Tag: Press Freedom

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 5, 2018

Until Trump came along, the only time most of us had heard the term “enemy of the people” was in reference to Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Our democracy is based on the premise that a free press is vital to the continued survival of the republic, and yet this president can whip up a friendly crowd into a foaming-at-the-mouth mass of rage-fueled zealots, without consequence. He’ll be the first to proclaim innocence if/when these ragebots go after reporters.

After all, isn’t it what they deserve for posting all that “fake news”?

America can’t condone his actions toward the press. Most importantly, the press’s job isn’t to be an echo chamber for any president’s BS.  Their job is to dig for the facts and call out the bullshit whenever they see it.

Donnie won’t be responsible when they get off the leash:

In Jeff Sessons’ world, “Religious Liberty” doesn’t mean what you think it means:

Sorry, Rudy, Mueller isn’t looking for collusion. Treason or obstruction, perhaps:

3D gun printers grab for both the First and Second Amendments:

3D printers are small potatoes in GunAmerica:

Donnie Distraction wants the mid-terms to be about MS-13, no collusion and the wall:

Lots of people are getting it. It’s going around, just like the flu:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 26, 2017

Five weeks into the Trump Ascendancy, and things look worse than ever. Wrongo has not had much time for the Trump/Russia conspiracy. If anything beyond the DNC hack surfaces, we can discuss the possibility of election interference. But as of now…unpersuaded. That is, until this coincidence occurred at CPAC:

From the Atlantic:

Jason Charter, 22, and Ryan Clayton, 36, passed out roughly 1,000 red, white, and blue flags, each bearing a gold-emblazoned “TRUMP” in the center, to an auditorium full of attendees waiting for President Trump to address the conference. Audience members waved the pennants—and took pictures with them—until CPAC staffers realized the trick: They were Russian flags.

The stunt made waves on social media, as journalists covering CPAC noticed the scramble to confiscate the flags. It was a gutsy and (mostly) harmless gag, unless you count the damage to Conservative egos. That the gag was carried out by two people who should fit the neo-con profile for Normal and Safe shows that the tribe cannot tell members from interlopers.

Trump’s team refused to let accredited journalists from certain news outlets attend Trump press secretary Sean Spicer’s “gaggle” on Friday. This is where American news is heading:

It is more important than ever to know who the real enemy is:

Kim Jong-Un channels the Donald, and there are surprising similarities:

Trump walks away from supporting LGBT rights:

GOP Congresscritters are terrorized about meeting their constituents:

 

 

Facebooklinkedinrss

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the”60 Minutes” Trump interview on Sunday. Basically, it was a low-information session, long on atmosphere and short on what is likely to happen in the first 100 days of Trumptopia.

There were hints that low information may be emblematic of the future relationship between the press and the new administration. In the interview, there was this: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Lesley Stahl:…A lot of people are afraid. They’re really afraid. African Americans think there’s a target on their back. Muslims are terrified.

Donald Trump: I think it’s horrible if that’s happening. I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country…and they’ll make into an event because that’s the way the press is.

More press paranoia by the Donald-elect. To think of the media as liars destroys one of the only protections we have for our democracy.

And Fortune Magazine, not exactly a haven for lefty journalists, said this:

What does that future look like? It looks like a pitched battle between a man who made his own media rules and rode them to victory, and a traditional press that has lost much of its power.

It seems obvious that President-elect Trump’s relationship with the press could be more contentious than even that of Richard Nixon.

Trump’s spokesperson, Hope Hicks, had to go out of her way to reassure the media that Trump was planning to operate a normal press “pool,” in which the president travels with reporters who share their news reports with others. The press is concerned, since they were not permitted to travel with Trump during the campaign.

But the media holding the Trump administration’s feet to the fire was is made very difficult by Trump’s points about social media in the “60 Minutes” interview: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Lesley Stahl: But are you going to be tweeting [about] whatever you’re upset about…when you’re president?

Donald Trump: So it’s a modern form of communication, between Face– you know, Facebook and Twitter and I guess Instagram, I have 28 million people. 28 million people—

Taken together, the major network and cable TV outlets account for 26.5 million viewers.

So, Trump has the ability to talk directly to more people than the networks. During the campaign, Trump took advantage of that to spread both accurate (and inaccurate) information that helped his cause. In effect, the Trumpets were using the media equivalent of modern military technology while the mainstream media (and the Clinton campaign) used tanks and bayonets.

