Is the Tara Reade Story Approaching Critical Mass?

Big Media silence is breaking in the Tara Reade story

by Thomas Neuburger

Is the Tara Reade story reaching critical mass, approaching a tipping point? It seems so.

The initial response to this story was silence from anyone with political or media power. The media in particular completely ignored it. Comparisons of CNN coverage of the Reade story with their coverage of the Blasey Ford story show a marked discrepancy. Reade told her full story first in a March 25 interview with Katie Halper. Yet CNN published no Tara Reade stories until April 25, and then, it seems, they published only in embarrassed response to The Intercept's revelation that Reade's mother had called in to CNN's own show, Larry King Live, on August 11, 1993 to discuss in unspecific terms her daughter's problem.

CNN finally broke silence on the Reade story less than a day after Ryan Grim and the Intercept published the Larry King show transcript and the Media Research Center located and tweeted a clip of it. Blasey Ford's story, in contrast, went viral on all national media. including on CNN, as soon as it was available. Deservedly so, in her case. Not so much, in Reade's.

To conclude that the media buried the story to help Biden remain the presumptive nominee is inescapable. The plan, apparently, was to starve the public of Reade news and wait out the indie-press storm until newer news drew their attention.

Once the wall of silence was breached, the indie press started asking why Democratic Party leaders and opinion makers, especially prominent #MeToo women, were either absent from the discussion or suddenly coming out in support of Biden. Kirstin Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton are the latest to announce support as of this writing, but the silence of many — Elizabeth Warren prominently among them — is still deafening. Note that "I support Joe Biden" and "I believe Joe Biden" are different statements.

Only Nancy Pelosi, speaking with Ari Melber on MSNBC, has been asked directly about Reade's accusation and replied, "I'm satisfied with his answer." (It's very much to the point of this piece that the only sources I could find to link to for this quote are right-wing sources like Breitbart. Yet Melber's show is on MSNBC.)

Now the story itself, or the story about the story, is coming to mainstream pages and screens, thanks partly to the shaming of the indie press and partly to the recent report by Rich McHugh in Business Insider.

Michelle Goldberg tweeted this on April 27, three days prior to this writing:

This is the most persuasive corroborating evidence that has come out so far. What a nightmare. https://t.co/u4yPbEElaf

— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) April 27, 2020

The New York Times now publicly acknowledges Biden's silence:

Democratic Frustration Mounts as Biden Remains Silent on Sexual Assault Allegation

Activists and women’s rights advocates have urged Mr. Biden to address a former aide’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. His lack of response has angered them.

In an April 27 New Yorker story entitled "The Biden Trap: As the candidate faces credible assault allegations, his progressive female colleagues are being offered a poisoned chalice," Rebecca Traister observes:

Biden’s shaky past behavior around women and their bodies isn’t staying in his past.

BuzzFeed weighs in with "Democrats Will Have To Answer Questions About Tara Reade. The Biden Campaign Is Advising Them To Say Her Story “Did Not Happen.”"

In which article we see this:

Democrats are in an increasingly precarious position as reporters assess Reade’s allegation. By any measure of the #MeToo movement that has seen the Democratic Party embrace “believe women” as a mantra, Reade, 56, has provided a serious account, disputed by Biden’s campaign and former senior staffers who worked in his office in 1993 but corroborated in part by people she told about the incident in the 1990s.

Chris Cillizza add his bit with "Joe Biden's campaign is twisting a New York Times story to defend against the Tara Reade allegation".

And the Daily Beast pursues responses from 10 prominent women's groups and notes their near universal silence (emphasis added):

Why Have Women’s Groups Gone Dead Silent on Biden Sex-Assault Accusation?

Women’s groups and prominent feminist figures have remained almost universally silent over a former staffer’s accusation of sexual misconduct against former Vice President Joe Biden—including those individuals and groups who came to express regret for how the Democratic Party handled similar accusations made against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The collective non-response from mostly Democrat-aligned groups comes as potential female running mates struggle themselves in responding to the Biden allegation, which has the potential to upend his campaign against President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women in alleged incidents spanning decades. And it echoes the division among progressives when the #MeToo movement revived scrutiny of Clinton’s own alleged sexual misconduct.

