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The Election Circus Begins
“Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money.”
Jan 07, 2019
It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year's football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.
It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices. Maybe Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces in the scramble for the presidency--Beto O'Rourke, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg?
It is a political version of the reality television show "Survivor." Who will be the first knocked out? Who will make it into the semifinals and the finals? Who is the most devious and cunning? Who will come out on top? We get to vote for the contestants that appeal to us most, or at least vote against those we hate the most. The cable news shows, in a prelude to the nonstop idiocy to come, have spent the last few days speculating about whom Mitt Romney will endorse in the 2020 race. Now, there's a burning question of national importance.
The "experts" and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress.
To take power in 2021 in lieu of any real policy changes, the Democratic Party is banking on the deep animus toward President Trump. It has no intention of instituting genuine populist programs, rebuilding unions, funding universal health care, providing free college tuition or curbing the criminal activities of the corporations and the big banks. The war machine will continue to wage endless war and consume half of all discretionary spending. The vaunted new populist members of Congress will be no more than window dressing, trotted out, like Sanders, to trick voters into thinking the Democratic Party is capable of reform. Most voters, for this reason, are "voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody," as journalist Matt Taibbi points out.
Working men and women especially despise the slick-talking politicians--including the Clintons and Barack Obama--and the "experts" and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress. Trump hangs on to the support of white working Americans because he expresses through his adolescent insults and dynamiting of political norms the legitimate hatred they feel toward the well-heeled, college-educated ruling elites who sold them out. The Democrats, at the same time, understand that it takes someone as revolting as Trump to fire up their lethargic base, a group in which millions do not vote. They cling to a tactic of "anybody but Trump" even though it did not work in 2016.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like. As for now, Warren--the only nationally known Democrat except Julian Castro to form an exploratory committee for a presidential bid--is not winning this popularity contest. A CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa poll--yes, polling in Iowa already has begun--puts her fourth, with only 8 percent of support among the Democrats surveyed, behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.
Our corporate rulers do not need to denounce democracy. Democratic laws, such as who can fund campaigns, have been subverted from within, their original purposes redefined by the courts and legislative bodies to serve corporate power. This managed democracy has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed theatrical productions. Politicians run on "moral" issues and use public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump, his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.
Politicians must stick to the script. They have well-defined roles. They express a suffocating, reality-defying positivism about the future of America. They are steadfast in their obsequious praise of the nation's "heroes" in the military and law enforcement. They are silent about the crimes of empire. They ignore the plight of the poor; indeed the word "poor" is banished from their vocabulary. They pretend we do not live in a corporate oligarchy, although they acknowledge amorphous attacks on the middle class and promise to stem the assault. They exude a cloying feel-your-pain compassion that revolves around personal stories of the hardships they overcame in their own lives to become "successes"--the most ludicrous being Trump's claim that he turned a "very small" loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar real estate empire. They telegraph to us that they are one of us. We can be like them. They trot out their wives, husbands and children, even when a spouse like Melania Trump looks as if she has been taken hostage, to portray themselves as family men and women. They claim they are outsiders, ignoring their long political careers and their status as members of the wealthy ruling elite. They are no different from the array of self-help gurus who ignore systemic injustice and social decay to peddle schemes for personal success. The formula is universal. It is the triumph of artifice, what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics."
Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
Those who do not play this game, like Ralph Nader, or who like Sanders play it begrudgingly--Sanders refused corporate money, has called for reforming "the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual Pentagon budget" and addresses issues of class--are ridiculed and marginalized by a monochromatic corporate media that banishes qualification, ambiguity, nuance and genuine dialogue. Trump's success as a candidate came, in large part, because of the constant media attention he received. Those like Sanders who attempt to defy the rules of the game are punished. The goal is entertainment. Politicians who are good entertainers do well. The poor entertainers do badly. The networks seek to attract viewers and increase profits, not disseminate information about political issues. Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
"At issue is more than crude bribery," the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism." "Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority. The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not those of the Nazis, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered feckless."
This process, Wolin writes, has turned the electorate into "a hybrid creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and popular fantasies of the miraculous. It was no leap of faith from the camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the twentieth century to the politically savvy televangelist of the twenty-first century."
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized.
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized. The corporate system is presented as sacrosanct and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism as natural law. The corporations are funding the show. They get what they pay for.
Sanders, it appears, will run again as a Democrat, despite the theft of the 2016 nomination by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party hierarchy. His next campaign, to quote Samuel Johnson, will be the triumph of hope over experience. The Democratic establishment and the media sharks will, if Sanders uses the old playbook, devour him. They have already severely diminished his stature by turning him into Clinton and Chuck Schumer's barking seal.
The differences between the right-wing media and the liberal media are minuscule. As Taibbi writes in "Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus," they are "really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier."
"Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they're about money," Taibbi writes. "The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates' charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things."
Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images.
"They mostly don't care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It's about the money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants down or Mexican babies at an emergency room."
The Republican strategy of playing to the lowest common denominator ensured that eventually the useful idiots would take over and elect one of their own, in Donald Trump. Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images. He, like tens of millions of other Americans, believes anything he sees on television. He does not read. He is consumed by vanity and the cult of the self. He is a conspiracy theorist. He blames America's complex social and economic ills on scapegoats such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and of course the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, in turn, blames Trump's election on Russia and former FBI Director James Comey. It is the theater of the absurd.
The childish gibberish Trump speaks is the new language of political discourse. His taunting tweets against his enemies are countered by his enemies with taunting tweets against him. These grade-school-level insults dominate the daily news cycle. The political process, captured by commercial interests, devolved to Trump's imbecilic level. The presidential election of 2020 has begun. The circus, with its freaks, con artists and clowns, is open for business.
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The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On
A new documentary reveals how the right-wing attack on the national, grassroots anti-poverty group ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture.
Jul 29, 2018
"We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN," said Senator John McCain in his third presidential debate with Barack Obama in October 2008. ACORN, he said, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
By early 2010, ACORN had closed its doors, a victim of an orchestrated assault by right-wing media and politicians, as well as some self-inflicted wounds.
Obama had briefly worked with ACORN on voter registration drives when he practiced civil rights law in Chicago. The group's leaders believed that, once Obama was in the White House, ACORN would become an even more influential group. But they hadn't anticipated the fusion of right-wing forces that brought ACORN down.
Had ACORN still been around in 2016, it might have prevented a real threat to democracy--Donald Trump--from becoming president. ACORN had developed a finely honed grassroots approach to registering voters and getting them to the polls. By putting its operation to work in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan--where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by only 77,000 votes to win the Electoral College--ACORN might have changed the outcome.
In their recent documentary ACORN and the Firestorm, Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard not only reveal how the mighty ACORN fell but also show how the attack on ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture, including the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right.
Through archival clips and interviews with ACORN staffers, leaders and members, friendly and hostile politicians, and political analysts, the film recounts the group's history, starting with its founding in Arkansas in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a charismatic and brazen young organizer.
In addition to registering millions of voters, ACORN assisted the working poor to buy homes and avoid foreclosure, challenged banks' racist and predatory lending practices, stopped companies from spewing cancer-causing pollution in low-income neighborhoods, got local governments to fix up abandoned buildings that had become havens for crime, and fought for fair treatment by employers, landlords, insurance companies, and government. ACORN led the campaign to get Congress to strengthen the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act. It organized the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. It spearheaded the living-wage movement in more than 100 cities and helped make the federal Earned Income Tax Credit an effective anti-poverty program.
By 2008, ACORN had more than 1,000 staffers and 400,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in forty states, making it the largest grassroots anti-poverty organization in the country. In the film, we see ACORN members engaged in protests, civil disobedience, lobbying, voter registration, and meetings with politicians.
Unlike many liberal do-gooders, ACORN didn't assume it knew what poor people wanted or needed. Maude Hurd, an ACORN leader from Boston, recalled her first encounter with an organizer. "People always knocking on my door telling me what the problems were," she said. "ACORN was different. When they knocked on my door, they asked me."
In the film's opening scene, we meet a burly bearded white man named Tavis, who looks like a character in Duck Dynasty and who has a Confederate flag folded across some chairs in the front yard of his house in rural Florida. ("Heritage not hate," he explains. "I don't fly it because I don't want to make nobody mad.") He says he voted for Reagan and Bush, but he swears loyalty to ACORN for helping him save his house from foreclosure after his wife lost her job and they got behind on their mortgage payments.
"The idea of ACORN is to stand up for the oppressed, the poor, the people who were taken advantage of," he explains.
For years, banks, the restaurant and other low-wage industries, and other business groups attacked ACORN, but in the early 2000s they were joined by the Republican establishment and the burgeoning right-wing media. ACORN was unprepared for the onslaught.
