monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

“Concocting fake news to attract eyeballs is a habitual trick of America’s New York Times, and this newspaper suffered a crisis of credibility for its fakery,” the Chinese government declared after The Times broke the news this month of government documents detailing the internment of Uighurs, Kazaks and other Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Who would have guessed that history had such a perverse development in store for us? As the historian Timothy Snyder has written in The Times, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came up with the slogan “Lügenpresse” — translated as “lying press” — in order to discredit independent journalism. Now the tactic has been laundered through an American president, Donald Trump, who adopted the term “fake news” as a candidate and has used it hundreds of times in office.

That is how, barely a generation after the murder of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps, the term “fake news” has come to be deployed so brazenly by another repressive regime to act against another minority, to cover up the existence of prison camps for hundreds of thousands of Muslims.

Mr. Trump surely didn’t intend this. He’s not a strategic or particularly ideological person. He tends to act instead out of personal or political interest and often on impulse, based on what he thinks his core supporters in the country or the cable television studios want from him. When he yanks troops out of Syria or pardons war criminals, it’s safe to assume he’s not thinking about the long-term balance of power in the Middle East or the reputation and morale of the American military. He is maneuvering, as ever, for some perceived immediate political advantage.

So it is with his attacks on the news media. Mr. Trump loves the press. He has catered to it and been nurtured by it since he first began inventing himself as a celebrity in the 1970s. But he has needed a way to explain to his followers why there are so many upsetting revelations about incompetent administration officials, broken campaign promises and Trump family self-dealing. He’s now tweeted out the term “fake news” more than 600 times.

When an American president attacks the independent press, despots rush to imitate his example. Dozens of officials around the world — including leaders of other democracies — have used the term since Mr. Trump legitimized it. Why bother to contend with facts when you can instead just pretend they don’t exist? That’s what the Chinese government did. It simply called the Times report fake, though it was based on the government’s own documents, and declared it “unworthy of refutation.”

Following the same Oval Office script, a senior government official in Burundi trotted out “fake news” to explain why his government was banning the BBC. In Myanmar, where the government is systematically persecuting an ethnic minority, the Rohingya, an official told The Times that the very existence of such a group is “fake news.” The Russian foreign ministry uses the image of a big red “FAKE” stamp on its website to mark news reports that it does not like.

Jordan has introduced a law allowing the government to punish those who publish “false news.” Cameroon has actually jailed journalists for publishing “fake news.” Chad banned social media access nationwide for more than a year, citing “fake news.”

As Shepard Smith, a former Fox News anchor, recently told attendees at the annual dinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Intimidation and vilification of the press is now a global phenomenon. We don’t have to look far for evidence of that.”

The press needs to be scrutinized. Its mistakes should be called out, its biases analyzed and exposed. But Mr. Trump has licensed a far more dangerous approach.

The rise of the epithet “fake news” as a weapon is occurring at an already perilous moment for the supply of information about the world as it truly is. The financial foundations of an independent press are eroding under the influence of the internet, which has simultaneously become a global conduit for malicious falsehoods. It’s harder and harder for anyone to know what stories to believe. A world in which governments and citizens can’t agree on a shared set of facts is one in which only the most powerful thrive.

The health of democracy, in the United States and around the world, depends on better answers to this challenge. Rather than making matters worse, politicians should be pursuing those answers, for example by pressing leading internet companies to accept responsibility for the roles they have already assumed as the world’s leading information publishers. The press has to do its part as well, by committing itself to a forthright accounting of any mistakes, an unending struggle against bias in news and an uncompromising pursuit of truth.

Some American politicians, from Maine to Alabama, have followed Mr. Trump’s example. But others have been wise enough to dissent, however cautiously. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, offered a rare if tepid defense of the media in August 2017. “My view is that most news is not fake,” he told a Louisville audience.