The Daily Beast contacted 10 top national pro-women organizations for this story, including Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women. Most organizations did not respond to a detailed request for comment about the allegation by Tara Reade, a former staff assistant in Biden’s Senate office who has accused the former vice president of forcibly penetrating her with his fingers in the early 1990s. Others replied and did not provide a statement.

In addition, according to the article, "neither [attorney Patricia] Ireland [who presided over NOW during the whole of the Clinton administration] nor feminist icon [Gloria] Steinem responded to a request for comment about Reade’s accusations against Biden."

Finally, the Washington Post's editorial board writes on April 29: "Biden himself should address the Tara Reade allegations and release relevant records".

What's notable in all these reports isn't the story itself. It's that the story is being told in mainstream media outlets where people with mainstream lives can finally see them.

What's Next?

The day may be almost here when Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Warren, and worse for Biden, all of the female VP candidates and hopefuls mentioned by Traister in her "poisoned chalice" New Yorker article will be asked on the record, not if they support Joe Biden, but if they believe him.

That's a question few women with strong #MeToo credentials will want to answer, since it ties them, perhaps forever, to Biden's "historical shortcomings" (in Traister's delicate phrasing). They have to be concerned that, if another credible accuser comes forward, it could sink them all.

Will this explosion of coverage lead to a collapse of the Biden campaign and a DNC search for a new 2020 standard-bearer? We can't be sure it will. Every indication that's come to my ears suggests that DNC Democrats, those with real power, are certain the storm will be weathered, the story will pass into the background, spring will fade to summer, then to fall, and by November Party-leaning minds will think only of Trump and the wreckage he represents.

But critical mass brings tipping points. We also can't be sure that Reade's story won't lead to Biden's collapse, now that the difficult questions are starting to be asked in places that give permission to ask them.
 

The Resistance to Sanders Is Led by Cable News Anchors

Click through to the source for the video

by Thomas Neuburger

There are growing signs that the resistance to [Sanders'] campaign will be led by cable news anchors.
—Alex Shepherd, The New Republic

The "Resistance" has been almost clichéd to death these days, bludgeoned into meaninglessness. Nancy Pelosi has been leading a "resistance" to Donald Trump that includes approving all of his spending and expanding all of his war and domestic spying powers.

"Every single day,"she wrote via Twitter, "I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump personally, financially, & politically?" But that doesn't stop her and the rest of Democratic Party leadership from giving him almost all the money and power he wants, stopping only at approving the worst of his policy choices, such as war with Iran.

"Wow!" [Trump] said on Twitter. "All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA: Pay Raise for our Troops, Rebuilding our Military, Paid Parental Leave, Border Security, and Space Force! Congress – don't delay this anymore! I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!"

The establishment of the U.S. Space Force as the sixth Armed Service of the United States, under the Air Force, fulfills one of Trump's most high-profile requests.

Despite broad bipartisan support, a handful of left-leaning Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans opposed the measure because it did not include policy planks that would have restrained Trump's war powers, including a ban on support for Saudi Arabia's air campaign in Yemen.

Some "Resistance" to the man Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called "the most dangerous and worst man in the presidency we have ever had in the history of this nation."

The Real "Resistance"

The real resistance by Democratic leaders, of course, is to its own base of anti-Establishment voters, candidates and office-holders, a resistance that's been too well documented to be repeated here. One of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, is right now making a credible threat to take over the Party in the name of that anti-Establishment base — an outcome that all donor-defending Democrats look upon with horror.

But what can they do, aside from the odd and opportune tilting of the balance? If they declare outright war — instead of the obvious but pretend-covert war they're now waging — they risk making a mockery of their own battle cries, Blue No Matter Who and Unity Unity Unity.

Enter the next line of defense, the Party-supporting mainstream press, including and especially cable news channels CNN and MSNBC. The real resistance for now against the Sanders-led revolt against the swamp in which they all swim has been handed off to Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and all the colleagues and "analysts" who occupy million-dollar seats on TV's cable news stations.

Alex Shepherd is by far the only person to have spotted this, but he's one of the few mainstream writers to point it out. In a piece for The New Republic, Shepherd says:

Bernie Sanders Has an MSNBC Problem

Cable news networks, particularly the "liberal" one, are a growing barrier to his surging campaign.