When McCain attacked ACORN on national TV in his debate with Obama, ACORN leader Bertha Lewis was thrilled "just to hear our names mentioned," she says in the documentary. "I thought it was great. Well, little did I know. Forty years of work called into question by one little video."
That "one little video"--actually, several videos--was made by two amateur activists, twenty-five-year old James O'Keefe and twenty-year old Hannah Giles, who met via Facebook. Their project was promoted by a little-known right-wing agitator named Andrew Breitbart.
As the documentary describes, O'Keefe and Giles took their undercover hidden camera into at least a half-dozen ACORN offices around the country and sought to lure staffers into agreeing to commit illegal acts. In one office, Giles (dressed up in a bizarre costume and claiming to be a prostitute) and O'Keefe (pretending to be her boyfriend) ask for ACORN's help to buy a house to operate a prostitution business with young girls smuggled from Central America. Whether the ACORN staffers believed the two provocateurs, or just played along with the charade, isn't clear. ACORN and the Firestorm allows the audience to decide for themselves what happened.
But what actually happened didn't matter because their sting operation worked. What most Americans remember about ACORN is what Breitbart wanted them to believe. With his help, O'Keefe and Giles doctored the videos to make ACORN look guilty. For example, as Breitbart was releasing the videos to the media, O'Keefe wore a pimp costume in an interview on Fox News. The show's host said that he was "dressed exactly in the same outfit he wore to these ACORN offices." That was a lie. He wore regular clothes when visiting the ACORN offices, but spliced into the videos scenes of him in the pimp outfit.
Breitbart turned what might have been dismissed as a college-age prank into a national controversy. He orchestrated a sophisticated internet campaign, employing an army of bloggers to keep the misinformation in the news. Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative media played and discussed the videos night after night, repeating the same anti-ACORN (and anti-Obama) talking points. In the film, we see a collage of conservative media commentators describing ACORN as a "criminal enterprise" and "a socialist outfit," and declaring "Obama is ACORN."
The mainstream media, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and even Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, soon picked up on the manufactured controversy and, without fact-checking, acted like a transmission belt for the anti-ACORN allegations. In doing so, they gave Breitbart a louder megaphone and turned him into a conservative cult hero.
ACORN's successful voter registration drives, especially in swing states, had been a nightmare for GOP campaign strategists. Republican governors, state attorneys general, and senior Bush administration officials alike led a fruitless pursuit for incidents of voter fraud by ACORN. In 2004 Karl Rove (President George W. Bush's top political adviser) told several U.S. attorneys to prosecute ACORN for voter fraud. One of them--David Iglesias, the Republican U.S. attorney in New Mexico--refused after finding no evidence of fraud, and was ultimately dismissed. Some local Republican officials nevertheless filed bogus lawsuits, accusing ACORN of voter fraud.
Most Americans had never heard of ACORN until McCain (and Sarah Palin) began attacking the group on the campaign trail. By October 2008, 45 percent of Americans believed ACORN was trying to register people to vote multiple times in violation of election laws. A November 2009 survey found that 52 percent of Republicans believed ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. By linking the group to President Obama, conservatives sought to undermine him and his liberal agenda.
Months after ACORN's demise, the group was exonerated from any wrongdoing by every official and independent investigation that looked into O'Keefe and Giles' accusations, including one by California's attorney general and two federal investigations. But by then it was too late.
As the film shows, ACORN leaders were surprised by the failure of most Democrats and liberal organizations to come to its aid when it was under attack. Many liberal foundations--cautious by nature--dropped ACORN like a hot potato. Even nine months after Obama took office, in an interview with ABC, George Stephanopoulos felt compelled to ask him if he favored cutting off federal funds to ACORN.
These two award-winning directors--Atlas's previous documentaries include Brothers Hypnotic and Sour Grapes; Pollard, who was Spike Lee's longtime editor, has also directed August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, Two Trains Runnin', and Sammy Davis, Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me--have produced an invaluable teaching tool about grassroots organizing, the role of media in politics, and the ongoing battle for the soul of America.
As the film suggests, Trump's attacks on the mainstream media for "fake news," his embrace of the right-wing echo chamber, his racism and attacks the poor and vulnerable, and his claims of widespread "voter fraud" draw on the right's campaign against ACORN a decade ago.
Soon after the 2016 election, Trump claimed that massive "voter fraud" was responsible for his losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. We can expect the GOP to continue its efforts to reduce turnout among poor, minority and younger voters (who, when they vote, tend to support Democratic candidates) during the current election season and in 2020 elections, justifying its actions by perpetuating the myth of widespread "voter fraud." The film reminds us that voter suppression is nothing new for the Republican Party.
The film reveals other parallels between the attack on ACORN and the rise of Trump. After Breitbart died of a heart attack at forty-three in March 2012, a little-known ex-Wall Street banker named Steve Bannon succeeded him as the head of Breitbart News. He turned it into an arm of the 2016 Trump campaign, served as Trump's campaign manager, spent several months inside the White House, and continues to be the president's ally.
With funding from wealthy conservatives for the misnamed Project Veritas, O'Keefe is still plying his sting operation, which he's used against Planned Parenthood, teachers unions, NPR, and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Atlas and Pollard gained Giles' trust and sought to tell the story of ACORN's demise through her eyes as well as those of her nemesis, Bertha Lewis. The film depicts Giles as an idealistic but naive conservative trying to make sense of the country's political tensions.
"You know, I was a kid," she says in the film, "Just wanted to have some fun." But she admits that the hit job was her idea.
"Andrew Breitbart and I were instant friends," Giles recalled. "Andrew knew and understood the media, and we [she and O'Keefe] had no media smarts whatsoever."
Lewis grew up in a poor family in Philadelphia. After college she worked in the theater business in New York but spent much of her spare time organizing her neighbors against slum landlords and drug dealers. A friend suggested she contact ACORN, telling her "they're looking for organizers." "They pay you for fighting?" Lewis asked.
She joined ACORN in 1995, quickly rose up the ranks, and became an influential player in New York City politics. In 2008 the ACORN board fired founder and top staffer Rathke (who had covered up an embezzlement scheme by his brother, the group's financial director) and replaced him with Lewis.
She believed that, by adding more financial controls and better staff training, ACORN could weather the storm. She went on TV and radio shows to defend ACORN and appealed to foundations to keep their grants coming, but she couldn't staunch the bleeding.
After ACORN folded, some local leaders regrouped and started new independent organizations--such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and New York Communities for Change--that have drawn on ACORN's organizing strengths but avoided its management problems. Lewis founded the Black Institute, a think tank on racial issues.
The filmmakers orchestrated a meeting of the two protagonists, Giles and Lewis, seven years after the videos went viral and brought ACORN down--on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., no less.
"So Hannah. This is quite bizarre for me. It must be bizarre for you too, right?" Lewis says.
Giles tells Lewis that she's become so disillusioned with politics that she's retired from activism and doesn't even bother to vote. But her Facebook page reveals that she (along with her husband) is still involved in using videos to expose alleged corruption among liberal groups by recruiting young conservatives to "follow in her footsteps" through a group she founded, the American Phoenix Foundation. Her Facebook handle is @hannahgiles.acorn.
She remains unapologetic about her work with O'Keefe and Breitbart to bring ACORN down. "The idea of helping low-income families is noble," she says, but she still believes that ACORN was corrupted by "power and money." "That makes me sad," Lewis tells her.
Giles and Lewis were talking past each other. They were involved in a political drama that, the film makes clear, was larger than both of them.
ACORN and the Firestorm--inspired by John Atlas's book, Seeds of Change--reminds us that America's current polarization wasn't inevitable. It was manufactured, a product of the web of big business, conservative media entrepreneurs, and right-wing politicians that led to Trump and his efforts to challenge science, the press, civil liberties, and public policy based on evidence.
ACORN was an early victim of that firestorm, but it continues to spread, damaging our democracy.
Originally published in Dissent Magazine.
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There's Fake News on Your Television, Too
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a hard-right corporation that imposes its views on the local television stations it owns.
Mar 21, 2018
There is increasing public concern about the political manipulation of Facebook and Twitter by private corporations and foreign actors, and it's certainly warranted. Social media, especially Facebook, are increasingly mediating their users' realities in ways that traditional broadcasters can only dream about. But millions of Americans still rely on television news, and they probably give it more credence than they do to random strangers on the internet.
That's bad news, because there's fake news on your television, too. And there's about to be more of it, unless something is done to stop an upcoming merger.
Fake News Network
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a hard-right - perhaps even "alt-right" - corporation that imposes its views on the local television stations it owns. It is closely allied with Donald Trump, whose administration has loosened the rules governing media conglomerates like Sinclair.
