The biggest critic of news media coverage of the Republican presidential campaign is the biggest beneficiary of news media coverage of the Republican presidential campaign.
“I do hate them,’’ Donald Trump has said of political journalists. “Some of them are such lying, disgusting people. … (They’re) among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met.’’ In October, he said 50% of reporters were “terrible.’’ He’s since upped that to “70 to 75%.’’
The relationship can get physical. On Tuesday, Breitbart website reporter Michelle Fields said her arm was yanked by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as she was trying to ask Trump a question. The Trump campaign denied the accusation. But the Daily Beast reported that Lewandowski acknowledged to a Breitbart editor that he grabbed Fields, whom he said he did not recognize as reporter for the site, which is friendly to Trump.
The previous week, in Virginia, a Time photographer was placed in a chokehold by a Secret Service agent after he stepped outside a press area to photograph protesters.
Trump has closed his rallies to reporters and news organizations he says have been unfair to him. Those he does admit are grouped in pens, to which Trump directs the attention of his raucous crowds with comments like, “What slime!’’
And — to the distress of First Amendment advocates — Trump says he’d make it easier to sue journalists for libel: “If I become president, oh, do they have problems!’’
Every presidential campaign tries to manage press coverage, but the New York developer is breaking new ground. “I’ve never heard of any presidential candidate who talked about weakening First Amendment libel protections,’’ says Victor Pickard, author of America’s Battle for Media Democracy, published last year. ”He’s taken attacking the press to a whole new level. It’s scary to think where this trajectory would take us.’’
Scary, maybe; ironic, certainly. For Trump spends much of his time doing press interviews; is on a first-name basis with many journalists; and (because he makes so much news and generates such high TV ratings) gets far more free media exposure than any candidate. As former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted after Trump floated his libel proposal, “Talk about ingratitude!’’
If anyone has a right to complain about news coverage, it would be the likes of Ben Carson, who was repeatedly snubbed by moderators at the GOP debates, or John Kasich, whose promises of competent governance don’t sell papers or goose the Nielsens.
But Larry Schweikart, a conservative political historian who’s writing a book about the campaign, says Trump’s critics are too worked up about his alleged “war on the media.’’He argues that Trump merely gives voice to popular resentment against powerful, unaccountable institutions — “People figure, ‘If we make a mistake, we have to pay for it. Why don’t they?’ ”
Trump’s talk about libel law, he says, is another shot over the media’s bow, not a serious proposal: “There’s the good Donald and the bad Donald. It goes back to The Art of the Deal (Trump’s how-to business best-seller.) It’s a negotiation.’’
“It’s like working the refs,’’ agrees Packard. As in sports, the hope is that a complaint now will yield more favorable treatment (or coverage) in the future.
As Schweikart suggests, The Donald v. The Press is merely the latest round in a battle between politicians and journalists that goes back to the republic’s early years, when most publications were frankly partisan or party-owned. Some papers called for the assassination of George Washington. His successor, John Adams, used the Sedition Act of 1798 (which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish, or assist in, any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government’’) to have editors arrested.
Battle lines hardened in the 20th century with the rise of professional journalism, which promised non-partisan coverage.
• In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt cracked down on radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin, who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The administration also fought attempts by newspaper chains to own radio stations in their markets.
•In the ‘50s, Sen. Joe McCarthy targeted journalists and news organizations for supposed (and largely illusory) communist influence. He summoned to a hearing the editor of The New York Post, whom he suggested was a secret Communist merely posing as an anti-Communist.
•In the ‘60s, Vice President Spiro Agnew led the Nixon administration’s campaign against critical journalists and news organs — “nattering nabobs of negativism.’’
Unlike his predecessors, who attacked from the left (FDR) or the right (McCarthy, Agnew), Trump is waging a two-front war. He’s attacking conservative voices — Fox News, the National Review— as well as the relatively liberal New York Times and Washington Post.
Trump also differs in his focus on individual journalists. He attacks them by name – not just TV personalities and famous pundits, but working stiff reporters. He even appeared to mock the physical disability of a reporter who contradicted his claim that thousands of Muslim-Americans cheered the 9/11 attacks.
“It’s one thing to criticize the coverage. It’s another to pick on reporters,’’ says Roy Gutterman, director of Syracuse University’s Tully Center for Free Speech. “No reporter worth his salt hasn’t been attacked by a politician, but usually it’s at a press conference in front of 15 people, not in an arena in front of thousands of rabid supporters.’’
Some at Trump rallies pick up on his cues, shouting insults at reporters or asking if they really work for Hillary Clinton. Katy Tur of MSNBC, one Trump target, tweeted this description of a rally in Virginia: “Trump trashes press. Crowd jeers. Guy by press ‘pen’ looks at us & screams ‘you’re a bitch!’ Other gentleman gives cameras the double bird.”
Reporters have reason to be nervous. On Thursday, for instance, a white man appeared to sucker-punch a black protester being escorted out of a rally in North Carolina.
But Schweikart says reporters are fair game for verbal criticism: “They’re filing the damn stories. They’ve gotten away with that cover for too long.’’ Moreover, Trump’s is a useful technique: “If you put a name to it, it takes it out of just ‘the media,’ and personalizes it. He did that with Megyn Kelly,’’ the Fox News anchor with whom Trump sparred during and insulted after the first GOP debate.
