Pathetic Trumpist Hack Martha McSally Is Having A Hard Time Taking On Mark Kelly-- So She Is Ginning Up A War Against The Media Instead

The Arizona Senate race is going to be one of the hottest of 2020, but it isn't one that DWT, let alone Blue America, has been active in. Like the Arizona Senate race last cycle, there's just no good choice, just two bad ones. Last time, the theory was that Arizona Democrats needed a Republican-like candidate to win a red seat. And that was confirmed when wretched Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema, then the single worst Democrat in the House, won the open red state seat. Today, Sinema is the single worst Democrat in the Senate, with a voting record to the right of Joe Manchin's. But that didn't stop Schumer-- it encouraged him-- from clearing the field for former Republican Mark Kelly to run against appointed Senator and cowardly Trumpist Martha McSally... the very same flawed candidate Sinema beat in 2018. McSally had once pretended to be a "moderate." Today she's an all-in Trumpist fanatic. When people call on Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Cory Gardner, Lamar Alexander, even Rand Paul and Mike Lee to consider the idea of a fair trial in the Senate, no one ever wastes their breath mentioning Martha McSally, just another sickening version of Marsha Blackburn. But Arizona isn't Tennessee and what works there, may backfire in a demographically changing Arizona.

From the perspective of the DC horse race game, Kelly is a great idea and will likely beat McSally and give Arizona two Democratic senators, something no one would have bet on in the last half century. Two Democrats-- but not Democrats from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Better than McSally? Sure. More harmful to the party than McSally? Yep. Arizona voters, especially young ones, are going to be very hard pressed to understand the difference between the two parties with Sinema and Kelly as their two highest-ranking elected officials.

McSally is getting desperate. She lost to Sinema-- a less popular candidate than Kelly-- 1,191,100 (50.0%) to 1,135,200 (47.6%). She lost her own congressional district (Tucson) and she lost Maricopa County (Phoenix). Both-- and therefor the state-- are trending away from Republicans. She's knows she's going to do even worse against Kelly than she did against Sinema. Last time Sinema outraised her slightly-- $22,197,141 to $21,618,743 with outside spending favoring Sinema. Outside spending also favored Sinema-- $33,915,055 to "just" $28,749,237 for McSally. This cycle, despite the advantages of an incumbent, Kelly is already outraising her-- and by a lot. In a report from KTAR, Kevin Stone revealed that "the challenger outraised the first-term Republican by more than $2 million in the fourth quarter and has amassed a far larger war chest. Kelly’s campaign on Tuesday touted a 2019 fourth quarter total of over $6.2 million, more than 50% higher than McSally’s announced total of around $4 million... The Q4 totals track with the yearly numbers in the race, with Kelly taking in around $20.2 million in 2019 to McSally’s $12 million, according to the campaigns."

Desperation is one ways to account for McSally's purposefully and aggressively nasty, boorish and probably racist behavior towards respected CNN reporter Manu Raju Thursday.

Raju: "Sen. McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?"

McSally: "Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you."

Raju: "You're not going to comment?"

McSally: "You’re a liberal hack, buddy."

McSally immediately posted the video her staffer shot on her official twitter page. Simultaneously, she unveiled her new website, "Liberalhack.com," apparently eager to use her time in her Senate office illegally campaigning rather than going over the hundreds of pages of Lev Parnas evidence Raju was asking her about. She quickly sent out a fundraising e-mail bragging about how she owned the liberal media, a popular refrain among the Trump-loving hate-filled, right-wing masses. I'm not saying she personally designed the ugly t-shirt herself, but she was hawking them on her site before Raju had left the Capitol! ($35 for anyone who would contribute to her campaign.)

She then booked herself s slot on Laura Ingraham's Republican Party propaganda show to discuss the latest developments in her war against the media. Chuck Todd noted how quickly she was raising money from the interaction-- "so quickly, in fact, that it seemed planned?"