Sinclair is privately held by the descendants of Julian Sinclair Smith, who started the network of 193 stations at Baltimore's WBFF in 1971. Smith's son, David, who was the CEO until last year, apparently shares more with Trump than just his politics. Smith was arrested for the solicitation of prostitution in 2004, and reportedly forced reporters at a Sinclair station to do some of his court-ordered community service work.
(Reasonable people may differ about Smith's morality or hypocrisy. But there can be little disagreement that his offense, which took place in a Sinclair company car as it proceeded down Baltimore's Jones Falls Expressway, displayed an indifferent attitude toward both public safety and the proper operation of a motor vehicle.)
The Smith family's political opinions aren't a cause for public concern, and neither are its personal peccadilloes. But the consolidation of media into a few private hands poses great risk, and Sinclair's behavior proves it. Sinclair is abusing its power by distorting the facts to impose a predetermined view of reality on reporters at its 173 stations -- and therefore on the public.
And now, thanks to a ruling from Trump's FCC majority that benefits a Trump ally, Sinclair is poised to impose its distorted worldview on many more markets around the country. Sinclair is proposing to purchase another conglomerate, Tribune Media, in a $3.9 billion deal. It would gain 49 stations, and would sell its stations in New York and Chicago to meet station ownership limits, for a total of 220 television outlets.
In 1983, 90 percent of American media was controlled by 50 companies. Forty years later, 90 percent of the media was controlled by only five companies.
If the deal goes through, Sinclair's stations will reach nearly 70 percent of all households in the United States.
TV Trolls
What does that fake news look like? Sinclair has broadcast videos made by hoaxster James O'Keefe, who has a record of producing misleading, heavily doctored video 'stings' of progressive individuals and organizations. (O'Keefe's attempt to entrap a Washington Post reporter, which reads like slapstick comedy, illustrates his methods.)
Sinclair's Circa subsidiary presents itself as an unbiased mobile news site, but reportedly skewed its reporting to its owners' political agenda after its acquisition by Sinclair.
In 2004, Sinclair refused to broadcast an episode of "Nightline" in which the names of soldiers killed in combat in Iraq were read out loud. Sinclair called the program "politically motivated" and asked why anchor Ted Koppel didn't read "the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorist attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001."
As the Washington Post reports, Sinclair planned to air a "documentary" distorting John Kerry's war record just before the 2004 election until public pressure forced it to moderate the broadcast. As the Post also reports:
"On the eve of the 2012 election between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, for example, Sinclair stations in several battlegrounds states aired a corporate-produced half-hour news 'special' that criticized Obama's handling of the economy, his signature health-care law and the administration's management of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Romney's record received less scrutiny."
Sinclair is currently forcing its stations to air the right-wing commentary of a former Trump aide named Boris Epshteyn, who displays no perceptible gifts as a commentator. (Judge for yourself.)
In another "must-air" segment, a commentator named Mark Hyman declared that "we have the greatest health care in the world" -- a statement that can be objectively disproved by comparing the U.S. with other developed nations -- and that ""government-directed health care can kill."
Sinclair is also working to drum up Islamophobic sentiments with a recurring segment called "Terrorism Alert Desk," which opens with a blast of "breaking news"-style music to present stories (and sometimes non-stories) that share no common theme -- except that they consistently cast Muslims as terrorists.
"Read Exactly as Written"
Now, internal memos obtained by CNN show that Sinclair is requiring all its news anchors to condemn the reporting of mainstream news outlets as "fake news." Sinclair's memos direct stations to air its pre-scripted attacks on journalism "using news time, not commercial time."
"Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written," stations are told. The scripts include this language:
"I'm [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I'm [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.
"The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts... members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'...
"We understand Truth is neither politically 'left or right.' Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever."
Fake news outlets on the internet do the same thing: They tell readers that "they" are lying, but "we" are telling you the unvarnished truth.
To be sure, mainstream media have often misled readers and viewers. But they have not done so at the direction of a single, central office with a political agenda and transparent ethnic and religious biases.
"I felt like a POW recording a message," one news anchor said of the Sinclair scripts.
No More Media Consolidation
If this is how Sinclair Broadcasting Group behaves while its massive merger is awaiting approval, how will it act when it has everything it wants?
Sinclair's proposed merger must still be approved by the FCC and the Justice Department. It is taking place during a time of mounting public pressure on the government to address media consolidation, as behemoths like Disney, Fox, Time Warner, ATT, and Comcast increasingly control what national audiences see and hear.
In 1983, 90 percent of American media was controlled by 50 companies. Forty years later, 90 percent of the media was controlled by only five companies. The Sinclair/Tribune merger would accelerate that trend.
Sinclair is a case study in the threat that media consolidation poses to democracy. This merger must be stopped.
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Trump's War on Voters Has a Long History: We Need a Grassroots Voting-Rights Movement to Fight Back
Trump and his minions have ramped up the attack, but the "voter fraud" myth goes back to the GOP's attack on ACORN
Aug 08, 2017
Donald Trump's war on voting rights, like much of his behavior, is rooted in revenge. After the November election, Trump tweeted that he lost the popular vote because 3 million to 5 million "illegals" fraudulently voted for Hillary Clinton. According to Trump, an unprecedented and truly astonishing amount of fraud was committed in the 2016 election -- and no officials noticed. Without any evidence, he's repeated accusations that nefarious groups organized non-citizens, dead people, and citizens registered in multiple states to engage in a huge voting scandal. He has even set up a commission - which held its first public meeting last month -- to scour the country looking for evidence of illegal voting.
Trump's efforts are rooted in his own need to avoid humiliation, but voter suppression is nothing new for the Republican Party. It has long been a key part of its strategy to reduce turnout among poor, minority and younger voters who, when they vote, tend to support Democratic candidates. Like other Republicans before him, Trump justifies the war by promoting the myth of widespread "voter fraud."
Voter fraud is not a problem, as academic researchers have shown over and over. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University examined every federal election between 2000 and 2015. More than a billion votes had been cast over that period. The researchers found only 31 examples of voter fraud.
Yet the canard of "voter fraud" persists on the right. Rather than focus on protecting our voting system from Russian hackers, or proposing ways to increase voter turnout, Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is going on a wild goose chase to protect us from nonexistent fraudulent voters. This is little more than a smokescreen to justify more voter suppression laws. Trump's commission is part of a larger strategy to reshape the electorate to ensure Republican domination.
All myths have an origin story. The Republican-sponsored voter fraud myth gained momentum in the early 2000s as an attack on ACORN, a community organizing group that was engaged in a bold voter registration drive among low-income, mostly minority, voters in cities and swing states like Florida and New Mexico.
To thwart ACORN's efforts, Karl Rove - George W. Bush's key political operative - led a campaign to destroy the group's reputation by accusing it of voter fraud. In 2005, for example, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales ordered David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a Republican, to investigate ACORN for voter registration violations. After Iglesias' probe came up empty-handed, Gonzales fired him. Then Bush and Rove escalated the campaign to persuade Americans that extensive voter fraud was a serious problem and required strict new laws to make registration more difficult. By doing so, they hoped not only to stop ACORN but also to intimidate other groups, like the League of Women Voters, from registering new voters.
During the 2008 election season, ACORN registered more than 800,000 young, poor and minority voters. A handful of ACORN's 13,000 part-time canvassers faked voter registration forms to get paid for work they didn't do. ACORN immediately informed local election officials when it discovered the counterfeit signatures, as the group was required to do by law.
As revealed in a new documentary film, "ACORN and the Firestorm," Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others) jumped on those small morsels of information to accuse ACORN of being part of a criminal conspiracy.
Soon the controversy shifted from the fringe to the mainstream. It peaked in October 2008 during a televised presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. Before millions of viewers, McCain warned that ACORN, whom he linked to Obama, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country." This modest community-based organization, the Arizona senator warned, may be "destroying the fabric of democracy."
The attack worked. Even some Democrats in Congress refused to come to ACORN's defense. Numerous independent investigations cleared ACORN of any criminal wrongdoing, but they were too late. By the next year, ACORN was dismantled after its foundation funders withdrew their support.
After ACORN was gone, however, Republicans continued their war on alleged voter fraud and even kept using ACORN as their bogeyman. In 2012, half of GOP voters said they believed that ACORN stole that year's election for President Obama, even though the group no longer existed. Earlier this year, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told CNN that ACORN was one of the reasons Trump needed a task force to investigate voter fraud.
In May, Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to head the so-called "voter integrity" commission, designed as a fishing expedition to find widespread voter fraud. Trump packed the commission with staunch right-wingers - including Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams, a Republican election lawyer and former Department of Justice official in the Bush administration - who have voiced strong support for restricting voting rights.
