Category: Hack Journalism

I’m Doing a Happy Dance Here

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Roger Ailes has left the building:

In the dark for days, Fox News staffers finally got word on Thursday about the future of their network.

The news was delivered in person by Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Roger Ailes 20 years ago.

It was an unexpected visit, and with stunned employees listening in Fox’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, Mr. Murdoch announced that Mr. Ailes was out as chairman and chief executive. Mr. Murdoch himself would be taking over Fox News in the interim.

Mr. Ailes was not there. Mr. Murdoch had barred him from the building starting on Wednesday, according to one person briefed on the matter. The person said Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, had learned Mr. Ailes was trying to get some of his on-air stars to criticize those who cooperated with investigators looking into accusations of sexual harassment against him.

………

Mr. Murdoch will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of the Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Mr. Ailes is found. His interim role is intended to ensure stability during the rest of the presidential race, and to be taken as a signal that the network is not on the verge of a wide-ranging overhaul, said a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Murdoch plans to be “extremely engaged” and had already been attending some news meetings because Mr. Ailes has had health issues recently, the person said.

I think that a lot of this is also driven by the fact that Fox News has horrible demographics, the average age of a viewer is 68, which means that the audience is literally dying off.

To change this, the network needs an extensive rework, and Ailes was clearly not the man for the job.

My guess is that they will stick with the current format and lineup through the elections, and then they start rearranging the deck chairs.

On the Superdelegate Canvass

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— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 7, 2016

Jake Tapper Wins with a Chinatown Reference

I was watching TV last night, and flipped over to Maddow and found her over the moon because some anonymous source told the AP that they had Canvassed the superdelegates, and Clinton had secured the nomination.

NBC officially called the nomination last night.

It turns out that being pissed off about this is something that both the Sanders campaign and Clinton campaigns can agree on.

Why the Sanders campaign would angry is self-evident.

For the Clinton campaign, it short circuited what they hoped to be a golden moment tonight.

As to the story, it smells:

Last night, the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

One question that is raised by all of this is who made the call to the AP to get this ball rolling.

I can think of 3 possibilities:

  • Someone who is both completely incompetent and in a blind panic about the possibility of the aftermath of the last days of the primary, and a potentially contested convention that they did something mind buggeringly stupid. (I call this the Debbie Wasserman-Schultz hypothesis.)
  • Someone at the AP is a complete idiot, and convinced his similarly dim cow-orkers that this was a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. (I call this the Baldrick hypothesis)
  • This is a ratf%$#ing from someone who wants to sow dissent between the Clinton and Sanders camps while diminishing whatever Clinton says today.  (I call this the Roger Stone hypothesis)

My money is on Baldrick.

    Today In Idiocy

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    1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage

    Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.

    Ummmm….Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?

    Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?

    Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?

    I Have an Irresistable Urge to Live in a Cave for the Next 5 Months

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    It appears that a low level Bernie Sanders staffer was doing advance work for a rally in California, and was looking at holding the event at an airport.

    It turns out that there was a sky diving concern there, and said staffer name dropped to get a chance at doing a tandem jump with the proprietor of NorCal Skydiving, Jimmy Haliday.

    This ended up with (I’m not joking here) international coverage about Bernie Sanders skydiving:

    Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.

    Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.

    The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.

    The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.

    ………

    On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out … I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”

    It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.

    If you had any doubt, we are officially in the silly season, and it’s only going to get worse.

    I just want to get away from it all until the damn election is over?

    Anyone know of any AirBNB vacancies in Pyongyang?

    I’m sick of this crap.

    What a Bunch of Hypocritical Pearl Clutching

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    Over at the former Kaplan Test Prep company, now a division of Amazon, Dana Milbank is having the vapors over Donald Trump’s sometimes salty language.

    This from the guy who joked about Hillary Clinton drinking Mad Bitch Beer.

    Seriously? If there is anyone in the Washington commentariat who is less well qualified to talk about misogyny and profanity, I haven’t read them yet:

    Here’s a serious question for Republican officeholders: WTF?

    Now that Trump has a lock on the presidential nomination, many top Republicans — too many — are moving to embrace this vulgar man for the sake of party unity. It is a real [expletive] show.

    The man who would be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer has said the following things (among many others) in front of thousands of men, women and children (and millions more via the media):

    On U.S. companies relocating overseas: “You can tell them to go f— themselves.”

    On China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea: “They’re ripping the sh– out of the sea.”