So, yes, there's more to it than just McSally's desperation. In an unrelated post on Thursday, we saw Trump uses the media for his own ends-- and how Democratic politicians are unable or unwilling to do the same. Peter Hamby noted in an essay for Vanity Fair that manipulating low-info voters is how Republicans have overtaken Democrats in certain demographics ow consistently voting against their own interests. "Trump," wrote Hamby, "despite his deep personal insecurities and lust for elite validation... has derived much of his political success by ignoring Washington finger-waggers and connecting with the more primal instincts of his supporters, in whatever televised or digital corner of the media he can, with or without the good graces of the national press and savvy insiders. Trump stumbled into understanding something crucial about the electorate, which is this: There are plenty of divisions in our conventional wisdom-- insider versus outsider, progressive versus moderate, young versus old-- but one of the biggest splits in American politics is simply between those who follow politics closely and those who do not." Is McSally as bad as Trump? She's trying. Martha McSally, like Trump, is trying, as Greg Sargent noted in a different context, to create and exploit "a fog machine of disinformation and incoherence." There isn't much more politicians with anti-worker/anti-family platforms like hers can do.

The next day we looked at a related essay by Sean Illing forVox about flooding the zone with shit to confuse these same low-info voters, utterly overwhelming the capacity for Trump's low-info supporters to be able to discern what's real and what isn't. Illing wrote that 'Regardless of how clear a case Democrats make, it seems likely that a majority of voters will remain confused and unsure about the details of Trump’s transgressions. No single version of the truth will be accepted. This is a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship-- some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side... We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information.'" McSally may be relatively new to that world, but she's taken to it like an old pro. All authoritarian politicians move rapidly to shutting down alternative sources of information. McSally gets it.

Rushin’ To Destruction, 2019 In Review, Part 12-- Lawrence O’Donnell Details The Fantasy World Of Trump Followers

-by Noah

During the 2016 campaign half of me was amazed that anyone could watch candidate Trump speak even for two minutes and not realize that they are watching an insane person who had managed to not be confined to asylum only because of his money and economic status. It wasn’t even entirely about what he was saying, it was the persona itself. Sometimes it’s all in the vibe, the eyes, and a certain vocal quality.

The other half of me, of course, knew the answer to the mystery perfectly well. The answer lay in his hypnotic hand gestures and the fact that anyone who found what he had to say profound, believable, or even interesting probably had an IQ south of 80. There was also the fact that some people just liked his message of grievance and blame, particularly when it came to race issues and minorities. Remember those hand gestures? It was more than his acting like he was waving a lantern or playing an accordion (two of his favorites), or even the clenched fist style of dictators throughout history. There was also the number one Trump hand gesture-- the white power WP, three extended fingers signifying the W with the thumb and index finger forming a P. Yes. Many people just see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, especially when they are led right to it.

Even given all of the above, it can still be hard to understand that 62 million fools would buy the crap this huckster is selling but they do. A lot of it has to do with Trump appealing to humanity’s baser instincts, i.e., the driving forces of what it means to be a Republican: greed, blame and the need to kick somebody, preferably if they’re down.

Back in mid-October, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell expanded on all of this in a piece he called “The Fantasy World Of Trump Followers” as follows:

To be a Trump voter, a Trump supporter is to be to varying degrees, a fantasist. Some businessmen supporting Donald Trump might like to live with the fantasy that they just vote to support his giant tax cuts that bankrupt the treasury of the United State and want his racism, not his vulgarity, not his rank ignorance about every subject he ever speaks about publicly.

Some Trump supporters live in a complete fantasy about Donald Trump himself, the fantasy that somehow Donald Trump will still get Mexico to pay for the wall. The fantasy that there will be a wall to pay for. The fantasy that Donald Trump is smarter than anyone else in politics, the fantasy that Donald Trump is a tough guy, even though he grew up a spoiled rich kid. The fantasy that Donald Trump is brave, even though he got repeated draft deferments to avoid the war of his era and has never once since then exhibited a single moment of bravery of any kind in his life. Still, the Trump fantasists see him as tough and brave and even thin and energetic as they do in this video that was shown at a Trump campaign event at a Trump property in Florida.





That’s about the only place where people would show this video publicly. We aren’t showing the video, and I noticed today the CNN hasn’t been showing the video because in this video, this fantasy version of Donald Trump shoots and kills someone from NBC, and someone from CNN, someone from CBS, and someone from BBC News, along with many other murder victims from many other news organizations. The fantasy Trump character shoots and kills Congressman Joe Kennedy whose grandfather was shot and killed while campaigning for president, and whose great uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed, assassinated.

