like he promised. He added twice as many trillions to the deficit as Biden, not even counting pandemic spending, and added half as many jobs.

Of course, other folks don’t need another reason to vote against Trump.

For them, Jan. 6 is enough, from the lying beforehand to attempting to overthrow a free and fair election to inciting a riotous insurrection at the Capitol. Protest “peacefully,” he said with one breath, and with the other: “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

For others, it was the two House impeachments. Or cozying up with dictators. Or nominating Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Or the 34 felony convictions stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star. Or the $540 million in legal judgments largely for fraud and defamation, including a finding that he’s liable for committing sexual assault.

For still others, it’s the threats about what he’ll do with a second term, especially after he lost the trust of many decent people who were willing to serve in his Cabinet the first time. Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, refuses to endorse his former boss after Trump branded him a traitor and turned loose an angry mob that hunted him during the Capitol riot so they could hang him. The distinguished military men Trump called “my generals” — including John Kelly, homeland security secretary before becoming Trump’s chief of staff; James Mattis, defense secretary; and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — are warning voters against his dictatorial tendencies. Milley, whom Trump named the highest-ranking military officer in the nation, told Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

But don’t take his word for it. Trump himself said the mythical fraud he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Those wondering whether he’ll really act on threats to retaliate against political rivals don’t have to wonder: he already did in his first term, as The New York Times has reported. From Hillary Clinton to former FBI director James Comey, to Trump’s own former national security adviser John Bolton, those who crossed Trump found themselves facing costly, grueling IRS audits, Justice Department investigations and in Bolton’s case, a criminal probe and lawsuit when he tried to publish a book critical of Trump.   

So yes, Harris’ best asset is that she’s not Trump. Beyond her basic qualifications of human decency, self-control and mature leadership skills, her career path from law enforcement to the U.S. Senate to the vice president’s office illustrates independence, drive and a steely spine. And perhaps as important, a propensity to give more than take. Prosecuting child molesters and rapists required patience and compassion to earn the trust of frightened children. Later, prosecuting transnational cartel members required guts.

From prosecutor to district attorney to the state attorney general of California, it wasn’t an obvious trajectory for the daughter of freedom-fighter academics, her Indian-born mother a scientist, her Jamaican-born father an economist. Harris says her mother modeled civic leadership, exposed her to history and the American principles of freedom and equity and took her protests where she had a “stroller’s-eye view” of the civil right’s movement.

In her book, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris said she wanted to fight for justice from the inside, where she hoped to dispel the false choice between being tough on crime and smart on crime: “You can want the police to stop crime in your neighborhood and also want them to stop using excessive force,” she wrote. “…You can believe in the need for consequence and accountability, especially for serious criminals, and also oppose unjust incarceration.” She cites a reentry program for low-level offenders as a success and yet, she’s expressed regretfor the unintended consequences of a truancy crackdown that landed some parents in jail.

As a U.S. senator, she prioritized health care and criminal justice, even working with Kentucky Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul on bail reform that would prioritize the risk someone poses to society over their ability to pay. Assertive and clever enough in her prosecutorial style, she turned heads in Senate hearings when she stumped then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh with probing questions.

She’s no flame-thrower. She’s no Marxist. Nor is she a superstar able to ace press conference improv or deliver spell-binding speeches that break free of stale scripts. She’s changed her stances on a few things, such as whether to ban fracking; now she says no. But that’s OK.

Magnetism, private jets, four-hour rallies and a lack of self reflection have never been strong predictors of a successful American presidency. She’s fearless and quick on her feet and apparently a quick study, having transformed from a bench warmer VP to a respectable presidential contender in three months. She’s a champion of federal protections for abortion rights, desperately needed in Texas where an extreme ban doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest or enough protections for women with severe pregnancy complications.

With little time, she’s come up with some workable policy ideas that would help Americans afford their first homes and provide expanded child tax credits to the parents of newborn babies. On immigration, she’s backed a tough bipartisan border bill that Trump undermined for political gain.

And there must be something genuine, and maybe a little magical, about a person who has obtained elite status in one of modern society’s toughest survivor challenges: She seems to be a truly beloved step-parent.

We don’t expect this endorsement to change many minds. We can’t inspire voter participation like Taylor Swift or Beyonce. We won’t buy it like Elon Musk. 

We just ask you to consider one question before you cast perhaps the most consequential vote of your lifetime:

If the brown floodwaters were rising around your house and the Cajun Navy could only send a small boat, who would you trust to pick you up: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? 

We know who we’d trust. 

Categories Elections, Harris, Kamala, Houston, Media, Trump

Washington Post Loses at Least 250K Subscribers After Non-Endorsement

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2024 //
13

After Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, stopped publication of the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, digital subscribers revolted. According to a report in The Post, at least 250,000 canceled their subscriptions.

Past and present journalists at the newspaper urged readers not to cancel. Loss of revenue means future layoffs.

