Culture & Society Blog

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

Aug 22, 2019

CNN - GOP Memo: Blame Left And Downplay White Nationalism (i.e. Business As Usual For Republicans)

Context/Background:
1. The Rights War On The Left - A Walk Through Some Of The Intimidation/Bullying/Terror Tactics Fox News Uses
2. Fox News And The GOP Are Basically Terrorist Organizations (Based On Their Rhetoric & The Effects Of That Rhetoric)
3. GOP Hypocrisy...The Republicans Basic Argument Is: We Are Going To Hurt & Betray The Country But You Should Be Nice To Us... While We Lie & Incite Terror!

Evidence confirming that Republican behavior is intentional.

GOP memo: Blame left and downplay white nationalism - CNN - CNN's Brianna Keilar speaks with an editor from the Tampa Bay Times who obtained a memo to Republican lawmakers instructing them to downplay white nationalism and blame Democrats after a series of mass shootings.

Related research;

Media Matters: The party of personal responsibility is now the party of “the libs made me do it” More than just a hit song by Taylor Swift, Look what you made me do has become the go-to excuse for unsavory actions among conservatives.

You’d be surprised how many conservatives were this close to casting a ballot for Democrats next month only to be thrust back into their Republican ways by how liberal protesters and Democratic senators handled themselves during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. No, I don’t have data to back this up. What I do have, however, are anecdotes -- lots and lots of anecdotes from conservative media figures who are sharing them, ever so kindly and not at all suspiciously, because they just want to help Democrats win some elections.

“From a conservative who has been disgusted by the Trumpified GOP: ‘I didn’t think I could drag myself to the polls. But after the Left’s performance in the Kavanaugh affair, I would crawl across broken glass.’ I believe this sentiment is common,” wrote National Review’s Jay Nordlinger on Twitter.

In his most recent Washington Post column, Hugh Hewitt stressed the importance of not rewarding the “outburst of the new McCarthyism” that was the opposition to Kavanaugh’s spot on the court. This lesson, of course, is for the Democratic Party’s own good -- and it’s one that can be taught only by increasing Republican majorities in the House and Senate. For Republicans who find themselves disapproving of President Donald Trump’s “hyperbole and occasional cruelty,” voting a straight-GOP ballot is a courageous sacrifice worthy of applause. Democrats can rest easy knowing that Hugh Hewitt, longtime friend of the left, has their best interests at heart. Or … something like that.

“I’ve heard from several of my center-right friends today who are turned off by the Left’s attacks on Kavanaugh & Cruz. As a result, they have started solidly supporting them both,” wrote Daily Beast columnist and CNN commentator Matt Lewis on Twitter, sharing an “admittedly anecdotal” bit of info with his followers.

Each of these stories could be thusly summed up: I didn’t want to vote for Trump or his congressional enablers … but look what you made me do. In other words, it’s your fault that we’re here.

GOP's "Height Of Hypocrisy" Series

BREAKING: Nazism Has Been Repackaged as "Conservatism"

Right Wing Terrorism

Aug 21, 2019

The Many Times The Washington Post Has Betrayed The Public's Trust

When a newspaper prints something you expect it to be true because that's thier job. Nowadays that isn't really the case in most of the media (as shown in the links below these extracts). This post specifically focuses on the Washington Post. All extracts are from the professional media researchers at Media Matters.org .

Media Matters: How shameful and misleading Wash. Post reports on disability insurance could be the preamble for cuts “Mean-spirited” and “cartoonish” depictions of Social Security Disability Insurance are a disservice to millions of Americans

Disability advocates hammered The Washington Post for its second misleading portrayal of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) recipients, saying it was a “mean-spirited” and “cartoonish” illustration of the struggles of those living with poverty in rural America. The second feature-length profile published by the Post has drawn consternation for its poverty-shaming, while also generating fears that these misleading depictions from mainstream news outlets could set the pretext for draconian budget cuts to programs that provide basic economic security to millions of Americans.

The Post’s previous foray into coverage of SSDI recipients did not end well; Media Matters joined disability advocates in criticizing the paper’s “dystopian portrait” of the program and its enrollees and was later found to be replete with critical data errors. The piece promoted the same misleading talking points about the program that are commonly touted by right-wing media. Despite these concerns, the Post’s editorial board used the deeply flawed article as its proof for justifying unnecessary cuts to the SSDI program.

The paper’s June 2 article in its series on disability coverage is just as misleading and problematic as the first. The article, titled “Generations, disabled,” attempts to chronicle the trials of a low-income Missouri family that relies on meager SSDI benefits. The article relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence drawn from the Tidwell family to buttress characterizations of SSDI and its recipients as succumbing to multi-generational dependence on federal assistance.

The article earnestly focused on the fact that one or more members of four generations of Tidwells have received federal assistance and detailed their daily routines in a way that political scientist Katherine Gallagher Robbins of the Center for American Progress (CAP) likened to the depictions of poverty and disability in Of Mice and Men. As CAP’s Rebecca Vallas pointed out in her damning review, “the article’s text makes no mention” of the fact “that disability often runs in families” and neglects to mention that disability benefits are “incredibly hard to get.”

The Post seemed to depict generational disability as a cultural problem, but as Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic pointed out, the article never provided any data to prove this or demonstrate that multiple generations of a family receiving SSDI is evidence of them being undeserving. Vox correspondent Matthew Yglesias voiced even stronger criticism, labeling the article as “incredibly mean-spirited” and “smack[ing] of the worst kind of moral panic.”

