The First Lawsuit Against Fox For Misleading The Public On COVID-19 Has Been Filed In Seattle

Early into the pandemic-- with Trump endangering peoples' lives daily with his lies and misinformation-- I asked a few of the legal scholars I know if he could be sued by the the families of people who followed his false information and died. The answer was the same from each: nope. Fox News, on the other hand, is another story.

There has been a great deal of chatter online about class action law suits against Fox for broadcasting a steady stream of coronavirus misinformation-- and not all of it from Trump. Last week, the Seattle Times published a piece by Sara Green about a Seattle nonprofit suing Fox in the King County Superior Court. The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) is claiming Fox and the Murdochs "violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act and acted in bad faith by disseminating false information about the novel coronavirus through its television news broadcasts and minimized the danger posed by the virus as COVID-19 began to explode into a pandemic."

They claim that "Fox New Fox News engaged in unfair or deceptive acts by representing the coronavirus as a hoax in broadcasts that aired in February and March. Those broadcasts caused viewers to fail to adequately protect themselves or mitigate the virus’ spread, and therefore contributed to the public-health crisis and preventable mass death, the lawsuit says.

Yakima attorney Liz Hallock, who is running for governor as a Green Party candidate, is representing WASHLITE in the lawsuit against Fox News.

“We are not trying to chill free speech here. But we believe the public was endangered by false and deceptive communications in the stream of commerce,” Hallock said in phone interview Friday. “There are a lot of people who listen to Fox News, and they’re not taking the recommendations of public-health officials seriously. This is not about money; it’s about making sure the public gets the message this is not a hoax.”

According to Hallock, several members of WASHLITE live in King County and one of them has COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

...Though the lawsuit does not fully enumerate instances when Fox News personnel characterized the virus as a hoax during the two-month period, it points to March 9 broadcasts by Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Trish Regan as examples.

On that day, Hannity said, “They’re scaring the living hell out of people and I see it as, like, ‘Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump again with this new hoax.'”

Late Night host Seth Meyers on Wednesday lampooned Hannity over his comments, playing the March 9 clip alongside one from nine days later in which Hannity said his program has always taken the coronavirus seriously “and we’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

Regan’s March 9 broadcast prompted her dismissal from Fox Business News. A video posted on The Daily Beast’s website shows Regan delivering a monologue next to a graphic that reads, “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.” Regan accused the left of creating mass hysteria over the virus and shutting down the economy, saying COVID-19 wasn’t as significant as other recent disease outbreaks such as SARS and Ebola.

“So why the melodrama on such an agitated scale right now? Why are the markets acting like this? I’ll give you two words: Donald Trump,” Regan said in the video.

Hallock said her clients are seeking only nominal damages and reasonable attorney’s fees. Ideally, she would like a judge to find Fox News violated the Consumer Protection Act and to tell the media organization to stop disseminating false information about the virus. She’d also like to see Fox News issue a clear retraction and an apology to viewers.

She said the classic example to demonstrate the limits of free speech is someone yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no danger. In contrast, Hallock said of Fox News: “They’re yelling, ‘There is no fire!’ when there is a fire.”

The Daily Beast reported that "Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories dispensed by certain Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network personalities... According to a top Murdoch executive, the father-and-son media moguls are ready to go to war with potential plaintiffs such as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics." Fox is screaming "frivolous lawsuit" every time it comes up. Besides, Fox isn't the worst media outlet. There's a genuine fascist one, OAN, Trump's favorite. Watch John Oliver explain what OAN is:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Well, it's Friday and our festering orange boil of a president will be jetting down to Mar-a-Lago to cheat at some golf games at our expense. If there are any bloated dead brown bodies in the water hazards on his golf course, they just might be some of his own undocumented employees but I doubt it. Trump would have stocked his water hazards with gators to take care of any such "problems." He'd even watch and laugh. If Pence was there, he'd get a boner.

The cartoon that serves as tonight's Midnight Meme was created by freelancer Michael de Adder, a top Canadian cartoonist whose work has been viewed in several Canadian newspapers and elsewhere for the last 17 years. It references the photo of the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter Angie Valeria who recently drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande to come to America.