Even with the cancellation of the endorsement, the Post remains the most forthright and persistent critic of Trump and his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, as well as his all-around unfitness for office.

Those who look for a future with a stable, functioning two-party system–post-MAGA–should resubscribe.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Elections, Ethics, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Washington Post: Trump’s Vulgarity Drags the Nation’s Politics into the Gutter

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
22

I did not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post despite the fact that I was outraged by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s censorship of the editorial board, which intended to endorse Kamala Harris.

I expected that the response of the editorial board and the opinion writ were a would double down on their contempt for the insurrectionist, lying former president.

As this editorial today shows, the editorial board will not be silenced. In this editorial, it draws a straight line between democracy and civility, a character trait that Trump knows not.

Unless Bezos replaces the editorial board with MAGA types, the WaPo editorials will dole out contempt for Trump every day that remains of the campaign. The last paragraph, in particular, is a gem.

Think of it as slow-walking its endorsement of Kamala.

Democracy depends on many things: institutions, traditions, public legitimacy and, yes, a culture of civility. The peaceful transfer of power requires people to have at least a minimum degree of trust in their fellow citizens — that the stakes are not existential. In this regard, former president Donald Trump showed, in his closing argument at a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden, that whether he wins or loses on Nov. 5, he has already done severe damage to American politics by coarsening and corroding public discourse.

Seeking to limit the fallout after a rally speaker referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt lamented on Monday on Fox News: “It’s sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

Here are some of the “truths” from the other “phenomenal” speakers, none of which the Trump campaign disavowed: Businessman Grant Cardone likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” he said. David Rem, billed as a childhood friend of Mr. Trump’s, called Ms. Harris the “Antichrist” and “devil” while waving a cross onstage.

Radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton a son of a b—- and dropped an f-bomb as he said that all Democrats are “degenerates … lowlifes.” Rudy Giuliani, disbarred over his misconduct as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s effort to block the 2020 election results, said Ms. Harris is “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Donald Trump Jr. claimed Democrats want to “replace” Americans with immigrants.

The stand-up comedian who made that nasty crack about Puerto Rico, Tony Hinchcliffe, made other tasteless ethnic jokes about African Americans, Latinos and Jews. The Bulwark reported that Trump campaign staffers reviewed a script of Mr. Hinchcliffe’s routine in advance and asked him to excise only a line that referred to Ms. Harris as a “c—.”

Even so, a pro-Trump group funded by Elon Musk, who also spoke at Sunday’s rally, posted on X, the platform he owns, and later deleted a video that referred to Ms. Harris as the c-word. After some innuendo, the video’s narrator clarifies that they mean she’s a communist.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has been destabilizing civil discourse since even before he started his 2016 campaign: It was in 2011 that he started voicing support for the false notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Yet in the final weeks of this election, he seems to be making the normalization of incivility one of his campaign’s de facto objectives.

He opened a rally this month in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, by commenting on the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. Mr. Trump told the crowd that night that his wife, Melania, has urged him to use less foul language and that evangelical leader Franklin Graham wrote him a letter pleading the same case. His punchline is that he cannot help himself because Ms. Harris has been a “s—” vice president and everything she touches turns to “s—.” The crowd started chanting “s—” in Latrobe. A top-selling shirt outside his rallies describes Ms. Harris as a “hoe.”

True, Mr. Trump’s campaign is not only a cause of this society’s spreading incivility but a consequence of it. Moreover, norms regarding profanity follow a cultural dynamic separate from politics, and the culture is more permissive about such things than it once was. This may explain why Ms. Harris has also occasionally been using four-letter words on the stump. She swore up a storm in a Rolling Stone interview and said being vice president has made her more profane. Her running mate, Tim Walz, called Mr. Musk “a dips—” during a rally last week. Not a great example. But Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and events like it are in a class by themselves, not least in their threatening tone.

When he finally took the stage on Sunday, the former president declared without irony: “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.” Then, over 80 minutes, he promised to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants, called Democrats “the enemy within” and the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” described the United States as “an occupied country,” and predicted Nov. 5 will bring “Liberation Day.” Even without a vulgarity, it was the most offensive language of all.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Kamala Agreed to Do “The Joe Rogan Show” But He Set Conditions She Would Not Meet

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
16

Jonathan V. Last writes on The Bulwark about why Kamala won’t be heard on Joe Togan’s podcast. It is a wildly popular podcast, especially among young men. He set conditions that she could not meet in the last week of the campaign.

Last writes:

This morning we got word that Kamala Harris tried to do the Joe Rogan show. She proposed a date and was willing to sit with him for an hour.

Rogan balked.

Rogan posted on Twitter @joerogan

Also, for the record the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast. They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.

Jonathan Last commented:

So Rogan’s demand was that the sitting vice president detour from her campaign in swing states to come to him in Austin and also that she give him—what?—three hours?