...Sanders has framed himself as an outsider, taking on the political establishment as a democratic socialist. But as he has surged in the polls—he now leads Biden with all voters—he is increasingly running up against another establishment: the media, and particularly cable news.

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was aided by a coup at Fox News. After some early turbulence, Fox quickly got in line and has become something like state TV, an echo chamber for the president’s point of view. Sanders has fewer natural allies in cable TV. In fact, the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC, has become a serious obstacle, pumping out Republican anti-Sanders talking points with increasing frequency.

After last Friday’s Democratic debate, Chris Matthews waxed apoplectic about what electing a socialist could mean for America. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro,” he said. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, OK?” Matthews’s colleagues pointed out that Sanders was more of a Danish type of socialist than a Castro type of socialist, but to little avail.

Two days later, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former campaign guru, went on Morning Joe to rant about how a Sanders nomination would bring about the apocalypse. Literally. “The only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” he said. “That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.” The same day, Chuck Todd, who also hosts NBC’s Meet the Press, read from an article from the right-wing website The Bulwark comparing supporters of Sanders, who is Jewish, to “brownshirts.”

And in the lead-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Lawrence O’Donnell argued that the real story was that Bernie was losing momentum because his poll numbers were down from the last Democratic primary—even though he is now facing more than a half-dozen opponents, compared to 2016, when he faced one. “The story of the Sanders campaign so far this year is how much ground he’s lost from four years ago,” O’Donnell said. He also ignored the fact that Sanders is leading nationally, which wasn’t the case in 2016.

This is not a new phenomenon....

The Sanders surge is real. Most polling sites give him a greater chance to win the Democratic primary than any of his competitors, prognostications that have been validated by Sanders' clear win in New Hampshire, his arguable win in Iowa despite the obvious and questionable machinations of the Iowa Democratic Party (see "Orwell Goes to Iowa" for more), and the likelihood, as I write today, of his winning most of the Super Tuesday contests, including the one in delegate-rich California.

But as the Sanders campaign ups its game, the Cable News Resistance is upping theirs. Most recently, Chuck Todd has likened Sanders supporters to actual Nazis ("brownshirts"), and Chris Matthews, as Shepherd notes above, publicly fears being hung by the neck by Sanders-supporting "socialists" from a tree in Central Park, America's Place de la Concorde apparently.

The battle is clearly on. Who will win this "primary within the primary," this war of insiders against insurgents? Establishment-defending media, or the mass of voters (the actual real Resistance) who are putting their trust in Sanders to drain the DC swamp of creatures like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and yes, Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews?

Smart money is on Sanders to win the nomination (even David Plouffe agrees with that). If he does, how far will Establishment and donor defenders in the mainstream press, people like Chuck Todd, go to stop him in the general election?

Smart money is sitting that one out.
  

Navigating The Media Maelstrom-- How Our Hyper-Connected Age Is Destroying Attention Spans, Eroding Critical-Thinking & Tearing Us Apart

-by David DeGraw

The multi-tabbed, multi-screen, multi-channeled, multi-media prism through which we currently experience the world is already wreaking havoc with our ability to think clearly.

The constant competition between signals clawing for attention erodes our ‘working memory’-- the neural architecture associated with our capacity for controlled attention and complex reasoning.

Increasingly we interact with information through stimulus-driven attention; the unthinking animal response.

Any mashup of dubious stats, images, half-truths and hyperbole can be arranged in a way that can make the most preposterous conclusions appear plausible.

The ease of access to information through search engines has created the illusion that truth is at our fingertips, instead, it is the ability to justify any prejudice or bias in seconds, or find communities to do it on our behalf.

Manipulation, Tribalism & Estrangement From Reality

From artfully crafted selfies to outrage-inducing memes, we treat information pulled from the Media Maelstrom like so much ochre paste and seashells; simply baubles with which to decorate ourselves, there to signal social status and tribal allegiance.

Outrageous claims don’t need to stand up to much scrutiny because we’re often not even thinking about this media  -  and max-out on cognitive biases when we do.