Issues with the Post’s story didn’t end there. In a June 5 column published by The Poynter Institute, journalist S.I. Rosenbaum added that the article misled readers by claiming to describe a family “on disability” without ever verifying that the Tidwell family are indeed all receiving benefits from SSDI, rather than other anti-poverty programs.

The generally exploitative tone of the piece was not the primary problem with the Post’s return to the topic of disability. The biggest problem created by the piece is how it could be used by political interests seeking to implement deep cuts to the American social safety net.

As Vallas pointed out in her response, by “pushing the nastiest of myths about Social Security disability benefits and the people who rely on them,” the Post set the pretext for budget cuts that will restrict access to the program. The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities voiced the same concern, arguing that “reporting by anecdote runs the risk of fostering harmful policy changes” such as those already proposed by the Trump administration. Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) came to a similar conclusion, mocking the Post’s “poetic description” of farming jobs available in rural Missouri, which suggested that disability recipients simply refuse to work those jobs. Baker added that the United States actually has one of the least generous disability programs in the world, but countries with more generous programs are not suffering labor shortages:

The obvious next segment in this series would have a Post reporter going to Germany or the Netherlands or some of the other countries that manages to have a larger percentage of their population working even though they have considerably more generous disability systems. The article can tell readers how they manage to structure their programs so that everyone doesn't quit their jobs and fake disability so that they can live off the government. For some reason, I don't think this is where the Post series is going.

We have already seen a Post report on SSDI result in the paper’s editorial board calling for unnecessary cuts to the program in a way eerily reminiscent to Fox News’ campaign against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which immediately resulted in Republican-authored legislation in Congress slashing the program and eventually trickled down to GOP-led state houses. The Trump administration is already targeting Social Security’s disability program for budget cuts next year and media outlets have largely failed to hold the president accountable for an obviously broken campaign promise to safeguard Social Security. The American people would be well-served if, rather than publishing more dehumanizing portrayals of disability recipients, the Post and other news outlets contextualize the hardship millions of Americans would face if SSDI and other vital programs are subjected to new cuts and restrictions.

Media Matters: The Wash. Post Has A Lobbyist As A Writer; Here Are 12 Times They Didn't Disclose Conflicts Of Interest Editorial Page Editor Says The Post Wasn’t “Initially Clear Enough With” Ed Rogers “On Our Expectations” But Defends Paper

The Washington Post has repeatedly failed to inform readers about major financial conflicts of interest in pieces by opinion writer Ed Rogers. Rogers is a leading Republican lobbyist who has used his Post column to advocate for the interests of his firm’s clients without disclosure in at least a dozen instances since the beginning of 2016.

Rogers writes for the publication’s PostPartisan blog. His columns also regularly appear in the Post’s physical edition and are syndicated across the countrythrough its syndication service.

The Republican lobbyist is the chairman of the BGR Group, which he co-founded in 1991. The firm is one of the country’s largest lobbying groups and had over $17 million in lobbying revenue in 2016.

His Post credentials are touted to potential clients in his corporate biography, which states: “Since 2011, Ed has been an opinion writer for the Washington Post, where he writes about politics and the current state of affairs in Washington, D.C., from a Republican point of view.”

Lobbying experts told Media Matters that the Post’s arrangement with a lobbyist of Rogers’ stature is “rare” and “highly unusual.”

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of The Business of America is Lobbying, said that “It's pretty rare for a megalobbyist to have a gig as a columnist in such a prominent venue.”

Media Matters: Wash. Post overstates the NRA’s ability to influence legislation and elections To explain the Virginia legislature's refusal to take up gun safety initiatives, look to racist GOP gerrymandering, not NRA power - The Washington Post undeservedly credited the National Rifle Association with blocking a package of gun safety proposals in the Virginia General Assembly to set up a contrast with the massive turmoil the gun group is currently experiencing. In doing so, the paper baselessly overstated the NRA’s power to influence the legislative process and elections in Virginia.

In fact, the primary reason Virginia's GOP-controlled legislature is in a position to vote down gun safety laws and other progressive proposals is racist and partisan gerrymandering implemented by the state’s Republican lawmakers.

On July 12, the General Assembly’s GOP leadership adjourned just 90 minutes into a special session called by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to vote on several gun safety proposals. Northam had called the session in the wake of a May 31 mass shooting in Virginia Beach in which a man armed with a suppressed handgun and high-capacity magazines killed 12 people in a municipal building. No votes were taken on Northam’s proposals, which included implementing universal background checks, reinstating Virginia’s one-gun-a-month law, and banning silencers like the one used by the Virginia Beach shooter.

Writing about the NRA’s activities leading up to and during the special session, The Washington Post published an article with the headline “The NRA is in turmoil. But in Virginia gun debate this week, the group flexed its muscles.” The report claimed that the session’s early adjournment “was a display of political muscle for the NRA, a brand that has appeared crippled in recent months” -- a reference to the massive turmoil and infighting occurring in the NRA -- and that “this week’s events in Richmond showed that the organization continues to wield significant influence at the grass-roots level.” The article described routine NRA outreach and lobbying activities -- including briefing lawmakers, holding events prior to the special session, emailing its supporters, and handing out T-shirts and pizza -- in crediting the NRA with blocking Virginia’s gun safety proposals.

The article included only a single piece of plausible analysis. Contrary to the narrative adopted by the rest of the piece, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Virginia Director Lori Haas told the paper, “I don’t believe that Republicans in the General Assembly are doing this only because of the influence of the gun lobby” because “most of them believe in an extremist version of the Second Amendment.” (I previously worked with Haas at CSGV.)

