U.S. Media Looking Down the Barrel of the Most Media-Hostile Presidential Regime in History

The U.S. media better prepare itself for a rough ride for the next 4 years- those elements that aren't willing to grovel and become Trump sycophants, that is. (I exclude from consideration fascist agitprop and overtly racist pseudo-media. They are thrilled by Trump's election, which should tell you how ominous Trump's attainment of presidential power is.)

Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist who reacts explosively to any perceived slight. He believes any criticism of himself at all is grossly "unfair," even "nasty." And he has already demonstrated repeatedly that he will have no tolerance for media reportage of him and his regime that displeases him.

During his campaign, Trump frequently directed vitriol at the media from the stage, and pointed out media people in the arena. He would egg the crowd on to menace and intimidate the press people.

Even before getting "elected" by a minority of the citizens voting (and fewer than Clinton received), Trump blacklisted  over a dozen media organizations, barring them from his events, including major media organs, because their coverage failed to be sycophantic towards him.

Post victory, he doesn't allow media to fly on his plane, a break with established practice.

Trump's first reaction to the protests against him when he was deemed president-elect was to tweet that the media was to blame for creating the protests.

Nixon is going to look like a media-lover compared to Trump.

Well, the media created Trump in many ways, from NBC making him a TV star with his awful show, "The Apprentice," based on abuse of people, to the billions of dollars worth of free air time. CBS boss Leslie Moonves giddily bragged, infamously, about how much money CBS was making by its grotesquely over-saturated "coverage" of Trump, saying Trump may be bad for America, but he was great for CBS. [1]

On the other side of the ledger, the media almost totally blacked out Bernard Sanders, to the extent of airing an empty Trump podium instead of a live Sanders speech. The media gave billions of dollars of free TV time to every Trump tweet, while virtually ignoring Sanders. Then,  after Trump won the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) nomination, the media elites panicked and skewed their coverage to favor Clinton and try to undermine Trump.

But it didn't work. With the FBI's help, Trump closed the gap and came close enough to win a majority of Electoral College votes. [2]

The media made its bed. Now it has to lie in it. Unfortunately so does everyone else on earth.


Two of the jackasses who brought us Donald Trump: Media czars Leslie Roy Moonves (CBS) and Jeffrey Adam Zucker (formerly of NBC, now CNN Worldwide).

Jeffrey Adam Zucker

                                                                  

 Zucker yuks it up with his Creation, the Creature from the Mar-a-Lago Lagoon.

 Leslie Roy Moonves
"Hey, I'm making so much money! My shareholders will be pleased! Who cares if America goes to hell in a handbasket?"

 Moonves doesn't want any doubt about who runs CBS so he himself holds all three top positions: Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Corporation. "Big Ego? Who, Me?"

The Man Who Knifed the Democrats By Dredging Up Clinton's Emails Again: FBI secret police chief and registered Republican James Brien Comey, Jr. (Thank Obama for appointing this Bush regime apparatchik to his post! What is it about Democrats? They long for Republican love. Bill Clinton also had a bad habit of appointing Republicans. Do Republicans ever appoint Democrats to top power posts? I can't think of any.) [See footnote 2.]

1] "Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise," Washington Post, October 2, 2016.

Moonves in February, 2016, at a Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, said, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." "Donald's place in this election is a good thing." "What can I say, the money is rolling in." "I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going."

Audio on youtube.com

Link to articles in establishment media on Moonves comments here.

2]  After the release in October of videotape of Trump bragging about sexually molesting women, it seemed that he was destined to lose. He trailed Hillary Clinton by 14% in national polls, a huge deficit so close to the election November 8. Then on October 28, eleven days before the election, FBI chief James Comey lobbed a bomb into the campaign. He sent a letter to 8 Congressional chairs saying the FBI found more Clinton emails in an unnamed, unrelated investigation. It transpired that in persecuting the hapless, sexually compulsive Anthony Weiner, the FBI found some Clinton emails as they seized devices used by his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top Hillary Clinton confidant and operative. Irrationally, this caused the polling gap to evaporate immediately. Trump ultimately won enough states to win in the Electoral College, even though he actually lost the "popular" vote (what is called the "vote" in every other country on earth). See my previous essay for a discussion of that, below.

