On @FaceTheNation #Priebus re Trump tweet that press is "enemy" of "American people:" "I think you should take it seriously." #NotTheEnemy
— Lynn Sweet (@lynnsweet) February 18, 2017
During “normal” times, people tend to regard the press as, at best, a bunch of prying busybodies, and at worst a pack of tattle-tales. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But for a brief shining moment after Watergate (and not, I would add, necessarily to the benefit of the profession), investigative reporters were swashbuckling young rebels who brought down an evil cabal which had threatened the very foundations of our democracy. Since some people mistook the movie version of All the President’s Men for a documentary, earnest suburban youngsters with adequate SATs dreamed of becoming the next Robert Redford Bob Woodward or Dustin Hoffman Carl Bernstein. Journalism became a credential-requiring career, not just a job for oddballs too literate for the factory floor and too stubborn or damaged to climb into the better white-collar ranks.
But if Trump and his handlers, on both sides of the Atlantic, are determined to reenact Watergate (second time as farce!), maybe we’ll at least get an influx of bright young minds interested in actual investigative reporting, as opposed to cocktail-party scrumming to join the ranks of the Media Village Idiots…
Reince Priebus makes Ron Ziegler look like Abraham Lincoln
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) February 19, 2017
Was there in 1970 at Nixon’s San Clemente w/ Herb Kaplow, Tom Jarrel, WH traveling press & beleaguered Ziegler. Seeing lots of parallels. https://t.co/b6gyNxQN71
— Wayne Slater (@WayneSlater) February 19, 2017
What did the President know and when did he interrupt who was telling him about it to brag about his terrific Electoral College victory?
— Rocky Mountain Mike (@RockyMntnMike) February 17, 2017
"Why don't we all get a member of the press and beat him up?" an Agnew advance man once asked. https://t.co/lSAy3sMRjH (h/t @YAppelbaum)
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) February 19, 2017
When reporters say “#NotTheEnemy,” they must remember how “Not a Crook” worked out for Nixon. #ProtectTheTruth https://t.co/PNWF28x91H pic.twitter.com/w8Yce11g6y
— George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) February 19, 2017
Good @GlennThrush explanation of efforts to fact-check, and also how Trump is merely throwing accelerant https://t.co/wmusPSY0TT
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 19, 2017
Mike J
The main thing I’ve noticed with Trump’s war on journalism is that the most serious journalists are livid. The more livid they are, the more likely you are to be able to look back through their stories and see, “Republicans say X, Democrats say Y, how are we ever to to know what’s really true?”
mb
Personally, I’d much rather have Trump berating the press than smoozing with them — which would probably work great, don’t know why he doesn’t. I do not think it was an accident that the press started turning against GWBush after he started jailing journalists. I like an adversarial relationship between the press and the powerful — and now more than ever since we have a press that has never been more easily co-opted. Kind of baffling to me that Trump has decided to be so combative when he could have had them eating out of his hand — just had to pivot just a little. Instead, he’s going to keep them riled up and investigating every little thing. LOFingL.
misterpuff
Oh Boy….Junior “Both Siders” streaming into J schools. That can only be Good News for John McCain.
lollipopguild
Drip,drip, drip. From nixon’s plumbers to today. So many ways to get information out to the public that were not around in the 1970’s. So many ways/tools that reporters can cover a story today. Trump is already deep in Big Muddy.
Jeffro
Spicer and Priebus, competing to see who can be the Baghdad Bob of the Titanic…er, Hindenburg…er, Trumpov administration.
sigaba
I don’t worry about a dearth of Woodsteins, these people will pop up. What is more troubling are the absence of Katharine Grahams.
lollipopguild
@mb: EVERYBODY’S JOB is to worship trump, no exceptions.
sigaba
@Mike J: “Here we played false equivalence with Republicans for all those years and THIS is the thanks we get?”
dmsilev
@mb:
He can’t pivot. This is who he is. This is who he’s been for the last several decades. There is no pivot and there will be no pivot.
dmsilev
Also, with the perspective of a few decades, could we please just get the Bernstein and skip the Woodward?
efgoldman
@dmsilev:
And some day, maybe the Chuckles Toddlers of the world will realize that. I’m not holding my breath.
SiubhanDuinne
It doesn’t completely hold up, but I’ve always kind of liked the old quick-and-dirty analogy: The press should not be lap dogs, nor attack dogs, but watch dogs.
sigaba
@dmsilev:
Without Woodward there’s no Deep Throat. Woodward was and is an ingratiating puppydog with peerless stenography skills but at the crucial moment that’s exactly what broke the story open.
