Bits: Media bias 1 and 2; Anti-GOP authoritarianism attack ad

Jim Hightower writes about media bias:

Here’s a story about media bias. Not the flagrant, pure propaganda that defines partisan outfits like Fox News, but the daily drip, drip, drip of slanted perspectives and loaded words that lard so many of the reports put out by establishment media outlets.

In particular, when these sources of supposedly “straight journalism” cover labor issues, environmental conflicts, consumer rights, tenant battles and such, they regularly slant their reports with corporate terminology, assumptions and viewpoints. For example, when auto workers launched their momentous national strike last week, so many mainline news stories were subtly-but-surely twisted to cast rich executives and shareholders as voices of reason victimized by union bosses.

Consider the Wall Street Journal’s Friday morning article announcing the UAW’s walkout. The story quickly plunged into an assertion by Ford’s CEO that the union’s leaders “refused to engage in a responsible manner.” In case readers missed this industry talking point, the Journal quoted another Big Three honcho four lines later, mouthing the exact same line. But… was the UAW really irresponsible, and—hello—could it be that the auto CEOs were the irresponsible players? The Journal didn’t inquire about these basic facts.

Then, the WSJ quoted a General Motors PR claim that it had “made an unprecedented offer to the union.” How grand! But “unprecedented” doesn’t mean good or fair. Was it? The paper offers no insight, though it does declare on its own that “a sharp increase in labor costs would come at a bad time.” Really? When would auto bosses and Journal editors consider it to be a good time for workers to get a pay increase? No follow-up to that obvious question.

The Journal also resorted demonizing UAW president Shawn Fain, gratuitously labeling him a “firebrand,” which the dictionary defines as “a person who kindles strife—a troublemaker.” A more honest depiction is that Fain—and the feisty UAW membership—are gutsy champions of economic fairness battling plutocratic greed. The actual troublemakers in this story are the auto chiefs and profiteers, along with their media protectors, who now assert that the autoworkers’ demands are “unsustainable.” The obvious question, as taught in beginning journalism classes, is unsustainable for whom?

Interestingly, while the Journal’s report portrays the autoworkers’ demand for a 40 percent pay hike over the next four years as an irresponsible ask, the paper doesn’t even whisper that the CEOs of this three trillion-dollar industry have recently pocketed 40 percent hikes in their take-home, now amounting to $21 million a year for Ford’s chief, $25 million for Stellantis’ boss, and $29 million for GM’s CEO.

This disparity is not secret information. Our little four-person Hightower Substack uncovered it with just a little digging. Media empires like the Wall Street Journal know the truth of it, too, but they’re in service to the existing hierarchies of power, even willing to abandon basic journalistic ethics to distort an inspiring news story of everyday people striving for a little more economic justice in our world.

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FWIW, a while ago I posted a bit about the Hunter Biden lawsuit that prosecutes him for illegally owning a gun for 18 days. The WSJ reported on it and failed to mention that the gun law was rarely enforced. This violation is so common that it is called "lie and try." Lie and try is when people lie about their illegal drug use when applying for a gun and hope they can get the weapon they want. In 2017-2018 12 people out of at least 13,000 lie and try violators were referred for criminal prosecution of that law, i.e., less than 1 in 1,000. An attorney commenting on this said that Biden would very likely not have been prosecuted if his last name was not Biden.

That is another example of what Hightower was arguing. Rupert Murdoch corrupted and subverted the WSJ, especially the opinion page which now operates as a fulminating authoritarian radical right Republican Party propaganda monstrosity. And that is why my WSJ subscription got dropped a few years after he bought it in 2007. 

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This is what the GOP has degenerated into.

Bits: DJT is a fibber; DJT getting jittery about time in jail; Racist USSC can undermine voting rights

Salon writes about what all of us already know, i.e., DJT is a chronic liar to tells whoppers all the time. The gigantic lie he is spewing now is that he is a "moderate" when it comes to abortion, despite him being the one responsible for getting rid of nationwide abortion rights:   

Trump is lying about his "moderate" abortion stance — he will ban it nationwide

Trump lies constantly, and history shows he and the GOP will repay evangelicals with a national abortion ban

This should be obvious, and yet, somehow, many in the press are being fooled by Trump's latest public posture about abortion, even though it's transparently dishonest. During his recent NBC News interview with Kristen Welker, Trump tried to strike a "moderate" pose on abortion. Referring to what the press misleadingly calls a "six-week" ban (it's really a two-week ban) on abortion in Florida, Trump said it was "a terrible mistake" for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign the draconian legislation.  

"We're going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it," he said, boldly claiming, "Both sides will come together. And for the first time in 52 years, you'll have an issue that we can put behind us."  

The pomposity of that statement should have been a reminder that Trump should be assumed to be lying about his abortion position, just as he lies about most things. And yet, much of the press took his statements at face value, even going so far as to report that he had angered anti-choice activists, which of course, only helps bolster Trump's false claims of moderation.

Once again, the cluelessness and/or subversion-complicity of most of the MSM is on display. The MSM is betraying us to deeply corrupt radical right authoritarianism. At least this reporter for Salon, Amanda Marcotte, sees and speaks actual truth.

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Rolling Stone reporting suggests that DJT is getting a bit nervous about a possible taxpayer paid vacation in prison:

IN THE PAST several months, Donald Trump has had a burning question for some of his confidants and attorneys: Would the authorities make him wear “one of those jumpsuits” in prison?

As the criminal cases against him have piled up, the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner has wondered aloud in recent months about what life would be like if he’s convicted, and if appeals fail. While Trump publicly professes confidence [lying to the public, as usual], privately, three sources familiar with his comments say, he’s been asking lawyers and other people close to him what a prison sentence would look like for a former American president.  