Media Matters: Wash. Post called out for needlessly scandalizing Elizabeth Warren's past work in bankruptcy law - On May 22, The Washington Post published an article detailing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) work as a lawyer while she was also teaching, drawing mostly upon information Warren provided on her website and supplemented with additional Post reporting. While the article contained valuable information about Warren’s past career, the Post was criticized for its framing of the story, which seemingly attempted to scandalize the compensation Warren received as a bankruptcy attorney.

Media Matters: Wash. Post fails to disclose that op-ed writer advocating military strikes against Iran is on the board of a major defense contractor

The Washington Post published an op-ed on Friday by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael G. Vickers in which he called for “limited U.S. military strikes” against Iran. But the newspaper failed to disclose that Vickers serves on the board of BAE Systems Inc., the American subsidiary of a majormultinational defense contractor.

BAE Systems published a press release in December 2015 saying that Vickers had “been appointed to its board of directors for a three-year term.” The company confirmed on June 24 that Vickers is still an active member of its board.

But in Vickers' June 21 op-ed, the Post identified him only as “a former special forces officer and CIA operations officer” who “served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities (2007-2011) and undersecretary of defense for intelligence (2011-2015).” In the column, Vickers urged President Donald Trump to authorize military strikes against Iran, writing, “The Trump administration should respond to these recent attacks with strikes of its own on Iranian and Houthi air-defense assets, offensive missile systems and Revolutionary Guard Corps bases. A measured but firm response is what is required.”

This isn’t the first time the Post has had disclosure issues with authors writing for its opinion section. Previously, the newspaper repeatedly published articles by opinion writer Ed Rogers about issues of interest to his lobbying firm’s clients without disclosing his financial conflicts of interest.

Media Matters: The Washington Post gave discredited gun researcher John Lott a platform to push repeatedly disproven nonsense

The Washington Post published an op-ed by gun violence researcher and National Rifle Association favorite John Lott Jr., in which he rehashed false claims that nearly all mass shootings occur in so-called “gun-free zones.” Lott’s claim has previously been debunked by the Post’s own fact checker.

The Post published the article co-authored by Lott and Virginia Republican state Sen. Richard Black ahead of a Virginia legislature special session on firearms scheduled to start on July 9. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam calledthe special session after a gunman opened fire in a Virginia Beach municipal building on May 31, killing 12. During the session, the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly will vote on proposals to ban silencers and high-capacity magazines, to implement universal background checks, to limit gun purchases to one handgun per month, and to extend the state’s ban on guns in city buildings.

Media Matters: Wash. Post editorial board ignores decades of violence and harassment by anti-abortion extremists It’s not “hard to imagine” anti-abortion harassment because it happens every day

After Trump administration officials faced protests at restaurants in light of the administration’s policy of separating families at the border, The Washington Post’s editorial board called on readers to “let the Trump team eat in peace.” Arguing for “civility,” the editorial board asked, “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?”

For abortion providers, patients, and clinics across the country, it’s certainly not“hard to imagine” the inability to “live peaceably." Pro-choice providers and patients are routinely targeted with death threats, harassment, and even assassinations at clinics and in their homes.

Since 1993, at least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, including abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, who was assassinated in 2009. Tiller’s murder was fueled in part by rhetoric like that of former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who repeatedly attacked him as “Tiller the baby killer” and suggested that “there's got to be a special place in hell for this guy.” As ThinkProgress’ Tara Culp-Ressler explained, abortion providers often feel “under siege” and live “in a state of heightened fear and anxiety because targeted harassment follows them everywhere.” Providers have described abortion opponents picketing their homes and their children’s schools. For example, the anti-abortion group Operation Save America is known for distributing flyers to providers’ neighbors with identifying pictures and home addresses under the headline “KILLERS AMONG US.”

Media Matters: The Washington Post's Hugh Hewitt problem Hewitt’s firm represents “clients before the US Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency”

The Washington Post repeatedly allowed Hugh Hewitt to write columns praising Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt without disclosing that Hewitt’s law firm does work before the agency. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt told Media Matters that Hewitt would no longer write about Pruitt.

Hewitt is a conservative radio host who also works as a host for MSNBC and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. Off air, he is a partner at the law firm Larson O’Brien.

Media Matters: The Sorry State Of Both-Sides Political Analysis Right Now, In One Blog Post The Fix Goes After Bernie Sanders For Saying Trump Lies (He Does)

President Donald Trump is a liar.

This is not a difficult conclusion to draw. You don’t need to be a bitter partisan to come to this conclusion. It’s perhaps the single most banal conclusion to draw from Trump’s behavior over his political life.

That political life began when he lied about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He refused to back down from that lie for years, until he eventually lied about his birtherism.

Trump lies habitually -- not strategically, as many politicians do, but constantly, on matters great and small. His lies appear to be contagious, with his aides forced to pick up his bullshit and carry it onward.

“There has never been a serial exaggerator in recent American politics like the president-elect,” wrote Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler in December. “He not only consistently makes false claims but also repeats them, even though they have been proven wrong. He always insists he is right, no matter how little evidence he has for his claim or how easily his statement is debunked.”

Trump’s actions take a blowtorch to general standards of political discourse.

And so it was surprising but perhaps not shocking to discover that a writer at The Washington Post’s The Fix blog declared Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) tweets criticizing Trump for “shamelessly” lying were a tragic violation of our political norms.

At The Savvy House That Chris Cillizza Built, Amber Phillips presents Sanders’ comments as equivalent to Trump’s evidence-free, much-denied claim that Obama illegally ordered his phones tapped (Four Pinocchios, according to the Post’s Fact Checker blog):

One side of the aisle is accusing the president straight-up of lying. In 2017, that's just another day in politics.

