The restructured MSM; Tales from the capitalism crypt; Public distrust rising

The American Prospect writes about the reality of the modern MSM and the critical importance of independent news media:

Democrats Lost the Propaganda War

The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation.

I have my own thoughts on messaging topics. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Democrats are missing something that is arguably a prerequisite for ideological messaging to have any effect whatsoever: a media apparatus that can get these messages in front of swing voters. The content of the message doesn’t matter if voters never hear it. An obvious place to start would be to build up straightforward reporting operations in news deserts in critical states, and to stop making traditional election broadcast ads the core focus of campaign spending.

If advocates of “popularism” like Yglesias are correct, how did Donald Trump win with such wildly unpopular proposals and behaviors?

I believe two things happened here. First and most importantly, there is a vast and exceptionally well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that pipes Republican messaging directly into tens of millions of homes, day in and day out, influencing people both directly and through conversations with families and neighbors.

Second, the mainstream media, for a variety of sociological and political reasons—including outright meddling from Trump-supporting billionaire owners—refused to give Trump the full-blown scandal treatment, with many consecutive days of inflammatory headlines and articles, no matter what he did. Democrats have relied on the MSM to do their messaging for them, but they did not and will not do it. As Josh Marshall writes, “Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structurally hostile to the Democratic Party.”

As a result, most swing voters simply did not hear about Trump’s platform, or did not believe it if they did. .... In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.

A recent study by Paul Farhi and John Volk at Northwestern found an even more stark gap in the worst-off counties. Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties—where there is no local coverage of any kind—by an average of 54 percentage points.

Absent any action, Trump is likely to make this worse. His antitrust authorities are going to be far more lenient than their predecessors in the Biden administration. That ensures significant media consolidation, which if history is any guide will deprive large parts of the country even further of real news and information, in favor of hot takes and ideological scandalmongering.

This all suggests an obvious opportunity: Democratic funders could set up new local papers in strategic counties, or buy up some of the remaining husks and staff them up. ....

To drive home the importance of real news reporting in a democracy, DJT is suing a newspaper in Iowa because it published poll data just before the election that turned out to be wrong. His lawsuit alleges “brazen election interference” for a poll published shortly before the election that showed Ms. Harris leading in Iowa by three points. DJT said, “I have to do it. We have to straighten out the press.”

By straightening out the press, he means getting killing it and turning the corpse into a giant authoritarian propaganda, lies, slander and crackpottery machine, just like Putin did to Russia and the Chinese government did to China.

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When a lot of money is involved, capitalism tends to become shockingly callous to human life and the environment. Capitalism tends to be loaded with seething hate of government, business regulations and protections for consumers and workers if any of that might get in the way of profits. Profit threats have to be obliterated. Project 2025 is quite clear and explicit about these priorities. The NYT published (not paywalled) an on-point article about drug industry callousness toward human life in ruthless pursuit of profit:

Giant Companies Took Secret Payments 

to Allow Free Flow of Opioids

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.

The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.

The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?

One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.

For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.

Money talks and corpses walk, sort of.

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Gallup reports about the state of public trust in the courts. It is low.

This year marks the first time on record that judicial confidence among those approving of U.S. leadership has ever dipped below 60%, and the first time that confidence in the courts has been below 50% among both those who approve and those who disapprove of U.S. leadership, a double whammy pushing the national figure to its lowest in two decades.

Documenting the collapse of democracy

It's looking more and more like I was right about DJT and MAGA, and less and less like a hyperbolic crackpot, or whatever. Even the restrained MSM is starting to come to see the ugly vision of kleptocratic authoritarian DJT-MAGA reality that has been staring it in the face since 2016. NYT opinionologist Michelle Goldberg writes:

The Great Capitulation

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, C.E.O. of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.

Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.

Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.

In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote of the current administration’s refusal, at least so far, to renew the humanitarian parole of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela and Haiti to possibly shield them from deportation under Trump. “For a president who considers Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate,” Blitzer wrote.

One of Kamala Harris’s pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions.”

Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.

Clearly, the light of kleptocratic authoritarianism is dawning for those who have the guts to see it for what it is. The rest? Still either in head in sand mode, or a mood of elation at what will come, whether it bites them or helps them, or not.

Nietzschean: focused on subjective reality and individual achievement, with rejection of absolute truth.

The Rambo effect

 Wanna know why Trump is so popular? He acts like Rambo.