... In the video, the fantasy Trump kills more people than you can count, including Rosie O’Donnell, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and, of course, of course, the fantasy Trump completes what is perhaps the most rewarding of the fantasies in this video for Trump fantasists by breaking President Obama’s neck and killing him. Everyone named Trump is now claiming they knew nothing about this video, including Donald Trump, Jr., who was at the event where the video was shown. President Trump has, through a White House spokesperson, condemned the video after claiming he has not seen the video.

...What are the chances Donald Trump has not seen that video? That is code language for his followers to understand that he really doesn’t condemn the video. When he tells them he’s condemning the video without having seen it, he’s telling them that this is just a political thing that I have to say right now about the video, which I hope you watch and I hope you think of me this way, especially the thin part, fantasy.

As I always say, context is everything. This video is not a one-off. Remember back in 2017 when Trump tweeted out a short fake video of him beating on a CNN reporter at a wrestling match?





The newer video, this year’s model, described in such detail by Lawrence O’Donnell is really, in essence, just a longer and even more graphic version of that. It’s no longer Trump wrestling a reporter and delivering a beating. This time Trump is shooting and stabbing political opponents and journalists to death. It is the stuff of Republican dreams. This extended video is an altered form of a scene filmed in a church from the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service and it takes place in what the video names “The Church Of Fake News.” It was shown at an event held by a pro-Trump group that calls itself American Priorities. The event was held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort which Trump himself now calls his legal residence and the “Southern White House.”

As O’Donnell mentions, Donald Trump, Jr. was in attendance. That we’ve had mass-shootings in churches and a Trump fanatic mailing pipe bombs to many of the victims depicted in the video should never be seen as a coincidence. Rather, it should be seen as another Trump attempt to incite violence against perceived Trump enemies, people he and his supporters call “enemies of the people.” It is a pattern. When that mass-shhoting or other violent event does occur, Trump will again “condemn’ the action and deny any responsibility or connection. Then he will go off camera and laugh.

Method To Trump's Deceitful Madness

Florida slob Matt Gaetz, a sick Trumpist whose father bought him his congressional seat, was on Mark Levin's neo-Nazi Fox show on Sunday, to denigrate the media. The gross slob, who sat and ate a whole extra-large pepperoni pizza in front of cameras to interrupt a congressional hearing last week, told Levin that "It’s a worldview where you eat nothing but kale and quinoa, where those of us who cling to our Bibles and our guns and our fried foods and real America are looked down upon."

It's a tactics more and more congressional Trump enablers-- particularly Gaetz, Gym Jordan (R-OH), Mark Meadows (R-NC), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Tom Emmer (R-MN) and Bradley Byrne (R-AL)-- have embraced with enthusiasm. But the whole GOP has been sliding down the slippery slope in this direction.

Back in May, 2018 the Washington Post published a piece by Eli Rosenberg, Trump Admitted He Attacks Press To Shield Himself From Negative Coverage, Lesley Stahl Says. Trump, Rosenberg wrote, admitted to Stahl "that his relentless attacks on the press was a strategy to discredit reporters and news media organizations to shield himself from negative coverage," something Stahl disclosed during an interview with Judy Woodruff at the Deadline Club Awards awards presentation. "Woodruff asked Stahl about her November 2016 interview with Trump-- his first after the election victory. Stahl described going to meet with him at Trump Tower in the months before the interview, along with one of her bosses, whom she did not name. After Trump began to unload on the news media, she said, she asked him whether he planned to stop attacking the press, which was a hallmark of his campaign." Watch the video above of Stahl talking about her encounter with Trump.

I said, you know that is getting tired, why are you doing this-- you’re doing it over and over and it’s boring,” Stahl said. “He said you know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Stahl's striking anecdote fell into a silent moment in the room. Woodruff shook her head.

“He said that,” Stahl said, raising her eyebrows. “So put that in your head for a minute.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump's belligerence toward the news media, which he lambastes as “fake news,” and journalists, whom he often calls “dishonest,” have continued to be an integral part of his presidency, part of a habit of attacking critics and other institutions that act as potential checks on his power.