This month, Mr. McConnell went to the Senate floor to highlight The Times’s reporting on Xinjiang, describing the documents published by The Times as “a handbook for this Orwellian campaign to effectively erase a religious and ethnic minority in a region that is supposed to be legally distinct from the rest of China.”

The capacity of news organizations to produce this kind of journalism — and to reach an audience that will listen — is contingent and fragile. Mr. Trump shows no sign of seeing this bigger picture, or, perhaps, of caring about it. So it falls to the rest of us, particularly leaders like Mr. McConnell, to tell the truth about a free press, to proclaim its value, in the United States and around the world.

Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press?

It is much closer to the truth than the NYT could ever hope for.

Long considered fringe, the right wing radio host Mark Levin has had a few good years: He picked up a weekly Fox News show ("Life, Liberty & Levin"); he counts conservative political commentator Sean Hannity as his best friend; and the president recently tweeted in support of his new book, "Word is out that book is GREAT!"

On his show, Levin speaks in the unmistakable tenor of a man experiencing road rage or shouting at a customer service representative. In a recent episode, he yelled at an absent Beto O'Rourke ("Nobody likes a weak man, Beto...Nobody likes a weak man like you."), attacked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's looks ("her eyeballs are popping out of her head, like ping pong balls."), called Sen. Mitt Romney an "ass," and Sen. Dick Blumenthal a "pathetic, loathsome liar." The media didn't escape his invective either, from CNN's Brian Stelter ("that little creep") to MSNBC's "whole conga line of freaks working its way right up to Rachel Mad Cow."

This is the starting point of his new book, Unfreedom of the Press. The media, Levin writes, constitute "a profession whose members form a class or aristocracy of strident, pretentious, arrogant, and self-righteously superior individuals, rarely capable of circumspection or improvement."

Levin hopes to prove this by tracing the history of American media from the early days of the revolutionary press to what he calls the modern "Democratic party-press." Along the way, he looks at The New York Times' inadequate coverage of the Holocaust (full disclosure: I write freelance pieces for the Times), and touches on a handful of clear problems in American media, from the often poor distinction between reporting and opinion to the distorting incentives of the Internet.

But the book is largely filler. Quotations and paraphrasing make up the majority of the book's central chapters. Lengthy and irrelevant block quotes from historians about, say, colonial printing practices ("The use of type commenced in Virginia about 1681...") give the book the air of a padded student essay. He has boasted that the book's chapter on The New York Times would contain major revelations: "What the New York Times did has not been well exposed in the popular culture, and I'm doing it." But in the book, he simply quotes the work of well-known scholars and journalists on the Times' mid-20th century failure to cover the extent of the Holocaust. He conducts no interviews, presents no original research, and visits no newsrooms.

According to the FDA, for something to be marketed as cheese, most of its makeup has to be cheese, not filler. Otherwise, it is generally called "cheese product." If there were similar rules for books, Unfreedom of the Press would have to be sold as "book product."

When Levin does offer his own analysis, it can approach parody. In one example, Levin suggests that in order to see how unjust the media's treatment of Trump is, all we have to do is compare it with the way the press garlands its most cherished progressive idol.

Yes, I speak of the Broadway hit "Hamilton: An American Musical."

As proof, Levin quotes from Ben Brantley's gushing Times review ("I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show. But 'Hamilton,'... might just about be worth it.") This adoring write up, Levin suggests, provides a stark and telling contrast to the paper's treatment of the Russia investigation.

Here, a reader might reasonably ask: Does the difference in press coverage between "Hamilton" and the Russia probe proceed from media bias and hypocrisy, or from the fact that one of those things is a musical and the other an investigation of a sitting president?