Indeed, scrutiny is increasingly hard work.

Even when we can force ourselves to wield deep attention long enough to do some sleuthing, the vast amounts of information available to us means that any topic can be explored in fractal levels of detail, with certainty itself remaining frustratingly elusive.

While “truth” might indeed lurk out there in the murk of the deep web, journeying out there to find it and bringing it back to the ordinary world is far too onerous for many to contemplate.

Instead, things are “true” when they provide social validation within a like-minded peer group-- the only metric of consequence-- and not any proximity to empirical reality.

It will come as little surprise to the reader that these frailties are routinely exploited.

The Darwinian struggle for attention-- between advertisers, marketers, bloggers, charlatans, narcissists, political fanatics, religious zealots, propagandists and general attention seekers-- results in a race-to-the-bottom tactic to trigger emotions and get a hasty share or retweet.

Our Descent into the Maelstrom

Writing during the twilight age of literature, maverick media theorist Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to the understanding of the global mass media and its effect on human behavior.

He argued that by changing our sense ratios, different communication technologies altered the focus of our mental attention and affected us both on an individual and societal level.

The media theorist Kevin Kelly similarly writes of how the medium of the book neurologically changed the brain, making it ‘focused, immersed,’ training our minds to follow a single topic in incredible depth.

He calls it “literature space:”

“One can spend hours reading on the web and never encounter this literature space. One gets fragments, threads, glimpses.

That is the web’s great attraction: miscellaneous pieces loosely joined.

But without some kind of containment, these loosely joined pieces spin away, nudging a reader’s attention onwards, wandering from the central narrative or argument.”

In 2007, English professor Katherine Hayles wrote of modern media causing a shift from ‘deep attention’ that involves concentrating one’s mental focus on a single object or information stream, to what she calls ‘hyper attention,’ which is: ‘Characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.’

She did not see this so much as a new evolutionary adaptation to cope with the challenges of navigating the Media Maelstrom, so much as a reversion to a much older way of processing sensory information, drawn from our deep past in the Paleolithic jungle.

She wrote this the same year the iPhone entered the market, massively escalating the war for our attention, creating a new, user-friendly means for psychic contagion to spread at the speed of light, right into the palm of our hands.

McLuhan also saw that the mass media was making the world smaller, coining the phrase the “global village,” prophesying electronic media (as he called it) would have a “retribalizing” effect on us by shifting us back to oral rather than literate cultural patterns.





While the idea of the global village has practically entered the common tongue, one lesser known metaphor ran through all of his work but perhaps summed up his thinking more totally; the Maelstrom.

The term was drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, A Descent into the Maelstrom.

McLuhan saw the mass media as a titanic vortex pulling society towards new forms of behaviors-- new ways of being-- that threatened to completely overwhelm or even destroy it.

In the electric age, the fluid nature of information and the sheer amount of it thwarted our attempts at top-down classification methods so characteristic of literate culture.

His hope, like the sailor protagonist of the poem, if we now study the perturbations and ‘configurations’ of the mass media, we can make sense of it and devise a way to escape its centripetal pull.

As McLuhan put it:

“The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion or consequences of destruction.

By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”

At the same time McLuhan was captivating television audiences with his often cryptic prophesies and ideas, the political scientist Herbert Simon was discussing the evolving landscape of communication technology from a less poetic, but perhaps more practical perspective.

When he coined the phrase “attention economy” in the early 70s, about 18 computers were attached to the internet. Even though the internet was still in its infancy, he could see how the growth of global mass media and cheap publishing were putting an increasing strain on our ability to collect and process information, writing that:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

He viewed this first and foremost as an organizational challenge; that “scarcity of attention in an information-rich world will be measured by the time, in minutes or hours, say, of a human executive” and as such, the information presented to them then needed to be accurate, useful and worthy of attention to begin with.

If it was deficient in any part and did not correspond to reality, any decisions based on it could be botched at best and catastrophic at worst.

The larger and more hierarchical the organization the greater the challenge, as each layer acts as an information filter that selectively processed data to channel to the top of the “pyramid.”

This being the height of the Cold War, the hierarchical system that most concerned Simon was the American Government, writing that “a frightening array of matter converges on that single, serial information processing system, the President of the United States.”

