Tag Archive: news

Can we please stop talking about Trump’s fee-fees?

Guess who’s picture is not being featured?

Over the past several years, especially since Donald Trump was defeated for re-election and Joe Biden became President of the United States, there has been a weird and annoying trend in the news: when something big happens, when some important action or decision takes place, instead of the story being the thing that happened, the focus (as evidenced by the news story headline and lede) becomes about how Donald Trump reacted to it. For example, take a look at these stories:

New York Times: Trump Rages at U.A.W. President After Biden Endorsement

Clearly, the important story is that the United Auto Workers union endorsed President Joe Biden for re-election, not how Trump feels about it (quite obviously, he wouldn’t be happy not to get the union’s endorsement).

CNBC: Trump lashes out at financial monitor in business fraud case after she reports errors

Once again, the real story here is that the independent financial monitor in the Trump business fraud case in New York has found serious irregularities in the Trump Organization’s business operations, including a questionable $48 million loan. Surely, it is not a surprise, and not the main story, that Trump is unhappy about the monitor uncovering his potential wrongdoings.

The Guardian: Angry Trump fumes after $83.3m damages ruling in E Jean Carroll case

By now, you can identify the pattern. The big headline should be that a Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million dollars for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of an earlier rape. That Trump was then “angry” about being hit with such a huge verdict is merely a very foreseeable consequence.

What to do when the media ignore President Biden’s accomplishments?

President Joe Biden

This past Monday, President Joe Biden held an event at the White House where he unveiled a more than $42 billion investment in high-speed broadband internet around the country. According to President Biden, this funding comes from both the American Rescue Plan (signed into law in March 2021) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (signed in November 2021).  The President indicated that the legislation passed thus far included “$25 billion for high-speed Internet in places where it was out of reach, for schools and libraries to help students connect to the internet if they couldn’t do it at home.” Now, says President Biden, the new funding will “be distributed to 50 states, Washington, D.C., and territories to deliver high-speed Internet in places where there’s neither service or it’s too slow.” The breakdown of such funding includes, for example, over $3.3 billion dedicated to Texas, over $1.8 billion to California, and more than $1.1 billion for Florida.

The President’s broadband investment plan is designed to “connect every person in America to reliable high-speed Internet by 2030.” However, President Biden stated that:

[I]t’s not enough to have access. You need affordability in addition to access. That’s why we worked with internet service providers to bring down prices for Americans struggling with internet payments. It’s called the Affordable Connectivity Program. It’s helping 19 million families save around $30 a month on their internet bills, and some save a lot more.

In short, this was a very important announcement about something that improves people’s lives and helps individuals, students, businesses and others conduct their activities more efficiently. It’s great for our economy and will create jobs as well.

However, at least according to a number of people (such as Mastodon user Kailee @skykiss@sfba.social), “[n]ot a single news outlet aired President Biden’s event.” If that is the case, the fault lies in several places, including with the news media, the Biden administration, Democratic leaders in Congress and in the states, and elsewhere.

Titanic submersible missing: is it news?

Submersible vehicle of the type that is now missing

By now, many people know that a submersible vehicle that set out from St. John’s, Newfoundland on Sunday with five people aboard to explore the wreckage of the Titanic went missing after one hour and 45 minutes into its Atlantic Ocean dive. A search operation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Air Force is underway, with France also sending a ship to assist. This operation is a race against the clock, as the occupants only have about 70 to 96 hours of emergency air supply.  CNN is running a live feed on its website, with updates as they occur. [NOTE: given the potential for fast-changing events here, this blog post is also subject to updates, and therefore may not reflect the latest developments].

While this story is no doubt a human interest story that elicits empathy in many people (though some might scoff at the wealthy privileged occupants who paid $250,000 each for a close-up view of the Titanic), is it really a news story? Does it contain any wider implications for our lives?

CNN is hosting Donald Trump, and people are freaking out

CNN covering 2019 Democratic Presidential debate

This week, CNN announced that it will host Donald Trump for a “town hall” event on May 10 in New Hampshire. This is a format that CNN likes to use with presidential candidates, and is essentially a one-on-one conversation with a CNN anchor or correspondent, on stage in front of an audience (some of whom get to ask questions as well), and televised live. Sometimes CNN interviews several candidates, one after the other, at the same event, and other times they hold a shorter event with just one candidate.