    On the Islamic State? “I would bomb the sh– out of ISIS.”

    Earlier, on dealing with China: “Listen, you motherf—ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

    And on climate change: “This very expensive global warming bullsh– has got to stop.”

    Republicans: This vulgarian speaks for you?

    Seriously Dana, go Cheney yourself.

    And Jeff (Bezos) make Dana do some useful work for his paycheck.

    The Only Opinion that Matters ……… Except Maybe his Own

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    Stephen Colbert just gave major props to Larry Wilmore for his White House Correspondents Dinner speech:

    ………

     Last night Stephen Colbert opened his monologue with that ‘phone call.’

     “Now personally, I thought Larry gave a great speech, that did not let the President or the press off the hook, And I am confident that Larry will receive the ultimate recognition for his work — never being invited back.”

     He also addressed the end of Larry’s speech, which if you have ever watched The Nightly Show you know was not a racial slur or insult. But leave it to Colbert to put it in perspective.

     “There was a little controversy, a moment at the end where Larry said the n-word. It was shocking, but it did lay the groundwork for President Trump to say it next year.”

    That sound you hear is a mic dropping.

    Mealy Mouthed Weasels At PBS

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    Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.

    We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.

    Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.

    We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.

    Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.

    We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.

    She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.

    You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.

    Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.

    Remember This Come Pledge Week

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    On her hand is the Celtic Cross, the logo for Stormfront, and NeoNazis throughout the world


    On the other hand, “H H”, as in, “Heil Hitler”


    And you can get it on T-Shirts and Pillows

    The PBS news hour did a warm fuzzy about how politically engaged some Trump supporters in North Caroline were deeply involving themselves in the political process.

    Somehow, they missed the fact that this family was festooned with white supremacist tattoos:

    Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.

    If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.

    Someone at the News Hour has got a lot of explaining to do.

    This sort of stuff is American Nazi 101, and I have no clue how everyone involved in this news report missed it.

    Nothing to See Here, Move Along

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    Is anyone surprise that the guests on Chris Matthews’ show Hardball have given over 75 thousand dollars to his wife’s campaign?

    It’s an interesting racket:

    One day last June, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews opened his show with some news: His wife, Kathleen Matthews, a former local news anchor and Marriott hotel executive, had announced a run for Congress, seeking to replace Chris Van Hollen in Maryland’s 8th District. Matthews enthusiastically endorsed his wife’s candidacy, and vowed to “offer Kathleen whatever help I can.”

    The longtime host of Hardball added: “As a journalist, I also know how important it is to respect certain boundaries on my support for her both in my public role and here on MSNBC. And while most of you know that our show doesn’t typically cover congressional races, I will continue to fully disclose my relationship with her as part of MSNBC’s commitment to being transparent and fair in our coverage.”

    In the ensuing months, Kathleen’s name has rarely come up on Hardball. But many of the guests on the show have become generous donors to her campaign. And the transparency Matthews promised has not extended to mentioning that to his audience.

    Using Federal Election Commission data and Hardball transcripts, The Intercept has identified 48 frequent guests of Matthews’s program who have made donations to the Kathleen Matthews for Congress campaign. These individuals, their spouses, or their political action committees donated $79,050 as of December 31, 2015 — about 5 percent of the $1.5 million Matthews had raised as of that time.

    Some of the guests made the donations after they were on the show — in some cases, long after. But in at least 11 of these cases, the Hardball guests appeared on the program after Kathleen Matthews announced her candidacy, and without any disclosure of the donations. And in at least three of those cases, the donations came within days of the MSNBC appearance.

    As Atrios would say, “Time for another blogger ethics panel.”

    Finally, Someone Confronts Hillary About It.

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    Just Desserts at a Fundraising Dinner

    I could call Hillary’s endorsement of the penal state in the early to mid 1990s the “Elephant in the Room”, but given the attendant political symbology, it wouldn’t clarify the issue.

    Bill Clinton was campaigning for president, and when he was campaigning for reelection, both he and Hillary Clinton acritively demonized black popular culture, see the “Sista Soulja Moment“, particularly with regard to young black men.

    Their crime bill was an abomination, and Hillary was blithely talking about “super predators” as a code word for young urban black males.

    A black lives matter protester shelled out $500 for a fundraising dinner, and got in Clinton’s face about her history:

    Two activists with the Black Lives Matter movement interrupted a private fundraising event in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, demanding that the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton account for language she used as first lady about the need to “bring [at-risk youth] to heel”.