["In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost."]

For my earlier analysis of the tempest-in-a-teapot email "scandal" redux, see " Much Ado About Emails: FBI Stirs the Pot Again Over Clinton Private Computer Server."

If You're Seeking Disingenuousness, The New York Times Is A Great Place To Look!

Year after year, the New York Times "news"paper often demonstrates a remarkable ability to be seemingly oblivious to elephants in the room. It even at times flatly denies the reality that the very facts it reports make obvious. One has to wonder why this is.

Sometimes it would seem to be motivated by a desire to avoid conflict with other capitalist industries, or with institutions of state power. There is also a desire to uphold and protect various planks of the ideological system. They don't want to fundamentally change the outlook or consciousness of people. (That is quite distinct from molding opinion on this or that issue, which they do assiduously, every day.)

Now here is a rather glaring example, which the Times put under the heading "Media," indicating that in the print edition it appeared in the Business section. This is from the Times website dated May 30:

            "Television Networks Struggle to Provide Equal Airtime in the Era of Trump." [1]

The article is about Donald Trump's dominant presence in the media vs. Hillary Clinton's much smaller media footprint. This is attributed by the Times to the different behavioral styles of those two presidential candidates, and in Clinton's case, to an active avoidance of the media. Much of the article consists of handwringing by various media executives and on-air figures, which likewise is disingenuous on their part.

The very first paragraph gets things wrong. Quote: "Donald J. Trump relishes the spotlight of live television. Hillary Clinton has long recoiled from it. Now, the television news industry is wrestling with how to balance fairness, credibility and the temptations of sky-high ratings as it prepares for a presidential matchup like none other."

Fairness, credibility and the temptations of sky-high ratings are in reverse order of actual important to the TV industry. Obvious ratings- a surrogate for revenues and profits- is most important. Credibility matters longer term. Fairness? What fairness? Maybe an appearance of fairness, somewhat. Since when has "fairness" (a totally subjective quality in any event, completely in the eye of the beholder) mattered in propaganda?

But no need to dally there. What struck me most forcefully, and revealed the headline to be packed with disingenuousness to the bursting point (remember, Networks Struggle to Provide Equal Airtime) are some facts from the article itself. Namely that when Clinton gave speeches to labor unions, the TV networks blacked out the speeches. In one instance, they instead "covered" an empty Trump podium. (Unmentioned by the Times: the TV bosses did the same thing to Bernard Sanders. On the night of a bunch of his primary wins, they blacked out his speech, focusing instead on an empty Trump podium. But the Times is no stranger to blacking out news itself. Ralph Nader was virtually ignored by the rag when he ran for president, despite drawing tens of thousands of people to rallies, including ones with admission charges such as at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Do I detect a political bias operating in the "objective journalism" of U.S. news?)

Here are the paragraphs from the article that reveal the dishonesty of the headliine:

"Networks are seeking novel ways to maintain balance [between Trump and Clinton], like staging voter town halls that provide candidates with equal airtime; seeking a wider spectrum of on-air contributors and campaign surrogates; and bringing more fact-checking into segments, as Jake Tapper has done recently on CNN to some acclaim. [Acclaim? From who? From other propagandists, that's who! For asking obvious questions! Hey, I could do that job.]

"Still, the presence of Mr. Trump can be irresistible, especially in an election in which viewership and advertising rates have soared, generating tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue for an industry threatened by digital competition. [What "threat"? The networks all ARE online themselves.There are no "upstart" TV networks.]