Going forward, what will happen when Trump, who has continued to attack the motives of the press, has to deal with them as president? Will Breitbart News and Fox get preferential treatment while the New York Times and the Washington Post are left scrambling for the scraps they leave behind?

And if that happens, who is in a position to stop him? In 2016 and going forward, how will you find out what is really going on in the world?

And think about the parallels to the GW Bush presidency: Pence has the operations role. This could very well turn into another Cheney Administration, where Pence actually runs the government in the background while Trump soaks up all the attention playing Mister President on Twitter and for the cameras.

The parallels are frightening. Fortune has this vision of the future:

A weakened and increasingly marginalized traditional media, fighting with the tools of a previous era, surrounded by more nimble adversaries who know how to use social platforms for their own ends, and a president who is actively hostile to the traditional press. Not that long ago, it probably felt like things couldn’t get any worse for the media—but they just did.

Let’s not lose hope completely. Why? This administration will enter office with close to zero credibility with the press. Think about how few newspapers endorsed Trump.

Second, the media remembers its failures to follow the facts during the Bush administration. So, the fear of being called unpatriotic as those few in the media were when they spoke out against Bush’s Iraq policy, will be tempered by the press’s memory of their complicity in Iraq War.

Finally, blogs and social media can work both ways. They may have helped elect Trump, but social media in particular will not allow Trump to operate unchallenged.

That challenge will force the MSM to follow stories in a way that didn’t happen in the GW Bush administration.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Somewhere, Bull Connor is Smiling

You don’t remember Bull Connor? He was Commissioner of Public Safety (chief cop) in Birmingham, Alabama when, in 1963 he used fire hoses and attack dogs against civil rights activists. The films of the confrontation and Connor’s disproportionate response, became an iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He became an international symbol of Southern racism.

Now, science has come up with a better, more efficient crowd control product. From the Daily Dot:

Imagine being soaked, head to toe, in a frothy mix of pureed compost, gangrenous human flesh, and road kill, and you might get some idea of what it’s like to be sprayed with Skunk, according to those who’ve had the misfortune of being doused.

A few police departments in the US, including the St Louis Metropolitan Police, have reportedly purchased the spray, a non-lethal riot-control weapon originally developed by the Israeli firm Odortec, and used first in the occupied West Bank in 2008 against demonstrators. The sticky fluid, which Palestinians say smells like a “mixture of excrement, noxious gas and a decomposing donkey,” is usually fired from armored vehicles using high-pressure water cannons.

Decomposing donkey? Where and when do you learn what THAT smells like?

It was used in Hebron on February 26, 2012 to disperse a crowd of an estimated 1,000 people which clashed with Israeli soldiers during a protest described as commemorating the anniversary of the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre.

Mistral Security, based in Bethesda MD, offers Skunk products to US police and the military. According to the company’s website, they sell it using a number of delivery systems, including 60 ounce canisters with a range of 40 feet; a “skid sprayer” equipped with a 50 gallon tank and a 5 HP motor that can shoot over 60 feet at up to 7 gallons per minute; and a 40mm grenade that can be fired by a 12-gauge shotgun.

The company reports that Skunk is made from 100% food-grade ingredients and is 100% eco-friendly – harmless to both nature and people. From their website:

Applications include, but are not limited to, border crossings, correctional facilities, demonstrations and sit-ins. Decontamination soap is available to mitigate the odor.

So what we have here is another way that our police spend money to create citizen compliance. Police have an ethical problem: How do they control (or disperse) a crowd that gets unruly without causing injury?

In the past year, we have seen several examples of “comply or die” in cities around the US. Now, we see that the technology is evolving from Bull Connor’s days of attack dogs and fire hoses, to tear gas, rubber bullets and bean bags, and now, Skunk. Policing seems to be headed in a strange direction. You better do what you’re told, and not participate in any, you know, civil disobedience, like sit-ins, protests, demonstrations and such, or we will Skunk you, (or worse).

A fundamental Constitutional issue has emerged in police response to civil disobedience in the past few years. City property has been “privatized”, with the municipal corporation as the owner. Public space is not owned, it is supposed to be available to the public with only limited conditions. But, we now see a growing number of examples where police, mayors and municipalities are limiting access for the press, for demonstrators as well as for ordinary citizens to public spaces.

