Progressives (Liberals)

Liz Cheney is pushing this as well. Apparently it is a party strategy, for the moment at least. I can't imagine they think they can alter the voting patterns of the Jewish community but it's possible they believe that even small differences (in their favor) may have consequences in close elections. But my guess is that their actual strategy is to 1) keep their evangelical base angry and stupid and 2) simply filling up the media space with their desired narratives.

I hope you’re right. Telling billionaires and those they pay to keep their gravy train running (Wall Street millionaires, news reader millionaires, pharmaceutical and big oil millionaires...) that your primary goal is to put laws in place to bring them down to size is enough for a lot of people to find a permanent solution to the problem you present...

But, if you saw the Town Hall featuring Tulsi, Buttigieg, and that other guy, you see how one journalist’s bias can enhance or ruin a candidate’s prospects. Since we know so many journalists get marching orders from their billionaire ‘owner’, it isn’t hard to see how election tampering is done in newsrooms as much as voting precincts.

TPM

Simple formula here - the individuals that the GOP fears are the ones who will gain the concentrated attacks.

You've said that before. I doubt there's anyone on this site who has studied US political media to the degree I have and there's no evidence that what you are saying here is true.

Fer shur. Likewise "Nuclear war is a silly term because it's actually "people war".

Statistics show that gun availability has little impact on homicide rates.

It's possible that nuclear war would drastically increase the number of deaths.

Not that the left is ever interested in facts....

If Democrats want to proudly wear the label of neonazis, it is reasonable for Republicans to make sure that voters understand this.

It has become clear that your ‘studies’ are handicapped by your refusal to see what doesn’t align to your preferred narrative. You are still black hats vs white hats.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship.html

‘Journalist’ collusion with the Clinton campaign is widely known and defended as legal in a court case.

Why do you continually pretend you don’t know?
If you click on the link, you’ll see the names of journalists who attended private parties and agreed to write plush pieces for the Clintons.

But it isn’t about Clinton as much as it is the newspaper owners who want Clinton (and now a new chosen candidate) to do their bidding. This is how the oligarchy runs the US.
——————————

INTERNAL STRATEGY DOCUMENTS and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.

The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion.

As these internal documents demonstrate, a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe are favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories the campaign wants circulated.

At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted “on background” and what should be described as “on the record.”

One January 2015 strategy document — designed to plant stories on Clinton’s decision-making process about whether to run for president — singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a “friendly journalist” who has “teed up” stories for them in the past and “never disappointed” them. Nick Merrill, the campaign press secretary, produced the memo, according to the document metadata:

That strategy document plotted how Clinton aides could induce Haberman to write a story on the thoroughness and profound introspection involved in Clinton’s decision-making process. The following month, when she was at the Times, Haberman published two stories on Clinton’s vetting process; in this instance, Haberman’s stories were more sophisticated, nuanced, and even somewhat more critical than what the Clinton memo envisioned.

But they nonetheless accomplished the goal Clinton campaign aides wanted to fulfill of casting the appearance of transparency on Clinton’s vetting process in a way that made clear she was moving carefully but inexorably toward a presidential run.

Given more than 24 hours to challenge the authenticity of these documents and respond, Merrill did not reply to our emails. Haberman declined to comment.

Other documents listed those whom the campaign regarded as their most reliable “surrogates” — such as CNN’s Hilary Rosen and Donna Brazile, as well as Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden — but then also listed operatives whom they believed were either good “progressive helpers” or more potentially friendly media figures who might be worth targeting with messaging. The metadata of the surrogate document shows the file was authored by Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director of the campaign. As The Intercept previously reported, pundits regularly featured on cable news programs were paid by the Clinton campaign without any disclosure when they appeared; several of them are included on this “surrogates” list, including Stephanie Cutter and Maria Cardona:

The Clinton campaign likes to use glitzy, intimate, completely off-the-record parties between top campaign aides and leading media personalities. One of the most elaborately planned get-togethers was described in an April, 2015, memo — produced, according to the document metadata, by deputy press secretary Jesse Ferguson — to take place shortly before Clinton’s official announcement of her candidacy. The event was an April 10 cocktail party for leading news figures and top-level Clinton staff at the Upper East Side home of Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, a fully off-the-record gathering designed to impart the campaign’s messaging:

In a post above on the GOP attacking Beto, I should have added this little gem.
They (Club for Growth) are pushing the line that Beto "drips with white male privilege".

It is, of course, an charge quite laughable coming from these guys - particularly with their President. Two things on this:
1) It is utterly common for modern conservatives to project their guilt onto others. I don't know that this is a unconscious psychological failing so much as a purposeful move to try and dissipate accusations against them by suggesting "everyone does it so we don't deserve to be attacked for it". Again, the tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) fallacy.
2) I suspect they are alarmed that Beto might be a very real threat in Texas and so are trying to denigrate him with the black voters.