    First reported by the Huffington Post, the protest began after Clinton told attendees about the need for police body cameras to stem police violence against members of the public. At this point, activist Ashley Williams stepped forward and unfurled a banner reading: “We have to bring them to heel.”

    The banner’s text refers to a speech Clinton made in 1994 in support of her husband’s crime bill, the passage of which has since been criticized as having expanded the prison system and imposed unduly harsh sentencing on non-violent offenders.

    “I’m not a super-predator, Hillary Clinton,” Williams said once Clinton turned around and noticed the sign, paraphrasing another line from the then first lady’s speech. “Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?”

    Williams told the Huffington Post that she and another protester made a $500 donation to the Clinton campaign to attend the event, held in a private residence with roughly 100 attendees. Williams was eventually removed from the fundraiser by secret service agents.

    Her eventual response, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” is a non-apology apology.

    What’s more it is further reduced in meaning in that she delivered this message only in writing.

    There is a problem with what you said 20 years ago. 

    The bigger problem was that you actively promulgated a racist trope because it helped Bill’s reelection campaign.

    It is a very sad part of your history, and any apology needs to come from your mouth, and not from a memo dashed off to one of your pet journalists.

    Well, This Explains Why Chris Matthews Has Been Felching* Hillary Clinton on His Show Lately

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    Did you know that Kathleen Matthews, the wife of MSNBC’s Chris “Tweety” Matthews is running to replace Chris Van Hollen in MD-8?

    Did you also know that her campaign is getting lots of donations from friends of Hillary?

    Funny, that:

    After what can only be described as an absolute disaster of an electoral showing in the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2016 increasingly hinge on her support from the Democratic establishment.

    The establishment, which is connected to Clinton and her financial backers by ingrown threads of funding and financing, is panicking over the surging campaign of Bernie Sanders. It will turn to its people in the media and party leadership to reverse the trend.

    ………

    Chris Matthews has been under considerable fire from the left recently for what’s been interpreted as “relentless shilling” for Hillary Clinton on his MSNBC talk show, Hardball.

    ………

    His endless devotion to the Democratic Party got Matthews the kind of attention that many people only dream of from party elders. Over the past decade, his name has been bandied about as a candidate for Senate or Governor in his native Pennsylvania. He’s been the subject of a speculative New York Times Magazine cover story on his political aspirations.

    But in the end, it appears Matthews is sticking with television. Instead, his wife Kathleen is running for political office as a Democrat, in Maryland, where the Matthews family lives.

    And herein lies the crux of the matter. As the Daily Caller reported on February 9, many of the wealthiest Clinton donors are funneling money to the Kathleen Matthews Congressional campaign. This, in turn, makes Chris Matthews’ constant kow-towing to the Clinton campaign suspect at the very least. Although it may just be part of ingratiating himself to the Democratis establishment.

    The money trail from Hillary Clinton to Chris Matthews crosses the path of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The support each of the latter gives to the former is a direct by product of that financing.

    So not a surprise.

    *If you do not know the definition of the word, “Felch”, do NOT Google it.

    Today in Historical Illiteracy

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    At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir takes aim at Marco Rubio, and effectively targets his own foot:

    Let me explain “Potemkin Super Bowl party,” because I don’t even know whether that’s a totally obscure reference. In the Soviet Union under Stalin — and Marco Rubio is already deeply unhappy about where I’m going with this — the state built “Potemkin villages,” idealized rural towns full of happy peasants for foreign visitors, while behind those façades the populace lived in misery.

    Ummmm…Stalin?

    You are only off by almost 200 years, and the reference is only a Google away.

    A Potemkin Village was a fake town created by a courtier in the court of Catherine the Great, Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski, who allegedly created an elaborate fraud to convince the Czarina that the lands in the south of Russia were happy and loyal.

    Attributing this to Stalin, when the term literally has its own Wiki page, does not inspire confidence on your grasp of the facts Mr. O’Hehir.

    BTW, it appears that after reading comments to his article he corrected that bit, and he should get props for that, but if you have an only vague knowledge of this sort of cultural reference, just f%$#ing Google it.