This is the state of our political discourse right now. Political norms — like, don't accuse the president of the United States of lying without evidence, or don't accuse the former president of the United States of wiretapping your phones without evidence — have been eviscerated.

Trump says Obama tapped his phones without evidence, Sanders says he’s lying, and Phillips concludes that Both Sides are at fault. Trump's tendency to lie is so brazen that he's actually managed to get Sanders and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to agree on the subject. But for Phillips, calling Trump a liar is not an accurate diagnosis of reality, but a partisan Democratic tactic. In 2017, that's just another day in political analysis.

“Plenty of nonpartisan observers would agree that the extraordinary claims Trump is making have no precedent in modern-day politics,” Phillips writes. “Here's the problem with using the ‘L’ word in politics, though. To say someone's lying suggests that you know they don't believe what they're saying.”

Phillips is channeling the talking points of the Trump administration. Sean Spicer used his first appearance before the press corps as White House press secretary to, in the words of Post columnist Margaret Sullivan, “brazenly lie” to them. Asked at a subsequent briefing if he would “pledge never to knowingly say something that is nonfactual,” Spicer responded that his “intention is never to lie,” but at times he will unknowingly pass along incomplete or inaccurate information, and that it would thus be unfair to “turn around and say, ‘OK, you were intentionally lying.’”

Kellyanne Conway, for her part, has termed critics calling Trump a liar “dangerous to the democracy,” not too far from Phillips’ declaration that comments like Sanders’ are destroying political discourse and making it harder for Trump to pass legislation.

“All of that is why we in the media are careful not to call Trump a ‘liar,’” Phillips concludes. “But top Democrats like Sanders feel no such hesitation.”

The press has at times been hesitant to call Trump a liar, but the hard and fast rule Phillips wants to cite does not exist. At the Post, her colleagues Sullivan, Greg Sargent, Erik Wemple, and Jennifer Rubin have all highlighted Trump’s “lies.” Rubin is a conservative, suggesting that one need not be a partisan to use such terminology; writers at National Review and The Weekly Standard have done the same.

If what Phillips means is that major news outlets have not referenced him as such in their news coverage, she is closer to the mark -- but still wrong. Several outlets, including the Post, have followed the line of reasoning Phillips uses in explaining why they don’t call Trump a liar in their news pages.

But not all of the Post’s competitors have taken that path. The New York Timeshas twice called out Trump for using a “lie” on its front page -- in Septemberwhen referencing his “‘birther’ lie,” and in January when discussing his “lie about [the] popular vote.”

Both statements were among those Sanders highlighted as lies.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to demand that politicians adhere to the same standards for rhetoric as news reporters. It makes even less sense to say that they should adhere to the standards of the Post and not that of the Times.

Media Matters: Wash. Post health care reporter has a history of spreading misinformation about abortion
On February 14, Washington Post health care reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham garnered significant attention for tweeting that it was “super weird how people are blaming their diminished sense of well-being on the Trump administration” when “personal events determine [her] quality of life; not who’s in the [White House].” Beyond this insensitive tweet, Winfield Cunningham also has a history of spreading right-wing misinformation about abortion and reproductive health in her reporting.

Note: Its funny that there are so many instances of actual fake news in the Washington Post when thats what the right claims for all media that isn't it. But all of right wing media likes to run fantasy rather than fact so a "fake news" accusation from them has little to no validity to a modern citizen.

Here is the NRA's latest in a laundry list of attacks against the First Amendment

The National Rifle Association’s broadcast platform NRATV has launched its latest attack against freedom of the press, this time targeting The Washington Post, calling the newspaper a “fake news outlet” and claiming it is where “journalism dies.”

On July 11, the Post published an article calling an NRATV video about political unrest in the U.S. “dark.” The article noted that the video condemned “Democratic politicians, the media and activists as the catalysts for political upheaval” in this country, “with one glaring omission: firearms.” According to the article, the video focused on “political discussions” around public safety during civil unrest, “with less clear connections to Second Amendment rights.”

On July 17, NRATV released a response video featuring NRATV host Grant Stinchfield, who called out the Post reporter by name and slammed him for “tell[ing] us we can’t have an opinion unless it’s about guns.”

The video also accused the Post of “spreading lies about those who disagree with their radical agenda” and said the newspaper is pushing “organized anarchy” that is “destroying our country.” Stinchfield went on to claim, “You people do more to damage our country with a keyboard than every NRA member combined has ever done with a firearm.”

Less than one day after the video’s release, The New York Times’ Max Fisher tweeted that the video is “edging right up to the line of endorsing violence against journalists,” while HuffPost called it “disturbing.”

Media

Mainstream Media Is Markedly Pro-Right Wing Lies

I don't know if this has always been the case but I can easily show that the "mainstream media" has a very strong right wing bent since, at least, the Iraq War. This right wing bent is so crazy that they even help, endorse or promote right wing lies and thus is worthy of comment. Cognitive dissonance, stupidity or bought? (All extracts are from Media Matters.org, an independent media research group)

Media Matters: Study: NY Times, Wash. Post quote more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats in political coverage

Throughout May and June, two of the nation’s leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, quoted Republicans at more than twice the rate of Democrats in their political news coverage.