At the commission's opening session in July, Kobach claimed that voter fraud was widespread across the country and even in his home state. He began making that accusation when he ran for his current office in 2010, insisting that as many as 2,000 people adopted the identities of dead people to vote in Kansas. That state's secretary of state at the time -- Ron Thornburgh, a Republican who served in that position for 16 years - said that "the voter fraud Kris Kobach speaks of does not exist." But Kobach kept repeating his lie, even announcing that he'd found a smoking gun. He claimed that someone had cast a ballot in the August primary using the name of a dead man named Alfred K. Brewer. It didn't take long for reporters to find the 78-year old Brewer in his yard, raking leaves. Kobach had confused Brewer with his father, who hadn't voted since he died in 1996.
Kobach has been a staunch advocate of employing discriminatory tactics to infringe upon the rights of voters. Since he was elected Kansas' secretary of state, he has run a program in which his office has collected tens of millions of voting records from other states in search of duplicate registrations and double votes. The list-matching exercise has turned up practically nothing. Kobach has charged just nine people, most of them senior citizens, with voting in Kansas and another state. Six have pleaded guilty, one case was dismissed and two are pending.
In late July, a federal judge upheld a $1,000 fine against Kobach, citing a "pattern" of "misleading the Court" in voter ID cases.
Despite this setback, Kobach hopes to use the commission to get Republican state election officials to purge the voting rolls of Democratic-leaning voters - poor, young and minority Americans. They will have the support of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who as U.S. attorney in Alabama brought a baseless prosecution against voting rights activists, which soon fell apart.
In early July, Kobach sent a letter to all 50 states requesting information on their voter rolls, including voters' names, their birthdays, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their voting history dating back to 2006. That request drew strong pushback from more than two dozen secretaries of state, including a few Republicans, who said they would not cooperate with the commission.
"They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico," Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said about the commission. "Given Secretary Kobach's lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas," said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, "we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this commission."
The resistance of these state officials, as well as pending lawsuits against the commission by the ACLU, Public Citizen, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Common Cause and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, may stop Trump's panel from pursuing the voter purge. But its efforts have already caused considerable damage. Soon after Kobach requested the voter data, election officials in North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Colorado and several other states saw an upsurge of voters asking to de-register, fearing the misuse of their personal information.
"In over 12 years of administering elections I never expected to see a day in the office where we would have more withdrawals than new registrations," Amber McReynolds, Denver's director of elections, told The Colorado Independent.
The real goal of Trump's commission, of course, is not to uncover voter fraud but to promote voter suppression. Trump wants to encourage more states to make it harder to vote through a variety of measures: adopting laws to cut back on early voting days and hours, eliminating same-day registration, restricting the use of absentee ballots by first-time voters, making it harder for people with past criminal convictions to regain their voting rights and creating roadblocks for nonprofit groups that seek to conduct voter registration drives.
Since the 2010 elections, 20 states have adopted new voter suppression laws. Last November, for example, turnout among black voters plunged in North Carolina after Republicans cut early voting hours and reduced the number of polling places.
Wisconsin was one of 14 states with new voting restrictions in effect for the first time in 2016. In that state, Trump beat Clinton by a mere 22,748 votes out of more than 2.9 million votes cast. Statewide, Trump received about the same number of voters as Mitt Romney had in 2012, but Clinton received almost 240,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama did that year. The statewide decline in voter turnout was particularly devastating in Democratic strongholds.
In 2011, Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-dominated state legislature adopted tougher voter-registration laws, including a requirement that voters provide a photo ID to vote. About 300,000 registered voters were disqualified from voting for lack of strict forms of ID. This had a particularly chilling effect in Milwaukee, the state's largest city, which has a large African-American and low-income population. According to Neil Albrecht, the Milwaukee Election Commission's executive director, voter turnout in that city declined by 41,000 people between 2012 and 2016, with most of the drop-off coming in high-poverty districts.
Last month, a delegation of faith-based human rights activists, led by Rev. William Barber, national president of Repairers of the Breach and founder of North Carolina's Moral Monday movement, met with United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad to discuss voter suppression efforts targeting African-Americans and low-income voters in the United States. The activists said that the voter suppression crusade violates the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"Enfranchisement is essential to human freedom and dignity," said Rev. Barber, who has led protests against North Carolina's voter suppression laws. "To deny citizens' right to vote is to deny their full humanity. Too many people have bled and died in America's long fight for voting rights. Their blood cries out against this evil."
The U.S. already has the lowest level of voter turnout of any democracy in the world. Compared to other countries, America's crazy-quilt voting laws already make it difficult to register and to vote. In last November's presidential elections, about 40 percent of all eligible voters - 93 million citizens -- didn't vote.
This right-wing effort to undermine our democracy is gaining traction just as a new Pew Research Center survey found that most Americans think it should be easier, not harder, to vote.
Voter reform laws can make a big difference. The 15 states that allow voters to register on Election Day have higher levels of voter turnout, according to a report by Nonprofit Vote and the U.S. Elections Project. The six states with the highest turnout in 2016 -- Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Iowa - permit same-day voter registration. Experts on voter turnout also advocate other measures to increase voting, such as allowing voters to register and vote online, changing the traditional Tuesday Election Day to Election Weekend (which would run from Friday through Sunday) and turning Election Day into a national holiday, as many other countries already do.
But strengthening our voting laws won't happen overnight. Even without these reforms, Democrats have an opportunity to regain a majority in the House of Representatives in 2018 and to take back the Senate and White House in 2020. But to do so, they need to resist the GOP's ongoing efforts to suppress the vote (justified by the bogus claim of voter fraud) and mobilize infrequent low-income voters to cast ballots.
If they want to expand voting, Democrats cannot simply depend on expensive slick ads to get people to the polls. They must partner with local community groups in urban and suburban areas, particularly Latino and African-American neighborhoods, to organize people year-round by going door-to-door to engage them in local issue campaigns - whether that means raising the minimum wage, stopping oil and gas companies from locating toxic facilities in their communities, challenging racial profiling by police, improving local schools, stopping banks and landlords from illegally evicting families from their homes and others. It isn't enough to parachute organizers into these areas a few months before Election Day. It takes time to build trust and energize the social networks that give people a sense that elections matter and can improve their lives.
ACORN understood that. It organized people around housing, jobs, lending discrimination, public safety and other issues. When election time came around, ACORN had built an ethic of civic engagement among people who might otherwise feel alienated from politics. ACORN's voter registration and turnout efforts were highly successful -- until it ran into the Republican buzzsaw.
Can Democrats and progressives learn from that experience? We need a new wave of grassroots organizing to protect democracy's core principle - the right to vote.
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Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever
Fox News founder made this the hate-filled, moronic country it is today
May 19, 2017
On the Internet this week you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.
When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."
Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.
We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.
"Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line."
Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.
Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly - "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh - where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.
In this sense, his Fox Newsbroadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad - scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Foxwas sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence.
Ailes launched Foxin 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt shallowness ("More News in Less Time" was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers. But the main formula was always the political scare story, and Foxquickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady's mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies - to say nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman, saying 'Stand By Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote - were daggers to the hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes' audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette?
So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.
But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies.
Soon the villains weren't just in Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.
Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others' eyes and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance.
The Foxresponse was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing,who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided muffin tops as evidence of America's decaying values.
Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention.
The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.
Ailes grew out of the entertainment world - his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show - but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.
So when he created Fox,he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.
The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms - Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.
Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.
What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.
Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It's no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front of terrified Democrats.
It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.
Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line.
And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.
The extent to which we hate and fear each other now - that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.
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Are Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Roger Ailes Cooking Up a Post-Election Media Empire?
The frightening possibility of a Trump TV network combining the extremism of Breitbart News and Fox News
Aug 20, 2016
Before he became the chairman of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department at Goldman Sachs. For the past year, Bannon has merged Breitbart News with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, hoping to acquire more and more influence as a frequent Trump advisor and, as of this week, as the campaign's CEO.
This week Trump brought the Breitbart News chairman on to head his sputtering campaign despite the fact that Bannon has no experience working on, much less running, a national political campaign.
After Trump loses, don't be surprised to see Bannon join forces with Trump and Roger Ailes (the former Fox News guru deposed for engaging in sexual harassment of employees who recently jumped aboard Trump's sinking ship) to create a new right-wing media conglomerate -- Trump TV or Trump Media -- linking Breitbart News to a new cable network that will almost make Fox News look tame and responsible. Together, Trump, Ailes and Bannon would run their media empire to advance their common goals: gaining political influence, massaging their massive egos, moving the Republican Party further to the right, attacking Democrats and liberal ideas, and promoting a neo-fascist agenda combining xenophobia, racism, sexism, government-bashing, and anti-immigrant nativism.
Earlier this week, Trump hired Bannon as his campaign's chief executive. Bannon took over the right-wing website in 2012 after its founder, Andrew Breitbart, died of a heart attack at age 43. The media have had a difficult time explaining Bannon's operation just as it did when Breitbart ran the show. In its article, "What Is Breitbart News?," posted on Tuesday, the New York Times labeled it a "conservative-leaning news website." TheWashington Post called it "leading organ of the conservative media." Closer to the truth, Bloomberg News termed it a "crusading right-wing site."
