"People Get Subpoenas, Shit Gets Real"...

[babylonsister]

“People Get Subpoenas, Shit Gets Real”: What John Edwards Should Teach the Media About Covering Trump
If you were in Las Vegas and could win $1 million by placing a simple prop bet on whether Trump enjoyed some pee play with Russian hookers in Moscow in 2013, would you bet yes or no? You know where you’d put your money. Even Mitch McConnell would take that bet.
by Peter Hamby

May 9, 2018 6:04 pm


When BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier, in January of 2017, much of the media universe rushed to condemn the release of an unverified document that made a series of explosive accusations about Donald Trump and his campaign’s dealings with Russia. Never mind that the claims included in the dossier are a key piece of the special counsel’s investigation into Trump, or that the dossier was being circulated around the highest levels of American government on the cusp of a new presidency. There was a righteous journalism debate to be had! Brian Stelter of CNN compared BuzzFeed to WikiLeaks. NBC’s Chuck Todd told BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith: “You just published fake news.” Even Bob Woodward, the high priest of investigative journalism, lashed the dossier, calling it “a garbage document.”

It was a weird look for the news media: opting to give Trump—a man with a decades-long record of telling mistruths, double-dealing, obscuring facts, dodging responsibility, and trashing journalists—the benefit of the doubt over a news organization working in the public’s interest to keep powerful people accountable. The journalistic tut-tutting feels even weirder in hindsight, now that we are in the midst of a near-daily firehose of lies and leaks emanating from an administration with a demonstrated contempt for the truth and a flagrant disregard for the traditional ways of doing business in Washington. Trump should never get the benefit of the doubt. Yes, that’s partly because he’s Trump, a guy who admitted to a biographer a few years ago that he still has the temperament of a first-grader. But it’s also because Trump is a politician, and even the most well-intentioned politicians deserve the suspicion of the press, not our good faith.

Trump’s history, mendacity, and dubious associations—see Cohen, Michael— require a new kind of thinking in the news world, an even deeper skepticism from the press. There is too much tedious soul-searching in journalism, too many old-school homilies, too many painful attempts at forced balance. “Balance” is a feeble idea that exists only in American political journalism, where truth is just a two-dimensional political concept that lies somewhere in between Republican and Democrat. Fairness is something else entirely, “the best obtainable version of the truth,” as Woodward and Bernstein are fond of saying. Reporters should stop worrying about the 40 percent of the public, and their representatives in Congress, who blindly agree with Trump at every turn when he bellows about “fake news.” The truth is that aggressive, confrontational journalism is revealing more scandals per week than we used to uncover in a year. Trump proves the necessity of an unshackled press. Trump also proves, on a near-daily basis, that he is unworthy of our trust.

The latest reminder of this has come in the form of Trump’s new attorney Rudy Giuliani, who escaped from an Edvard Munch painting to inform the world that the president did, in fact, pony up the cash to pay off Stormy Daniels. Trump, of course, is on record lying about this, and so is his longtime flunky Cohen. These people are not to be trusted. This might feel like a blinding flash of the obvious, especially for the keyboard jockeys of #Resistance Twitter, but in Washington it can sometimes be hard to see through the fog. It’s genuinely difficult to make sense of scandals as they unfold in real time. We are inhaling bits and pieces from multiple investigations that feel like they blur together, and the only thing we can do is text our friends and say, “Holy shit, did you see this?” without divining any clear answers.

Truth-seeking is also genuinely hard for beat reporters, especially when you are in it every single day. You are talking to sources at all hours, some loyal to the president, some only kind of loyal. Some with proximity to real information, some trafficking in third-hand gossip. People that you genuinely like tell you something and you think, “Hey, maybe Trump didn’t actually do that awful thing? Maybe we are being too hard on him?” You can’t burn or antagonize these sources because you need them. You look at your Twitter mentions and second-guess yourself. “Am I being fair here?” You’re under a huge amount of deadline pressure from your bosses in a news world where scoops and cable bookings are the coin of the realm.

more...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/what-john-edwards-should-teach-the-media-about-covering-trump

[american_ideals]

1. Reality is coming. GOP propaganda media can't hide truth forever.

[maxsolomon]

4. GOP Propaganda has made truth irrelevant

the truth is available, but Americans by and large prefer to remain asleep.

the goal is always to delay the truth, find a tiny fault to discredit it with, offer a counter-narrative, dilute, until the average voter gets overwhelmed and has to go to work, pick up the kids, make dinner, call their dying trump-voting parent.

life interferes, then the outrage fades, and the GOP sails on. this is a science they've perfected. it worked when they lied the nation into an endless war with sunni islam.

