Commentariat Central: New York Times Fake News Edition

In an appearance this week on the "Useful Idiots" podcast hosted by Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, journalist Chris Hedges nailed it about the trajectory the Paper of Record has taken since Donald Trump's election. "They're morphing into MSNBC in print," he observed.

MSNBC, of course, is not so much in the news business as it is in the plutocratic promotion business and the Russophobic business as marketed by the Democratic Party. Staffed to the rafters with former - and in some cases, current - security and military officials, it preaches hatred of Trump, fear of Putin, and loathing of Bernie Sanders -- all crammed in between commercials for overpriced prescription drugs, wealth management experts, the goodness of oil and gas, the beneficence of for-profit hospital chains, and all manner of antisocial neoliberal claptrap.

The Times, long known for at least a pretense of seriousness and impartiality, has recently branched out into video, including a partnership with Hulu to produce weekly documentaries starring its own reporters, as well as producing its own podcasts. It has, meanwhile, stopped publication of often trenchant political cartoons for the sin of offending too many people.

 When Edward Bernays wrote his seminal volume on propaganda in 1928, he estimated that about one-quarter of all the front page articles in the Times were pure propaganda, the contrived "narratives" coming in about equal portions from government, big business. and the various public relations/lobbying outfits currently euphemized as "think tanks."

With the introduction of Russiagate and now Ukrainegate, the mere one-quarter propaganda content has at the very least doubled, especially since the lockstep opinion columnists now receive pride of place on the digital homepage. ("Where do they find these people?" Hedges marveled on the Useful Idiots podcast.)

Exactly one hundred years ago, about a decade before the Bernays book, muckraker Upton Sinclair had described the Times as "the great organ of world capitalism," writing in The Brass Check:

Our newspapers do not represent public interests but private interests; they do not represent humanity but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth.

The Times not only refused to review Sinclair's book, whose observations and criticisms have held up remarkably well over the past century, it even refused to run paid advertisements for it.

The historic truth of the consolidated media's inherent capitalistic value system has been conveniently muffled by the emergence of Donald Trump and the media's subsequent positioning of itself as "Resistance, Inc." Trump has gifted them with a new opportunity to advance the interests of property in the name of endangered Norms and abused Decency. They relish their roles as the righteous victims of Trump's fascistic "enemies of the people" crusade and as the simultaneous hypocritical enablers of Trump, feverishly covering his every Nuremberg-style rally and republishing his every tweet the minute it emanates from his twitchy thumbs. 

So never mind the brass check. Times columnist Michelle Goldberg was recently given a blank check, or at least a generous expense account, to travel to all the way to Ukraine just to assert that the Democracy which America has always tried so very, very hard to export has been sadly supplanted by the rank corruption that Donald Trump and his mafia minions have been single-handedly forcing down that beleaguered nation's throat.

She didn't personally travel to the Russian border to cover the "proxy war's" skirmishes and battles. She didn't interview ordinary Ukrainians. Instead, she followed the MSNBC echo chamber playbook and interviewed like-minded fellow professionals in trendy Kiev cafes. She even glowingly quoted the discredited neoconservative  Francis "The End of History" Fukayama, who is now trying to rebrand himself as a professional Never-Trump liberal resistance fighter.

According to Goldberg - Bernays and Sinclair notwithstanding - the epidemic of fake news and propaganda is a brand-new, purely TrumPutian phenomenon which only started a few years ago:

Ukrainians are no strangers to post-truth politics. The first time I ever heard the term “fake news” was in 2015, when I learned about the Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake. It was created by a group of journalists to push back against the torrents of Russian disinformation sowing chaos in the country’s politics. At the time, it would have been hard to imagine that the United States would soon join Russia as a source of weaponized untruth in Ukraine....

Pro-Western reformers, the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko told me, had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

When you combat alleged fake news with pure propaganda, as Michelle Goldberg does with her column, nothing good can come of it. (It does help, though, that Goldberg's propaganda is so clumsily rendered that it becomes a virtual parody of itself.)

 Not only does she omit any mention of the US-backed Maidan Square coup of 2014, she ignores the entire imperialistic history of the US and its numerous CIA-led regime changes, its aiding and abetting and installation of myriad corrupt and vicious right-wing dictators (Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Armas, etc.) who are compliant with US corporate interests. Did I mention that her other regular gig is paid MSNBC punditry?