Michael de Adder had taken a break from criticizing Trump in his cartoons since, Brunswick News, Inc. the company that that owns several English and French language Canadian papers throughout the Canadian province of New Brunswick, plus papers in Toronto and Halifax, refused to run any of his anti-Trump cartoons anyway. The above cartoon was not even submitted to Brunswick News but that didn't matter. Within hours of the cartoon going viral via social media, Michael de Adder was told to never submit any of his cartoons of any kind to the Brunswick News ever again. The company, privately owned by 91-year-old billionaire industrialist John K. Irving, now claims the timing is all just a big coincidence. Sure!

This incident follows a recent incident where the staid, old "Grey Lady," aka the New York Times, announced that it would no longer be running political cartoons from two of it's longtime cartoonists after The Times ran a cartoon that mocked Trump and Israel's far right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A similar chilling incident recently occurred at the Pittsburg Post-Gazette after a string of 18 anti-Trump cartoons by Pulitzer Prize nominee Rob Rogers were killed. Liberal Media? What Liberal Media! Joseph Goebbels is smiling.

Manufacturing Consent-- Are Trump's Tweets Losing Their Power?

Yesterday, Memorial Day, Trump woke up in Japan-- but you would hardly know it from his tweet stream. His main topics were his grievances against members of Congress who want to impeach him, how bad Congress is in general, a shout out to Liz Cheney for suggesting FBI agents are guilty of treason. some crap about Netanyahu's trouble forming a coalition government in Israel and a couple of canned obligatory Memorial Day tweets his staff inserted.

Trump tweets more than ever-- but his tweets don't mean what they used to. CNN's Brian Stelter reported yesterday that he's tweeting a lot more. "From his obsession with TV ratings to his around-the-clock usage of Twitter," wrote Stelter, "Trump is clearly savvy about the attention economy. But there are some signs that he is garnering less attention than he did, say, one year ago. Google data showing 'interest over time' for the search term 'Trump' shows him at or near a yearly low for the past month. And Andrew Tyndall's research into the nightly newscasts shows that Trump sound bites have dropped by a quarter in the past two months. All of this could be fleeting, of course... But the president is tweeting a lot more often. We counted 664 tweets and retweets in the past 30 days, up from 226 in the same time period last year. The question arises: Is Trump having to try harder and harder to get the public's attention?

Over the weekend, Neal Rothschild reported for Axios that Trump's tweets are losing their potency, that they no longer "pack the punch they did at the outset of his presidency. His Twitter interaction rate-- a measure of the impact given how much he tweets and how many people follow him-- has tumbled precipitously... It's a sign that his strongest communication tool may be losing its effectiveness and that the novelty has worn off. Trump's interaction rate has fallen from 0.55% in the month he was elected to 0.32% in June 2017-- and down to 0.16% this month through May 25. (The metric measures retweets and likes per tweet divided by the size of his following.)"

Trump's lines of attack have been repeated so much that they don't shock anymore, says Toronto Star Washington bureau chief Daniel Dale.

Because norm-breaking tweets have become the new norm, Dale says, he doesn't cover them as often-- and therefore, casual readers hear about them less.

Attacking the Mueller investigation went from scandalous to routine for Trump, and accusing government officials of treason went from groundbreaking to commonplace.

Since April 1, Trump has tweeted about:

• "No Collusion" 54 times
• "No Obstruction" 30 times
• "Witch Hunt" 30 times
• "Hoax" 19 times
• "Radical" Left/Democrats 17 times
• 13 or 18 "Angry Democrats" 12 times
• "Presidential Harassment" 10 times
• "Treason" 7 times

While the number of interactions per tweet Trump generates has increased 21% between his first six months and most recent six months, it lags way behind his follower growth of 110%.

And he's tweeting more, which could make any individual tweet less likely to stand out.

The pace of Trump's tweet has picked up over the course of his presidency, from 157 times per month during his first 6 months to 284 times per month over the last 6 months.

May is on pace to be the lowest month for Trump's Twitter interaction rate since January 2016.

Not counting posts he retweets, he is at 343 tweets through May 25-- closing in on his one-month record of 348 in August.