"Last week, none of the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC — carried Mrs. Clinton’s speech to a workers’ union in Las Vegas, where she debuted sharp new attack lines against Mr. Trump. [Sounds "newsworthy" to me. She had new things to say. But ah, she was talking to workers, in a union, and the capitalist media hates unions and doesn't much like workers either.]

"Instead, each chose to broadcast a live feed of an empty podium in North Dakota, on a stage where Mr. Trump was about to speak.

"The same discrepancy [sic!] occurred earlier this month, when the cable networks aired Mr. Trump’s address to the National Rifle Association live from start to finish. A speech by Mrs. Clinton in Detroit days later, to a labor union, did not receive the same coverage; all three networks skipped the speech, with Fox News airing a lighthearted [read: trivial] segment about a nationwide backlog of cheese." [My emphases.]

I wouldn't call that a "discrepancy." But the Times is right: covering a Trump speech, while totally ignoring a Clinton speech, is indeed not "the same coverage." Just like zero and 100 aren't "the same."

So here's the disingenuousness. Are the networks "struggling" to provide "equal airtime" when they actively black out events involving unions? Doesn't sound like they're "struggling" very hard.

Notice too the attempt to substitute "town hall" bullshit for people in their actual role as workers. The U.S. media always strives to prevent people from thinking of themselves as workers. "Workers" are always somebody else, somebody costing businesses money, or being selfish and inconsiderate by going on strike and causing the public hardship (or at least inconvenience). We all are "consumers." So there's "the consumer" and "the worker," and never do the twain meet in bourgeois ideology (or in "economics" either, it seems).

But you see, this "discrepancy" is because Trump is just so masterful. He's "irresistible" catnip to the media drones and their masters, who count the dollars in the tills. Here's the Times again:

"In interviews, more than a dozen anchors, executives and news producers displayed admiration for Mr. Trump’s facility with their medium. Some expressed a bit of soul-searching, [see the handwringing?] admitting unease at the unfiltered exposure he has received, with one anchor describing frustration about being asked to conduct on-air interviews with Mr. Trump by telephone, rather than in person. But several offered the defense that whatever viewers make of Mr. Trump, he is undoubtedly newsworthy — and always accessible."

Why, it's enough to make a propagandist swoon!

Of course, you have to be "nice" to Mr. Trump, or he'll abuse you ferociously, and in public.

This is such nonsense. It's like "McCarthyism," the idea that one person is making things happen that are in fact institutional activities. "The" media is promoting Trump, although we have to make a distinction here between the broadcast arms and the print arms. The print arms, aimed at more intelligence and intellectually sophisticated people- people who read- has certainly been quite critical (rightly so, and I mean rightly both factually and morally) of Trump and his despicable demagoguery. But there is no question that broadcast media has aided and abetted the Rise of Trump. In fact, the man can be said to be a media creation.

The truth is, the media pick and choose what to "cover" and what to ignore. The only caveat here is that by creating a Frankenstein monster, "the" media have created a self-reinforcing momentum for Trump. Now they feel compelled, for reasons of profit (as the article does admit) and competition with each other, to keep on giving Trump far more attention than his idiotic statements deserve.

But another caveat: now that he's the presidential candidate of one of the two corporate oligarchic political parties of the U.S. two-party dictatorship, he actually is very important.

What happens if this loose cannon, Donald J. Trump, narcissist extraordinaire, becomes president of the globally dominant U.S.A.?

Well, the ruling elites made their bed, now they have to lie in it. They created their monster, and they'll have to figure out how to control his rampages if he attains the top power position in the U.S. and in the world.

As they used to say in Brooklyn, Oy vey!

1] New York Times, May 30, 2016.

Funny thing, when I went to double check the meaning of disingenuous, Oxford Dictionaries online gave a first example sentence that dovetailed nicely with this essay:

DISINGENUOUS
ADJECTIVE
"Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does: 'this journalist was being somewhat disingenuous as well as cynical.'"

Now why did they choose that as an example!

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/disingenuous