1755

I’d like to say ‘not me!!!’ but… yeah, that’s pretty much me.

I do read articles! But I just read exponentially more headlines. It’s hard not to.

1756

Not even in the national news, even though it’s News. it isn’t really “news”. You know?


1757

That guy is not going to have a good time in prison.

1758

Good hire, CNN. This guy is going to get you tons of clicks.

1759

What a shock. Hire a piece of shit, get piece of shit conspiracy theories.

1760

At which point, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin added his self-critical perspective. “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on that," said Toobin. "And that’s something that I have felt a great deal of personal responsibility for because I talked about the emails here at CNN, I wrote about it in the New Yorker and I think I paid too much attention to them and I regret that, and I hope a lesson is learned. I mean, this story turns out to be … a big nothing. And we spent months on it. Hillary Clinton very likely lost the election because of it, and I think I should have been talking about other issues, not about the emails.”

In January 2018, Toobin made similar remarks in a podcast with comedian Larry Wilmore. “I think there was a lot of false equivalence in the 2016 campaign," said Toobin back then. "That every time we said something, pointed out something about Donald Trump — whether it was his business interests, or grab ’em by the p—y, we felt like, ‘Oh, we gotta, like, talk about — we gotta say something bad about Hillary.’ And I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading, and I regret my role in doing that.”

1761

Wow, they correctly identified their failure and role in this?

Now if only a few hundred others would have such a wake up call.

1762
1763

Today I learned something. As we all know, last week Hillary Clinton said that Tulsi Gabbard was being groomed by the Russians to be a third party candidate. Obviously this must be true - there were roughly ten bajillion news stories about it.

Except: she didn’t actually say that.

Here’s the quote everyone obsessed over:

“I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”

Now of course Clinton didn’t mention anyone by name. (Gabbard outed herself by freaking out on Twitter.) But that’s not what I’m talking about. When Clinton said “they’ve got their eye on someone … and are grooming her” it turns out she wasn’t talking about the Russians. When she said “they,” she was talking about the Republicans.

Read the full context here, or better yet listen to the podcast the quote was pulled from. Throughout, when she says “they,” she means Trump and the Republicans.

Now some people (like me) might argue that this widespread media error doesn’t really matter: Clinton makes it clear in the interview that she thinks the Russians are helping the Republicans, so six of one, half dozen of the other. But of course, if you’re someone who argues that the GOP isn’t in the Russians’ pockets, this is a very different and much more provocative statement.

The fact the media just lazily stuck with the error says volumes about them. Nobody asked her to clarify what she meant. Nobody followed up on the actual substance of what she was saying (which is that 3rd party candidates help Trump in particular.) Nobody picked up on its interesting implications, which is that there are some GOP operatives encouraging people to vote for someone other than Trump - Dear Leader would not be amused! And most damning, no one in the media stopped to look for evidence (of which there is lots, see the election thread) that the GOP is pushing Tulsi as Jill Stein 2020.

Instead they stuck with the flashy but wrong headline until Clinton complained: now places like NYT are correcting their reporting.

1764

Just going to say something here, not towards you @HumanTon but at the Clinton defense as a whole. Why does it matter? We continually laugh about Fox, Trump, etc, wailing about Hillary and everything she says or does now when it was Trump who won and took office. We are all like, “let it go, man. Move on.”

But on the flip side, we run to defend Clinton at times like this. My response is, don’t. She’s not only a big girl and able to handle it, she’s a private citizen, not a politician. She’s quite welcome to say Tulsi Gabbard is a hardcore Russian spy for all I care. It’s her opinion and she would be entitled to it if so. It. Does. Not. Matter. Either. Way.

We’ve got much bigger fish to worry about, and letting them spin things around Clinton and every word she speaks is both a ruse as much as it is a tired eyeroll at this point.

So you’re saying they misquoted Clinton. Put a checkmark next to the scores of others. But dont let up on the fact that it’s to push the soundbite away from them or anyone else as a target. At this point in time, stories on Clinton are nothing but a bothsidesism news bite. Dont let them do that.

1765

Heh, I’m not “defending Clinton,” who as you can say can look after herself and in any case isn’t running for anything.