Today, Big Data problems are still primarily framed as commercial and organizational challenges; of how wisdom can be sourced from exponential oceans of data measured in exabytes, zettabytes or other numbers alien to human scale.

As more of us migrate online, and the more physical environment is colonized with information harvesting devices to catalogue every waking and sleeping moment, this is only going to get worse in the coming decades and centuries.

Today the sheer speed at which we are exposed to information undermines any systematic and rational analysis almost by its very nature, either as organizations or as an individual.

What was a whirlpool to McLuhan in the middle of the 20th century is today more akin to the Eye of Jupiter, a monster that, as it encroaches closer to our immediate realities, threatens to tear them apart.

In the words of the biologist E.O Wilson:

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.

The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

The Bernie Sanders Health News — What Happened, What We Will Be Told

BERN NOTICE: When You See The Word "Stent" -- Remember Medicare for All

HELLO somebody #MedicareForAll https://t.co/4jpLWv4S8W

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) October 2, 2019

by Thomas Neuburger

As most people know by now, on Thursday it was announce that Bernie Sanders had a medical event (not a medical "scare"). He complained of chest "discomfort," a medical evaluation revealed a blockage in one of his arteries, he was taken to a hospital and the blockage corrected with the use of stents.

Afterward senior advisor Jeff Weaver released the following statement: “Following medical evaluation and testing, he was found to have a blockage in one artery and two stents were successfully inserted. Sen. Sanders is conversing and in good spirits. He will be resting up over the next few days. We are canceling his events and appearances until further notice, and we will continue to provide appropriate updates.”

To be clear, this was not a "heart attack." He did not collapse and have to be ambulanced to the emergency room. He did not have open heart surgery. He merely complained of discomfort, a coronary blockage was found and treated with a procedure that's "minimally invasive" and almost always successful, and he'll be released in a few days.

He's already raring to go back on the trail. According to Shaun King, who spoke with the Sanders family, "He’s already feeling so much better & is having to be held back by everybody to not just get right back on the campaign trail." King later added: "Bernie is not quitting the campaign. If doctors and family would allow it, he’d campaign tonight."

Bill Clinton had the same procedure done in 2010. After experiencing "chest discomfort" (same phrase), Clinton was likewise taken to a hospital and treated by "inserting stents in one of his coronary arteries."

Clinton's symptoms were described this way: "[Clinton’s cardiologist, Dr. Allan] Schwartz also said Clinton’s symptoms should not be described as chest pains. Rather, he had experienced feelings of pressure and constriction in recent days. They were “brief in nature, but because they were repetitive, he contacted me,” Schwartz said during a news briefing outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital."

Sanders prognosis, like Clinton's, is good and recovery is expected to be rapid. I expect him to be ready to go for the October debate.

What Will Cable News "Analysts" Make of This?

I present the news in the way I did preëmptively, as a way of preparing you for the way this will be spun. Expect cable news to present the news as news, just as you've seen it, then hosts like Chris Matthews will turn to guest "analysts" to offer their opinions, who are free to say anything they want, as this person did recently:

"If you're still supporting Sanders instead of Warren, it's kind of showing your sexism" — says MSNBC guest analysts Emily Tisch Sussman, a child and grandchild of wealth and the former VP of Campaigns at Neera Tanden's Center for American Progress

While the host may be more moderate in language, you can tell what a host wants said by the guests she brings on. Thus, while anchors won't muddy the waters when reporting the story, expect commenters to use phrases like "medical emergency," "heart attack," "raced to the hospital" and "open heart surgery" when responding to it in an attempt to make this story more than it is, to make it a story about how Sanders is unfit for the presidency.

Don't be surprised, therefore, when people like Ms. Tisch Sussman call for Sanders to drop out and endorse Warren "for the good of the country" while cable hosts quietly nod, or quietly assume he's no longer in the race for real.

Ain't gonna happen, of course — he's not dropping out — but the pressure from neoliberals at think tanks, in the press and among the professional commentariat is likely to mount to great heights even after Sanders returns to the trail at more than full strength. (Do you remember these same "liberal" commenters calling for Hillary Clinton to drop out when she collapsed in public in September, 2016? Neither do I. I remember them making criticism of her health as toxic as they could make it.)

