Mainstream Media Refused to Report Trump's Bombshell Quid Pro Quo Offer to Big Oil Execs
Media Matters For America delivers a bombshell analysis of news coverage and how its missing from Trump's offer to prostitute himself and the Constitution.
National TV news, with the exception of MSNBC, failed to cover Trump's scandalous Big Oil proposition
Nearly 40% of all TV news coverage appeared on Ali Velshi’s program
WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER
Media Matters For America, 05/14/24
On May 9, The Washington Post published an exclusive story on a dinner at Mar-A-Lago in which former President Donald Trump promised to reverse President Joe Biden's actions on climate change as he asked oil executives to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign, assuring them that they'd be getting a “deal” due to the “taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”
Subsequently, Reuters, The New York Times, Politico, and The Atlantic, among other digital news sites, covered the new revelation, which The Atlantic’s David A. Graham acknowledged “may not have been illegal,” but described as “undeniably scandalous.” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), “You won't read a more important story today.”
Unfortunately, over a four-day period, TV news broadcast and cable networks — with the exception of MSNBC — did not cover Trump’s proposition to oil executives. From May 9 through May 12, MSNBC spent 48 minutes discussing Trump’s proposition to Big Oil, with nearly 40% of the coverage airing on Velshi.
Big Oil and industry allies have already poured millions of dollars into Trump's joint fundraising committee to help cover his legal fees, all the while also drafting their wish list for his day one agenda, including “ready-to-sign executive orders,” according to Politico. Now, with this new revelation from The Washington Post, it appears the price has been set for getting the oil industry’s wish list done, making it even clearer what’s at stake for the climate in the outcome of the 2024 election.
SNIP...
During the May 10 edition of All In with Chris Hayes, host Chris Hayes interviewed New York Times climate reporter Lisa Friedman about Trump’s proposition to Big Oil, which he pointed out was “not prosecutable under current law,” but “in common parlance … is a political quid pro quo.”
CONTINUES...
https://www.mediamatters.org/msnbc/national-tv-news-exception-msnbc-failed-cover-trumps-scandalous-big-oil-proposition
The truth hurts as Corporate McPravda wants to keep the fascist boot on our faces for ever.
= new reply since forum marked as read
A study found that five of the major oil companies - ExxonMobil, Shell plc, Chevron Corporation, BP plc, and ConocoPhillips Company - spent nearly $3.6 billion combined on advertising between 1986 and 2015, trying to clean up their appearance. Notably, higher years of spending matched up with years of congressional activity on climate change and high media coverage of the issue.
Source: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/big-oil-trying-sell-false-narrative-about-its-sustainability#:~:text=A%20study%20found%20that%20five,to%20clean%20up%20their%20appearance.
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Corporate promotion and climate change: an analysis of key variables affecting advertising spending by major oil corporations, 1986–2015
Abstract and Figures
Advertising by fossil fuel companies is a ubiquitous element of modern political life. Promotional campaigns in the service of a corporation’s position toward environmental issues such as climate change are prevalent in the oil and gas sectors, where corporate image is seen as a valuable asset in managing risk, controlling negative media attention, and overcoming resistance by antagonistic civil society groups. This article assesses advertising expenditures by five major oil and gasoline companies for the time period 1986 to 2015. We examine four major factors that may influence spending on advertising by the oil and gas sectors: (1) the overall reputation of the oil and gas sector; (2) congressional attention to climate change; (3) media attention to climate change; and (4) a series of control variables including major oil spills, the publication of major climate change reports, overall public concern about climate change, GDP, and oil prices. We find that the factors that most influence corporate promotional spending are media coverage and congressional attention to the issue of climate change.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Brulle-2/publication/337909380/figure/fig1/AS
41575693680686@1601500547933/Corporate-promotion-spending-by-major-oil-corporations-1986-2015-in-constant-2015.png
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337909380_Corporate_promotion_and_climate_change_an_analysis_of_key_variables_affecting_advertising_spending_by_major_oil_corporations_1986-2015
From the Helpful Professor
Readers are leaders!
A phrase that’s not heard on TV, coined by the late Ben Bagdikian:
The Media Monopoly
Ben Bagdikian, Visionary
Jeff Cohen
Fairness and Accuracy In Media FAIR, March 12, 2016
EXCERPT...
Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed . . . but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.
But we weren’t the visionaries. It was Ben Bagdikian who was the seer.
Ben was a journalist’s journalist—from his years as a local reporter to his years at the Washington Post (where he played a crucial role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and went undercover as an inmate in a maximum-security prison). He served the public, not the boardroom—and luckily for him, he got out of corporate media before the conglomerate era.
SNIP...
Ben’s motto through all these decades could have been: “Tell the Truth and Stand Strong.”
The New York Times obit for Ben (3/11/16) quotes his message to his journalism students at UC Berkeley:
Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.