Media Matters: STUDY: NY Times, Wash. Post coverage of caravan plummets after midtermsNews stories referencing the caravan drop by more than half post-elections, front-page ones by more than two-thirds

In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, The New York Times and The Washington Post filled their news pages with reporting about a caravan of migrants moving through Central America and Mexico toward the United States. The caravan was more than 1,000 miles from the U.S. border -- a journey of several weeks on foot -- and shrinking. But President Donald Trump, in a series of demagogic statements aimed at bolstering GOP chances in the elections, warned that the caravan constituted an “invasion” and a national emergency, and the Times and Post allowed him to set their news agendas.

After the election, Trump largely stopped talking about the caravan, and the coverage of the subject in those papers plunged.

Media Matters: After white nationalist gun massacre, major newspapers' headlines give Trump a pass for his racism

After President Donald Trump’s speech following back-to-back mass shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all ran similar headlines claiming that he condemned “bigotry” or “hate” but “not guns” or “gun policy.” While highlighting the president’s failure to directly address the issue of gun safety is important, the three dailies allowed Trump’s condemnation of bigotry to stand in headlines without contextualizing his role in perpetuating that same bigotry.

The New York Times ran the August 6 headline “Assailing hate but not guns” after its initial headline of “Trump urges unity vs. racism” was heavily criticizedfor downplaying the president’s weaponization of racial hatred. The Times' executive editor, Dean Baquet, acknowledged the earlier headline was a mistake, however the second headline still failed to connect the president’s speech to his own record of racism and bigotry.

In addition to the Times’ second faulty attempt, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times ran two nearly identical headlines: “Trump condemns bigotry, not guns,” and “Trump blames bigotry -- but not gun policy.

August 6, 2019 Washington Post front page with headline reading "Trump condemns bigotry, not guns."

August 6, 2019 Los Angeles Times front page headline reading "Trump blames bigotry -- but not gun policy."

It is important for the press to cover the president’s failure to meaningfully discuss gun policy after two mass shootings killed 32 people in one weekend -- as opposed to Fox News, where anything except the gun is always the problem. However, the president’s long history of weaponizing racial and ethnic hatredmust also be mentioned in any headline about his purported denunciation of bigotry.

That journalistic imperative is even stronger when the president’s speech is partly in response to a mass shooting reportedly committed by a white supremacist who cited as his motivation an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants -- an idea consistently pushed by Fox News and Trump himself.

Media Matters: In drawing equivalencies between white supremacists and antifa, media outlets obscure ideologies -- and impacts - White supremacists commit murders in pursuit of genocidal policies. Antifa throws punches. They're not the same, and media outlets should make that clear.

Last weekend marked the sequel to 2017’s violent right-wing rally in Charlottesville, VA, that left one counterprotester dead and many injured. Unite the Right 2, as the anniversary event was dubbed, was poorly attended by a small coterie of white supremacists. The media focused a significant amount of their coverage of the event on a sensationalized version of the threat posed by the loose, decentralized group of anti-fascist activists collectively known as “antifa.”

“Antifa clashes with police and journalists in Charlottesville and DC,” Vox declared. The Washington Post told its readers that “antifa protesters” had “harassed the press.” The headline of a piece in that paper’s opinion section asserted that “black-clad antifa again [gave] peaceful protesters a bad name.”

CNN personalities also weighed in with their disapproval on social media:

It’s easy to understand why the “black bloc” -- anti-fascist protesters who wear black masks when confronting racist groups -- attracts alarmist headlines, as images of masked ranks are both exotic and easy to otherize. And right-wing media have seized on this trend. As Media Matters’ Grace Bennett noted, Fox & Friends’ coverage of Unite the Right 2 entirely obscured the white supremacist intent of the event, instead sowing fear about an “antifa mob,” while The Daily Caller decried “violent antifa protests.” But according to experts on extremism and those who cover fascist and anti-fascist groups’ clashes on the ground, media fearmongering about antifa protesters obscures both the ideology and the real impacts of anti-fascist groups’ opponents -- the violent racists.

A look at Washington Post and Vox coverage of antifa at Unite the Right 2 indicated that the most serious reported incident of antifa protesters confronting the press they described was when activists cut a local news reporter’s microphone cord, after expressing a desire not to be recorded.

“Reporters covering protests should also come aware that most black bloc activists do not want to be photographed, for fear of being doxxed by the far right, or identified by law enforcement,” Kelly Weill, a Daily Beast reporter who covers the far-right and its opponents and was present at the rally, told Media Matters. “[Journalists] should take into account the implications a photograph might have for its subject, and why that subject might object. When anti-fascists come into conflict with journalists, it’s in reaction to being filmed. They aren’t hunting the media, unlike their opponents who regularly dox and threaten journalists in attempt to silence them.”

Weill said the activists’ fear of being targeted by law enforcement is legitimate. She pointed, as an example, to a case in which the government charged hundreds who participated in a protest rally at Donald Trump’s inauguration with felony and misdemeanor charges after some of them were caught on camera at the protest.

“I've found people can usually tell whether you're making a good faith effort to listen to them, and they respond accordingly,” Weill said. She said she thought the relations between the journalists and antifa protesters “were fairly smooth” when factoring in “the nature of the event -- more than 1,000 journalists, protesters, and police [were] at an emotionally charged white supremacist rally where police occasionally shoved media and protesters together in densely packed kettles.”

Even though last year’s Charlottesville rally was violent -- it ended with a white supremacist driving a car into a crowd and killing counterprotester Heather Heyer -- fearmongering headlines about antifa led to a narrative of false equivalency. And that narrative quickly reached the upper echelons of the conservative movement, most notably the president, who felt empowered to place the “blame on both sides.”