Quoting Shaun King again: What you’ve been seeing was Bernie WITH a heart blockage. Now it’s removed. The man should be back stronger than before.

And if the calls to drop out continue, Sanders has the perfect response: When you see "stent" — remember Medicare for All. Stents cost six times more in the U.S. than in Europe. 

 Amen.
 

The "Existential Battle" Is for Control of the Democratic Party

Steve Kornacki, MSNBC's so-called "numbers guy," visually misrepresents Sanders' strength against Trump, then lies about the erroneous graphic: "Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points." The graphic shows that Kornacki is obviously wrong. Warren is in third place, and Sanders' margin against Trump is greater than Warren's.

by Thomas Neuburger

Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.
     –Matt Taibbi

We've been hearing quite a bit about how the 2020 election is an "existential battle" for control of the nation's future, and that Trump's re-election poses an "existential threat." For example:

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: "we are in a fight for our democracy and our decency; we are engaged in an existential battle to defend objective reality".

Chauncey DeVega, Salon: "Trump is promising an authoritarian "national renewal" to his white supporters through a fake populism that nurtures feelings of grievance and victimhood -- feelings that can only be remedied through loyalty to the Great Leader and Dear Father. Political violence will be necessary -- and is already taking place across the country -- because TrumpWorld and its members believe that they are in an existential battle for survival."

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, reporting from Iowa: "In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an 'existential threat.'"

That 2020 existential battle, of course, is always cast as between the Democrats and the Republicans.

But there's another existential battle going on, one that will occur before the main event — the battle for control of the Democratic Party. In the long run, that battle may turn out to be more important than the one that immediately follows it.

Matt Taibbi, from the same article:

[T]he undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Before mainstream Democrats can begin the "existential battle" with the forces of Trump and Republicanism, they have to win the existential battle against the force that wants to force change on their own party.

They're engaged in that battle today, and it seems almost all of the "liberal media," sensing the existential nature of the threat, is helping them win it. Katie Halper, in a second perceptive piece on the media's obvious anti-Sanders bias, "MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous," writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) said that Bernie Sanders 'made [her] skin crawl,' though she 'can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,' she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network."

Halper then documents instance after instance of this bias, from graphics that show Sanders in fourth place in a poll in which he placed second...

.@MSNBC just posted this poll.
Why is Bernie listed below Warren? pic.twitter.com/GD8nO0xMJO

— Geoff Campbell (MiamiGator) One of the Squad (@GeoffMiami) July 7, 2019

to Steve Kornacki presenting a different misleading graphic from a different poll, then reinforcing the visual error with a verbal lie (see above), to political analyst Zerlina Maxwell (and former Clinton staffer, though this was never mentioned) blaming Sanders on-air for not mentioning race until 23 minutes into a speech, when in fact he mentioned it at the five-minute mark.

Maxwell corrected her misrepresentation later when challenged about it...

.@ZerlinaMaxwell, I appreciate your work but you said Bernie didn't talk about race / gender until 23 min in.

At 3min: he thanked @shaunking for his work on criminal justice reform.

At 6min: he discussed fighting Trump's sexism + racism.

13min: he discussed mass incarceration. pic.twitter.com/x7B2F2PNhM

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) March 2, 2019

...but only on Twitter, and only while reinforcing her scorn for Sanders.

MSNBC is clearly acting as a messaging arm of the Democratic Party mainstream in its battle with progressives in general and Sanders in particular, and Zerlina Maxwell, who's been variously employed by that mainstream, from her work with Clinton to her work on MSNBC, is an agent in that effort.

Let me repeat what Matt Taibbi wrote: "[Sanders'] election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector."

Before this election becomes a referendum on Trump, it will be a referendum on the Democratic Party, on whether voters in the Democratic primary, as many of them as are permitted to participate in it, will choose to continue the Party as currently constituted, or force on it sudden, radical and transformational change.

If the nation wishes true deliverance, not just from Trump and Republicans, but from the painful state that got Trump elected in the first place, it will first have to believe in a savior. 