SOURCE: http://fair.org/home/ben-bagdikian-visionary/
Additional info on corporate owned news:
http://www.corporations.org/media/
https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaMonopoly_Bagdikian.html
Media Monopoly: Great for the Billionaires, another disaster for Democracy.
PS: What you wrote is true true. Still, I’ve tried my best and expect the same from other citizens.
I hope so. 
If there is a recording . Biden will be taking that to the first debate. 
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” — Edward L. Bernays, “Propaganda,” published 1928.
Here’s the history. First, details and a GOP legal memo from a guy Nixon later tapped for SCOTUS:
The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy
Additional important history to know...
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
Source: TUC Radio
Part 1: https://tucradio.org/podcasts/newest-podcasts/alex-carey-corporations-and-propaganda-part-one-of-two/
Part 2: https://tucradio.org/podcasts/newest-podcasts/alex-carey-corporations-and-propaganda-part-two-of-two/
Here’s what political reporters care about, and it’s not you
By Dan Froomkin
Press watchers.org - November 17, 2022
It’s a mystery to a lot of folks how political reporters who seem so smart and accomplished consistently get the big things wrong.
The reason is that political reporters are human beings. Human beings respond to incentives. And in the case of the elite Washington press corps, those incentives are skewed.
These reporters respond to four core constituencies: Their editors, their sources, their peers, and right-wing trolls.
SNIP…
Your Editors
You will never get scolded by your editors for talking trash about Democrats. That proves your independence. By contrast, if you express an even slightly negative common-sense view about the Republican Party, that is liberal editorializing that sets off alarms throughout the newsroom’s glass offices. You get rewarded for scoops – incremental tidbits of no lasting significance – not edification. Your safest place is always in the middle, pointing fingers at both sides. You are rewarded for unflappability, and looking like you care too much about something is the quickest way to lose your job.
Your Sources
If your sources don’t return your calls, your editors will find someone else to do your job. Democrats will never cut you off, no matter what you write. Democratic operatives will even admire how you play the game. Republicans will cut you off if they conclude you’re biased against them. As long as you don’t stray from the conventional wisdom, you’ll be OK.
CONTINUES…
https://presswatchers.org/2022/11/heres-what-political-reporters-care-about-and-its-not-you/
When Plausible Deniability infected the news room.
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.
The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:
■ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad.
■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.
Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
Continues…
https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-1977
The Right has been at war with Democracy in the USA since FDR introduced the New Deal. They hate a free press that holds the comfortable to account and a public education system because it creates thinking people, in short, our democracy
Digital sources continue to grow while everything else shrinks – but there are still some surprises.
A massive 86% of Americans get their news from smartphones, tablets or computers at least some of the time, according to new data released by Pew Research. That’s a 4% increase since last year.
Additionally, Americans prefer to get their news from digital sources. The numbers are smaller, with 58% choosing apps and websites over any other kind of news. Just 27% tap TV as their first pick – but even those numbers are generous compared to the dismal 6% who prefer radio and 5% who prefer print.
SOURCE: https://www.prdaily.com/where-americans-get-their-news-new-data-from-pew-research/#:~:text=Pew%20Research%20found%20that%2062,turn%20to%20digital%20sources%20first.
Readers are leaders. Which is why billionaires bankroll conservative politicians who promise to eliminate the federal Department of Education and de-fund public education in the 50 states and however many territories the nation colonizes.
Thinking in familiar terms makes things more eh clearer.
Here's another story media supporters might want to consider:
Seeing how this happened when Trump ordered a mob to attack the Congress and stop the certification of the Electoral College, the editors who knew about this in January, 2001, had a responsibility to publish it at the time.
I very much appreciate that you grok why, live love laugh.
There is only one business mentioned by name in the Constitution: the Press, in the First Amendment. The founders understood the importance of an informed electorate for the nation to thrive. That is why, as pee-resident, Trump did all he could to keep the people from learning how he used the powers of government to enrich and empower himself and his cronies.
For instance, where was the mainstream media coverage when Trump invited Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Russia's ambassador to Washington Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office without any American press or national security officials. He did invite TASS, the old official Soviet news agency, now owned by the Russian government, though. I cannot find if this meeting was written down in the public logs. I understand that we only know the meeting happened because Trump posted a TASS photo on his social media.
That all happened May 10, 2017. How many people do you know who’ve seen this picture?
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
I don't remember ANY coverage of it on the TV or broadcast radio. Perhaps one day we will hear it discussed in a Trump focused criminal trial for espionage.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
The polls indicating the 2024 Presidential Election currently is a dead-heat demonstrates the power of propaganda and the corrupt nature of America’s profit-driven news media. Were it otherwise, most Americans would know Trump hosted Russia’s top spies in the Oval Office.
Or this?
Still as shocking as when I first read this 2 months ago. 
smh
Thanks