Abraham Lincoln, now there was a "man." Ditto Ronald Reagan. Though not as macho, JKF and Bill Clinton and Obama still oozed sex appeal. What did one term Jimmy Carter ooz? Or one term Joe Biden? Or candidate Kamala Harris? She oozed "joy." THAT is not where Americans are at. They want heroes. Even corrupt, dishonest, and dangerous ones like Trump will do.

The making of an American hero, and what his ascendance tells us about our society — and ourselves.

And that is how we all now view ourselves — as heroic in our certainty, our clarity, our superiority to our fellow passengers, whom we regard as intellectually and morally disingenuousness for failing to see things the way we do.

We are all Rambo. God bless us… and God help us.

https://medium.com/@glandrybeam/the-rambo-effect-67fb887f04d

The prospect that the nation might knowingly put back in power a man who cozies up to authoritarian leaders, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and promises to be a dictator himself (if only, he says, for a day) has not only alarmed but baffled Democrats. 

That conclusion ignores a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader.

https://newrepublic.com/article/183866/americans-want-authoritarian-president-trump

YABBUT what about democracy, the rule of law, common decency and Mom's apple pie? Forgettaboutit.

THE LEFT needs to meet Americans where they are, and provide them with what they want..................

A FRIGGIN' RAMBO!!

MAGA taming MSM criticism by killing the Sullivan defamation standard

CONTEXT

As I predicted last month, DJT and his morally rotted, kleptocratic authoritarian wealth and power movement are moving briskly to reign in the MSM (mainstream media). They are deploying one of the best, most effective weapons they have, defamation lawsuits. MAGA and the radical right generally have been chafing under the old Sullivan standard for defamation of a public official or famous person. In a nutshell, here's the existing defamation law that MAGA is focused on taking down to neuter the MSM and all other significant critics:

In the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the USSC held that for a public official to succeed in a defamation lawsuit, they must prove that the defamatory statement was made with "actual malice." This means the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. Later the USSC expanded the standard to include public figures. Public officials include, law enforcement personnel, members of legislative bodies, mayors, governors, and other elected representatives at various levels of government, officials appointed to positions of authority, such as judges, commissioners of state agencies, and members of state boards. Under the Sullivan standard, a famous person, or public figure, is defined as someone who has achieved a role of special prominence in society due to notoriety (accidental or not), achievements, or by actively seeking public attention.

Authoritarian regimes frequently engage in crackdowns of criticism by the media and prominent public figures as a means to maintain control over information, suppress dissent, and ensure political legitimacy. Common methods of crackdown include (i) enacting legislation or regulations to restrict freedom of speech and press or to limit media competition (DJT already did that the last time he was in office), (ii) getting judges who create new definitions of defamation (what MAGA is trying to do right now), (iii) increased prosecutions of journalists, (iv) economic pressure or sanctions to muzzle criticisms, e.g., having authoritarian billionaires buy media conglomerates, (v) economic sanctions with the redistribution of media assets to pro-government sources, and (vi) intimidation and threats of violence. Defamation lawsuits aim to intimidate and financially burden media organizations, a tactic reminiscent of most other authoritarian leaders and movements that use lawsuits to exhaust journalists and media outlets.

DJT and MAGA have employed several such strategies to crack down on media criticism. In addition to filing defamation lawsuits, DJT and MAGA have repeatedly threatened to revoke media broadcast licenses, e.g., revocation of broadcasting licenses for CBS, ABC, and NBC. DJT and MAGA have also unleashed rhetorical assaults, calling the MSM the "enemy of the people", repeating classical 20th century tyrant rhetoric.

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DJT AND MAGA ATTACKS ON THE SULLIVAN STANDARD

The NYT writes about the onslaught against the MSM (not paywalled):

Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage

The small flurry of threatened defamation suits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.

The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.

All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.

The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.

On Saturday, ABC News said it had agreed to give $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum to settle a defamation suit that Mr. Trump filed against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. Mr. Trump sued in March after Mr. Stephanopoulos inaccurately said the former president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil trial in New York, though the judge in the case later noted that the state has a narrow legal definition of rape. In fact, Mr. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse.

The settlement followed months of attacks by Mr. Trump and his allies on ABC News, with the once and future president going so far as to say that the network should lose its federal broadcast license.

The deal set off criticism of ABC News by those who perceived the network as needlessly bowing down to Mr. Trump.

Regarding the settlement with ABC News, the NYT quotes an expert, RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah:

“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.” 

 

In [the E. Jean Carroll sex abuse] case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Newsweek writes about the settlement with ABC News:

ABC News is facing backlash from both Democrats and Republicans following its $15-million settlement with Donald Trump.

