Category Archives: fox
Fight Speech You Don’t Like with More Speech
What ever happened to the idea that you fight speech you don’t like with more speech?
In 2013 Hunter Biden flew to China on business with his father on Air Force 2. But Joe claims to know nothing about Hunter’s business dealings there. Navy vet and investor Tony Bobulinski says otherwise. And he has evidence to back it up, including his two personal meetings with Joe Biden.
Sounds like a news story to me. But Adam Schiff called it Russian disinformation. Twitter shut down the NY Post’s account when it published the story. And now Fox News is carrying the story.
Thank You For Spying
Eric Holder’s Justice Department threatened Fox News Reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator under the espionage act. Except Holder never really intended to charge Rosen. It was all a pretext to spy on his phone calls and emails to find out who in the government was leaking information to him.
The Obama administration also spied on the phone records of Associated Press journalists.
More Spying
And of course they lied about spying on us too.
This week Joy Behar, of all people, outed James Clapper for spying on the Trump campaign. Clapper claimed Trump should be happy about this because his agent was really spying on Russians.
The Washington Post and New York Times find this explanation perfectly reasonable.
Bill O’Reilly Sexual Harassment Retirement Party
Bill O’Reilly joined Roger Ailes in enforced retirement on Wednesday. Both were accused of sexual harassment.
Not to worry though. CNN Money says O’Reilly’s golden parachute falls just a little south of the $25 million contract he recently signed. That compares to his former boss’s $40 million bail out.
Bill O’Reilly Sexual Harassment Charges Lift All Boats
Also, there’s a trickle down payout effect. The NYT says O’Reilly and Fox paid about $13 million to various women who accused him of sexual harassment. He admits nothing.
Still, Fox gave him the boot.
Killing Putin
In his Super Bowl interview with President Trump, Bill O’Reilly accused the Russian President of killing people. Trump’s response? “You think our country’s so innocent?”
That made me think of one of my favorite exchanges between Michael Corleone and Kay Adams:
Michael: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?
Except Trump is president, not a mob boss. Now who’s being naive?
Putin
Anyway, I got the idea for this cartoon from a Holman Jenkins column in the WSJ.
His assessment of Trump’s comments was, “unwise, spoken by somebody with a thin grasp of his circumstances.” But he went on to say, “Trump, clumsily, was actually keeping up a longstanding U.S. policy of covering up for Mr. Putin.” Then Jenkins detailed the Ryazan bombing plot by Putin security thugs to frame Chechen terrorists. It rarely gets mentioned by American officials. Jenkins thinks that’s because everybody wants to make a deal with Putin.
He concludes, “Read a certain way, Mr. Trump’s comments make him the first U.S. president to address Mr. Putin’s real nature.”
BTW: Not climbing on the assassination chic bandwagon or anything here with the title. Just having a little fun with a commentator’s line of books.
Never Trump Media
A common thread among the elite media seems to be that Trump is so bad anything goes to stop him. Which is interesting, since The Donald brags that his electoral success so far comes from free media coverage.
Howard Kurtz picked up on the NeverTrump media movement in his August 9 Media Buzz column titled Media justify anti-Trump bias, claim he’s too dangerous for normal rules. Howie says some in the media “are flat-out making the case for unfairness—an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented campaign.”:
Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”…
Now comes Jim Rutenberg , in his first season as media columnist for the New York Times. He’s a good reporter and I give him credit for trying to openly grapple with this bizarre situation.
But Rutenberg is, in my view, trying to defend the indefensible:
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
Then there’s Michael Goodwin in this New York Post column titled American Journalism Collapsing before our eyes:
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
And here’s historian Victor Davis Hanson:
The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased.
NeverTrump Media
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic isn’t having it. He explains why it’s difficult to cover Trump. Trump says provocative things like “Obama founded ISIS”. That’s not literally true – you can look it up. So what did Trump mean by it? That answer involves judgement and interpretation:
His strategic gambit was always and precisely to have things both ways.
By insisting that Barack Hussein Obama “founded” ISIS, knowing full well that his use of the word was unusual, inapt, and likely to mislead, then doubling down again and again when asked to clarify, Trump—who began in national politics by questioning Obama’s birth certificate—could again appeal to the part of his base that believes America is led by a secret Muslim foreigner who is allied with America’s Islamist enemies. And as even Trump acknowledged at the end of his interview with Hewitt, Trump willfully chose less accurate, more outrageous words to generate attention.
Having deliberately provoked with the repeated false statement that Obama founded ISIS, and deliberately inflamed with his reluctance to say he was speaking figuratively when asked to clarify, one Trump objective was achieved; having had things one way, he could move on to pretending, at the end of his Hewitt statement, that he was really just saying Obama had lost the peace all along, though he had directly rejected that notion moments earlier when Hewitt presented it.
Then, the next day, Trump sent out a Tweet with yet another contradictory explanation: He didn’t literally think Obama was the founder of ISIS; nor was he simply trying to express that Obama’s policies gave rise to ISIS; rather, when he said Obama founded ISIS, he was being “sarcastic,” but the media doesn’t get sarcasm.
All this deliberate, mendacious gamesmanship puts journalists in a very tricky position. If they merely report what Trump literally says, they’re accused of hyper-literalism. If they report what he reallymeans, judgment and interpretation are required.
Trump the Gardener
Another rich guy with “rice pudding between the ears” comes to mind. Maybe Trump is really Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers character in the 1979 movie Being There):
President “Bobby”: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?
[Long pause]
Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
President “Bobby”: In the garden.
Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
President “Bobby”: Spring and summer.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
President “Bobby”: Then fall and winter.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
Benjamin Rand: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we’re upset by the seasons of our economy.
Chance the Gardener: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!
Benjamin Rand: Hmm!
Chance the Gardener: Hmm!
President “Bobby”: Hm. Well, Mr. Gardner, I must admit that is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I’ve heard in a very, very long time.
[Benjamin Rand applauds]
President “Bobby”: I admire your good, solid sense. That’s precisely what we lack on Capitol Hill.
I like to watch.