According to Levin, it is the former: "The same Democratic party-press that seeks President Trump's indictment, impeachment, and tar and feathering for his noninvolvement in a supposed Russian collusion scheme celebrate their remake of Hamilton despite Hamilton's collusion with the British during the Washington presidency." He continues, "Now that Hamilton's collusion with Britain has been made broadly known, will progressives care? Of course not." (Levin is citing a claim by the historian Lance Banning that despite the U.S's official neutrality in the conflict between the British and the French during the French Revolutionary wars, Alexander Hamilton had "confidential" communications with the British. But I want to reiterate that we're talking about a review of a musical).

Levin often appears to misunderstand the sources he quotes, either because he does not notice or chooses to ignore humor, irony, or nuance. In one representative instance, a quote from New York Times journalist Jim Rutenberg has been cut to appear to echo Levin's claim about left-wing media bias, when Rutenberg's ultimate point is that harsh coverage of Trump is merited, and in fact "is what being taken seriously looks like." At other times, the quotations are merely beside the point.

Levin has long been a merchant of questionable goods: He uses his popular radio show to hawk nutritional supplements he implies will boost resistance to measles. He was also instrumental in spreading a conspiracy theory that then-President Obama tapped Donald Trump's phone during the 2016 election, an allegation Trump later tweeted — but for which there is no evidence. More recently he "revealed" a left-wing plot to ship illegal immigrants to Florida in order to alter voter demographics for future elections (there is no evidence of this). But people seem to be buying what he is offering: When this review was published, Unfreedom of the Press was the bestselling book on Amazon.

This can be put down to a few factors, including the presidential endorsement, the approach of Father's Day, and Levin's pre-publication rounds on the talk shows. On his radio program, Levin has marketed the book as a way to stick it to the media, to get a book "exposing" The New York Times onto the The New York Times bestseller list. In this framing, Unfreedom of the Press is little more than a free gift with purchase. What people are actually buying is not a book but a message to the Times and the media at large. And the message, to use a favored Levin phrase, is "SCREW YOU."

Who would have guessed that history had such a perverse development in store for us? As the historian Timothy Snyder has written in The Times, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came up with the slogan “Lügenpresse” — translated as “lying press” — in order to discredit independent journalism. Now the tactic has been laundered through an American president, Donald Trump, who adopted the term “fake news” as a candidate and has used it hundreds of times in office.

Your article from the NYT in the second paragraph, already with the Hitler crap. Hitler drank water too, do you drink water?

As the historian Timothy Snyder has written in The Times, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came up with the slogan “Lügenpresse” — translated as “lying press” — in order to discredit independent journalism.

I would stay away from American water.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the "Lügenpresse" has been and is common among neo-Nazi and right-wing radical groups.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the "Lügenpresse" has been and is common among neo-Nazi and right-wing radical groups.

It's sounds like the implication is that anyone who questions the press will be branded a neo-nazi and/or right-wing radical.

Is there a way to question the press without getting stigmatized?

the press without stigmatizing

and the journalist responsible has been terminated.

Don't get too excited, it was reported by the Washington Examiner.

Why Republicans Will Sidestep Their Garland Rule for the Court in 2020

WASHINGTON — When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was released from the hospital last weekend after another in a string of health scares, blue America breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more month, many whispered, until the start of a presidential election year when filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court would be off limits in the Senate.

But would it?

That was the case in 2016 when Senate Republicans stonewalled President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to fill an opening that occurred with 11 months left in Mr. Obama’s tenure. “Let the people decide,” was the Republican mantra at the time, as they argued that it was improper to consider Mr. Obama’s nominee when voters were only months away from electing a new president who should get the opportunity to make his or her own choice on a Supreme Court justice.

But with the tables turned and Republicans holding the White House, that almost certainly would not be their refrain in 2020 if a court seat were to open up through death or retirement.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, majority leader and unapologetic mastermind of the 2016 Garland blockade, has made clear that he would move ahead with a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump. The only potential barrier would be resistance from his own party on the grounds it would be hypocritical and unfair for Republicans to do what they prevented Democrats from doing four years ago.

Fat chance of republicans recognizing hypocrisy and unfairness when it stares at them in the face.