Despite near-universal shock at the president’s equivocation, media outlets have failed to correct their role in pushing that narrative, continuing to sensationalize the threat posed by antifa and thus downplay the inherent violence of white supremacist activity.

“Antifa is a subject that’s worthy of exploration. It’s not a subject that’s worthy of exaggeration or hyper-sensationalism,” Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Center on Extremism, told Media Matters.“There have been a number of serious incidents where they really assaulted people over the years. … But white supremacists have committed hundreds of murders over the last 10 years -- aggravated assaults, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks. There’s no comparison.”

Both Weill and Pitcavage pointed out that media outlets have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of antifa -- a decentralized group which, as its name suggests, primarily emerges to oppose organized fascism when it arises, as opposed to operating proactively.

“I think most media fundamentally misunderstands anti-fascism, in part because the right presents ‘antifa’ as a unified gang or a kind of catch-all bogeyman that describes everyone from anarchists to moderate liberal Sen. Tim Kaine,” Weill said. “A significant chunk of center-left media has adopted this incorrect characterization, either out of lack of fact-checking or this pundit-style drive to present all conflicts as a clash of two equally valid ideologies. Some research would clarify that ‘antifa,’ as it's commonly understood (as a gang or a central organized group) isn't a real thing.” Weill also pointed out that not all anti-fascists endorse engaging in physical brawls with far-right groups; others focus on online activities and rhetorically countering fascism within their towns and cities.

Media Matters: The media’s “civility” game helps TrumpThe Red Hen reaction shows how Trump benefits from backward media accountability

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was politely asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, this past weekend because the owner was unwilling to serve a senior Trump administration official who defends (among other things) the cruel and inhumane separation of migrant families and internment of immigrant children. This act of protest -- the most recent example of a senior Trump official being heckled or protested over the family-separation policy -- galvanized certain pundits who voiced a moral objection to what they viewed as a grave injustice: “uncivil” behavior by ordinary people toward perpetrators of a despicable government policy.

This ridiculous crusade was led by the Washington Post editorial board, which published a profoundly silly piece urging all of America to “Let the Trump team eat in peace.” Per the Post:

OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.

I agree completely with The Week’s Ryan Cooper, who writes that this reaction is counterproductive and morally backward: “If there is any main wellspring of ‘incivility’ … it comes from the monstrously evil actions of the Trump regime.” Diverting the focus from the evils of the White House to the “uncivil” protest actions they inspire does the evildoers a tremendous favor.

The civility game does nothing but privilege the people whose views and actions are horrific. When the president does contemptible, anti-democratic things like ordering the separation of migrant mothers from infants and demanding that due process be eliminated, he and his lackeys follow a poisonous process in which the White House enthusiastically demonizes its adversaries -- Democrats, immigrants, journalists, anyone who objects to toddler internment -- while rigorously and woundedly demanding that everyone else follow the rules of polite discourse. The idea is that the president and his cronies deserve respect and deference no matter what they say or do simply because of the offices they hold.

This cynical posturing gets helped along by journalists and pundits who acknowledge that the president’s policies and beliefs are abhorrent but nonetheless self-righteously cluck their tongues at the “incivility” of the White House’s critics. The Washington Post editorial board writes that the Red Hen’s defenders are correct on the merits when they say that the child internment scandal is “no ordinary policy dispute” and that President Donald Trump “has ordered terrible violations of human rights at the border.” But even in the face of what the paper recognizes as a uniquely appalling violation of rights and norms, the Post still takes a swipe at those who are “justifying incivility” and asks us to imagine a world in which abortion rights advocates are harassed for their (constitutionally protected) views -- something that happens literally all the time and too often has deadly consequences.

This vapid argument was perfectly crystallized in a chiding tweet from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius:

“However troubling her views.” Her “troubling" views are the story! The despicable arguments and actions of the administration are driving this public backlash against senior officials. But elite members of the media are busily doing the White House a favor by prioritizing “civility” over accountability -- forget about the fact that she’s the mouthpiece for an administration perpetrating a deliberate evil against a vulnerable population; this senior government official deserves respect and steak tartare.

Media Matters: How The Press Never Stopped Blaming Obama For Radical GOP Obstruction

Right on cue, as President Obama readies his exit from office, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza this week published a misguided critique of the Democrat’s two terms. His analysis focused specifically on Obama’s broken “promise” and parroted a favorite Beltway media talking point: Both sides are to blame for the federal government being mired in “partisan gridlock” during his eight years, and it’s largely Obama’s fault he didn’t “fix” politics. Obama didn’t create “a government that worked for all of us”; he failed to create “something new, different and better,” wrote Cillizza.

Cillizza acknowledges that “Democrats immediately point to the fact that congressional Republicans, almost from the first day of Obama's time in the White House, made opposing him a political strategy,” but dismisses it as being the primary cause for the partisan mess. (In Cillizza’s view, it’s both sides’ supposed culpability for the failed “grand bargain” in 2011 that serves as the key event.)

The erroneous analysis represents a safe refrain that’s been repeated by journalists for years, as they’ve collectively convinced themselves that Obama’s culpable for the radical Republican obstruction that partly defined his two terms. They’re comfortably certain that if Obama had just reached out earlier, or more aggressively, or more sincerely (or “schmooz[ed]" a bit harder), things could have played out more smoothly and Obama could have written a different Beltway script where harmony and progress reigned.

It’s pure fantasy, of course.

Fact: When Republican leadership adopted the radical position that they’d refuse to even hold hearings for Obama's next Supreme Court nominee, the GOP systematically shred more than 100 years of protocol in the process. That’s what Obama faced for much of the last eight years, and the press’s messaging has helped Republicans every step of the way.