My published comment on her Oct. 12th column: 

My own earliest memory of the term "fake news" was when President Obama used it on a trip to Europe in November 2016, shortly after Trump's election. He called it a "threat to democracy."

 In the Athens leg of his trip, the White House shared a "travel diary" with photos of a pensive Obama at the Parthenon and other ruins in the birthplace of Democracy. He wrote:

"We view ourselves as part of a broader humanity and a community of nations that can work together to solve problems and lift up what’s best in humanity.”

 But what neither he nor most US media outlets saw fit to share were photos and footage of riot police lobbing tear gas at some 7,000 Greek citizens who were protesting and demanding "Yankee go home!" just blocks away from the American embassy where he was dining with officials. People were not only protesting the harsh austerity measures imposed by bank-friendly politicians, but the timing of the presidential visit. It occurred on the anniversary of the 1973 revolt that helped oust the military junta backed by the US.

"Fake news" can also be perpetrated by the deliberate omission of salient facts, giving any "narrative" the desired slant. "Exporting Democracy" is greasing the skids for multinational corporate plunder with the weaponized help of what is commonly euphemized as "the intelligence community."

Corruption is baked right into the system. Maybe we can start to root it out at home by overturning the Citizens United ruling that's made most of it perfectly legal.

The Biden Critic Who Came In From the Cold

What's a well-paid New York Times columnist who moonlights as a regular MSNBC contributor to do when, repulsed as she is by Creepy Uncle Joe, realizes that her career probably depends on at least passive-aggressively promoting Creepy Uncle Joe in the interests of her corporate sponsors?

If you're Michelle Goldberg, and you have previously opined that Biden should never run for president, then the first step in your rehabilitation is to write a chastened column about all the polls that show Joe Biden with a substantial lead. You then subtly denigrate the anti-Biden "online left". You provide no evidence to back up your claim that this group has little to no influence over the vast, silent majority of Democratic "moderates" for whom the defeat of Trump trumps everything else. Defeating Trump is more important than Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Those nice things are for the "future" of the Democratic Party, not for the precarious present of the actual people and the planet they live on.

As horrible a candidate as Joe Biden is, after all, he could never be as horrible as Donald Trump.

Goldberg seems to want to have it both ways. She gives her reluctant tacit approval to the "electable" Biden, while still clinging tenuously to her faux-progressive feminist brand:

 I still think it’s a bad idea for the party to nominate a man who, among other things, voted to authorize the Iraq war and oversaw the televised humiliation of Anita Hill. But while it’s still very early, his poll numbers suggest that those of us who’d written Biden off could be the ones who are out of step with a lot of Democrats. (my bold).
The future of the Democratic Party is still with left-wing social media dynamos like Ocasio-Cortez. As Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann recently wrote in The Atlantic, she’s “often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation.” Right now, though, her generation is mostly in charge only online.

How odd that even though Goldberg had long ago dutifully joined the media chorus insisting that a Russian troll farm swayed an entire election by posting a few hundred cheesy ads online, the "Online Left" back home in the USA does not wield similar power and influence.

One explanation for this alleged lack of power and influence, she continues, is that MSNBC doesn't give lefty ideas as much coverage as Fox News gives to those in its own right-wing audience.

MSNBC (where I’m a contributor) doesn’t play a remotely similar role in mainstreaming fringe ideas. Polls tell us that Democratic voters don’t rely on it as their main news source the way Republican voters do with Fox, and it doesn’t take its cues from online left-wing subcultures. In fact, it often seems that Fox News pays more attention to progressive Twitter than MSNBC does, because the right-wing network loves to jeer at anything that looks like lefty overreach.

She doesn't mention that MSNBC also loves to regularly jeer at leftists, including but not limited to Bernie Sanders. The most infamous incident took place in March, when a different on-air contributor falsely claimed that Sanders had not mentioned gender or race until 23 minutes into his campaign announcement speech. (He had mentioned them immediately, and to this day, MSNBC has not issued a correction or apologized.)