Tweeter by Nancy Ohanian

His top tweets since Putin put him in the White House:

1- The pro wrestling video of him taking down a man with a CNN logo for a head. (930,531 interactions)

2- Insulting Kim Jong Un (592,052 interactions)

3- Threatening Kim Jung Un (538,564 interactions)

4- Merry Christmas (592,052 interactions)

5- "Good Morning, Have A Great Day" (538,564 interactions)



Chris Hedges posted a media analysis of his own to TruthDig! Monday: The Mass Media Is Poisoning Us With Hate, one that's neither about Trump's tweets nor all that much about Trump in general. He began by referencing Edward Herman's and Noam Chomsky 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which "exposed the techniques that the commercial media used to promote and defend the economic, social and political agendas of the ruling elites. These techniques included portraying victims as either worthy or unworthy of sympathy. A Catholic priest such as Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, murdered by the communist regime in Poland in 1984, was deified, but four Catholic missionaries who were raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by U.S.-backed death squads were slandered as fellow travelers of the 'Marxist' rebel movement. The techniques also included both narrowing the debate in a way that buttressed the elite consensus and intentionally failing to challenge the intentions of the ruling elites or the actual structures of power."

Manufacturing Consent was published on the eve of three revolutions that have dramatically transformed the news industry: the rise of right-wing radio and Fox-style TV news that abandon the media’s faux objectivity, the introduction of 24-hour cable news stations, and the creation of internet platforms-- owned by a handful of corporations-- that control the distribution of news and information and mine our personal data on behalf of advertisers, political campaigns and the government. The sins of the old media, bad though they were, are nothing compared with the sins of the new media. Mass media has degenerated into not only a purveyor of gossip, conspiracy theories and salacious entertainment but, most ominously, a purveyor of hate. Matt Taibbi, the author of Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Media Makes Us Hate One Another, has dissected modern media platforms in much the same way that Herman and Chomsky did the old media.

The new media, Taibbi points out, still manufactures consent, but it does so by setting group against group, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two Minutes Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide. It is mesmerized by the fake dissent of the culture wars and competing conspiracy theories. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on political personalities. Civic discourse is defined by invective and insulting remarks on the internet. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. The result is political impotence among the populace. The moral swamp is not only a fertile place for demagogues such as Donald Trump-- a creation of this media burlesque-- but channels misplaced rage, intolerance and animosity toward those defined as internal enemies.



The old media sold itself as objective, although as Taibbi points out, this was more a reflection of tone rather than content. This vaunted objectivity and impartiality was, at its core, an element of a commercial tactic designed to reach the largest numbers of viewers or readers... The old media rigidly held to the fiction that there were only two kinds of political opinions-- those expressed by Democrats and those expressed by Republicans. These two positions swiftly devolved into caricatures on radio and television. The classic example was the show Crossfire, in which two antagonists, the stereotypical liberal and the stereotypical conservative, could never agree. The liberal, Taibbi pointed out, “was always cast as the person who couldn’t punch back. He was always in retreat. The conservative was always in attack mode. A personality like Tucker Carlson.” These staged and choreographed confrontations were, in essence, sporting events.

...The fact that on most big issues the two major political parties are in agreement is ignored. The deregulation of the financial industry, the militarization of police, the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale surveillance of the population by the government all have bipartisan support. For this reason, they are almost never discussed.

“It’s always presented as two parties that are always in disagreement about everything,” Taibbi said, “which is not true.”

“We [members of the press] are not focusing on the timeless, permanent nature of how the system works,” he said. “We don’t think about the central bank. We don’t think about the security state. We don’t think about any of that stuff. We focus on personalities. Donald Trump versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That simplifies everything and allows us to not look at the bigger picture.”

Once the old media model imploded with the arrival of 24-hour news networks, Fox-style news and the internet, the monopoly of a few dominant newspapers and networks ended. In the new setting, media organizations tailor their content to focus on specific demographics.

“MSNBC, which has gone through some interesting changes over the years, markets itself as a left-leaning network,” Taibbi said. “But it was so intensely pro-war in 2002 that it had to uninvite Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue from the network. This latest thing was ‘Russiagate’ and the constant hyping of the narrative ‘If you watch, you might learn any minute that we, along with Robert Mueller, are going to take down the president.’”

The media model not only sets demographic against demographic, it mutes and destroys investigations into corporate systems of oppression and genuine dissent.

“You don’t have to make the news up for these people,” Taibbi said of the process of carving up the public. “You can just pick stories that they’re going to like. You start feeding them content that is going to ratify their belief systems. Fox did it first. They did it well. They started to make money. They were No. 1 for a long time. But this started to bleed into the rest of the business. Pretty soon, everybody was doing the same thing. It didn’t matter whether you were the food channel tailoring content for people who liked food or MSNBC who tailored content for people who leaned in a certain political direction, you were giving people stuff they wanted to hear.”