Still, the bipartisan fantasy endured: Republicans wanted to work with Obama and make serious, good-faith deals, it’s just that Obama wasn’t savvy enough to read their signals (i.e. Why won’t he just lead?).

What’s so bizarre about this parallel universe that the press concocted is that by the end of Obama’s second term, Republicans weren’t even trying to hide their radically obstructionist ways in closed-door strategy sessions. They bragged about refusing to work with Democrats. (Today, they insist that Trump, who lost the popular vote, somehow secured a “mandate” that Democrats must respect.)

Yet here’s Cillizza in the face of Republican obstructionist boasts, still pretending Obama’s largely at fault for screwing things up and that he passed up a great chance to forever fix partisan rancor. So desperate is the media’s need to portray the Republican Party as a mainstream institution that has not drastically veered toward the fringes in recent years, that journalists are willing to blame the victim. And they’ve been willing, and eager, to normalize Republican behavior.

Just logically, why would the president who's had his agenda categorically obstructed be the one blamed for having his agenda categorically obstructed, and not the politicians who purposefully plotted the standoff? It doesn’t make sense, other than because the Beltway press is opting to give in to Republicans and downplaying the party’s radical ways -- in an apparent effort to maintain the preferred media mirage that “both sides” are to blame when the government doesn’t function.

When Republicans obstructed Obama's agenda, the president was responsible for not changing the GOP's unprecedented behavior. And if it wasn’t entirely Obama’s fault, then “both sides” were to blame for the GOP's extremist actions and the grand gridlock it purposefully produced.

And the media blame game started from essentially day one for Obama. On January 29, 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported, “As the House on Wednesday gave President Obama the first big legislative victory of his term, it was clear that his efforts so far had not delivered the post-partisan era that he called for in his inauguration address.”

Meaning, nine days after first being sworn in, Obama was being blamed for not having ushered in a shiny, new “post-partisan era.” (Loved that Times headline, too: “Newpolitical era? Same as the old one.”)

But no, Obama didn’t usher in a new bipartisan era, because Republicans wouldn’t let him -- and that’s according to Republicans. “If he was for it, we had to be against it,” was how former Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich once explained the GOP’s knee-jerk response to Obama proposals.

Given a path by the press to obstruct Obama and to also be rewarded for scoring victories over him in the process, Republicans seized every opportunity and soon defied historic norms.

We saw it with the sequester obstruction, government shutdown obstruction, paid leave obstruction, cabinet nominee obstruction, Hurricane Sandy emergency relief obstruction, the consistent obstruction of judicial nominees, the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act obstruction, and of course the 2013 gun bill obstruction.

That was the expanded background check bill featuring a centerpiece proposal that enjoyed nearly 90 percent public approval, including overwhelming support from Republican voters and gun owners. But Obama couldn’t get most Republican senators to budge. “There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” explained Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-PA), who was one of just four Republicans who voted for the compromise bill.

But most of the context was left out of the gun vote coverage in 2013, as pundits and press rushed in to blame “Obama and his allies” for the actions of obstructionist Republicans.

For the record, there were some lonely voices in the Beltway wilderness who specifically debunked the “both sides” meme and placed the gridlock responsibility squarely on the shoulders of activist Republicans.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote in The Washington Post in 2012 in an essay adapted from their then-new book. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Sunday morning broadcast network political talk shows and much of the media at large wasn’t interested in their analysis, which Ornstein told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent was unfortunate given the fact that their assessment “focused on press culpability — it would be hard to find a more sensitive issue for the media than the question of whether they’re doing their job.”

That simply wasn’t the preferred story the Beltway press wanted to tell during the Obama years.

Media Matters: Why We Should Keep Using The Term “Fake News”

The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan uses her latest column to call for journalists to stop using the phrase “fake news,” a term reporters and activists have used over the past few months to describe a form of politicized misinformation that had at least some impact on the 2016 presidential election. She reasons that “though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost” in the wake of a deliberate effort by conservatives to co-opt the term.

Sullivan is one of the best media critics currently working, with a keen sense of the media’s responsibility for calling out lies and a well-earned wide following. That’s what makes her missive so troubling.

If conservatives succeed in their effort to dilute the meaning of “fake news,” the result will not be the clearer discourse that Sullivan hopes to inspire. Instead, critics will lose a common term used to identify and accurately describe a real and specific problem, while conservatives will take that victory and apply the strategy behind it to other fights, making it even harder to describe the challenges in a “post-truth” news environment.

“Fake news” describes a unique phenomenon. Sullivan’s definition is “deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public.” This largely mirrors Media Matters’ own description: “information that is clearly and demonstrably fabricated and that has been packaged and distributed to appear as legitimate news.”

The term gained prominence after conservative and “alt-right” social media accounts and Russian intelligence services weaponized fake news during the 2016 presidential election, leading to an extensive discussion in the press over fake news content, its purveyors and beneficiaries, and the information ecosystem that allows it to flourish.

Some conservatives have been trying to delegitimize the term by broadening it to encompass virtually all information with which they disagree. Breitbart, the right-wing, white nationalist website run by top Trump aide Stephen Bannon, was among the first to adopt that formula; it has deployed it dozens of timessince to criticize stories by a litany of legitimate news outlets like CNN and The New York Times as “fake news.”

For Sullivan, the term has been so “tainted” by these conservative efforts that it’s no longer of value. “Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it,” she writes. “Instead, call a lie a lie. Call a hoax a hoax. Call a conspiracy theory by its rightful name.”