She also doesn't name any "online left-wing subcultures," other than AOC's twitter account, or even explain what she means by this dismissive term. But by lumping them all together into one fringe-dwelling pot, she does manage to make them seem both suspect and scary. At most, she damns them with her very faint praise. They're not radical at all, but by golly, they're still fringe-dwellers despite the overwhelming support of more than 90 percent of registered Democrats for single payer health care.

I suspect that if Michelle Goldberg had mentioned the inconvenient truth that MSNBC is essentially a corporate Democratic Party propaganda mill and regularly lies by both commission and omission, she would no longer have her lucrative gig on MSNBC. Members of its revolving stable of occasional contributors get paid a reported average $85,000 to $100,000 a year to be available to rehash and promote their articles, their think tank research papers, and their Democratic Party consulting work. Their job is to agree with each other, and occasionally debate GOP operatives and politicians in the interest of "balance" and for shouting-over purposes. This keeps the audience glued to the screen in a simulacrum of mass indignation and righteous liberal solidarity. If it's not about the anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc., "the Russians," or the Mueller Report soap opera, then it does not exist.

Michelle Goldberg

Goldberg seems to have gotten the message that the time has now arrived for even the mildly restive liberal stable to get trotting in unison in the spectacle of the Horse Race, mainly by endlessly promoting that P.R. gimmick called "electability." (As I wrote last week, the electability gimmick was dreamed up in the 1980s by the Democratic Leadership Council to justify implementation of the undemocratic superdelegate system as a means to steer the party toward the right and keep it there permanently.)

Goldberg thus dutifully continues:

In his own horrific way, Trump seemed to expand the possibilities of American politics, making it seem as if the old rules of electability no longer applied. Many of us assumed that the expansion would go in both directions, since Trump’s rise represented such a catastrophic failure of the political center. But there are a lot of Democrats who don’t want a revolution, or even a protracted political fight. They just want things to be the way they were before Trump came along, when ordinary people didn’t have to think about Twitter at all.

My published comment: 

 The media promotion of Biden proceeds apace. Michelle Goldberg basically shrugs "what do I know?" as she pivots from finding Biden borderline-abhorrent to acknowledging that The Polls Speak.

 But what about those polls? What percentage of the people questioned were contacted by cell phone as opposed to landline? Few young people have landlines. "Biden leading by double digits!" is about as far as most people read. The polls then become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a magnet for the undecided voter.

Meanwhile,there are fewer stories about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. There are Zero stories about Tulsi Gabbard, whose opposition to the regime-change wars embraced by both establishment parties and mainstream media outlets makes her persona non grata in the "official narrative."

 Michelle Goldberg acknowledges that she is also a contributor on MSNBC, which exposes yet another problem of journalism. One corporate outlet or personality quotes another corporate outlet or personality, and ad infinitum until it all becomes "the conventional wisdom."

Beating Trump is now the be-all and end-all as news and political personalities and the "horse race" supersede deep discussions and reporting about the everyday problems of ordinary people.

 No wonder impeachment is "off the table." It would take attention away from the candidate whose main policy platform is "restoring America's soul." Whatever that even means.

 Who's up? Who's down? Who cares?

Commentariat Central: Fear and Despair Edition

The closer we get to the Most Important Elections Ever in History, the more the Duopoly is ramping up the fear factor. The end of the world is nigh, not so much because of the ongoing climate catastrophe, but because neither of the two corporate political parties we're stuck with thinks that more than a billion dollars in campaign contributions is enough.

A glance through your inbox gives you the impression that every day is a deadline of doom. The money-raking professionals are getting more brazen, going from begging to demanding, informing you that your payment is past due and that you only have until midnight tonight to fork it over.

And what if you don't? I really hate to tell them this, but the democracy repo man came and went decades ago.

So they'll try to scare you silly anyway. Always near the top of their bag of tricks to get you to fork over the cash before voting is the warning that "they're coming after your Social Security and Medicare!"  

Democrats say this of Republicans, and Republicans say this of Democrats (and also about "illegals" and welfare cheats.)

As is his convenient wont, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman limits his own critique of the continuing attack on the New Deal and Great Society programs to the Republican Party and to the deplorable Republican voters who get all their information from Fox News. That he again fails to mention that it takes two corrupt bodies to tango comes as no surprise, although I do happen to agree with him that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blatantly announcing his attack plan before the midterms was pretty shocking.