First, it's delightful to see you forward a Russian propaganda project designed to keep Clinton out of office and put Trump there (Guccifer). How could that go wrong?

I trust you don't presume that Sanders and every other serious candidate will not have a staff who's precise task is to manage the press? How do you think that work gets done? Obviously, cultivating contacts in the media who have been or might be friendly to the candidate's message is going to be top of the list. Obviously, repetition of the message is the point. Obviously some individual press people will be more accommodating than others. Do you imagine there's been no contact between Sanders' people and The Intercept. Greenwald makes precisely this point at the end


Your claim that many in the press get their marching orders from their corporate bosses gets no support in Greenwald's piece. None.

I wonder if you ever see the hypocrisy in your repeated questioning of the motives of others (which you cannot possibly know for sure) regarding opinions they have expressed, in the context of the many opinions, both explicit and implicit, you offer here -and which you state with the expressed assumption that the A2K reader will accept them.

Just what do you suppose it is that makes your motives and opinions more reliable than those of these others - all with different political perspectives - you so energetically criticize. Do you suppose that this, on your part, is the unconscious projection of your own failings on others (to which you referred above) , or is it merely the mean-spirit political propaganda it so strikingly appears to be?

Re Tim Apple
Benen

If you take the time to read up on the characteristics of the sociopath (or anti-social personality), you'll find that Trump matches just about every one of them. If you doubt me, try it.

Domination of others is key See this Psychology Today piece but read further and check other sources


Sociopaths, authoritarian personalities, dictators, bullies etc can almost never abide satirization of them or jokes about them because these things work to damage the desired projection of superiority. Challenge that in any effective way (and satire is very effective in this) and you become a target of the sociopath's rage and his/her steps to crush you.

Just take everything you’ve said about Rupert Murdoch’s influences on that dastardly conservative outfit and apply it to the other oligarchs holding media companies.

You keep bringing this (how can bernie know another's intentions?) up, young fellow.

It's more than a tad bizarre. And here I won't even mention your oft-stated understanding of why Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch met and chatted in an airport hanger. Not going to bring it up.

When Clairol runs an ad campaign on the theme that "blondes have more fun", do you find yourself at a loss as to intentions?

Likewise when the big tobacco companies spent big dollars on a decades-long project of casting doubt on the health effects of smoking, do you find yourself on the porch in your rocking chair wondering, "Golly, it would be nice to understand why they are doing this but no way of telling unless I'm them"?

It should duly been noted that Trump saved a valuable 0.27 seconds by not including Tim Cook’s last name!

First, let's acknowledge that you continue to fail to provide evidence for your claim that many reporters are ordered to write X or Y by corporate heads.

As to what you've just said above, that is intellectually lazy and not well educated.

Chomsky, in books like The Manufacture of Consent or Media Control (I have them on my bookshelf and I've read them) makes legitimate and serious charges that mainstream media tend to function in an over-arching support of the existing power structures. That's often true for churches and other social institutions as well, by the way. I think this is undeniably true and becomes more acutely dangerous where major media is controlled and dominated by large corporate entities with holdings across hundreds or thousands of profit-driven companies.

But that's not your claim. You are doing something else and in the way you make the claim, you have to evidentiary basis for it. If you imagine that Chomsky would validate your equivalence formulation on Fox and everyone else, you're not paddling in the right direction.

Damn. That is really, really funny. Thanks Walter!

Only the best people
TPM

Unfortunately you did. According to press releases Clinton was on a flight from LA to New York, and Lynch on one from Washington to Aspen CO. Both were in aircraft that could make the cross country trip unrefueled. Take a look at a map - Phoenix is far from the great circle track of either route, and the stops were both unnecessary for the alleged refueling, and very far out of the way for both. The announced "accidental meeting" story didn't pass the laugh test for anyone with a basic knowledge of aviation.

It turns out an apparently disgruntled FBI officer in Phoenix, when informed on a need to provide security of the then forthcoming "accidental meeting" informed a local reporter of it - otherwise the whole deal would have remained a secret. "Accidently meeting during simultaneous, unnecessary refueling stops in an airport far from their planned routes, and somehow being parked in adjacent slots in a remote hangar " is a story that defies belief.
Not to mention the fact that the FBI closed out their investigation of Hillary a few days later. Why the Hamlet-like Comey reversed course later is a story waiting to be told.

No I don't. Moreover I have equivalent impressions of your motives.

No, actually, I did provide evidence that the Clinton campaign ordered up and received favorable puff pieces. You just don’t acknowledge it, as is your habit.