The broadsides have been mimicked by politicians and others running for elected office around the country, and parroted by foreign leaders around the world, many with poor human rights records and reputations. The wife of Alabama judge and failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore described The Washington Post's reporting on sexual misconduct allegations against Moore as “fake news,” for example.

Trump has falsely claimed credit for the phrase, which he called the “one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with”-- one of more than 3,000 false or misleading claims he has made as President according to a running tally compiled by The Post's Fact Checker column. The term had previously been used to describe phony stories that had gained traction on Facebook during the election year.

But Trump's relentless attacks on journalists and the work they put out has had an effect.

A poll in April found three out of four Americans believe that traditional news organizations report “fake news,” though the term's meaning has become murky. (Another survey this year found that 42 percent of Republicans believed that stories that were accurate but negative qualified as “fake news.")

The term ‘fake news’ has lost all meaning. That’s just how Trump wants it.

But perhaps Trump has tipped his hand, dismissing information and reporting that has later been shown publicly to be true.

In March, he attacked the New York Times and reporter Maggie Haberman after a report that disclosed discussions he was having with veteran Washington lawyer Emmet T. Flood ahead of a potential shake-up of Trump's legal team dealing with the Russia inquiry.

“The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out,” Trump tweeted. “Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job.”

The Times said at the time that it stood by its reporting.

And by the first week of May, Flood had been publicly welcomed to the President's legal team by the White House. Cobb announced his departure. And Dowd had long since quit.

The story was sound.

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

Twitter's War Against The Bots?

About 5 years ago a closeted Republican retired from Congress-- not a case like Mark Foley who was really forced out because he was found to be molesting underage pages-- but just a garden variety gay guy who, though notorious inside the Beltway, was relatively unknown for his homosexuality in his own district. I used to write about him being gay whenever he voted against the LGBTQ community, which was not all the time but was still fairly frequently. After he retired, he became friends with a close friend of mine and I came to know that he had hired an (expensive) firm to bury all the posts I had written about him. I hadn't known that could be done... but it can and often is. There was a time when you could type "David Dreier, gay" into google and tons of DWT would pop right up. Now the first DWT post about him doesn't come up until the 4th search page. Bitch! (Here: take that!)

In 2016 I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find topical video clips that were favorable to Hillary and negative about Señor Trumpanzee. After a while I figured out what was happening. "Someone" was running a campaign to banish those clips off the front YouTube search pages with absurd videos that came up by using the search terms someone would use to find the clips for Hillary and against Trump. It went on for month after month after month before-- and after-- the stories about Russian interference-- and collusion-- in the U.S. election.

I hope Facebook is taking action to protect itself from a repitition. Twitter is. They're clearing out the bots-- 70 million fake accounts in May and June alone! That's a million fake accounts a day! The Washington Post reported that that's more than double the rate the social media platform was suspending back in October.

Twitter's increasingly aggressive purges were already alarming some users; In February, the platform assured that it was wiping out bots, not silencing conservatives. But the company has also taken the opportunity to liquidate retweet-spamming accounts in order to promote more genuine interaction. While today's revelations are more about controlling misinformation, the heavier-handed platform policing is a definite policy shift for a company that has avoided banning users for behavior or abuse.

Suspending 70 million users still sounds like a blow to a company that's struggled to increase its userbase, but these cullings have not had "a ton of impact" on the amount of active users, Twitter's VP of Trust and Safety told the Washington Post. According to him, those accounts weren't tweeting regularly.

Sources told the Post that there was widespread internal debate over the decision to target fake accounts on Twitter. Reportedly, it was the political pressure after Congress grilled the company on the litany of Russian-controlled fake accounts that pushed Twitter to pursue more aggressive action to curtail bots on its platform. The company started looking at account behavior to identify them, determining that things like tweeting at a large number of unfamiliar accounts and how often they were blocked were red flags. Twitter's punitive measures have also evolved beyond suspensions: For example, they can now curtail the impact and reach of a user's tweets by burying them deep in the message stream.

Is 70 million a lot. It really is, since Twitter only has 337.06 million accounts, although some experts are claiming that most of the 70 million were just dormant accounts, not Russian saboteurs. Still, as Trump ramps up his war against the mainstream media, it's going to be important tp watch what social media companies are doing here? Are they silencing legitimate voices of dissent or blocking actual spammers and bots?