My published comment:

The timing of McConnell's threat surprised me too. The only explanation is that he so secure in his iron grip on both Kentucky voters and the Senate that he's willing to play "bad cop" for the duration.

The first step in this stale old routine is to gaslight and terrorize the sick, the old, and the poor. Demonizing people and calling them fraudsters works wonders in the divide-and-conquer department.

The Dems, as they have done before, might react to his snarling cruelty by offering to snip and slash here and there to save what is little is still left of our social programs.

Trump might even achieve the "Grand Bargain" with Congress that Obama and Boehner could not, thanks to the Tea Party faction insisting that the cuts weren't cruel enough.

He could accept slightly less sadistic cuts in exchange for the building of his nasty wall. Who knows? I wouldn't put any subterfuge past any of them. This is, after all, government of, by and for the oligarchs, who really comprise one political party unto themselves, the Pathocratic Party. Their unbridled greed to possess everything and to control everybody has reached truly pathogenic proportions.

 They need to go, and we need to make them go.

So let's tell the Democrats in no uncertain terms that we will agree to no more of their "pay-go" rules, aka robbing from the poor and working class to keep our social insurance on life support.

Stop the trillion-dollar wars if you want to tame the deficit. And soak the rich.

Now we come to Times columnist Michelle Goldberg's piece addressing the despair of women in the Age of Trump.  Her solution?  Get involved working for the Democratic Party, and do it for free! Or at the very least, chat with some party activists to cheer yourselves up. (That this advice column is directed at affluent women not having to work at multiple low-paid gigs is punctuated by the accompanying feel-good photo showing a Democratic candidate hugging an unpaid campaign worker in a room full of white people.) 

Goldberg writes:

There is, I find, only one thing that soothes my galloping anxiety, and that is talking to women who are actually doing the work of campaigning. The people who are knocking on doors and organizing rallies tend to be much more cheerful and confident than those who spend too much time on Twitter obsessing over each new poll....

 Now, part of the job of a good politician is projecting optimism. But again and again over the horrible months of Trump’s reign, I’ve found that spending time with the women who are working their hearts out against him is at least a temporary cure for despair. So if you, too, are scared, or furious, or despondent, find a Democrat close to you and go canvass for her (or him). “It’s the best way to feel good about the world and connect with people,” (Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen)Whitmer said.

Heaven forbid that you should storm your local social services office, go on a wildcat strike, or join Cindy Sheehan in the anti-war Women's March on the Pentagon on Oct.20-21!  If you're nervous or depressed from spending too much time stressing over Trump all by your lonesome, then put all your energies into joining others in fixating obsessively on Trump, and forgetting all about the toxic neoliberal system that created him. If you're affluent, you will benefit mentally under a more rhetorically tasteful Democratic majority and thereby save yourself all those trips to the therapist.

My comment, trying to gently change the subject from the "liberal women are emotional wrecks and victims of Trump" trope, with its artificially narrow emphasis on gender/reproductive rights, to the wider economic justice/class struggles that are so ignored by the liberal elites during this campaign season:  

The more that Donald Trump denigrates women, the more obvious it becomes that he is terrified of women the same way that a middle school pre-adolescent boy is afraid of girls. His rallies are fascist iterations of the Little Rascals' He-Man Woman-Haters Club.

We should treat Trump with all the derision we can muster. He is a weakling at his core.

We must treat the establishment which spawned him with equal derision as a balance to our well-placed fear. We should also recognize that this is essentially a class war. The Republicans under Mitch McConnell have made no secret of the fact that the next big item on their agenda is to slash Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security. The citizens who depend the most on these programs are women and children.

Trump's tweets calling women names might sting and cause outrage. But the economic attacks on women's pocketbooks and pantries literally endanger our lives, if we are not so lucky to reside in the top 10% of income earners.

Rather than merely demand protection for the increasingly whittled-down social insurance programs we contribute to all our working lives, we must insist upon their enhancement. The Democrats have to do more than pay lip service to diversity and gender rights. We have to ensure not only equality of opportunity, but basic fairness of economic outcomes.

Repeat after me, ladies: Conservative men are afraid of you. Use the power that has been within you all this time. Make them even more afraid of you.