People like this are essential, just as long as they aren’t the only people.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: And there is no mustard.
amygdala
And maybe these hungry young reporters will come from ViceNews or BuzzFeed, rather than than the WaPo, NYT or cable news.
Having said that, given the complexity and actual danger of reporting this story–Putin, after all, has no problems offing reporters–investigating this wouldn’t happen quickly, right? Unlike Watergate, this would take travel to Russia and quite a bit of care, for one’s own safety, as well as that of one’s sources. There would be the language barrier to manage. Editors would probably demand more than the usual fact-checking. Everything about getting to the bottom of this would be more time-consuming than Watergate.
Not that I’m particularly optimistic someone is aggressively on this, but if that’s the case, I wouldn’t expect the story to drop for quite some time.
lollipopguild
Trump is blaming Fox for the “Swedish attack”. I cannot wait for Fox to report that the Martians have landed in New Jersey and are advancing on New York.
sigaba
@amygdala: Vice is the Uber of news, I’ve done gigs for them. The CEO is a sorta legendary creep.
@lollipopguild: Grover’s Mill.
patrick II
@SiubhanDuinne:
Good watchdogs are important, but when someone is attacking you (or in this case the country, civil liberties, the order of the western world) give me a German Shepard with titanium teeth.
XTPD
@sigaba: Michael Tracey and Gavin McInnes can suck shit out of a shotgun (although I’ve always liked their TV channel).
Pogonip
@?BillinGlendaleCA: And the Subaru is in the field.
The spook monitoring this blog must have gone through 10,000 code books trying to decode these cryptic sentences. I imagine him yelling across the office, “Hey, Jane! Does Putin like mustard? How about Kim? Has either of them ever owned a Subaru?”
My actual reason for interrupting, if you will forgive me, refers to actor Andrew Robinson’s book about his Deep Space 9 character, discussed in a previous topic. He, or his ghostwriter, is good. I read the sample and despite the typos, forked over $9 for the book.
Taylor
@sigaba:
Bezos has deeper pockets than the Graham family ever had, and I’m personally grateful that little Donny Graham is no longer running the DC industry paper.
NYT is so bad that I would not be surprised if Russian oligarchs had them by the financial short and curlies. However it’s probably just some kind of upper East side “above it all” arrogance, mixed with pride that the local boy beat the bitch from Chicago.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@patrick II:
What would you call it? Jaws?
amygdala
@sigaba: I hear you. Still could happen that the story gets broken by a nontraditional outlet, I think. If anyone had said to me a couple of years ago that some of the best reporting about the awful state of women in academic STEM would be from BuzzFeed, I would have choked. But so it has been.
sigaba
@XTPD: See that’s the thing they know how to keep it flash and easy to watch. I think their biggest problem long-term is like BuzzFeed’s– half the Vice business is essentially an
advertisingbranded content agency and they really don’t pay attention to the distinction.XTPD
@Taylor: Their wall of shame.
Mnemosyne
@Taylor:
How ironic would it be if Jeff Bezos turns out to be the 21st century’s Katherine Graham?
different-church-lady
@mb:
Because assholes gotta asshole.
patroclus
@sigaba: Not necessarily. Mark Felt could have found another reporter had he felt like leaking info – and he did because he was angling to be Hoover’s replacement. Woodward just happened to have met him in the WH one day and was the reporter covering the break-in, so he called him up and asked Felt to confirm info that he and Bernstein had already found elsewhere. If you read Woodward’s books, Felt rarely gave them new stuff, he just confirmed some details and provided guidance as to where to look next (i.e., “follow the money”), which they might have found in any event. The idea that Deep Throat was the key to the whole thing mostly came from the movie.
Renie
anyone following the twitter storm about milo? will he be cancelled from cpac? or do conservatives not care what he says about 13 yr old boys as long as it annoys liberals
efgoldman
@lollipopguild:
Not until Halloween. It’s a glorious holiday in Martian.
Suzanne
@Renie:
Yes this.
They will all tire of Milo quickly enough. The dude has a schtick, but nothing of genuine value. I predict that it will become uncomfortably evident (to themselves) in fairly short order that the right wing needs to get it together. I have a feeling that, in four years, admitting that you voted for Trump will be like admitting that you still wet the bed. Already, I’m seeing the most passionate sTrumpets I know they to equivocate with statements like, “Well, we really didn’t have ANY good options….”. To which I reply, “We had the equivalent of two options for dinner: Brussels sprouts and dog shit. You may not like Brussels sprouts, but at least they’re FOOD.”