When our laws are manipulated in order to suppress a free press, or personal speech, it shows contempt for the entire idea of a free people or a government of laws. When our police continually purchase new weapons to insure compliance with police orders, peaceful protest is at risk.

Consider this: At Donald Trump’s Dallas rally on Monday night, Politico reports that as the mostly white attendees filed out, they clashed with 200 or so protesters, mostly black and Hispanic.

Dozens of police officers, including several on horseback, pushed protesters off arena property. After being pushed to the other side of the street, one protest leader encouraged the rest to arm their families and teach them to protect themselves:

You’re only going to get Martin Luther King so long before you get Malcolm X.

Our police should be careful what they wish for.

See you on Sunday.

Facebooklinkedinrss

What Happened to Our Free Press?

We have a free press, right? That freedom implies the absence of interference from an overreaching state. With respect to government information, governments routinely distinguish between materials that are public or protected from disclosure to the public based on a classification process that protects some information from disclosure due to the information’s relevance to protecting the national interest.

Washington is making more and more information, including some that is decades-old, inaccessible except to journalists who are “trusted”. That is journalists who the Administration or an agency have invested time and effort to determine that they will put the best possible spin on whatever they are fed.

In the past, the term “access journalism” meant giving exclusive interviews (or leaks) to pet reporters who had established that they won’t bite the hand that feeds them good stories. From the perspective of the government, this is a virtuous circle: Not only can they reward reporters who play ball, but over time, these correspondents become influential, by virtue of having an inside information advantage.

But there are darker ways this game is played. Some agencies block information from journalists or historians who prefer to report rather than to take dictation. The American Historical Association has an article about government agencies using the courts to keep secrets secret:

In a two-to-one decision the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, in May 2014, agreed with the CIA that a volume of its…history of the 53-year-old Bay of Pigs Invasion could “confuse the public” and should thus be kept secret.

Huh? What are we supposed to be confused about? That the invasion failed? That the CIA set it up? Or maybe that the Agency was flat-assed wrong about the popular anti-Castro uprising that was supposed to be triggered by the invasion?

To win the legal argument, the CIA successfully convinced the two Judges that any document the agency deems “predecisional” (dealing with file information developed prior to a decision to act) can be withheld permanently. To do this, they rely on the CIA Information Act of 1984. This bill was a deal made to speed the CIA’s processing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests while protecting information unlikely to be released because of national security concerns. But today, the CIA doesn’t abide by Congress’s intent, it routinely refuses to search its operational files – in particular, files which have been subject to an investigation. As an example, Admiral William McRaven, the Joint Special Operations (JSOC) Commander who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid, knew about this transparency black hole when he ordered the FOIA-complying Department of Defense to purge its computers of all files on the Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden and send them to the CIA, where the Operational Files Exemption would keep them “safe” from search and review for release.

If our society wants to maintain even a veneer of democracy, we have to change the CIA Information Act, which keeps important information from the public. It seems it is used to preserve the image of the CIA and shield it from criticism, as much as it is used to protect national security.

A second dark way in which the game is played is demonstrated by the Obama administration’s pursuit of more criminal leak investigations than all previous administrations combined. The Institute for Public Accuracy reported yesterday that 14 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists have issued individual statements voicing support for New York Times reporter James Risen, who continues to refuse to name his source for information about a bungled CIA operation in Iran that appeared in his 2006 book State of War. The DOJ is considering whether to attempt to force Risen to testify against his sources.

Third, the White House occasionally threatens reporters about their methods of obtaining information. Press Secretary Josh Earnest publicly lectured the WaPo after they reported that Obama aides had early warning of a potential border crisis, and for citing an anonymous sources. At the same time, other reporters present at the lecture pointed out a familiar email that had just arrived in their inboxes: an invitation to a phone call with anonymous White House officials:

All of this is designed by the Administration’s spinners to produce cover stories. Because there’s always a cover story, even if it’s “nothing happened.” Cover stories are built like onions, one layer behind another, a fallback story behind every cover story.

Anti-transparency is tantamount to anti-accountability. Criticism is the only known antidote for error.

By contrast, in a competitive arena like business (or sports), ruthless postmortems, particularly of failures, often happen in public. They are believed to be necessary for improving performance.

But in Ultimate Politics, Washington can’t tolerate critiques, so they plan to be even less transparent. Forget the Constitution, folks.

Facebooklinkedinrss