The settlement describes the funding as a "charitable contribution" from the broadcaster. Additionally, the network will pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump's attorneys.

Trump filed the defamation suit after Stephanopoulos claimed during a March 10 segment of ABC News' This Week while interviewing Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, that Trump had been "found liable for rape" in connection to writer E. Jean Carroll's lawsuits. Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

"People are not going to forget what ABC did," the Republicans Against Trump X, formerly Twitter, account said.

Conservative political scientist Norman Jay Ornstein added: "Add ABC to the basket of cowards in our media."

Democratic attorney Marc Elias wrote: "Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience."

Reporter Oliver Willis also chimed in, writing on Threads: "This is actually how democracy dies."

The malicious, anti-democratic intent of DJT and MAGA attacking the MSM could not be much clearer. They want to force the MSM to shut down or stop criticizing him, his political wealth and power movement and his cadre of enabling MAGA thugs, perverts, grifters, deranged zealots, cranks and criminals. It really is just that simple.

Qs: Is it really just that simple, or if not, why not? Too hyperbolic/alarmist? Not supported by sufficient facts? Flawed reasoning? Too partisan biased?

The JFK Jr. job application test

I've seen some weird stuff in my life, but JFK Jr has go to be in the top 3% of lifetime weirdness achievement. He has posted a job application test that anyone can take online. The instructions basically were, don't cheat! 

I took the 90 minute test in about 20. Not a single question asked about public health, infectious disease, health care or anything remotely related to relevant academic training or expertise. The whole thing was a bizarre deep dive into personality plus some stuff I have no clue about. Presumably, if one "passes" this abnormal test, there will be some actual relevant substance to the job application process. At least, one can hope for that.

Slate writes:

I Took the Test RFK Jr. Is Using to Determine 

Who Should Work at His Health Department

We are extremely doomed.

Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, anti-vax conspiracist, and brain-worm survivor chartered an oddly shaped coalition of COVID denialists and almond moms in his path to the White House, all of which was successfully marbled into the Trump platform during the waning months in the campaign. .... Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you’ve ever experienced clairvoyance.

The whole assessment, which was first reported by Puck and was confirmed to be real by the Trump transition team, is available for anyone to take. Unlike more concrete examinations of one’s fitness to serve in a public health regime—like, for instance, any tangible background in medicine or health policy—the test reveals itself to be a free-associative chimera of IQ-ish logic puzzles and the sort of discredited Myers-Briggs queries you used to take in Computer Lab. It would be a hilarious prank if its intentions weren’t seemingly dead serious.

The whole thing reeked of neo-psychological quackery, in the Gladwell tradition, where the vast gradient of human experience can be neatly organized into, like, three smooth categories.

And yet, after that first round of personality disentangling, RFK’s assessment gets much more specific, and, somehow, even more bizarre. The quiz presented me with a lengthy list of strange personal insecurities, and asked me to highlight the five that I identified with most. That sounds straightforward enough, but the available choices coalesced into a majorly unwell person. One reads, “I tend to have unstable and intense personal relationships, where I alternate between extremes of idealizing and devaluing another.” Another adds, “I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart bit of incel coalition management. Speaking for myself, I was self-aware enough to check off “I require excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others” to ensure that the next regime doesn’t peg me as a sociopath. (This is also where the question about “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least distressing of the bunch.)

And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.

I know we’ve all grown numb to the outrageous stupidity of this political climate, but I don’t think we can hammer this point home hard enough. Robert F. Kennedy—a guy who dumped a bear carcass in Central Park—is set to take on a paramount role in the health policy of this country. Helping him round out his staff? Peterson, who is closer to the levers of power than ever before. What a horrific timeline. This carnival of MAGA grift will continue to blob out until it blocks out the sun. It can, and will, get worse from here. Hey, maybe I am clairvoyant after all. (emphases added)

Yup, we're extremely doomed.

I think I flunked the test!

Huh? Wot? 😕

MAGA lies; Opinion: Congressional Dems are MAGA enablers

MAGA lies are coming coming fast, furious and shamelessly blatant. Some examples:

Tommy Tuberville said he has ‘paid close to a million dollars in Social Security.’ That’s impossible -- “Here’s the sad truth: the American people don’t have any confidence that they will see all the money they paid into Social Security over the years,” he said on Wednesday. -- Comment: His lies are a direct attack on Social Security and its alleged out-of-control cost. The only reason that people might not get back their SS payments is because originally Republicans, but now MAGA, have attacked and undermined the SS program for decades. They have tried their best to break SS so they can then claim it is broken and use that as an excuse to get rid of it. The goal is kleptocratic authoritarian. MAGA wants to shift power from the people and government to private interests who will gain that power and use it to fleece the hell out of people, leaving many of them destitute in retirement.