Will it choose as its savior a radically overhauled Democratic Party? Or will it trust its salvation to a Party that, in the words of the Onion's fictional, but accurate Nancy Pelosi, offers as "our core 2020 argument" that "we are infinitesimally less objectionable than our opposition."

Welcome to the Democratic primary. In the long run, if mainstream Democrats win the first existential battle of 2020 and enter the second unreformed, how much of the nation will truly rally to their side and help them defeat the current Trump, or the next one, or the next one after that?

Will the nation still seek delivery from their pain, even after Trump is defeated, if indeed he is? And if they do, will they find it in an unreconstructed, money-driven Democratic Party, or go looking elsewhere again, perhaps to an elsewhere worse than the elsewhere the current Trump emerged from?
  

The Most Important Question In Decades: Will Bernie Be President?

Netroots Nation happened. One of the guys who runs it, Markos from Daily Kos, told Vox that "Nobody’s excited about Biden. He’s old, tired, and elite." Nor was he there. Except for Elizabeth Warren, Markos' top pick, none of the front-runners showed up this year-- not Bernie on the left, Biden and McKinsey Pete on the right and not even Kamala from the identity politics lane lane. "While attendees have yet to identify which of those three candidates is their favorite, wrote Ella Nilsen and Tara Golshan for Vox, "it was clear the conference’s progressives had identified their enemy: Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the 2020 field. The weekend even featured a pop-up podcast titled “Why Joe Biden is the least electable major Democrat for president in 2020.”

[W]hile Sanders and Harris were absent, their surrogates and fans certainly were not. The same couldn’t be said for others like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), however.

“You had the Buttigieg boomlet earlier this year and you might have thought that might have continued into a place like this, but it really hasn’t,” Neil Sroka, a spokesperson for progressive political action committee Democracy For America, said. “What’s pretty clear is it’s Bernie, it’s Warren, and maybe it’s Kamala.”

...Seven months from when the first 2020 voters have a say in the Democratic primary in Iowa, progressives are winnowing down a deep field of candidates in a party that’s increasingly turned toward more left-wing ideals-- from public health care to wealth taxes and free college proposals.

But at Netroots, only three names had any meaningful energy behind them: Sanders, Harris, and, of course, Warren.

Across the street from the Netroots convention on Thursday, Sanders’s campaign co-chair Nina Turner took the stage at a protest outside Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital, a local institution that’s set to shutter in coming weeks. Among the protest’s attendees were local activists, physicians, and Netroots attendees showing solidarity with the movement. Sanders himself wasn’t in attendance, but it was a show of the political revolution he’s been trying to build a campaign around.

“With these hands we will save Hahnemann hospital, and with these hands we will elect Sen. Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States of America,” Turner said to a crowd with raised arms chanting “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.” Sanders is scheduled to rally at the hospital Monday.

...Biden’s lead in the polls means progressive activists are approaching their choices in the primary with some caution.

“I like both of them-- Bernie and Warren-- I trust both of them. Ultimately, it will be where are they in January or February of next year?” Sroka said. “Who is up and who is down?”

...Progressives may not know exactly who they want to be the Democratic nominee in 2020, but they know who they don’t want: Joe Biden.

Some activists [keyword: "Some"] at Netroots conceded they would support Biden in a general election if they had no other choice. But as far as exciting the base at Netroots, Biden seemed to represent everything attendees disdain, particularly because, despite clearly trying to capitalize on his ties to Obama’s progressive brand, Biden hasn’t made an effort to cultivate a progressive base.

“Biden is using a strategy of running out the clock,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party. “There’s a number of forums and spaces he could place himself in, in order to be scrutinized by the grassroots. Our job is not to coronate the person that the Third Way and elite media decision-makers think is most electable.”

“Biden’s campaign headquarters is four blocks away, and the only person I have seen come here is his digital guy,” Sroka said. “The fact that they are not even working to try and make the argument to this community is the sign of a campaign that doesn’t get where the future of the party is.”

The Biden campaign would not comment on their presence at the conference.