Although it has the word "news" in its corporate name, Breitbart News is not a news-gathering enterprise. It does not report the news. It does not investigate the news. It does not comment on the news. It manufactures news.
It is, as my colleague Christopher Martin and I explained in our 2010 Huffington Post article, "Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?" (pasted below), a propaganda organization. To be even more straightforward, Breitbart News traffics in lies in order to advance its ultra-right wing agenda.
Through a careful analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber, Martin and I identified the key factors that Breitbart News uses to inject its manufactured scandals into the mainstream media. As we explained in our article, some of Breitbart's most famous crusades involved spreading lies about the community organizing group ACORN and lies about Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, both designed to promote an ultra-conservative agenda and attack liberal institutions.
Under its founder, Breitbart News invented scandals and then fed them to Fox News. Ailes' operation broadcast these fake news stories, which the mainstream media picked up, giving them credibility they didn't deserve. Under Bannon, it has continued this tradition, advancing lies about Planned Parenthood and affiliating itself with various extremist causes.
Under its founder, Breitbart News invented scandals and then fed them to Fox News.
As Stephen Hayes observed, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, bringing Bannon on board "means that Trump is choosing to end his campaign living in the alternate reality that Breitbart creates for him on a daily basis--where everything he does is the best, where everyone who questions him is an idiot or a traitor, where big rallies portend electoral victories, where House speaker Paul Ryan is the problem with modern conservatism, where polls that find him down are fixed, where elections he loses are rigged, where immigration and trade are the nation's most pressing issues, and where, truly, Trump alone can fix it all."
When Breitbart, who started the site in 2007 after learning the ropes from Matthew Drudge, found the truth inconvenient, he simply made stuff up and packaged it as "news." This included posting videos that were edited in ways that gave viewers a totally misleading view of what actually occurred. These weren't errors or mistakes. They were conscious lies. But the mainstream media never called them lies, but simply referred to these videos as "controversial" or similar words.
Bannon has continued his predecessor's modus operandi of spreading lies and manufacturing news, but taken it a step further, blatantly aligning itself the most extremist right-wing politicians.
Under Bannon, Breitbart News promoted a series of deceptively edited videos, manufactured by David Daleiden and his anti-choice group, the Center for Medical Progress, claiming - wrongly -- that Planned Parenthood profited from donated fetal tissue. This is part of Breitbart's ongoing crusade against Planned Parenthood, designed not only to destroy the pro-choice movement but also to undermine support for pro-choice Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. Breitbart News contributors have compared Planned Parenthood and doctors that perform abortions to Nazis, and claimed that contraceptives make women "unattractive and crazy."
In February, Breitbart News contributor Crystal Wright claimed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in "a sinister pattern of black genocide" by placing some of its clinics - which provide the full spectrum of medical services for women -- in predominately black neighborhoods. Another article in Breitbart News advised women subjected to online harassment to "just log off" and stop "screwing up the internet for men." In June, Breitbart a contributor Austin Ruse wrote a bizarre story fear-mongering that exposure to "contraceptives in drinking water" could be linked to "infertility among those who want to have babies," hoping to jump start a "a legal revolution against the pill."
Bannon worked for Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, before embarking on a career as a right-wing propagandist, including producing documentary films lionizing Sarah Palin ("The Undefeated") and attacking the Occupy Wall Street movement ("Occupy Unmasked").
Since taking over the reins at Breitbart News in 2012, he has also tried his hand as a talk show provocateur, hosting the Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM satellite radio channel, rising to the status of a third-rate Rush Limbaugh.
In 2014, Breitbart News promoted David Brat's successful Republican primary campaign against House majority leader Eric Cantor. Brat had almost no money, no political experience, and no name recognition, but Bannon's operation helped publicize Brat's uphill challenge to Cantor who, despite being a Tea Party favorite, wasn't reactionary enough for Bannon, who was friends with one of Brat's top campaign advisors. Breitbart News published dozens of pro-Brat and anti-Cantor articles that helped the little-known college professor topple the powerful Cantor.
If Bannon truly ran a news operation, he would have come to the defense of his employee, Michelle Fields, when she accused Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, of assaulting her after a news conference in Jupiter, Florida earlier this year.Serving as a virtual Trump surrogate, Bannon's Breitbart News has criticized Trump's Republican opponents and conservative critics, such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, whom Breitbart News called a "renegade Jew." (Given its penchant for lies and for anti-semitism, don't be surprised if Breitbart News soon republishes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early 1900s forgery purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination that was a favorite of anti-semites Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford).
If Bannon truly ran a news operation, he would have come to the defense of his employee, Michelle Fields, when she accused Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, of assaulting her after a news conference in Jupiter, Florida earlier this year. Instead, when Trump backed Lewandowski and attacked Fields, Breitbart News published an article questioning Field's account. Not surprisingly, she soon quit, as did other Breitbart employees who, despite their common right-wing views, believed that even Bannon had gone too far.
This week Trump brought the Breitbart News chairman on to head his sputtering campaign despite the fact that Bannon has no experience working on, much less running, a national political campaign. The appointment was generally seen as evidence that Trump was unhappy with efforts by his previous campaign operatives to restrain the impulsive candidate's rants and rages. Bannon will remove the straightjacket (and the Teleprompter) and let the narcissistic Trump be Trump.
Bannon and Trump are a perfect fit, since Trump has consistently demonstrated his willingness to make stuff up if it can rile up his followers at rallies. And with Ailes joining the Trump campaign (helping him prepare for his debates with Hillary Clinton, among other tasks), it is clear that Trump will crawl even lower into the gutter of lies and character assassination to try to revive his faltering presidential run.
In our 2010 analysis, Martin and I looked closely at Breitbart's approach to manufacturing scandals and injecting them into the mainstream media. We can expect that formula -- which Breitbart pioneered, Fox News perfected, and Bannon took even further -- to be reflected in Trump's increasingly bizarre campaign between now and November, and to serve as the template for a new media operation that Trump, Ailes and Bannon may launch soon after Clinton delivers her inaugural address in January.
Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?
By Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin
Huffington Post, July 23, 2010
Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart's job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.
Breitbart is part of the "paranoid style" conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade.
Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the "paranoid style" of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.
Breitbart is part of the "paranoid style" conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn't even pretend to be "fair and balanced." What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.
What's distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart's website, is only the latest example of this.
Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.
Breitbart's public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.
His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists -- Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe -- who visited 10 ACORN offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group's staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O'Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.
In fact, O'Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O'Keefe's costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media's mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O'Keefe and Giles as "actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp."
Breitbart not only defended the duo's actions but said that O'Keefe "is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists" and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.
By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart's website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN's Lou Dobbs Show. The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN's problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of "voter fraud."
The videos led many of ACORN's supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN's budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress' action was more important than the money itself. Congress' action provoked ACORN's cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.
Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group's receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O'Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office in another "gotcha" attempt, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).
(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart's smear tactics after we published a study revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. That study, "How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting," was published in the September 2010 issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association).
Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. He's gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.
First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans -- hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber -- including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere -- picked up Breitbart's ball and ran with it.
Next, the mainstream media -- the daily newspapers and the TV networks -- took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart's attacks -- by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.
Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself.
Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart's deception in the Sherrod "scandal" was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning -- that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.
There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered -- indeed, having helped create -- the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.
Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.
Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don't quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a "rising conservative media figure." The Washington Post called him a "conservative activist" and an "internet entrepreneur." NPR described him as a "conservative online news entrepreneur." The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a "blogger," while Newsday and the New Republic called him a "conservative blogger." The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an "online muckraker and journalist." Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC's "Good Morning America" labeled him a "publisher."
Regardless of what he's called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart's skill at what academics call "agenda-setting" and "framing". A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she's practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That's the art of agenda-setting.
Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they've been told that she's a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That's the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.
This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservativeWashington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart's propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal. Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wingAmerican Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart's best customer, followed by CNN.
Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing -- and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists -- the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists' responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.
By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don't know they are being conned -- or don't care.
Given Breitbart's track record, why does anyone -- reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials -- take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?
Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart's credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.
But it isn't only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.
Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck's Fox News show. Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck's (or Limbaugh's) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.
And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart's and Beck's poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing "independent" and "swing" voters -- and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates -- then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.
Breitbart's credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what's important is whether responsible journalists -- as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives -- learn some lessons from this episode.
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I Spent the Day with Trump's Undying Fans in Maine
A hot afternoon with They Who Will Not Be Swayed.
Aug 05, 2016
PORTLAND, MAINE--Somehow, my press credentialing e-mails from the Trump campaign keep getting blown off the porch of the Intertoobz.