“Previously, you were looking at the illusion of debate,” Taibbi said of the old media model. “You would see people arguing on ‘Crossfire.’ On the op-ed pages, there were people who disagreed with each other. Now, most people’s news consumption experience is tailored entirely to their preferences… If you’re only reading media that tailor to your particular belief system you’re not being exposed to other ideas. It’s going to be progressively more vituperative.”

“One of the first stories that taught the news business you can actually sell anger as a product was the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal,” Taibbi said.

MSNBC built its brand and its audience by relentlessly warning that the presidency of Bill Clinton was in mortal peril during the Lewinsky investigation. It repeated this formula by spending two years hyping the story of supposed Russian collusion with the Trump administration.

“What they were trying to do was basically create the impression that [a new] ‘Watergate was going on, you better tune in because at any moment this could all go kaput,’” Taibbi said of the Lewinsky scandal. “They got an enormous market share. Fox added a twist to it. Fox took the same concept and openly villainized the characters. They decided to make Bill and Hillary Clinton into caricatures and cartoon figures, aging hippies. They kept running clip after clip of Hillary Clinton talking about how she didn’t bake cookies. They knew their audience was going to react to all these images in a certain way. They sold people stories that make them angry. They told them, ‘If you keep tuning in, somehow you are a part of the process. You are a part of this ongoing prosecution of this culture enemy that we’re showing you… We tell you about somebody you don’t like. We keep telling you about it over and over to dominate the ratings.’”

The result, Taibbi argues, is a marketing strategy that fosters addictive and aggressive behavior. The more the habits of readers and viewers on the internet and electronic devices are tracked, the more the addiction and aggression are fed.

“This creates more than just pockets of political rancor,” he went on. “It creates masses of media consumers who have been trained to only see in one direction, as if they have been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way... Even without the vitriolic content, just the process of surfing and consuming the news has a lot of the same qualities as other addictions-- like smoking cigarettes or taking drugs. People get addicted to the feel of their phones. They get addicted to the process of turning on screens. You especially get addicted to the idea that you’re going to turn on a news program or read an article and it’s going to tell you something that is going to anger you even more than you were yesterday.”

The template for news, Taibbi writes, is professional wrestling.



“Wrestling was a commercial formula that they figured out worked incredibly well,” Taibbi said of the corporate owners of news outlets. “There was a simplified morality play where there was a good guy, who was called the baby face, and a bad guy they called the heel. They relentlessly hyped the bad guy. The heel was more important in wrestling and more popular than the face. The amount of tickets they can sell is a direct correlation to how much people hate the bad guy. You have to have a hateable heel in order to make the formula work. This is how news works.”

Reporters, Taibbi writes in his book, “now regularly do the outraged hero, finger-pointing routine whenever they are within a mile of Trump. Jim Acosta’s confrontations with the president, for instance, seemed pulled straight from WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment] outtakes. Trump’s whole presidency has turned into a heel/hero promotion with Bob Mueller in the face role.”

“Trump fits like a glove into the commercial formula of all of this,” Taibbi said in the interview. “That’s what’s fascinating about it. He actually makes more money for the MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times side than he does for Fox and the Daily Caller. He’s a cartoon character who is a perfect heel. You have an utterly simplified political landscape. There are only two ways to be. You are either for this incredibly noxious figure or you are against him.”

But, Taibbi notes, there is a diminishing return as with any addiction.

“You always have to constantly increase the level of the rhetoric in order to get people to keep coming back,” he said. “You can’t be narrowly ‘incompetent’ or ‘corrupt.’ Sooner or later, you have to get to the point where you’re saying ‘demagogues,’ ‘authoritarians,’ ‘dictators.’ Finally, as Glenn Beck discovered, you have to start calling them Hitler. Beck got to the point where he was simultaneously calling people Hitler and Stalin. It wasn’t enough just to be Hitler.”

“If you are defining somebody else as that bad, then everything is permissible,” he said. “We saw this with Russiagate. The same sort of liberal commentators who, ages ago, would have been very concerned about things such as the collapse of attorney-client privilege, or the FISA program, any of that stuff. They don’t care about it anymore. They just want to get the person.”