Media Matters: How Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have taken the NY Times’ campus concern trolling to new heights in just 2 years The two were brought over from the WSJ to bring a bold new perspective to the paper. Instead, they’ve been amplifying its most played-out talking point.

In April 2017, The New York Times announced the hiring of Wall Street Journal columnist and Pulitzer winner Bret Stephens. In a memo sent to staff, editorial page editor James Bennet wrote that Stephens would “bring a new perspective to bear on the news” as part of the newspaper’s plan to “continue to broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions.”

Hiring Stephens was a controversial move given his history of denying the reality of human-caused climate change, engaging in Iraq War revisionism, and disputing the existence of the campus-rape epidemic. And Stephens did little to assuage critics of his hire; his debut column for the Times was an error-riddledop-ed misrepresenting the state of climate consensus in the scientific community. That article was later held up by Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt to defend his personal skepticism of climate science.

Stephens was joined at the Times by fellow Wall Street Journal alum Bari Weiss. At the Journal, Weiss wrote about things like “campus rage,” “the PC police,” and “social justice warriors” who were supposedly outraged over the film Sausage Party. In another memo to staff, Bennet announced that Weiss would “be writing and commissioning the kinds of quick-off-the-news pieces that are such a critical part of our efforts to amplify the section’s already important voice in the national conversation.”

Instead, it seems their presence has served mostly to intensify the focus on topics like campus speech and social justice activism -- namely, arguing that liberals are overstepping their bounds in both arenas. From reading Stephens and Weiss, you'd get the impression that some of the most pressing issues in the country are the conduct of protesters demonstrating outside a Ben Shapiro speech -- where he’s no doubt busy CRUSHING a question about atheism and DESTROYING the argument for trans rights -- and runaway PC culture on college campuses, which poses an existential threat to democracy itself.

Weiss appears to delight in shining a light on minor campus controversies such as the one that erupted at Evergreen State College, when a professor was challenged by student activists for his views on a proposed “day of absence” protest. Similarly, she has shown a particular interest in stories about speakers being “no platformed” at universities.

In a piece titled “We’re All Fascists Now,” Weiss bemoaned Lewis & Clark Law School students’ protest of a speech by American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers. On Twitter, Weiss called this incident “a 21st-century auto-da-fe,” referring to public executions carried out during the Spanish Inquisition. But far from the teeming masses her article made the protest out to contain, video shows only about a dozen demonstrators in total.

Weiss also took issue with students’ characterization of Sommers as a “fascist,” noting that she is “a self-identified feminist and registered Democrat.” As this piece illustrated, Weiss has a tendency to give incomplete and often inaccurate descriptions of her stories’ protagonists. In this case, Weiss failed to note that Sommers was a prominent voice in the anti-diversity “GamerGate” movement, has joined panel discussions alongside the likes of neo-Nazi sympathizer Milo Yiannopoulos and far-right troll Steven Crowder, has appeared on Fox News to argue against perceived liberal causes, and has been a guest on white supremacist YouTube channel Red Ice TV’s Radio 3Fourteen. The original version of Weiss’ article also referred to libertarian talk show host Dave Rubin as “a liberal commentator” who was supposedly “denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” But those criticisms of Rubin came from a parody Twitter account, and the references to him were later removed.

Media Matters: Mueller’s statement was an indictment of the press

Recall how major newspapers handled the letter Barr sent to Congress on March 24 summarizing what the attorney general termed the “principal conclusions” of the report Mueller submitted a few days earlier.

There was no reason for journalists to accept Barr's rosy assessment at face value -- Trump had long publicly griped that his previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had failed to act in his personal interest, making it likely that Barr had been selected at least in part because he was willing to do so. His letter was a transparent attempt to spin the report in Trump’s favor while it was still hidden from the public.

And yet, the next morning some of the nation’s biggest newspapers had splashed Barr’s statements across their front pages as evidence that Mueller had exonerated Trump and his associates:

“For President Trump, it may have been the best day of his tenure so far,” The New York Times’ Peter Baker reported. “The darkest, most ominous cloud hanging over his presidency was all but lifted on Sunday with the release of the special counsel’s conclusions, which undercut the threat of impeachment and provided him with a powerful boost for the final 22 months of his term.”

Over the next few weeks, that phony narrative circulated, bolstered by Trump’s own false statements, the willingness of major news outlets to parrot those falsehoods, and Fox’s vicious attacks on the rest of the press for their prior reports on Russia.

On the morning of April 18, Barr held a press conference to discuss Mueller’s report, which was scheduled for release later that day. This was, again, a clear effort to spin the press. And again, many in the press fell for it, echoing his obvious false claims.

Then the report came out and the Trump-Barr story collapsed. The report diverged from Barr’s description in several key ways that made it much more damning for the president than the attorney general had let on. But by the time reporters had access to Mueller’s actual conclusions, the damage had already been done.

“What Barr did shaped the debate for the half of the country that mattered,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake concluded after reviewing the discrepancies between Mueller’s report and Barr’s statements. “It gave Trump’s supporters a built-in narrative that, though misleading, has taken hold.”

Mueller himself was reportedly disturbed by Barr’s letter and the way it was subsequently interpreted by the press. In a March 27 letter to Barr, he wrote that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation. In a subsequent phone call, he reportedly told the attorney general “he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction probe was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work.”

The weeks since have done little to assuage such concerns, as major media outlets continue to view Mueller’s report in large part through the false statements of the president and his allies.

That’s the context in which Mueller stepped up to the lectern this morning. Minutes after he stepped down, Trump and his allies started lying, and the media spin cycle began again.