So, on Thursday, I decided to be just another face in the crowd at an event at the Merrill Auditorium, a lovely old piece of big government memorabilia attached to City Hall here. I applied through the website, and I got my confirmation that I was invited to be a guest at what the website said was going to be a "town hall" with the Republican candidate for President of the United States. Doors would open at 7 a.m. for a 10 a.m. start. No, wait. The doors would open at 11 a.m. for a 2 p.m. start. Hold on. The doors will open at noon for a 3 p.m. start. Technically, you're not running late if you keep changing the time.
I assumed that the last e-mail was the final one, so I got to the venue at 9:30 on Thursday morning. There already was a line. People stood in the shadeless plaza, broiling and being heckled from all over the sky by raucous seagulls. (You'd have sworn Tippi Hedren was in line, wearing a God, Guts, and Guns tanktop.) A lot of the people were elderly, and most of them were white and pale. (For the record, I am both.) You'd have thought the campaign would have kicked in a few pallets of Trump Water for the faithful.
I fell into conversation with Gloria and Mo, a nice couple from Lewiston. (Mo's brother worked concessions at the second Ali-Liston fight, which is the only reason anyone ever has heard of Lewiston.) Mo helped develop the communications system for the space shuttle. For some reason, Gloria attracted the attention of various microphones and cameras that were grazing the line. She told them that she didn't trust the president and the $400 million that he sent to Iran because she had heard Oliver North on Fox TV explaining how terrible it is secretly to pay off the Iranians to obtain the release of our hostages. At that point, I confess, I mentally tapped out and tried to pacify my stomach, as Satchel Paige advised, with cool thoughts. I also eavesdropped.
And, oh, the things I learned. I learned that Elizabeth Warren used "affirmative action" to pay for her college education, which must have been quite a thing, since Senator Professor Warren graduated from the University of Houston in 1970, before there was affirmative action anywhere. I heard a deep dive into the international conspiracy of liberal fire marshals. I also learned that the Obamas and the Clintons really hate each other because the president stole the 2008 nomination from HRC through some shenanigans with ACORN, and that's the reason HRC was not named vice president, because the president knew that, if he picked her, she would have him killed. Oh, the things I learned.
(Let us stop for a moment to appreciate the latest in snarkitude from SPW. She was asked by Bloomberg Business why Wall Street seems to prefer HRC to He, Trump. "Nuclear war," she replied, "is bad for business.")
Shortly after noon, the doors to the auditorium opened and people dashed as best they could for the cool and the dark. They would sit in the hall for three hours, as the notoriously eccentric Trump playlist, including the completely non-ironic rendition of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," ran over and over again. Chants broke out from time to time, but they died as the afternoon went on. If you are a Trump fan, I was learning, you better be ready to give up the better part of a day. Slowly, everybody began to chill, in every real sense of the word.
"Of course the protesters were out there," said a guy sitting behind me. "It's not like they have jobs to go to." It was about there when I decided to go upstairs to the very last row of the balcony.
(And let us stop for another moment to appreciate an anti-Trump sign held by a woman out on the sidewalk. It read, "If yourMuslim ban is an attempt to avoid the prophecy of 3 witches," it read, "you haven't read Macbeth, either." OK, it makes a lousy bumper sticker, but it's nice to see some respect for the classics.)
To be completely fair, and after a lengthy introduction by Paul LePage, the human bowling jacket who is the governor of Maine, He, Trump hit the stage reasonably close to his scheduled time, albeit the third scheduled time that his campaign had sent out. He has a new chewtoy to play with: the $400 million that the United States sent to Iran as part of the settlement of a 37-year old lawsuit.
"$400 million in cash?" he said. "I wonder where that money really goes."
He also talked at length about this tape that Iran had put out of the plane's landing in Tehran and the cash's being unloaded. "There's only one reason for Iran to put out that tape," he said. "And that's to embarrass our country, and to embarrass our president, who is an incompetent."
It is here where it is incumbent on us to mention that nobody ever has seen anything like this tape. Ever. Anywhere.
It didn't matter. He was off again in his usual style, speaking to his audience in fluent confetti, ideas half-formed fluttering in the air and landing like blessings on the people who had come to hear him, who had stood for three hours in the broiling sun, and then sat in an auditorium for three more, to hear what they had come to hear.
It was about then, right after some folks were removed from the hall for standing mutely and holding up pocket copies of the Constitution, that the thought struck me: Whatever happened to the town hall? This was another speech, virtually the same as all the others. How many people, I wondered, stood in the heat and sat through the long afternoon because they expected actually to ask the candidate a question? Did they care?
I suspect not. These folks are what MSNBC's Chris Hayes has called Trump's "floor," the 30-odd percent of the country that will not be moved away from what they believe. There were no votes to be "splintered off" in that auditorium. That's the way it's going to be all the way to the election.
I admire people who will stick this way. I admire them far more than the candidate who is playing them like violins.
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Don't Shut Post Offices--Reinvent Them
Feb 29, 2016
Naomi Klein delivered the following remarks in Ottawa on February 29 at the Leap Day launch of Delivering Community Power, a proposal to turn postal offices into green community hubs to power Canada's next economy. Leap Day is the official kickoff date for dozens of climate action and events already planned in Canada and worldwide, which will take place throughout February and beyond. Check out leapyear2016.org and #leapmanifesto on Twitter for more.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we're on the traditional territory of the Algonquin people.
I'm delighted to be here today with my colleagues from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Idle No More, ACORN, and the Canadian Labour Congress, brought together by our allies from Friends of Public Services.
2016 is a leap year; today, February 29th, is Leap Day. We all enjoy the extra day we add to our calendars every four years to align them with the earth's orbit around the sun.
We do this because it's easier to change our human-created systems than to change the laws of nature. In this way, the leap year is a perfect metaphor for the present moment, in which our political and economic systems badly need updating to accommodate the hard realities of our common home, the Earth.
We see the conflicts all around us. In the gap between what scientists tell us we must do to prevent catastrophic warming, and the emission reduction pledges our government has proposed. In the gap between even those inadequate pledges and the actual policies that would get us there.
We see more gaps between the promise of reconciliation with First Nations in Canada and the gross inequities facing Indigenous communities. We see more gaps still, between the values of inclusion and compassion with which so many Canadians identify--and the economic policies that continue to exile many to the margin.
The gaps are huge and they are many. Too many, in fact, to tackle slowly and one at a time. In a time of overlapping crises, we need visionary policies capable of addressing multiple failures at the same time. So, how do we make the leap?
The Proposal
We're here to launch a concrete proposal for what a post-carbon economy could look like in Canada, one that would touch every community in the country. "Delivering Community Power" lays out a vision for post offices with solar panels on the roof, electric chargers outside, and a low-emissions fleet on the roads.
But this is far from cosmetic. Services provided inside would expand to include food delivery, door-knocking on elders' homes, and perhaps most exciting, affordable banking.With this proposal, the post office once again becomes a community space, where you can come in to mail a letter or make a deposit; organize farm-to-table food delivery for your home; get advice and a loan for rooftop solar panels; invest in a community energy project; and buy products from local businesses.
We believe this is no time to further contract public services. But neither is it a moment to simply protect a static status quo.Rather, our moment calls on us to reimagine what is possible.
And we find ourselves at a critical juncture that makes this kind of visionary change both necessary and entirely possible. The Trudeau government is in the process of unleashing billions of dollars of stimulus to Canada's economy, which is suffering thanks to our ill-advised ride on the oil roller coaster.
What we are saying is that every new public dollar we spend has to do more than simply spur random economic activity. Given the pressing nature of the climate crisis, as well as the many social justice fronts on which this government has pledged to act, that money must fuel the transformation of our economy. Of our energy system. Of our public sphere so that it meets all of today's complex needs.
Canada needs more than stimulus money. We need catalyst money--investments thoughtfully designed so that they bring down emissions, while making Canada a fairer and better place to live, particularly for the most vulnerable.
Which is where today's launch comes in. Progressives often get asked: we know what you're against, what are you for? Well, this is it, or a big piece of it. We encourage everyone to take a look.
Six months ago we launched The Leap Manifesto, a bold proposal for how we can transition Canada off fossil fuels in a way that battles systemic inequalities. We called for a transition grounded in "caring for the planet and one another"--and this proposal from Canada's postal workers turns that principle into a concrete vision for how to boldly retrofit one of our most ubiquitous and beloved brick-and-mortar institutions.
Since we launched The Leap, more than 30,000 people and close to 200 organizations have endorsed the document, and today dozens of groups are hosting teach-ins, sit-ins, rallies, community events and solar installations to celebrate the Leap Year. And not just in Canada: from Zagreb to Copenhagen to the Bronx.
