The dangerous myth about the so-called ‘liberal’ media is still going strong

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It is an enduring belief that the vast majority of U.S. media are “liberal” or “leftist.” This is a powerful myth, used by the political right to convince citizens that a secular, urban elite pushes a leftist agenda on the nation via television, newspapers and Internet. This notion wasn’t invented by Trump. But Trump has, more than any other president, leveraged that pre-existing distrust and taken it to new depths. As we watch Trump openly fight democracy post-election, it is worth considering how this myth is perpetuated, even internationally.

As an American and an academic who studies the media, I have, of course, followed Swedish media coverage of the U.S. elections. And, as someone invited to comment on those elections in Swedish media, I was even part of that coverage. During my consumption and participation, it struck me that it was often taken as a fact by Swedish journalists that a large part of the U.S. media landscape is dominated by what is defined as a “liberal/left” media, and that a large portion of “mainstream media” in the U.S. were partisan in their opposition to Trump.

This is a misleading, decontextualized position. Continue reading.

Trump’s eruption at an NBC reporter says it all about his alternate reality on coronavirus

Washington Post logoUpdate: Trump’s campaign issued a release Saturday attacking Alexander, even as Trump and the coronavirus task force began their briefing. The release accuses Alexander of arguing there is no “magic drug” for coronavirus, when in fact Alexander was quoting Dr. Fauci saying that.

President Trump on Friday excoriated an NBC reporter for pressing him on whether he was being overly optimistic about the government’s ability to deliver drugs to treat the coronavirus. But the exchange epitomized just how out of tune Trump is with actual developments and his top health officials.

At the daily news briefing, Trump played up the promise of a malaria drug to possibly treat the coronavirus. He was asked about its application to other similar diseases like severe acute respiratory syndrome, for which he said he thought the drug had been “fairly effective.”

But then Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading immunologist, stepped in to qualify things. Continue reading.

An embarrassing scene in the White House Rose Garden

Washington Post logoThe last four years have laid waste to many of the norms and supposedly uncrossable lines of American politics. But few scenes encapsulate how ridiculous things have gotten like the spat that led to the White House suspending Playboy White House reporter Brian Karem’s press pass.

A judge ruled Tuesday that the White House must return Karem’s pass — but not before laying out in excruciating detail exactly how we arrived at that point: to wit, a confrontation between him and former White House aide Sebastian Gorka.

The White House Rose Garden was particularly ripe for such a scene July 11, as right-wing “influencers” were invited to meet with Trump before the news conference and then allowed to attend it alongside the mainstream media that many of them deride as “fake news.”

Here’s what followed, according to the judge’s ruling, including the original citations. You can click on the yellow highlights to read my annotations via Genius.

View the complete September 4 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Trump spokeswoman: ‘I don’t think the president has lied’

The Hill logoNOTE:  This is another spokeswoman from the previous post, this time from his re-election campaign, stating the President hasn’t lied. This, when there’s a massive archive showing his lies.

CNN host Chris Cuomo and Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for President Trump‘s reelection campaign, got into a heated exchange late Wednesday over whether Trump lies, with McEnany repeatedly insisting that he doesn’t. 

The contentious back-and-forth came as Cuomo accused the president of consistently lying and demonizing people for being different.

“He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t lie,” McEnany retorted. “The press lies.”

View the complete August 29 article by Justin Wise on The Hill website here.

Trump accuses social media companies of ‘terrible bias’ at White House summit decried by critics

Washington Post logoPresident Trump assailed Facebook, Google and Twitter on Thursday — accusing them of exhibiting “terrible bias” and silencing his supporters — at a White House “Social Media Summit” that critics chastised for giving a prominent stage to some of the Internet’s most controversial, incendiary voices.

For Trump, the conference represented his highest-profile broadside against Silicon Valley after months of accusations that tech giants censor conservative users and websites. With it, the president also rallied his widely followed online allies — whom he described as “journalists and influencers” and who together can reach roughly half a billion people — entering the 2020 presidential election.

“Some of you are extraordinary. The crap you think of is unbelievable,” Trump said.

View the complete July 11 article by Tony Romm on The Washington Post website here.

Donald Trump tells Putin journalists are “fake news”, something Putin doesn’t have to put up with

Once again, Donald Trump is envious of Vladimir Putin’s government-controlled media in Russia. Just what an American president sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution should do to defend the American people’s freedom of speech and the press.

New White House press secretary yanked Arizona reporters’ access after critical coverage

Washington Post logoOn April 5, 2016, Hank Stephenson checked his email and saw that he had a new message from Stephanie Grisham. “Attached please find the form that you requested for the cursory background check we have discussed,” Grisham, then the press secretary for the Republican majority in the Arizona House of Representatives, wrote. “Really appreciate everyone’s willingness to work with us.”

Stephenson, who at the time was a reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times, initially hadn’t thought too much about what Grisham claimed was a new security protocol. That was about to change.

“At first it was kind of like, eh, whatever,” he told The Washington Post. “And then, they explained what they would want.”

View the complete June 26 article by Antonia Noori Farzan on The Washington Post website here.

Trump threatened Time reporter with prison — and then griped about never being named Man of the Year

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump threatened a reporter with prison after a photographer tried to snap a photo of his letter from Kim Jong Un.

According to a transcript of his interview with Time‘s Brian Bennett, the president asked to go off the record to show off the letter.

When the magazine’s photographer tried to take a picture of it, Trump became enraged.

“Excuse me — under Section II — well, you can go to prison instead, because, if you use, if you use the photograph you took of the letter that I gave you,” Trump said, according to the transcript.

View the complete June 21 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

‘Lying press’ and the Nazis: The long and troubling history behind Trump’s attacks on ‘the enemy of the people’

At an election rally in Cleveland in October 2016, two supporters of Donald Trump were captured on video shouting, “Lügenpresse!” What was going on? Why would people who are looking to Trump to “Make America Great Again,” be shouting a German word at one of his events? And what did it mean? The “lying press” — an idea at the heart not only of Trump’s campaign and presidency, but of his entire worldview.

The news media, Trump complains, treats him unfairly. It does not report all the positive news about his campaign and then his presidency. Instead, he insists, it lies to the public, publishing what he calls “fake news.” Within the confines of Trump’s community of supporters, stories critical of Trump are seen as lies, as phony left-wing propaganda. They’re not to be believed. As it turns out, the use of the term Lügenpresse happens to be quite illuminating. It sheds light on a connection between Trump’s political approach and that of Hitler in the 1930s, when one also heard that word used quite often.

The term Lügenpresse has its origins in Germany during the First World War. Initially intended to counter allied propaganda campaigns (a good deal of which we now know to have actually been accurate) the Nazis used it to attack hostile media. And considering the central role of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s worldview, it was a particularly effective weapon. The idea of a Jewish-dominated press stretched back decades. By the 1920s it was all but an unspoken assumption within German anti-Semitic circles. So now, if the press was critical of the Nazis, the explanation was clear: the Jews. And since, according to Hitler, Jews were fundamental enemies of Germany, the press, too, was the enemy of the people.

View the complete June 9 article by Richard E. Frankel from Salon on the AlterNet website here.