The Crucifixion by Nancy Ohanian

In case you didn't read Maureen Dowd's For Whom The Trump Trolls this weekend, here you go." More Twitter stuff, this time about, among other things, how dangerous Trump's addiction is to the country.

Donald Trump was profoundly affected by watching his older brother, Freddy, die from alcoholism at 43.

He proselytized against drinking and smoking, warning his kids away from those vices. Even with his casinos, Trump wasn’t a gambler, either, saying he’d rather own slot machines than play them.

And yet, in a strange twist, Trump has ended up an addict.

One of the more chilling things I’ve heard recently came from Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley founding father whose new book is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Lanier, who met Trump a couple of times back in the real estate developer’s New York heyday, thinks the president’s addiction to tweeting is rewiring his brain in a negative way. As Trump picks up speed on Twitter, the Oval Office is becoming a Skinner box. Like other “behavior modification empires,” as Lanier calls social media sites, Twitter offers positive reinforcement for negativity.

“Twitter addicts take on this kind of nervous, paranoid, cranky quality, sort of itching for a fight,” Lanier said in an interview. “Trump used to be in on his own joke, and he no longer is. He’s just striking out every morning, fishing for somebody to harass or seeing who’s harassing him.

“I do think it creates a terrifying situation because somebody who is addicted is easy to manipulate. It’s easier for the North Koreans to lie to him than if he wasn’t an addict.”

And the hostility and insensitivity that so easily flow from his fingers now define his immigration policy.

I saw a report on PBS about a mother on the border who was reunited with her 14-month-old child after 85 days. “The child continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go,” the mother wrote. “When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us.”

On the occasion of America’s 242nd birthday, we must ask who we are, if we can see accounts of infants snatched from their parents and returned covered in lice, and not worry about our country’s soul.

Trump has certainly made political discourse more crude and belligerent. But is he making the whole country meaner, coarser and less empathetic? Or was the pump primed for a political figure like him because the internet had already made America meaner, coarser and less empathetic? Did they happen simultaneously?

Launching a comeback, Twitter recast itself in a harsher light. The company, The Times’s Farhad Manjoo wrote, “tweaked its central feed to highlight virality, turning Twitter into a bruising barroom brawl featuring the most contentious political and cultural fights of the day.”

Manjoo told me: “Now when you log in, they show you the most interesting tweets you missed while you were away. They highlight the tweets of people arguing, the big news brawls of the day, as a way to engage the rest of the audience. That makes it a meaner place.”

This, even as Twitter-- under pressure like the rest of Silicon Valley for letting the monsters get out of control-- is developing “health metrics” to promote civility and communicate “more holistically.”

On its company blog, Twitter said it was inspired by Cortico, a nonprofit research organization that is trying to measure “conversational health” with four indicators: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion and receptivity. Not exactly the attributes we see in Trump.

It will be hard for Twitter to become more civil and holistic given that in January it instituted a world leaders policy exempting a certain head of state from any tempering efforts. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company said.

That leaves Trump free to grab his phone at all hours to shove and to smear and to spew falsehoods. As Michiko Kakutani writes in her new book, “The Death of Truth”: “Trump, of course, is a troll-- both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling-- the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path.”

Be best!

We have a president who is an addict running a country overflowing with opioid and social media addicts. (In an interview with The Times a few days ago, our tech reporter Nellie Bowles said she dealt with her smartphone addiction by graying out her screen, noting, “These phones are designed to look and work like slot machines-- hit us with bright colors and little pings to activate and please,” and “we all have to figure out little hooks to pull back into the physical world.”)

Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has lamented the extraordinarily aggressive online comments at media outlets, hopes people will resume a sense of decorum when they realize “there’s very little long-term profit from a viral tweet.”

“We don’t have to cater to those meanspirited instincts,” he said. “We can be better than that.”

But I don’t think Trump can. He figured out how to dominate Twitter, not with the cool-kid arch style of making fun of someone, but by being school-yard-bully mean.

His tweets propel the story on cable news and shape the narrative for reporters-- who are addicted to the First Addict.

For Trump, who is also an attention addict, that is about as holistic as it’s going to get.