We all have the same message for decision-makers: small steps are not enough; it's time for a leap. So let's get to work. Thank you.
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The Electability Spin Machine
Sanders has fought Clinton to a virtual draw in Iowa — it's time to crank up the spin machine
Feb 02, 2016
Here's where the spin begins.
Ordinarily you would think math would settle the issue of who won or did not win an election, but that's not the country we live in. The spin started months ago, and will continue forever. Barack Obama didn't win 2012: That RINO Romney surrendered it to him. And he didn't win 2008: The media didn't vet him, and George W. Bush's big-government conservatism handed half the country over while the New Black Panther Party and ACORN stole the rest.
Even now some buzz-cut Nixon die-hard gasping his last breath in a hospice named Shady Palms Death Quonset is probably still raging against the Daley machine for delivering 1960 to Kennedy. Or against that ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. Or Kennedy's father's money. Or the media, who televised that famous debate.
So naturally for the rest of the week we will learn that nobody who lost actually lost, and that all the winners are frauds. Campaign strategists have to justify where all that money went, and those in the media who prognosticate into lifelong panel-show sinecures have to course-correct reality when it gets in the way of a good story. And as for the candidates -- if we absolutely must drag them into this -- they have to persuade voters and donors that they haven't wasted their time, energy and money.
First up was the perpetual load billed as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who emerged at his headquarters to announce, "So this is the moment they said would never happen." Well, no. He was polling in third place, and that's where he finished. Apparently that's enough for victory.
"For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn't have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance.... But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message."
Once again, he came in third, which is where the Real Clear Politics average has had him ever since Ben Carson's numbers started nosediving around mid-December.
What Rubio was really saying -- through the perpetual vocal quaver of alternately traumatized patriotic horror or beatific patriotic awe he has sported during every public speech since 2010 -- was that he needed to repudiate the Cruz/Trump argument that this was a two-man race and prove that a third person was involved. But, "I showed 'em all by coming in third!" isn't much of a sales pitch.
Not that the PR wing of the Republican Party hasn't been making it. Fox News spent the evening pumping up Rubio's surging numbers in a recent Quinnipiac poll to prove that the ethnic telegenic candidate situated firmly between the establishment and the Tea Party wing is just as prime for an "inevitable" breakout as he has been every week since around August 4, when Donald Trump started eating his (and everyone else's) lunch.
The Rubio team's calculus is that, once other "establishment lane" candidates drop out, either humiliated by Iowa or New Hampshire, all the reasonable conservatives who hate black people, Muslims and Latino immigrants but who don't want to go full neofascist will get on the bandwagon. And that's a fine argument, but it's nothing close to inevitable. People enjoy backing winners (there's a reason why so many people still hold betting stubs for Secretariat at the Belmont), so why trade up for Rubio when you can go higher and pick one of the other two guys?
Chamber of Commerce types have no reason not to like Trump, apart from "electability," which is just as much a problem with a Rubio campaign that thinks "take a second job with Uber" is a solution to income inequality, is just as hardline anti-immigrant, and sounds increasingly determined to go full neocon by peppering speeches with casual calls to start conflicts with roughly two billion people. As for the culture-war types, why not pick Cruz? He and Rubio keep sounding the same War on Christianity notes, and if anything the ferocious pettiness of their attacks amounts to two guys trying not to sound identical. The only concrete way that Rubio proves an alternative to either of the frontrunners depends not on policy but on whether voters already personally hate those frontrunners.
Meanwhile, if overnight media Twitter is any indicator, the "Donald Trump Is a Loser" narrative is already in full swing. It's fine; it's funny, and needling anyone who overreacts to negativity as much as Trump does is a great pastime. There's just no way to argue that this is any more inevitable than Rubio's ascendance.
The argument goes something like this: Donald Trump says he will win all the time, so if he loses once, nobody will vote for him now, and they'll all like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It kind of makes sense, and that would be a great line of reasoning in a party that didn't make so little sense that it made Donald Trump its frontrunner for five months, despite the horrible things he says and all the ways in which he's repeatedly displayed a supposedly fatal heterodoxy.
You can find counterarguments without trying too hard. For one thing, Trump has been running a national-media campaign, which is a disadvantage in caucus states like Iowa, where he only dedicated serious attention for the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, Cruz flung everything at Iowa for months on end and still won by only 4.4 points, which might not mean much in light of Trump's absence of a ground game. Trump currently holds a large lead in New Hampshire, where his style of campaign and the easier voting process can pay off, and then we move to South Carolina, where he has a 16-point lead. And while it's late to start an operation from scratch, who's to say he doesn't throw a bunch of money at the problem and make a more serious get-out-the-vote effort now that he's been beaten once?
All of this is excellent spin. Wonderful, fantastic spin. Beautiful, luxurious spin. Trump has a spin guy, he's very very good.
But if you want maximal spin, just raw, thick tar spin, look to the Democratic Party and a legion of electability-policing flunkies.
What Bernie Sanders did Monday night was incredible. Until very recently, even a good showing would have sufficed to confirm his candidacy's seriousness, and any characterization of his loss as critical merely demonstrates how rapidly the goalposts can be moved when narratives need to be upheld.
At the start of last May, he was 54 points behind in Iowa to Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with the most open path to the eventual nomination in primary history. Sanders is a cranky old Jewish man from a tiny state and proudly considers himself a socialist, which in the rarified air of Beltway Centrism and in the swamp-gas of an America that still thinks the Cold War can be lost at any moment is somehow a more revolting word than "pederast."
With the exception of a few pro-Biden holdouts, almost the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment and the big money lined up behind his opponent, including veteran organizers and advisors. The Democratic Party chair scheduled a tiny number of debates on broadcast evenings so hostile to reaching a mass audience that their only purpose must have been minimizing exposing the electorate to any names that aren't Hillary Clinton's. Against this apparatus, Sanders decided to refuse to use super PAC money.
Meanwhile, every dead-eyed hack angling for a gig taking "Socks II" for walkies in the new Clinton administration has responded to Sanders' rising popularity with the Clinton-endorsement equivalent of Marge Simpson holding up her excised frontal lobe in a jar and groaning, "It's bliiiiiiiiiiiissssss."
You have Ezra Klein really taking it to some bozo named Ezra Klein over Sanders' health care plan. Along with assists from The Atlantic and The New Republic, Salon has gone balls-to-the-wall stupid peddling a mythic creature named the Bernie Bro whose existence is about as well documented as Prester John's.
The most substantial claim is that Bernie Sanders has some fans on the Internet who are assholes. Which puts him in exclusive company with literally everything. The same thinkfluencers who argue that Bernie Sanders needs to take personal responsibility for people he's never met being rude to journalists on the Internet (who are already berated and ridiculed by fans of everything else) are also filling column inches by doing the human-dignity equivalent of reaching a whole arm through a buzzing garbage disposal to latch onto yet another slime-slicked take festering in the U-bend and explaining why Hillary Clinton does not need to explain anything further. She doesn't need to justify that Iraq War vote again, or the destabilization of Libya, or that desire to go hog wild in Syria, or that 1990s support for welfare reform that hit women hardest, or those 1990s tough-on-crime policies she endorsed along with private prisons, or those speaking fees at Goldman Sachs or that opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall.
Against this habitual sycophancy, you have a 24-hour news and legacy media structure that has consistently pushed the "conventional wisdom says that a socialist like Bernie Sanders can't win" line to hammer home the message that Bernie Sanders can't win underneath a veneer of objectivity. It's not advocacy, after all, if you're only saying what everybody thinks. Even if your job is literally to help shape how everybody thinks.
Against all that, Bernie Sanders fighting Clinton to an essential draw in a state in which his opponent held a huge advantage in terms of local political operators and influencers is nothing short of extraordinary. Which, combined with Sanders' 18-point lead in New Hampshire, means it's time to crank up the RPMs on the spin cycle fast enough to rip apart space-time.
You will hear that Sanders can't win South Carolina because black voters love Hillary Clinton, without the qualifier that black voters largely don't know who Bernie Sanders is. You will hear the Clinton team again attack universal health care from the right, scaremongering about taxes while ignoring the savings people would enjoy from no longer paying health insurance premiums. You will hear Chelsea Clinton or some other mouthpiece again claim that Bernie Sanders -- the guy who wants to give Medicare to everybody -- is going to take away everybody's health care.
You will see Clinton wrap herself in the mantle of Obama's legacy not only to appeal to black voters but to obfuscate her record with that community. Embracing Obama obscures her support for her husband's welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies that harmed that community. It obscures that his first presidential bid is remembered for a "Sister Souljah moment" that amounted to a repudiation of Jesse Jackson, literally sitting next to him on the dais, and a reassurance of the white audience "right there in [that] room" that they were good white people. And it helps to wipe the memory of Bill embarrassing himself in front of the black community in 2008 while Hillary herself challenged Barack Obama's electability because white people wouldn't vote for him.