The shaping of the public into antagonistic tribes works commercially. It works politically. But it is a recipe for social disintegration. I watched competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia seize rival mass media outlets and use them to spew vitriol and hate against the ethnic group they demonized. The poisonous images and rhetoric that were pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia led to a savage fratricide.

The United States is already plagued by an epidemic of mass shootings, death threats against critics of Trump, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, and aborted assassination attempts, including a Trump supporter’s mailing of pipe bombs last year to prominent Democrats and CNN, an effort to decapitate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, as well as terrorize the media outlet that is the party’s principal propaganda arm.

“If you’re constantly winding up audiences and telling them that all of their troubles are a result of this other group that is literally Hitler, that they’re literally Nazis, they’re literally Stalin, sooner or later some people are going to start picking up weapons and do something crazy,” Taibbi said. “This is why people are correctly upset about Fox News. But they should also be concerned about other forms of media. The formula is similar across the board.”

“Our system of bubble economics is going to produce some kind of a catastrophe at some point,” Taibbi, the author of one of the finest books on the 2008 financial crash, Griftopia, concluded. “At which point, if you tell people often enough that their next-door neighbor is literally in the league with Nazis or terrorists or whatever it is-- of course Fox pioneered this, going back to the Iraq War, when we were told liberals were terrorist supporters-- sooner or later, there’s going to be violence. The inability of society to agree on a common set of facts means the media has failed already. It means we’re just not reaching people. [In this atmosphere] we will never be able to work things out in a civil way.”

Air Force One by Nancy Ohanian

Let’s All Send This Simple Poll Back To Trump! It’s The Patriotic Thing To Do!

-by Noah

Filling out this official Republican Party poll will only take 3 minutes of your time and you will have the satisfaction of having thrown a little jab at a Republican today. Just think of whatever goon in the White House who gets the results and has to share them with the new communications director or whomever.

The poll came in my email today. I get all sorts of things from Repugs in my email: things that just make you shake you’re head. Quite some time ago, I deliberately put myself on a few Republican mailing lists in order to see what kind of emails the kooks get. Call it an effort to understand.

This poll is called "The Mainstream Media Accountability Survey." It comes from the Trump-Pence "Trump Make America Great Again Committee." It’s a classic textbook example of an organization creating a poll and sending it only to those who they think will give them the exact answers they want. Once the results are in, you will hear things like "Our latest polling shows that most Americans back us, support Trump, etc. blah, blah, etc. etc."

Most importantly, the questions in the poll reveal the increasing paranoia of the Trumpanzee crowd. It’s a very defensive poll and it’s clearly part of the White House effort to counter the reality of daily revelations of their treachery towards America and 99.5 % of its people. It seeks to place blame elsewhere.

The questions have a real, as Bill Maher would say, "whiny little bitch" quality. You might even come to the conclusion that Trump wrote the questions himself or that they came directly from his tweets. Regardless, the questions reveal that republicans are in an obvious an ever-deepening bunker mentality. It’s a mentality that is acting like quicksand. The more they thrash around in it, the deeper they sink.

So, let’s be great Americans and help them out! Let’s help them sink as much as we can! Some are already jumping ship but we can throw some cinderblocks or some lead weights to the rest.

Will we affect the majority answers at the end of the day? Doubtful. After all, the repugs have sent this poll to a very large list of republicans. But, we can still confuse them and dig at them and disturb at them. Maybe we can even push them a little closer to the glorious day when they crack up completely (as if they hadn’t before they applied for their jobs). How? Well, the more progressives that answer this poll, the more the poll skews away from the expected percentages they are seeking.

Answering this poll from a progressive viewpoint and sending it to the republican bunker is our assignment for today! Have a poke at the bear! The Russian bear. We can all do our little bit to "Make America Great Again."

And there are already polls out about what the public thinks about Trump's deranged attacks on the media. This is from last week's Quinnipiac poll:

With So Many Low-Info American Voters, Did Trump Even Need Putin's Help To Win?

In his column yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote that not only is Trump "the least qualified individual, temperamentally or intellectually, ever installed in the White House," but that "the broader Republican quagmire-- the party’s failure so far to make significant progress toward any of its policy promises-- isn’t just about Mr. Trump’s inadequacies. The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works."