What I am interested in is the media’s behavior. As I said, instead of investigating and reporting - the things we naively hope they do - they all just ran with a misleading narrative without even looking for context. They aren’t interested in context or in the issues under discussion - Republican campaign tactics in 2020, and the fact that they have a vested interest in promoting a non-Trump 3rd party candidate. (“OK, you can’t bring yourself to vote for Trump. So vote for a guaranteed loser instead!”) The lesson I learn from this is not anything about Clinton, but rather that the media will cheerfully get things wrong and ignore what’s actually happening as long as they keep a story going.

If that doesn’t bother you then it should. Even if it does occasionally entail reading the word - gasp! - “Clinton.”

1766

That is not good. So, nobody got the story right?

1767

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/24/ukraine-oligarch-lawyers-joe-digenova-victoria-toensing-056643

John Solomon, the right-wing “investigative journalist” who recently found his natural level at Fox News, has ubiquitous right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing as his lawyers.

Problem number one: Solomon never disclosed this to his readers, even when writing stores about the couple:

Problem number two: diGenova and Toensing also represent Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US at the center of the Ukraine scandal. “Firtash paid the lawyers $1 million to uncover dirt on Joe Biden and to win help in his legal case from Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Bloomberg News.”

And what was Solomon doing earlier this year? Why, writing “investigative” articles pushing the debunked Hunter Biden corruption claims. Curious coincidence, that.

This level of sleaze is to be expected from Fox News - but the depressing thing is that Solomon only went to Fox this month. Prior to that he was working for The Hill, which claims to be a respectable new outlet. It’s hard to take that claim seriously if this is the type of person they hire.

1768

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/25/kellyanne-conway-berated-reporter-noting-her-husbands-feud-with-trump-newspaper-published-audio/

This is an interesting one. The Washington Examiner is a ridiculously right-wing DC paper that occasionally also does real reporting. A reporter did a story on Kellyanne Conway being considered for Chief of Staff, but noted that her husband and the POTUS are in a long-running Twitter feud. Kellyanne called the paper, had her assistant ask for an off-the-record conversation, and then lit into the reporter, berating and threatening her.

The Examiner then published the transcript of the conversation, claiming that Kellyanne was cynically using the “off-the-record” status as an excuse to act badly.

A couple things here: First, it’s interesting that the Washington Examiner would ever publish anything even vaguely anti-Trump or against his administration. That’s simply not something they do. So it implies that they might be serving some other player in the White House who does not want to see Conway as CoS.

Second, the reactions from most other news sources that basically are saying “Hey, put your adult pants on; getting yelled at is part of being a reporter; you NEVER go back on an ‘off-the-record’ promise!”

1769

Depending on what exactly the threats were, I kind of have to agree.

1770

I don’t know, a powerful administration official personally threatening a journalist is, well, news. And trying to cloak it with a preface off-the-record request is a trick that we shouldn’t take very seriously. Off-the-record is suppose to be an agreement, and presumably the journalist entered into the agreement on the premise that the purpose of the cloak was to obtain something other than a personal attack and threats.

1771

Journalists are threatened all the time. With lawsuits, with losing their jobs, and worse. If there was a threat of violence or other criminal act, then that’s something else, but advertising that you’ll burn a source like that doesn’t seem like a great idea to me, even setting aside professional ethics.

Having read through the transcript, it just seems like a fairly typical rant.It’s one thing to publish someone’s rant if they try to claim it was off the record at the end, but if you’ve agreed it was off the record to begin with, then, yeah, you suck it up.

1772

So John Solomon, at the time assumed to be a legit reporter working at a legit publication, was flat-out working with Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s flunky (or is it the other way around?) on the Ukraine disinformation scheme this spring.

Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman were working with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote a story that it was Democrats and not Republicans who colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the duo this month on allegations that they illegally funneled foreign money into U.S. political campaigns.

Interviews and company records obtained by ProPublica show Parnas worked closely with Solomon to facilitate his reporting, including helping with translation and interviews. Solomon also shared files he obtained related to the Biden allegations with Parnas, according to a person familiar with the exchange. And the two men shared yet another only recently revealed connection: Solomon’s personal lawyers connected the journalist to Parnas and later hired the Florida businessman as a translator in their representation of a Ukrainian oligarch.

1773
1774