The blackmail is though
The addled, dementia patient in the White House is misinformed, as usual, Nieman Lab unpacked the “scandal.”
Is your brain hurting, just from reading that? If Politico was, in fact, being bribed in exchange for slanted coverage, that would be noteworthy. It is, of course, not.
Some of MAGA’s biggest brains seem to have noticed that several million federal dollars went to Politico and assumed that they came from a “Bribery—Media Fellow Travelers” line item in the budget. Instead, the money comes from federal offices buying subscriptions to Politico’s bureaucracy-focused Pro products. Government offices (and even Republican political campaigns!) have paid for news subscriptions for literal centuries. By the Trumpist line of logic, whenever a government department buys some desks or office chairs, it’s actually bribing Ikea to twist its Lagkapten and Grönfjäll into supporting DEI.
That, for outlets like the AP, the size of the outlays were greatest under Trump’s own previous administration does not seem to have shocked anyone back to reality. The questions, they continue to swirl!
November 18, 2024We’ve all gotten familiar with the absurdity of a lot of anti-media rhetoric the past decade or so. What’s different in this go-round is the speed with which nonsense spirals up from social media to policymakers to actual governmental action. Brendan Carr really does want to kill public broadcasting. Trump really is going to go after Politico’s revenues because he doesn’t like some of its stories. The lawsuits will keep coming, and they’ll keep getting settled by nervous corporate executives. Where it ends is entirely unclear.
I think POlitico can take care of itself but the point of this is to intimidate the media into going easy on the administration — and it works.
For instance, CBS is in settlement talks with Trump over his completely bogus accusation that they engaged in election interference by editing Kamala Harris’ interview with 60 Minutes. They are doing this even though they released all the unedited tapes and transcripts yesterday which prove that this did not happen.
Brian Stelter at CNN wrote about this, showing just how corrupt this whole thing has become:
Shortly before Election Day, Trump sued CBS in federal court alleging that the interview was deceptively “doctored.” Legal experts said the suit was frivolous and CBS said “we will vigorously defend against it.”
But the suit became a problem for the news division’s parent company, Paramount Global, once Trump won the election. Paramount is awaiting government approval of its pending merger with Skydance Media. Outside analysts, citing Trump’s transactional nature, predicted that Paramount may have a hard time getting the necessary federal approvals. Last week The New York Times reported that Paramount is now trying to settle the suit, despite having a strong legal case.
The complaint to the FCC moved along on a parallel track. The Center for American Rights alleged that “60 Minutes” violated the FCC’s “news distortion” policy. According to the agency’s website, “news distortion” must “involve a significant event,” not a minor part of a news report, and must require proof that a broadcaster “deliberately distorted a factual news report.”
Carr’s predecessor atop the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, dismissed the complaint in one of her last acts as FCC chair. But Carr, who Trump appointed in 2017 and promoted to chair last month, brought it back to life. Carr acknowledged in interviews that the bar for proving “news distortion” was very high – for instance, it would apply if someone said “no” in an interview, but a TV station edited the segment to appear like the person said “yes.”
But he argued that he had to send a letter to CBS asking for the transcript and tapes from the interview. “I don’t see how the FCC can reasonably adjudicate this claim of news distortion without seeing what was actually said,” Carr told CNN.
Now he has.
The material supplied by CBS showed debatable but normal editing practices, not deliberate distortion.
There was nothing material in the edit, no contradiction and nothing that one could say helped Kamala Harris in some way. The question was about Israel and why Netanyahu was “not listening” to the US. Harris defended the administration:
It was not a particularly newsworthy exchange. But CBS aired two different parts of Harris’s answer on different broadcasts.
In a preview clip that aired on “Face the Nation,” Harris was shown saying that “the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
During the actual “60 Minutes” program, in response to the same question, she was shown saying “we are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States, to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
The comments were from the same answer, CBS just aired different parts of it. And it was meaningless in any case. It’s just Trump trolling that’s going to end up putting millions in his pockets now that he’s found out how to leverage his trolling against media companies and, presumably, anyone else over whom he has power. It’s graft, pure and simple.