At this point, then, major Republican initiatives are bogged down for reasons that have nothing to do with the personality flaws of the tweeter in chief, and everything to do with the broader, more fundamental fecklessness of his party...[W]hat we’re witnessing is what happens when a party that gave up hard thinking in favor of empty sloganeering ends up in charge of actual policy. And it’s not a pretty sight.

And, alas, this says quite a lot-- unmentioned by Krugman-- about half our countrymen, the ones who routinely support Republicans, like, for example, the 62,985,106 (45.9%) who voted for Trump in November. And cry all you want about gerrymandered districts, 63,173,815 Americans (49.1%) voted for congressional Republicans while only 61,776,554 (48.0%) voted for congressional Democrats. What's wrong with them? My theory has always been-- going back to my childhood in Brooklyn, where we had virtually no Republicans in my neighborhood-- that they had low IQs.

Tangent alert: Although Brooklyn went for Clinton 595,086 (79.25%) to 133,653 (17.8%), the neighborhoods I grew up in and near where i grew up in-- which are filled with Russian Jewish immigrants now-- went for Trump:

• Ocean Parkway South- Trump- 71.15%
• West Brighton- Trump- 68.77%
• Homecrest- Trump- 66.56%
• Midwood- Trump- 60.62%
• Brighton Beach- Trump- 59.35%
• Lindenwood-Howard Beach- Trump- 58.99%
• Madison- Trump- 56.35%
• Sheepshead Bay- Trump- 50.53%

[I threw Howard Beach into the mix for DWT contributor Helen, who grew up there and who may be as shocked as I am to see what happened to the old neighborhood.]

Last May, writing for New York, Andrew Sullivan noted in a piece entitled Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic-- And Right Now America Is A Breeding Ground For Tyranny, that "Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events."

Those who believed that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism had no chance of ever making it to the White House--myself included-- did indeed miss a dynamic. This week many people are discussing a Columbia Journalism Review study that came out Friday about how the right-wing media ecosystem altered a broader media agenda. It's an explanation of how Trump won that is "less exotic" than Russian hacking, fake news, and Mercer-bankrolled psychological manipulation by Cambridge Analytica-- although it negates none of those symbiotic explanations. The study-- over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day-- "shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton."

Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

...Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.

...What we find in our data is a network of mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world. “Fake news,” which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.

...Use of disinformation by partisan media sources is neither new nor limited to the right wing, but the insulation of the partisan right-wing media from traditional journalistic media sources, and the vehemence of its attacks on journalism in common cause with a similarly outspoken president, is new and distinctive.

Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.

To accomplish this, traditional media needs to reorient, not by developing better viral content and clickbait to compete in the social media environment, but by recognizing that it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation-rich environment. This, not Macedonian teenagers or Facebook, is the real challenge of the coming years. Rising to this challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.

Where do low IQs fit in here? The study implies that disinformation proliferates on the right because that is exactly what morons-- challenged by the daunting prospect of critical thinking and abstract thought-- are looking for. Going back to Mercer-- the psychotic Long Island billionaire behind Trump, Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart, Media Research Center (and CNSnews)-- there was a project of manipulation that didn't necessarily count on Putin. Normal people-- say someone who gets their news from Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell-- will instinctively tend to test partisan information against more objective sources. Breitbart readers, Hate Talk Radio listeners and Fox News viewers don’t-- not ever.

In her New Yorker piece a week or two ago, Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds, Elizabeth Kolbert looked at how "new discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason."

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments... If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats-- the human equivalent of the cat around the corner-- it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

...Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

Journalists' Unique Role In Resisting The Fascist Take-Over

Team Trump is going around the world telling people to ignore what Trump himself says. When the cameras are rolling, the Trumpists are just delivering an alternative message-- the opposite of what Trump says on a wide range of topics. When the cameras aren't rolling, they've been letting European leaders know that what Trump says for domestic consumption is just to placate or arouse his feeble-minded and drugged up fans and that most of it isn't related to actual American policy goals. It would be wise for us to be very skeptical of these pronouncements disavowing any of the basic tenets of Trumpism.

It's true that when Trump offered the VP job to John Kasich, he had Donald, Jr. define the role as a kind of de facto presidency. Kasich would be in charge of domestic policy and foreign affairs, Freddo told Kasich. "What would Trumpy-the-Clown do," they asked. "He'd spend his time making America great again," was the response." He's certainly spending a lot of that time at his gawdy mansion in Mar-a-Lago and... how long does it take to play 8 holes of golf? But as lazy and afflicted with attention deficit disorder as he is, Trumpy-von-Thin-Skin isn't about to let anyone run his show, other than implementation of his grand fascist vision. People who have signed on to work for him-- the collaborators-- are all part of the kakistocracy.