    Bullsh%$ Bingo Winner of the Day

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    There is a mildly amusing parody web site that does a compare and contrast of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, things like:

    • Bernie: Star Wars is a great series, and I thought that episode 7 is a nice return to the Franchise’s roots,
    • Hillary: [Makes “Live long and prosper” hand signal]

    It’s kind of silly, and not too deep, and pokes fun at Hillary Clinton’s perceived lack of authenticity,* but someone at Salon decided to use the meme to attack all Bernie Sanders supporters as male chauvinists, aka Bernie Bros:

    ………These jabs at Clinton’s imagined sonic preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers—from teenagers on through boomers and beyond—are something to be mocked and disrespected.………

    Don’t even bother trying.

    Annie Zaleski has won the bullsh%$ bingo game for this month, and possibly for the entire f%$#ing presidential campaign.

    She has her head so far up her ass that she resembles a Klein bottle.

    *Not her fault.   Bill Clinton does authenticity so well that if he were sharing a bill with Pope Frank, the Pontiff would look like the Andy Kaufman character Tony Clifton.

    Today in Blithering Idiocy

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    New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is wondering where the compassionate conservatives have gone in the Republican Party:

    Back in 2000, George W. Bush did something fascinating: On the campaign trail he preached “compassionate conservatism,” telling wealthy Republicans about the travails of Mexican-American immigrants and declaring to women in pearls that “the hardest job in America” is that of a single mother.

    Those well-heeled audiences looked baffled, but applauded.

    That instinct to show a little heart helped elect Bush but then largely disappeared from Republican playbooks and policy. Yet now, amid the Republican Party’s civil war, there are intriguing initiatives by the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and some other conservatives to revive an interest in the needy.

    Has the columnist, aka Mr. “Sh%$ for Brains” actually read these proposals?

    They are all the same:  “Make the alternative starvation, and the poor will pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

    As fellow Times pundit Paul Krugman noted Eight Years Ago, “Compassionate Conservatism” was, “A dog-whistle to the religious right:

    Oy. Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right? It comes from Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion. From the Publisher’s Weekly review:

    Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive … Olasky adds a proviso that the giver too must be personally involved. He holds up the example of 19th-century charity workers, whose religious beliefs made them compassionate and willing to deal intimately with the poor … Olasky does not blame the system for poverty. He faults the poor, along with social workers back to Jane Addams and the founders of the settlement house movement.

    Paul Ryan and the rest of them have no plan beyond making the poor even poorer.

    My conclusion is that Nicholas Kristof is in a competition with Tom Friedman for dumb-assery.

    Trump: 1 — Fox News: 0

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    I think that Donald Trump’s beef with Megyn Kelly is stupid, and his promised boycott of the next debate because she will be a moderator is more about tactics than any real sense of offense.

    It’s a win-win for Donald.

    He is clearly would be the one on stage with the most to lose, and by standing up to Fox, he reinforces the image that he wishes to cultivate: That he is beholden to no one, because he is dissing what is arguably the kingmaker of Republican Presidential politics:

    Instead of attending the debate, “We’ll have an event here in Iowa, with potentially another network, to raise money for wounded warriors,” campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. “And Fox will go from probably having 24 million viewers to about 2 million.”

    The fracas escalated quickly on Tuesday, but was the culmination of months of tension between the GOP frontrunner and the Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

    ………

     Trump’s apparent decision changes the dynamic for Thursday’s event, which is the last GOP debate before the all-important Iowa caucuses.

     Without Trump, Ted Cruz will take center stage. Cruz also challenged Trump to go mano a mano.

    ………

     The disagreement came to a head on Tuesday afternoon. Around 1 p.m. Trump polled his fans on Twitter, asking, “Should I do the GOP debate?”

     The poll suggested a real reluctance to attend, perhaps because Trump, as the frontrunner, arguably has the most to lose on Thursday night. The respondents were evenly split, with about half saying he should skip it.

     In an Instagram video that coincided with his poll, Trump said, “Megyn Kelly’s really biased against me. She knows that, I know that, everybody knows that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?”

    The other winner here is Ms. Kelly, a phony journalist who can use this incident to better pretend that she is a real journalist.

    My prediction* is that Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, and the then runs the table to become the Republican nominee.

    I need to update my f%$#ing passport.

    *With the obvious caveat that Saroff electoral predictions have frequently been very, very wrong.

    F%$# Me, I Agree with Geraldo Rivera

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    On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.

    He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:

    Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

    ………

     But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:

    When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.

    ………

     Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”

    “He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”

    As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.

    Still, agreeing with Geraldo?

    I feel so dirty.