A number of Democrats, however, are reacting very badly to CNN’s announcement regarding the Donald Trump town hall. For example, in perusing various websites and social media platforms, statements and comments like these can be seen:

CNN is so desperate to boost its ratings, it will provide more free publicity for Trump.

Sure, have fascist insurrectionist town hall meetings air on cable news as if he hasn’t just been indicted and have 14 other investigations taking place in to his criminal activity, is just run of the mill normal. Nothing to be alarmed about, just another day in America.

It’s preposterous that CNN would invite someone to hold a purely political event who is currently being probed for his efforts to steal an election and stage a violent coup against the government of the United States.

Trump criminal arraignment will be test for news media today

New York tabloid coverage of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is being arraigned today on numerous criminal charges at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Thus far, much of the news media coverage of this process has focused on what Trump is saying and doing, e.g. his reaction to his indictment, his travel plans, and his plan to fly back from New York to Florida later today to give a speech, no doubt full of whining and complaining about being subject to the legal system. But today is really about what is being done to Trump, and what he faces, i.e. hopefully some modicum of justice. It’s also a teachable moment for many Americans, to find out this country was founded upon the principle that no one is above the law.

Therefore, the news media have a choice today: will they correctly focus on what is happening to Trump, including booking, fingerprinting, reading of the charges against him, analysis of the legal process going forward, the potential for prison time, etc.? Or will the media continue to base their coverage on Trump’s own statements and travels? In particular, will the news media fully cover the rather meaningless Republican circus of Trump’s Florida speech tonight, letting him once again set the agenda? If so, then we will know that the media will cover the 2024 presidential elections, like the 2020 elections, in the most superficial and damaging way.

Watch what Trump and the Republicans do, not just what they say

Everyone is in a tizzy this week because Donald Trump wrote racist tweets. The story is all over every type of media, from TV news to Twitter to Facebook to news media websites, and more. However, this has to be one of the biggest non-news events of the year. Trump already has a well-known history of public racism dating back at least to the 1970s with housing discrimination, continuing through the 1980s and beyond with the Central Park Five case, and which was on full display in Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign announcement speech, where he came out of the gate attacking immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

If you’re still wondering why Trump deliberately creates distractions with shiny objects regarding immigration and race, here are a few things that Trump has been distracting us from while the whole country obsesses over his racist tweets:

Is Donald Trump preparing us for the release of a very naughty tape?

Suspected Trump/Russia connections

Donald Trump has spent much of this year attacking mainstream (non-Murdoch) news media outlets, calling them “fake news.” The term apparently means real news that isn’t flattering to Trump. This can be seen as a strategy to influence us not to believe what we see, hear and read, unless it comes from a pro-Trump media outlet like Fox News. But now Trump seems to have taken his propaganda strategy one step further: he is saying that the Access Hollywood” tape released in October 16, in which Trump tells host Billy Bush that he likes to “just start kissing women” and “grab them by the pu*sy. You can do anything” is not authentic. What’s going on?

Bypass the corporate mainstream media

Dick Cheney, CNN's go-to right wing apologist

Dick Cheney, CNN’s go-to right wing apologist

In 2015, the traditional news media — what we call the Corporate Mainstream Media — have continued to move to the right, in some cases sharply so. These television and newspaper media outlets are no longer reliable conveyors of facts that Americans need to make decisions at the voting booth and elsewhere. We should ditch these corporate mainstream media. Instead, we need to become our own news aggregators.

Here are some of the many examples of the mainstream news media’s rightward drift:

Social media and the fall of Brian Williams

Brian Williams as Willi Vanilli

Brian Williams as Willi Vanilli

Chris Cillizza wrote a short Washington Post piece last Friday entitled “Who had the worst week in Washington? NBC’s Brian Williams.” Cillizza’s op-ed described how NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was taken down by social media. In particular, Williams was placed on six months’ unpaid suspension, and may lose his job permanently, as a direct result of a Facebook comment by helicopter flight engineer Lance Reynolds, who disputed Williams’ oft-repeated story about being on a helicopter that was hit by enemy fire during the Iraq War. The social media takedown of Brian Williams was a keen observation by Cillizza, but social media are responsible for much than just Brian Williams’ job status. The Brian Williams debacle might be remembered as the moment where social media, and the Internet itself, overtook  television.