Over the weekend, Time published a lecture Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Bret Stephens gave at UCLA, dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pearl and other journalists killed for their work as journalists. He started by talking about how professional journalists revere, as a matter of course, truth. "We honor the central idea of journalism-- the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, 'that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.' And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with."

No one could have doubted at that moment that his lecture was going to be an attack on Trump, who thrives on lies, confusion, chaos, fear and ignorance. To Trump, Stephens reminded his audience, journalists as "the disgusting and corrupt media."

Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.

...[T]he question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes-- Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.

His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt-- so long as it’s on his side.

But again, that’s not all the president is doing.

Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:

Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.

To which the president replies:

Many people have come out and said I’m right.

Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

We are not a nation of logicians.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant-- if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them-- or, in his case, both.

...If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then-- it’s 90% occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest-- well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

...Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.

But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a severe example of a common type.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

...I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

...Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.

Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.

But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?

At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.

To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”-- which is to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.

So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.

The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.

The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters-- the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way-- we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance-- of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.

One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble.

But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.

If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.

...Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.

Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers-- precisely because I haven’t changed my opinions about anything.

By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right-- again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.

In his 1953 masterpiece, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues.

There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump... We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

In case you haven't seen it yet, Quinnipiac released their latest survey on Trumpanzee job approval. As you would have probably guessed, it's continued to sink. Trumpy-The-Clown disapproval fell from 51% on February 7 to 55% today. Of the 55% who disapprove of the idiot-- almost all-- 49%-- strongly disapprove. It gets worse:

• Not honest- 55-40%
• Bad leadership skills- 55-42%
• Doesn't care about average Americas- 53-44%
• Not level-headed- 63-33%
• Doesn't share our values- 60-37%
• More a divider than a uniter- 58-36%

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said "Trump's popularity is sinking like a rock. He gets slammed on honesty, empathy, level headedness and the ability to unite. And two of his strong points, leadership and intelligence, are sinking to new lows. This is a terrible survey one month in."

Trump's Constant Lying Is a Power Game Called "Fuckery," and He's Winning At It

Amy Winehouse, live, 2010

by Gaius Publius

Yes, Virginia, that man said "fuckery." It's a lovely word with a lovely place in hip-hop culture. And it's exactly the word we need to understand Trump's (and really, all Republicans') outrageous lies and shenanigans, and also how to deal with them effectively.

Bottom line: Donald Trump isn't just lying, he's "fucking with us" and challenging us to call him on it. This is exactly the "Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?" problem. And here as there, it's not about the lies; it's a naked show of power. It's about whether one person can impose his will on another person and make him publicly ignore the truth. This interaction is especially true of Trump and the national media, which Trump needs to bring to heel in order to rule for the next four years.

Cheating husband to spouse: "I can make you say you didn't see what you saw. Now, are you going to leave me? Thought not."

Trump to the media: "I can say whatever I want and make you swallow it. I can make you "fact-check" my language instead of laughing in my face for lying straight to yours. Watch me do it ... again."

Fuckery is a power game, and pretending it isn't a power game — pretending its a game about truth instead — is what losers do. Fact-checking someone who's fucking with you is like correcting the grammar on a death threat. Once you do that, once you play the game that way, it's over. Your side just lost. 

The Fuckery of Donald Trump

Here's more on Trump and his fuckery from Shawn Hamilton, writing at the Huffington Post (bolded emphasis mine):

The Birth Of F**kery: How To Think About Donald Trump's Lies

Yes, [Trump] lies ― constantly, badly and ridiculously ― but the assembled lies create a whole that is greater and more awe-inspiring than the parts....

“Lies” doesn’t quite capture the distance between these statements and truth. Staid, boring, newspaper language has gotten editors tied up in knots. What do you call a lie that causes you to pause and rewind? What do you call a claim that is so patently and verifiably false that you feel insulted for even being expected to debate it? What do you call a sudden shift in position that demands that you ignore both your “lying eyes” and the official record? “Brazen dishonesty” does not quite do it. Neither does saying that he goes “beyond lying.” It’s not even “bullshit,” which is a lie thrown off carelessly, with no power dynamic at play.