[Cosmocat]

8. T H I S

This is what I see when I look around me ...

[american_ideals]

11. Well yes. Tell all your friends and family "Fox Lies"

[maxsolomon]

12. They know, or they won't listen

I watched a drunk 40-year old tell a 80 year old that exact thing over and over at a bar a month ago.

It had no effect. Fox viewers think WE are the brainwashed.

[american_ideals]

13. Gotta give them new info. It works for me.

"Republican billionaires want to destroy the government to cut taxes on the rich".
"That's why Fox and Limbaugh lie to you."

"They think you're a sucker."

"You just put a huge tax cut on a credit card. You didn't get the money, the Koch brothers did. The Koches are laughing at you. They think you're a sucker. They love the lies on Fox. Rupert Murdoch made a billion dollars on that tax cut. That's why Fox lies to you."

I have had great success with these lines. Try them!

[maxsolomon]

14. i prefer to ask questions

that point out that things aren't black and white.

dumb people like simple answers, and the GOP knows it. getting them to stop the knee-jerk generalizations is key, but you can lead a horse to water...

[american_ideals]

15. Yes that's another good method

My patience is probably lower than yours.

[Iggo]

7. Yes, reality is coming. Expect bombs dropped on brown people very soon. (n/t)

[procon]

2. This is a highly critical article on the consequences of weak journalism.

We all know Trump's "entire administrations and political parties and business and media interests are mobilized to obfuscate, deny, and lie on behalf of a president."

A free press is not supposed to be fair or balanced, but confrontational and aggressively sceptical.

Aggressive, always-on skepticism: it must be the media’s enduring posture with the Trump administration and its allies and its attempts to diminish what’s under investigation. For the public and the press, our north star, even in moments of doubt, has to be the knowledge that it’s all probably worse than we think it is. That’s always how political scandals work. To take Raelyn Johnson’s (John Edwards baby mama) analogy a step further: where there is smoke, there is fire. What about when there are four dozen fires, all burning simultaneously in the same house?

[pangaia]

3. "...always-on skepticism.." nope

Even THAT is to weak.
They lie about everything.NOTHING is the truth..

Why even be skeptical? It is all lies, half truths and smoke..

smoking does NOT cause cancer.

Have a ROUNDUP cocktail.

AUTHORITARIANS !! Global CORPORATIONS.... et al....

[peggysue2]

5. Until the media can actually utter the words . . .

money-laundering, the Mob and gross fraud and criminality, they're sipping weak tea. At the behest of the Trumpster and his enablers, I might add, who threaten daily to cut off access to all FAKE NEWS.

And sorry, I don't want to hear about the deadline pressure and stress that journalists are under. That's their damn job: stressed out, muscular watch dogs, not pampered King Charles spaniels. How 'bout our stress watching the country slip into a fascist Mobster-ring?

Even the subhead on this article is ridiculous. Pee-pee tapes? That's not where it's at, not worth anyone's bet, McConnell's or anyone else's. A perversion--as gross as it may be--has nothing on money-laundering, international Mob affiliations and conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States of America. Which is what these incredibly arrogant, greedy pigs are guilty of doing.

The question should be: why are media outlets giving the Trumpster the benefit of the doubt?

Follow the damn money. Because that's what ushered in this nightmare.

[FakeNoose]

9. Certainly the news media in New York should have been onto Cheeto's game

New Yorkers knew about Trump's failures, lawsuits and lies early in his career. It has been the fodder for many local news stories in the Big Apple over the years. There are no New York journalists or pundits who can claim they didn't know (or at least suspect) that Trump had no business running for President and completely lacked the credentials for such an important position.

And yet, how very few journalists, reporters and pundits ever told us the truth? I mean yeah, they're all trying to pile on now but when it mattered was BEFORE the election. The media was seriously derelict, and Americans became complacent reading "news" on Facebook and Twitter.

[BobTheSubgenius]

10. For some bizarre reason, that photo really struck me.

One of the fleeting thoughts I had was "Maybe it's an invitation to go stage-diving." Wouldn't that be fun?