Trump lied about food prices. Now he says it's too 'hard' to bring down costs. There's not much a president can do to wrestle food prices down. Did you think Democrats just wanted to lose the election so they chose not to push the magic 'lower grocery prices' button? -- Comment: It was obvious during the election that when DJT claimed he would lower food prices that he could not do that. Now he admits he can't do it. It was obvious then and still is. But his admission of the lie won't faze most MAGA elites or his supporters, at least now for and probably in the next year or two. Maybe later it will sink in on some of the rank and file that food prices have not come down. But even then, most will probably either forget about this, or just blame the Dems if inflation still bothers them.

Time Undercuts Trump Interview With 2,300-Word Fact Check -- The magazine took aim at its honoree’s statements about immigration, vaccines, and gender transition. -- In addition to undercutting Trump’s claim about the number of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, Time questioned his assertion that he “fixed” the border crisis after he was elected in 2016. Another eyebrow-raising remark Trump made came during a discussion of vaccines [MAGA's anti-vaccine crackpottery]. “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” Trump said. “If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.” 

Surprise! Key Witness Reveals He Lied About Biden Corruption -- Alexander Smirnov admitted he fabricated the conspiracy that Joe Biden and his son Hunter had made millions from a Ukrainian energy company -- Comment: Smirnov had been pegged as a liar back in 2020, but DJT and MAGA used his false testimony anyway to slander and try to impeach Joe Biden. The pressure on DJT and MAGA to lie and even fabricate evidence against people and entities they hate is intense and only getting stronger. Just like DJT and MAGA laid the groundwork to attack the 2024 election if Harris had won, they now need to lay the groundwork to (i) undermine what is left of political opposition, and (ii) blame anyone or anything but themselves as responsible for failures going forward. In my firm opinion, people who think that DJT and MAGA are not deep, cynical strategic thinkers like this are almost certainly horrifically mistaken. 

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Enabling MAGA: Time to play chicken?

An interesting opinion The Hill published criticizes what Dems have done to help MAGA get away with its own gross incompetence, deep corruption and severe damage to society and government: 

If Johnson wants to do something that’s good for America, shouldn’t Democrats lend him their support regardless of whether his own caucus backs him or not? Shouldn’t Democrats act responsibly even when Republicans won’t? Surprisingly, there’s a correct answer here. And it comes from the field of addiction recovery.

For the last two years, Democrats have thought they were acting in the country’s best interests by helping Republicans govern. They have not been. They meant well, but they have actually been protecting voters from the consequences of Republican dysfunction and enabling bad Republican behavior.

Republican politicians are now addicted to drama, outrage and “owning the libs.” When you shield addicts from the consequences of their actions, you’re not doing them any favors. All you are doing is enabling their addiction.

The country won’t be on the road to recovery until it is allowed to experience those consequences. If that means giving free rein to the collection of clowns with flamethrowers that now passes for the Republican Party, so be it. Democrats should resist the urge to intervene when the inevitable happens and they set themselves on fire.  

For the next two years, Democrats have no responsibility to govern. They should focus on politics instead and take a longer view of the country’s best interests. If, for example, House Democrats had allowed Republican dysfunction to shut down the government in September, they almost certainly would have won a House majority in November. A few weeks of furloughed workers and shuttered national parks would have been a small price to pay for an effective check against Donald Trump’s plans for an American autocracy. Democrats should be practicing tough love and allowing Republicans to inflict pain on themselves, even if that also inflicts some pain on the country.

This isn’t to say they should let Trump permanently wreck America just to teach his voters a lesson — an approach advocated by some angry progressives. If there is an issue that could do irreversible damage to America’s future, then Democrats should be prepared to step in.

Politics as usual is dead. In the age of MAGA, congressional Democrats are resistance fighters, and resistance fighters are often called on to make difficult and distressing choices. Trump has a lot of things planned for America — foolish things, dangerous things, things he often promised but that many of his voters don’t want and never believed he would do. Democrats should not be enabling him by spending their political capital to make all this a little more bearable.

Now that is an interesting perspective. Clowns with flamethrowers, that's an interesting way to see MAGA. However, vicious, morally depraved, authoritarian clowns with flamethrowers is more precise. After all, we don't want to slander regular clowns with flamethrowers, do we?