Would he be sent to a “club fed” style prison — a place that’s relatively comfortable, as far these things go — or a “bad” prison? Would he serve out a sentence in a plush home confinement?

One can only hope for a “bad” prison, all appeals failed and no pardon.

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Radical right authoritarian Republican USSC 

continues attacks on voting rights and free and fair elections 

The USSC (US Supreme Court) is going to hear for the 2nd time a lawsuit about an illegal districting map in Alabama. The state lost in federal courts, including the USSC, and was ordered for the 2nd time to draw a 2nd voting district that would give black voters a chance to elect a black politician. The state legislature redrew the map, but it still contained only one district where a black could be elected. The case is now back to the USSC for a second hearing on the 2nd map.

Slate describes how the authoritarian radical right Republican USSC can now sanctify and bless the Alabama map with just one black district:

In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.

Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

Like with the climate deniers saying, “it's not climate change, it's just the weather” radical right Republican racists can say things like “it's not racism, it's just legal, rough and tumble politics.” 

I cannot understate how inimical and effective this USSC is and has been in gutting voting rights and free and fair elections. This is clear racist authoritarianism. Democracy with civil liberties, including voting rights, and a meaningful rule of law are high priority targets to be obliterated. People who cannot see the seriousness and urgency of the threat are far beyond sorely mistaken. Words fail me here.

The decision in this emergency filing should come fairly soon, maybe in the next month or two. For the 2024 elections, Alabama needs time to implement whatever map the radical authoritarians consider legal.

Trumplandia legal sagas: Attorneys suing attorneys

It's getting ugly out there ladies and germs. Rudi's attorneys are suing him for failure to pay his $1,360,196.10 bill. Naughty Rudi the Tooti Frutti. Here's some of the 8 page filing.

The summons

The heart of the matter

The signature page

It won't be long before we are all familiar with lawsuit filings. FYI, this case was filed in a New York Supreme Court. In New York, the Supreme Court is the lowest court. Trial courts include the Supreme Courts (unlike in the federal system), the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court, and the Court of Appeals, which is the court of last resort (similar to the Supreme Court in the federal system). That's ass backwards, but whatever.

Jeez, talk about a cheap law school with a crappy professor.

On the Meaning of the Post-Truth Concept and Its Effects

I originally posted this in April 2021, but the deafening clamor for it to be reposted has forced my hand. 😮

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A 2019 research paper, The Upsurge of Irrationality; Post-truth politics for a polarized world, discusses how researchers see the recent descent of political discourse into the mess it is today for tens of millions of Americans. It nicely describes what concepts such as post-truth mean and how they can influence thinking and political and social policy. The following are some quotes from the paper.

Truthiness

.... the term “truthiness”, coined in 2005 by the comedian Stephen Colbert and defined as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” So, truthiness is not necessarily falsehood or propaganda: it can be mere ignorance shaped by emotion, “gut feeling” and overreliance on intuitive thinking. Nevertheless, while truthiness was used primarily for political satire .... post-truth is not a joke any more.

Post-truth

Current social polarization has led to an upsurge of collective irrationality in which formerly underground unwarranted beliefs and radical discourses have become mainstream. .... controverted shared values have been replaced by alternative epistemologies shaped by identity-related empirical misconceptions that are at the core of current cases of “culture war.” This state of affairs has recently been called “post-truth.”

There are several interconnected concepts considered as major forms of collective irrationalism, such as pseudoscience, science denialism, fact  resistance, and alternative facts. Post-truth has emerged as a higher-order concept that describes the current sociological state of affairs in which all these forms of irrationality thrive. This recent term is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The meaning of post-truth goes beyond being a fool or a liar — “in its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd's reaction actually does change the facts about the lie (...) what seem to be new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself.” In this regard, although political lies have always existed, “post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than truth itself. Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.” So, while truthiness locates the responsibility for lying, post-truth is more vague and collectivist in this regard, providing no clear way to define who is responsible, when, and to what extent. Hence, post-truth gives rise to “a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever.” 

Comments

The paper’s author points out that there is reliable evidence to believe that unfounded beliefs in post-truth rhetoric is not just innocuous folklore. Adverse effects on political campaigns and regressive cultural backlashes have been documented, but the full ramifications are still playing out and thus unknowable. Counterproductive effects of motivated reasoning and false public opinion significantly adversely affect attitudes toward vaccination and climate change. Solid evidence also indicates that conspiracy theories containing post-truth content are also damaging.[1]

The paper’s concluding comments include these: “Post-truth is not an urban legend: it is a harmful collection of alternative epistemologies with a postmodern background that arises from the kind of intergroup struggles that shape the current polarized socio-political landscape. So, post-truth can be interpreted as a result of self-defensive cognition regarding social identity — a process that is fostered by social networks, perceived moral superiority, and partisan media that generate affective [emotion-based] feedback loops, strong perceived threats, and boost against ethical dissonance.” 

Footnote: 

1. The author writes: “The amount of negative social attitudes and outcomes associated with conspiracy theories is overwhelming. For example, they are associated with less pro-social behavior, science denial and misunderstanding, collective narcissism, moral absolutism, partisanship, Machiavellianism and personal willingness to conspire, political cynicism, unhealthy behaviors — such as the use of alternative medicine, anti-vaccination and unsafe sex —, prejudices, political extremism, and reduced intentions to decrease carbon footprint.” (citations removed)

Belief in false conspiracy theories can be downright dangerous to one’s health and to the health of democracy.