Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Dumped in the Trumpster

If Donald Trump does not acknowledge that Team Putin has and is attacking the U.S. with cyberwarfare, he succeeds on centering the ongoing news coverage on his denials, which is consistent with his methods used to control media coverage during the 2016 election campaign.

If Trump were to acknowledge Russian cyberattacks, the media questions and discussion would center on "Mr. President, what are you going to do about Russia's attacks?". Trump does not want to go there because he does not want to do anything at all about Russia's cyber warfare. Trump does not want to do anything about Russian cyber warfare because Russian cyber warfare inures to his benefit.

Our mainstream media, including MSNBC, despite calling on all kinds of experts on these matters, still struggles to ignore the president's statements, which are such an effective tool to deflect their attention. Even after two years of this nonsense, the media struggles.

The only effective way for the media to cover this endless obfuscation would be to speculate about matters unknown assuming a worst case scenario. The absolute worst case - that the president is an agent of a foreign enemy - actually provides the most consistent, credible explanation of the behavior of all bad actors throughout the current crisis.

"Mr. President, what did you discuss with Vladimir Putin in private? People are saying (to borrow a phrase from the Obfuscator in Chief)...people are saying that you and Putin agreed on further conspiracies to sabotage the 2018 election, similar to your collaboration on 2016. We suspect that you made agreements on Syria, which, together with your side agreements with the Saudis and the UAE, will result in enormous personal financial gain to you and the Kushners."

And so on. The only way to fight this manipulation by Trump of the media's reluctance to go beyond the minimization of the bad case is for the media to speculate on the maximal worst case. Right now, Trump is just doing a dance as he always has and the media is dancing along with him. The media has come to depend on the "he says/she says - the truth will out as we fact check" so much that they do not know how to shift gears.

The media needs to keep speculating until those tax returns are released and the American translator in Helsinki testifies under oath divulging the details of the most recent secret meeting between Trump and Putin. If the American translator left the room, we need to know that. We need to know the reason so many Republican congressmen had to be in Moscow for the 4th of July this year and why Rand Paul needs to go there.

Monday, July 16, 2018

The Problem With Appearances

The more extreme the overt actions of the U.S. President, the more compelled our U.S. traditional media feels they need to mince words.

So, the WaPo, behaving in the mold of the careful NYT, headline reads:

"Trump offers little pushback to Putin's denial of interference"
source:cnn.com
The problem of that headline is that it arises from a place of deliberate caution, rather than a place of reporting plain facts... from a place of expecting any U.S. president, acting in the interest of the United States, would, of course, finally, firmly call out Russia's attacks at the U.S. (Actually, not agree to meet with Putin.) Instead, the WaPo, determined that there is some kind of push back, decides to describe the "pushback" as "little", which renders the headline way off the mark.

CNN betrays its own problems reporting the facts with:

"An unprecedented refusal to believe his own intelligence agencies"

We do not know and can not know what another person believes. We only know what they say they believe. A person may lie. A person guilty of substantial wrongdoing is likely to deliberately lie. The strong possibility, nay, the likelihood that Trump has betrayed his country and, of course, knows that he and his team have worked with Russian for a long time means that he needs to deny the findings of the U.S. intelligence agencies in order to cut off all serious discussion of Russian operatives efforts to undermine democracy. After all, it's not just intelligence agencies at this point. The Department of Justice continues to issue indictments of Russians who have acted against the interests of the United States. That "unprecedented refusal to believe his own intelligence agencies" is old, old news at this point.

The dramatic breaking news that these organizations hold so dear, yet recoil from when the news is so astounding, is that Trump, fresh off his meeting with leaders of NATO countries who he attacked with ferocity, soon after meeting with G7 in Canada, whose leaders he also attacked, cozied up to Putin in Helsinki.

Even in their editorial Trump just colluded with Russia. Openly (granted, that title's an improvement), WaPo pulls their punches. Just because the truth is so shocking - that's my guess for this behaviot.

Twice in the editorial, WaPo tells us what Trump "appeared" to do. Think of the logic to that. He spoke openly and plainly. Yet, his statements can only be appearances.

"Mr. Trump appeared to align himself with the Kremlin against American law enforcement before the Russian ruler and a global audience."

If he only "appeared" to align himself with Putin, what is the source of the doubt? Was it something he said?

"As Mr. Trump apparently sees it, Russia’s invasions of Ukraine and Georgia, war crimes in Syria, poison attack in Britain and the shooting down of a Malaysian civilian airliner over Ukraine are morally equivalent to the policies pursued by previous U.S. administrations."

Here we mix two prevalent flaws of mainstream media - shying away from accurate statements that would, if written, directly report an outrage by a politician, and, on a related note, telling us what a politician believes, even though we can not know what a person believes.

WaPo continues later in the editorial, "Incredibly, Mr. Trump appeared to endorse a cynical suggestion by Mr. Putin that Mr. Mueller’s investigators be granted interviews with a dozen Russian intelligence officers indicted in the DNC hack in exchange for Russian access to associates of William Browder, a financier whose exposure of high-level corruption and human rights crimes in Moscow led to the adoption by Congress of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on those responsible. Mr. Putin’s citation of bogus Russian charges against Mr. Browder was matched by Mr. Trump’s garbled reference to “the Pakistani gentleman” who was falsely alleged by right-wing conspiracy theorists to be behind the leak of DNC emails."

Again, WaPo insists on reporting what Mr. Trump "appears" to be doing, yet, if they are so intent on reporting appearances, why not report that Mr. Trump appears to be acting as an agent of a foreign country, against U.S. foreign policy interests? Unfortunately, that reticence creates a loophole that Trumpian lackey propaganda outlets are happy to exploit. Not so with New York Magazine's:

"At Summit With Russian, Trump Betrays His Country In Plain Sight"

That's a headline that is needed and avoids the problem of WaPo and NYT that often insist on minimalism to the point of absurdity - trying so hard to objectively report the facts that they fall short of factual reporting.