nKoan
1667
Lets take a break from our regular fear mongering to move onto something more scientific.
Timex
1668
I just had a thought which hadn’t occurred to me previously:
Imagine that humanity has first contact with an alien civilization, while Donald Trump is POTUS.
SNL did a sketch about that, though it wasn’t super funny.
mono
1670
That idle thought occurred to me as well. Figured I’d direct them to Angela Merkel.
Today’s headlines at Fox News website. Their outrage over the President’s comments is palpable.
Oh wait…no it’s not.
Timex
1672
Fox news actually showed footage from that Vice documentary, which is surprising.
Dana Milbank takes one for the team, watches all 3 hours of Fox and Friends.
So with Rupert Murdoch taking a backseat and letting his sons take over, is there a chance that Fox may begin to moderate a bit? I mean, there’s still room for a conservative view that doesn’t include idiocy like Hannity.
My guess is ol’ Rupe will have his cake and eat it too - have some anti-Trump shows, but then double and triple down on the crazy on his pro-Trump ones. Why moderate when you can make more money dividing?
I’ll just put this here because it’s interesting to me. It’s from WaPo and it talks about how Kelly is unhappy with Trump going off-script:
So here’s the first thing that stuck out, that actually seems a bit unfair, bolding mine:
The uproar — which has consumed not only the White House but the Republican Party — left Kelly deeply frustrated and dismayed just over two weeks into his job, said people familiar with his thinking.
That’s not an anonymous source who talked to Kelly, but simply people who know Kelly posting conjecture. We don’t really know if he is “deeply frustrated and dismayed” because he hasn’t communicated that to anyone sourced in this article. That’s awfully strong wording for someone speculating on his state of mind. I wouldn’t call it fake news but it seems a bit manufactured.
Then there’s this, which made me chuckle when thinking about Scaramucci’s short reign of terror and promise to fire leakers:
This portrait of the White House under Kelly comes from interviews with 17 West Wing aides, informal advisers, Republican lawmakers and Trump confidants, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a more candid assessment.
Seventeen! You can’t bail fast enough when the ship has sprung 17 leaks! It is comical, and also sad.
Clay
1677
Better yet, how do we get advertisers to boycott the network?
Miramon
1678
Is there any reason to think the Murdoch offspring are any better than the old man? The little Trumps seem just about as horrible as their sire.
“People familiar with his thinking” is just reporter code for “people who do actually know but don’t want to be called surrogates in the article.”
There’s an evergreen title for you.
Why not say “sources who which want to be anonymous” or some variation? It’s a weak attribution if people who have talked to Kelly and heard that are now reporting it anonymously. I would guess the majority of readers don’t know “reporter code” so why not just write it for it what it is? “Sources have heard Kelly say this…”
How about “cowards who are so spineless that they can barely manage to talk to a reporter on background while being complicit in the utter perversion of American democracy?”
Actually, I’m guessing the majority of readers recognize it by now. It’s boilerplate stuff for these Ashley Parker and Phillip Rucker pieces at the Washington Post. They’ve been doing these for a while now and they routinely give the number of sources and a general sense for how the sources are connected to the topic. “People familiar with his thinking” casts a wide enough net to credit all their sources, but not so wide that it could include any Tom, Dick, or Harry working at the White House. Basically, their readers know they’ve got a bevy of folks from inside the Trump Administration who talk to them anonymously.
-Tom
Razgon
1684
Interesting choice of words here - Exodus.