Hip-hop has a better word for it: fuckery.

Fuckery is telling a lie so big it messes with the people hearing it — which is its goal. 

Fuckery is ascendant in our time, and while Trump is not its inventor, he is its most effective practitioner at the moment. The urban dictionary defines fuckery as “absolute bullshit; utter nonsense; something rather suspicious that can bring forth uneasy, angry and irritated feelings.” It’s a lie that is told, not just to achieve an objective, but to demonstrate the power of the person telling the lie relative to those affected by it. Fuckery creates a wall between the person or group telling the lie and the people hearing it. Fuckery throws down a gauntlet: It is too big to ignore, yet so absurd that it promises to debase anybody who grapples with it. It makes a mockery of the very idea of truth.

Fuckery isn't just words, it can be deeds as well. And it isn't just part of Trump's domain.

Fuckery & the Constitutional Coup

Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republicans are "fucking with us" over Obama's Supreme Court nomination: "Consider Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) obstruction of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland. For McConnell and other Republicans to completely block the confirmation process was outrageous. McConnell’s claim that he obstructed so that the “American people have a voice” is ridiculous. But for McConnell to say that the American people won’t tolerate Democrats obstructing Trump while he is currently obstructing Obama is pure fuckery."

I would argue that McConnell's so-called obstruction was fuckery too, a naked power play. As soon as we call it "obstruction" — as the press has constantly done — and not outright theft — which it certainly was — we and the media accept his premise, and thus we lose. We're "fact-checking" instead of making a concerted effort to steal what was stolen. Calling McConnell's theft act an "obstruction" allows it, forgives it, normalizes it, and guarantees it will happen again. The right response is to treat it as a power play and respond with a power play of equal force and magnitude. That didn't happen.

What McConnell did was actually a kind of coup, a constitutional coup, but a coup nonetheless. He used the Constitution to achieve a goal opposite to what the Constitution intends to occur. In the same way, the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was a constitutional coup as well.

Did anyone in the mainstream or "liberal" press call Bush v. Gore a coup? No, they disbelieved the evidence of their eyes, regardless of what they privately thought, and publicly said they "saw nothing." This is the way fuckery always wins.

So What Do We Do? (How Hip-Hop Treats Fuckery)

Hamilton continues: "Fuckery is a capital offense in hip-hop. Artists, labels and hangers-on get away with all kinds of things they shouldn’t, but there is no spectacle large enough, no “establishment” legitimate enough, and no fan important enough to defend fuckery once it’s been identified." He offers two examples:

An artist that transforms into a gangster overnight like Hammer in 1994 or Ray J in 2011 is mocked and dismissed unless they can provide some extraordinary evidence to support their extraordinary claims.

And:

[W]hen Ray Benzino’s group Made Men received an extraordinarily coveted 4.5 mics rating from The Source for their debut album, putting it on par with Biggie Small’s “Ready to Die” and higher than Jay Z’s “Reasonable Doubt,” fans immediately called bullshit. But it was more than bullshit. It was fuckery, because Benzino was known to have close ties to the magazine, which explained why the album received the rating. Fans trusted their “lying eyes” ― or ears ― and The Source’s credibility took a hit. Standards remained high. Made Men was not normalized. And fans that defend wack music are still judged accordingly. We need to take the same approach to voters.

The Source took a hit because it committed a mockable offense ― and was mocked. It was not, however, “fact checked.” That would have given Made Men’s 4.5 mic rating an air of legitimacy.

 What hip-hop culture can do, we can do.

Believe Your Eyes and Say So: "He's Not Lying, He's Fucking With Us"

Trump is committing a "mockable offense" when he lies as he does, and the media lays down for him, normalizes him, and "ignores their lying eyes" every time they don't treat him as something fundamentally different than everyone else who's held the office he holds.

Not that everyone in that office has been a decent person — very far from it. But Trump and the rest of the Republicans have taken manipulation of the press to a brand new low. He fucks with them to their face and dares them to take it. So far, they do.

After all, do even the mighty hosts of MSNBC call out these lies as "lies," or do they use words like "counter-factual," again and again and again? Do they call out the constant lying as "pathological" — which it certainly is if it's not fuckery? Not in my hearing, but maybe my ears are lying to me too.

GP