And if she was only willing to give him an hour, and he had to travel to her? Well, then he thought his audience would be better off not hearing from her at all.

I am sorry but that is not on the level.

This is just one more area in which Kamala Harris has done—or tried to do—everything that was asked of her in the name of outreach to the great and good American people who get their news from a guy who talks about sucking his own dick.

Kamala Harris has a 50-50 chance to win this election.

But I want to head off arguments that if she loses it was somehow her fault. That she did something wrong, or didn’t do something important.

Because here is the rock-bottom fact: No reasonable observer could have asked her to run a better campaign.

Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee a hundred days ago. In that time she:

  • Unified the Democratic party.
  • Reversed Biden’s polling deficit and took the lead over Trump.
  • Organized a successful convention.
  • Created a policy framework for her prospective administration.
  • Pivoted to the center on nearly every issue: From domestic energy production, to gun reform, to immigration.
  • Absolutely schlonged Trump in their debate.
  • Performed somewhere between adequately and exceptionally in every single media interview.
  • Spent time with several non-traditional media outlets.
  • Gave almost unfailingly good speeches in front of giant crowds.
  • Performed heroic levels outreach to Republicans and swing voters by appearing on Fox News and campaigning with the likes of Liz Cheney—while explicitly inviting and welcoming Republican voters into her coalition.

Harris did not play perfect baseball—you or I could sketch out a handful of things we wish she had done differently. Or better. But the perfect campaign does not exist. 

Seriously: This has been the most error-free presidential campaign in memory and yet Harris hasn’t played it safe. She combined aggressive strategy with disciplined execution. In terms of campaigns as they exist in the actual, real world? This is as good as it gets.

Which is why, if Harris loses, it will be incorrect to say that it was somehow her fault. That if only she had done [this thing I like] or said [this other thing that’s important to me], then she would have beaten Trump.

Because not only has Harris run the best possible campaign, but Trump has run an entirely mask-off campaign. He has told America who he is and what he wants.

He wants to round up immigrants and put them in camps.

He wants to deploy the military against domestic groups he disfavors.

He wants to eradicate the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

He wants to put crazy people like RFK and Elon Musk in charge of large swaths of the federal government.

He wants to fire Jack Smith and make the criminal charges against himself go away.

He wants to force Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire in terms favorable to Russia.

Believe me: If Trump wins, it isn’t going to be because Kamala Harris gave a bad answer to a question on The View.

It will be because some large percentage of the American public looked at these two candidates and decided that they wanted Trump.

Attempts to blame Harris or find an alternate reason for why voters didn’t consciously choose an authoritarian strongman will be an exercise in reality avoidance. It will be an attempt to avoid grappling with who, and what, our country is.

2. Stories We Tell Ourselves

In a sense, the 2024 election has been an exercise in creating rationalizations in order to avoid reality.

The pattern was simple: People would come up with a rationalization for why 47 percent of the country wanted Trump. Said rationalization would be demolished. Someone would come up with a new rationalization.

  • The only reason people supported Trump was inflation.
    • Then inflation came down, and people kept supporting Trump.³
  • The only reason people supported Trump was high interest rates.⁴
    • Then rates got cut, and people kept supporting Trump.
  • The only reason people supported Trump was crime.
    • Then we had two years with the steepest drops in crime rates in history, and people kept supporting Trump. ⁵
  • The only reason people supported Trump was Biden’s age—they were deeply concerned about his mental ability to do the job.
    • Then the Democratic nomination went to a nimble and vigorous Kamala Harris; Trump became the addled geriatric in the race; and people kept supporting Trump.

How many times do we have to do this? 

Imagine that it’s November 10 and Trump has lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. People will be desperate to come up with explanations.

  • It was immigration. Sure, the Democrats passed the toughest immigration bill ever, only to have Trump kill it. And sure, Biden closed the border.
    • But if only they’d done that sooner. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁶
  • It was Harris’s liberal past.
    • If only she had the exact same policy positions as Tim Ryan or Joe Manchin. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁷
  • It was Joe Rogan.
    • If only she’d gone to Austin and given him three hours. Then male swing-voters in [Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, whatever] would have rejected Trump.

But none of these rationalizations will be any more true than the arguments that what voters really cared about was crime, or Biden’s age.

Categories Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media

Alexandra Petri: WaPo Humorist Endorses Kamala, as Her Publisher Refuses to

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
7

Alexandra Petri is the humorist for The Washington Post. In her column, she endorsed Kamala Harris. She called her column “It Has Fallen to Me, the Humor Columnist, to Endorse Kamala Harris for President.” This is why I didn’t cancel my subscription to The Washington Post. I want to see many ways the opinion writers devise to torture Jeff Bezos.

She wrote:

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president.

It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!
Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.
I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Humor, Media, Trump
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