This isn't just another leg in the 44-year-old Democratic-hack sprint away from McGovern suddenly made more frantic by Bernie Sanders' visage haunting them from the left, like George returned to life to remind them of their sins. This is a long low road stretching toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, un-illuminated by any purpose greater than the tautological -- that we use electability to win elections, that we win elections by being electable, that we cannot fail to be victorious, that we must be victorious for we cannot fail.
This is the dim path where a career pro-gay-rights feminist looms as a misogynist and an enemy to identity politics because some people with egg avatars sent some tweets. Where a candidate who personally earned millions in speeches and whose campaigns were significantly funded by Wall Street firms that nearly broke the world is equivalent to the candidate whose whole campaign opposes them because, apparently, he took money from a nurses' union. Where a legitimate candidate of the working class will be hammered over and over in an authenticity battle with a campaign that weekly releases some "How do you do, fellow kids?" embarrassment and whose Instagram manager is a woman with her own HBO series. Where the real progressive candidate has already pledged not to raise any middle-class taxes and once called people on welfare deadbeats.
This is the claustrophobic world of small meaning that is born when everyone knows the only idea you have to aspire to is the reaffirmation that the Republicans are worse. It's the logic that says that nothing we do to each other in this room -- that nothing we do anywhere -- matters when we know there's a monster behind the door. It is a mean and interminable partnership with nihilism that will get much worse before it gets better, and no one will blame you if you fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the sea.
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Credulous Reporting of Deceptive Propaganda Made Planned Parenthood Attack Inevitable
The attack on Planned Parenthood was probably inevitable after the right saw how well the attack on ACORN was received.
ACORN, like Planned Parenthood, was at the top of the right's list of most-hated organizations, though in ACORN's case its chief sin was not helping women control their own bodies but rather helping poor people vote. ACORN was taken off the board by a series of deceptively edited, cunningly marketed hidden-camera videos, shot by right-wing prankster James O'Keefe (with Hannah Giles) and marketed by BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart.
Dec 14, 2015
The attack on Planned Parenthood was probably inevitable after the right saw how well the attack on ACORN was received.
ACORN, like Planned Parenthood, was at the top of the right's list of most-hated organizations, though in ACORN's case its chief sin was not helping women control their own bodies but rather helping poor people vote. ACORN was taken off the board by a series of deceptively edited, cunningly marketed hidden-camera videos, shot by right-wing prankster James O'Keefe (with Hannah Giles) and marketed by BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart.
The story that the videos told about ACORN was repeated uncritically by elite reporters like the New York Times' Scott Shane (9/16/09), :
The undercover videos showed a scantily dressed young woman, Hannah Giles, posing as a prostitute, while a young man, James O'Keefe, played her pimp. They visited ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn and San Bernardino, Calif., candidly describing their illicit business and asking the advice of ACORN workers. Among other questions, they asked how to buy a house to use as a brothel employing underage girls from El Salvador.... In the footage made public--initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com--ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work.
As became clear when the tapes (and accompanying transcripts) were examined by more skeptical eyes, O'Keefe and Giles did not go into ACORN's offices in outlandish costumes. They presented O'Keefe as a concerned boyfriend trying to protect Giles from a fictional abusive pimp. The "advice" they got on how to evade taxes or set up brothels turned out to be the product of selective editing. (See FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10; Extra!, 4/10.) In one instance, an ACORN employee called police to report the pair's suspicious visit (FAIR Blog,7/23/10).
But rather than criticizing O'Keefe and Breitbart for perpetrating a hoax, leading corporate media outlets suggested apologetically that they should have done more to spotlight the misleading story. New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (9/27/09) warned that if papers like his miss such stories, they might "wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan."
Centrist media critics endorsed the deceptive project, with the Columbia Journalism Review (9/18/09) pronouncing, "ACORN got caught on candid camera, and they got caught good." The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz (10/7/09) wrote that the videos "proved to be a legitimate story," while Slatemedia critic Jack Shafer (9/23/09) claimed that even "critics of Breitbart and the filmmakers don't really dispute the basic information unearthed by the videos."
"I have to give you credit for this," ABC's George Stephanopoulos told Breitbart (This Week, 6/1/10); "on ACORN, you did expose people doing things they shouldn't do."
With encouragement like that-not to mention that the video attack succeeded in driving ACORN to disband in April 2010-it's no wonder that O'Keefe and Breitbart continued to use the same unscrupulous techniques against the right's enemies. In July 2010, Breitbart released a tape of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod in which she seemed to be boasting that she refused to help a white farmer because of his race. When the full tape of Sherrod's talk came out, it turned out she was actually talking about how she overcame her prejudices to help the farmer and recognize that "there is no difference between us." But by that point, Sherrod had already been forced out of her job (FAIR Blog, 7/21/10).
O'Keefe claimed another victim when he forced the resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller after releasing a tape of an NPR fundraiser meeting with a fake Muslim charity (FAIR Blog, 3/11/11, 3/14/11). The tape as edited by O'Keefe appeared to show the fundraiser making light of Sharia law and asserting that the Republican Party had been "hijacked" by the Tea Party--but an analysis of the full tape found that "several key scenes were edited misleadingly.... Several of the most embarrassing moments were cobbled together or left out context" (Time, 3/13/11).
Why did O'Keefe in this case post the full video when it revealed his shenanigans? Time's James Poniewozik had a revealing take:
If O'Keefe hadn't posted the source video, it would have invited suspicion.
Instead he posted it and took the chance that most people would watch the edited video (or just clips from it on the news); that reporters, pressed for time with a stack of other assignments, would cover the edited video; that blogs (including, I will admit, this one) would link to those reports; and that by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people's minds and the ideological battle won.
As the resignation of NPR's boss indicates, it was a chance well worth taking.
Even more loathed on the right than ACORN or NPR, of course, is Planned Parenthood, and O'Keefe's methods were naturally applied to going after the reproductive health clinics. In fact, O'Keefe targeted anti-Planned Parenthood before he targeted ACORN--makingundercover videos at Planned Parenthood clinics in 2007 and 2008 with one Lila Rose, who went on to found a group called Life Force making similar videos for a group called Live Action. Live Action, in turn, was where David Daleiden, who made the more recent Planned Parenthood videos under the nameplate of the "Center for Medical Progress," learned his techniques. Daleiden calls O'Keefe a friend (NPR,7/22/15).
Given the connection, it's no surprise that the Planned Parenthood videos used the same bag of tricks that O'Keefe had employed to such success: deceptive editing, false framing, misrepresented visuals. And it's also not a surprise that corporate media--concerned about seeming "clueless" but even more worried about appearing "partisan"--gave plentiful newshole to Daleiden's claims, and to right-wing politicians who echoed him, generally in a "he said/she said" format. As Janine Jackson put it on CounterSpin (8/7/15):
As long as reporters feel that they have to report every politicians' claim basically credulously, to give weight and attention to baseless assertions because they were in fact made by a person who's running for office, then there's always a benefit to saying the most inflammatory, distorted thing, because even if it's criticized, the journalists' rule requires still require going back to that person to credulously entertain whatever cockamamie thing they say next.
The most inflammatory, distorted thing you could say, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is "selling baby parts"--which the videos provided no evidence of, and in fact edited out numerous instances where Planned Parenthood representatives explain in no uncertain terms that they can't and don't do that. Nevertheless, the videos provoked a deluge of coverage revolving around the question, "Does Planned Parenthood sell baby parts?"--until, predictably enough, three people were murdered in a Planned Parenthood clinic by someone exclaiming "No more baby parts!"
In the aftermath of the killings, media still couldn't seem to get past the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand mindset to say that Planned Parenthood had been targeted on the basis of unfounded allegation. Thus Reuters(11/29/15):
Conservatives have accused Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that provides a range of health services, including abortion, of illegally selling baby parts, an accusation it has strenuously denied.
Or you take the route of the New York Times (11/27/15), where the "selling baby parts" lie was left out, leaving it entirely unclear why Planned Parenthood was "criticized":
The shooting came at a time when Planned Parenthood has been criticized because of surreptitious videos made by anti-abortion groups of officials discussing using fetal organs for research.
Then the Times (11/29/15) can cast blame on both sides-for "foment[ing] political passions":
Congressional supporters and opponents of Planned Parenthood were uncharacteristically subdued over the weekend as they awaited more information about the shooting.... But considering the extent to which Planned Parenthood has fomented political passions on both the left and the right in Washington, that restraint seems unlikely to hold.
In fact, there is blame to be shared for fomenting murderous passions--not between reproductive health clinics and those who smear them, but between the right-wing propagandists who create the smears and their corporate enablers who through credulous pseudo-journalism transmute the smears into "news."
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