Peale
@Renie: I mentioned this earlier. Milo is acting like our detractors think we really are. So no, they won’t care about that.
permafrost
I can’t imagine Lakoff being a more useless nit.
permafrost
Milo is in deep shit.
patrick II
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Eichenwald
Jerzy Russian
@permafrost:
Somehow, I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for him.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: And you could probably put something on them so that they would taste ok, the dog shit will still taste like dog shit.
efgoldman
@permafrost:
How? He travels around being a provocateur, likely on someone else’s dime. Is there an arrest warrant out on him somewhere? Is he being sued by someone?
I mean, he’s an asshole of assholes. Unfortunately, that’s not prosecutable.
Mike J
Will the CPAC organizers come down on the side of antifa or paedophiles?
cmorenc
In yet another #YouCan’tMakeThisShitUp incidence of Trump’s unPresidential crassness, the Trump organization has started a singles dating site, TrumpSingles.com (http://www.TrumpSingles.com), complete with a gold American flag next to the name Trump. Other than the fact that the site actually exists, I can’t detect any obvious signs it could be a spoof, and a Google search for external articles about the site leads to numerous articles at places like New Republic, NY Daily News etc. indicating it’s a real thing. The site is oriented toward Trump-supporting singles, so assholes can find like-minded dating partners.
efgoldman
@cmorenc:
I guess the next thing is the official branded Shitgibbon whore house. And he won’t pay the piano player, either.
Peale
@cmorenc: on the plus side, at least they aren’t advertising Russian brides (those girls…they have no morals!)
LeonS
@SiubhanDuinne: I like that, since a watch dog’s job is to bark, not bite.
jl
Saw interviews with some hard core Trumpers. These seemed to be of the knucklehead variety, not hard core racist fascists, though I am just guessing. Reason I guess that way is that they were pleading with the interviewer to understand that they believe in Trump, and they ‘understand’ what he is saying, they can ‘decipher’ his words. IIRC they actually did use the word ‘decipher’.
The interviewer just asked them to comment on what they thought Frump meant when he rambled on about the horrible thing happened in Sweden.
Heard a radio report of the news from the Swedish police and drunk tank beat: some guy got burned in an accidental fire, car accident, somebody vandalized a store, I think a couple of house’s got their basements flooded. I guess Muslims behind all that mayhem. I’m sure Hannity will let me know the truth behind it all.
Edit: maybe they said that they could ‘interpret what his words really mean’. Maybe they didn’t use ‘decipher’, but their desperation was obvious.
EBT
I still predict Milo will start a confrontation with someone in the halls at CPAC and get kicked out.
efgoldman
@jl:
You say potato….
Kat
@jl:
The Sweden thing was about this:
Alleged gang rape shown on Facebook shocks Sweden
You have to read deep here to find out nobody has been arrested yet because the authorities haven’t received the facebook videos yet – and to find out that this was reported on one of Trump’s favorite news sites on Thursday or Friday.
NotMax
@efgoldman
Ancient, ancient joke.
Man 1: Ed! where ya been, buddy? Haven’t seen you in ages.
Man 2: Been a while. I’ve been on Mars.
Man 1: Say what now? Mars? Pull the other one, Eddie.
Man 2 (fishing in pocket): Look, here’s a picture of me and my bud Flrmko standing in front of his flying saucer.
Man 1: Holy cow! So you’ve really met Martians?
Man 2: Sure, plenty.
Man 1: Are they all green like that?
Man 2: Yup.
Man 1: They all have those antennae?
Man 2: Uh-huh.
Man 1: And they all wear those little caps?
Man 2: Nah. Only the Orthodox.
zhena gogolia
I had no idea there actually was someone named Glen Thrush. I thought SNL made him up. I have never seen such a byline in the New York Times.
msdc
@permafrost: No, no, if we’d just change our words from These Words to Those Words, then everything would be okay.
Mind you, once we start using Those Words, Lakoff will show up like clockwork to tell us we need to be using These Other Words, because that’s all he’s got.
Vhh
@sigaba: Actually, Jeff Bezos (owner) and Marty Baron (editor) have worked miracles in re-establishing the Washington Post as a serious paper and defender of the Republic.
artem1s
@Renie: they have routinely let preachers who advocate for the death penalty for homosexuals do keynote, so pretty much, I’m betting no.