Underscoring the theme of there being a top-tier group of three, some Netroots attendees were gifted a six-pack of craft beers by event organizers. Warren, Sanders, and Harris were the only presidential candidates with a beer named after them: There was the “Professor Warren Perfect Plan Pale Ale” (a “quasi-session beer”), the “Kamala’s California Common” (a lager), and the “Bernie’s Barleywine” (“Gritty’s favorite beer”).

Joe Biden and the group of other moderate white men running for president, however, were symbolized by the “Average Centrist White Guy Cream Ale”-- “pale and not strong,” according to the beer guide handed out to attendees.

While progressives are only one segment of the Democratic electorate, Biden, and other candidates Netroots attendees were less than enthused about, could use their support. Particularly as it was progressives who helped energize the party’s base ahead of the 2018 midterm elections that saw Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

Progressives have grown sick and tired with the unabashedly biased way the corporate media covers Bernie and his campaign. As we noted last week, the NY Times coverage of the campaign is headed by rot-gut Wall Street shill, Sydney Ember, whose every piece reads like unadulterated Biden propaganda. Monday morning, Michael Calderone, posted a piece about that widespread bias for Politico readers. Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told Calderone that some reporters, "attempt to hide their disdain and masquerade their commentary behind purported straight pieces that amount to seeing everything as a 'bad news for Bernie' moment."... "If Bernie Sanders’ team had its way," wrote Calderone, "every reporter covering the Vermont senator would put out a tweet disclosing their unvarnished, personal feelings about the candidate." By the way, that ActBlue thermometer on the right? That's so you can contribute to Bernie's campaign if you want to. Just click on it.

It’s not going to happen, but campaign manager Faiz Shakir thinks he knows what it would reveal anyway.

"This isn't intended to be a sweeping generalization of all journalists,” he told Politico, “but there are a healthy number who just find Bernie annoying, discount his seriousness, and wish his supporters and movement would just go away.”

In the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders’ complaint about the media was that he was ignored, especially early in the campaign, while a phalanx of reporters trailed Hillary Clinton and cable networks turned live to Donald Trump’s raucous rallies.

Now, he’s not having trouble getting airtime, giving interviews in just the last week on ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. Among the Democratic field, Sanders ranks behind only Vice President Joe Biden in mentions in traditional news outlets this year, according to an analysis by global media and intelligence company Meltwater.

In the 2020 campaign, his team’s frustration has morphed, centering on what they see as excessively negative stories and dismissive commentary. Even though he’s consistently near the top in the polls, Sanders’ staff thinks pundits write off his chances. And they’re unusually vocal in calling out coverage they dislike on Twitter and on the media channels they’ve created in-house, fueling frustration once again among the senator’s supporters about whether he’s getting a fair shot at the White House.



On Sanders’ live-streaming show, The 99, three campaign staffers spent more than an hour last week discussing what they perceive as media bias, such as the tendency to focus on the shiny and salacious rather than Sanders’ decades-long advocacy for the poor and working class. “Standing up on these issues over 40 years is not new and exciting for people,” said chief of staff Ari Rabin-Havt.

...Rabin-Havt told POLITICO there’s something akin to a language barrier between political journalists and the campaign.

“They just will never buy that we don’t think it’s a game,” he said.

Sanders hosted a cable access show in the 1980s, and many of his campaign staffers have backgrounds at progressive news outlets-- Shakir was founding editor of ThinkProgress, Rabin-Havt served as executive vice president at Media Matters, Sirota wrote for The Guardian, and national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray was an editor at The Intercept.

They all share a skepticism of the “corporate media.” “The media work for huge multinational corporations,” Sanders told Rolling Stone last month, adding that “anyone with my agenda is going to attract a lot of opposition.”

He doesn’t have much patience for reporters who want him to talk about anything other than that agenda. Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos kicked off an interview Thursday by telling Sanders that voters want to know more about him as a person.

Sanders didn’t take the bait. Americans “have a right” to know about a person running for president, Sanders acknowledged, but “sometimes the media goes overboard on that and does not pay enough attention to what you are trying to do to transform the country."

On Sunday, he said on NBC’s Meet the Press” that he had no plans to change his approach.

“When the poor get richer and the rich get poorer, when all of our people have healthcare as a right, when we are leading the world in the fight against climate change, you know what? I will change what I am saying,” Sanders said.

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