Trump’s generalizations about the news media come at a time when, in reality, it’s never been more fractured and diverse. Agnew, in contrast, could describe the network broadcast news establishment as “no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators and executive producers (who) settle upon the 20 minutes of film and commentary that is to reach the public.’’ He also deplored the “concentration of power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands,’’ like the Times and Post.
Which explains why Trump can ignore the adage, “Never quarrel with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.’’ The metaphor is outdated in the Digital Age; Trump, figuratively speaking, is the one with the ink — media access, for which he pays nothing.
Category: media
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On its way from no longer publishing nude female photos to no longer publishing, Playboy came up with this:
Of course Charlie Brown is the most famous fictional character from Minnesota, but is Marty McFly really more famous than Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Zack Morris or The Terminator? Well for very scientific reasons (we said so), yes he his. And also we knew everyone was going to fight about it no matter who we chose.
The writer was probably correct about that. Kelso, of “That ’70s Show,” is probably as good a choicee as anyone …
… because there aren’t very many fictional characters of note from Wisconsin. (The list of actors from Wisconsin is slightly longer; I know this because I wrote a story on that subject for the late great Marketplace Magazine.) In fact, according to the always-accurate Wikipedia, Wisconsin-born characters comprise a pretty small list beyond “Happy Days” and “LaVerne and Shirley,” both set in Milwaukee, and “That ’70s Show,” which was set in “Point Place.”
Where? Wikipedia again:
Over the course of the series, Point Place is depicted as a population center gradually evolving from an industrial town into a growing suburban city during the economic downturn of the mid-to-late ’70s. During the period between 1976 and 1980, small, locally-owned businesses are forced to close as aggressive chain stores move in and rust-belt factories are shut down due to the fall in consumer demand. Other closings include the auto-parts manufacturing plant (where Red Forman was a supervisor), a local appliance and electronics store, Bargain Bob’s (owned and operated by Bob Pinciotti), the local Foto Hut chain (owned by Leo) and the Forman & Son muffler and auto repair shop (itself built in a former local muffler business). In their stead, large chain stores such as Price Mart and Muffler Master (which purchased the Forman & Son business) moved in and opened. During the eighth and final season, in contravention to this trend, the William Barnett-owned music chain Grooves is sold and closed, with the sole remaining store becoming the privately owned business of Barnett’s son, Steven Hyde.
The town is depicted as a somewhat rich town. Though Jackie thinks it looks like Paris, the town is often verbally bashed by some characters. Republican politics have been referenced as impacting the town: Jackie’s dad, who was a local Republican politician (before landing in prison for financial crimes), organizes a campaign rally for President Ford in 1976, which is attended by much of the town, including both Eric’s and Donna’s parents. At the event, Red criticizes Ford for pardoning Nixon (though Red is later depicted as a Nixon diehard).
Point Place is located within the fictional Greater Oshkosh Area of Wisconsin. The “FAQ” on the program’s official website says, “Point Place is a fictional suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. This is why many Wisconsinites may recognize names of nearby towns such as Kenosha. There is an episode where the gang travels “down” to Kenosha to go to a movie.” This seemed to be directly contradicted by concrete information given in several episodes, such as the fact in one episode (“The Velvet Rope”) it was possible to drive to Chicago, attend a party, and drive back in the course of a few hours; and in another Kelso explicitly states that Chicago is a two-hour drive from Point Place. Over the course of the series many local businesses and events were identified as being in or taking place in Kenosha (which is actually 155 miles from Green Bay). The name Point Place was chosen for the town because co-creator Bonnie Turner is from Toledo, Ohio where there is a section of town called Point Place.
It’s hardly surprising that a fictional Wisconsin town would be a geographic mess. Twenty years ago, the CBS-TV series “Picket Fences” was set in “Rome” in this state, though it was shot in Monrovia, Calif. “Picket Fences” had a sheriff as the town’s chief law enforcement officer, when everyone who cares about the subject knows that counties have sheriffs and cities, villages and towns have police chiefs. There was also an episode where kids from inner-city Green Bay (really) got bused into Rome for school. All it would have taken is to move the kids to Milwaukee, and the premise would make sense, but apparently the series’ creators were too lazy to do that. (And they also passed up a chance for a quintessentially Wisconsin episode on the subject of people moving into a rural area and then objecting to how farms smell.)
There is one Rome in Adams County and another in Jefferson County, along with New Rome in Jefferson County. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged also has a Rome, whose mayor purchased the remnants of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, located in Starnesville, wherever that was (is?). (Maybe Detroit?)
There are a number of comic book characters from Wisconsin, led by Badger, created by Facebook Friend Mike Baron:
Wikipedia describes Badger as …
… mostly set in Madison, Wisconsin, where Capital Comics was situated, and where Baron lived. The lead character wasNorbert Sykes, a Vietnam warveteran suffering from multiple personality disorder. “The Badger”, an urban vigilante who could talk to animals, was just one of his personalities. Bizarrely, he would often call people “Larry”, and it was later revealed that “Larry” was the name of his father who left his mother when Norbert was five. His mother remarried Rollin Sykes who physically abused Norbert. After escaping from a mental institution, Norbert met a 5th-century Druid named Ham (Hammaglystwythkbrngxxaxolotl in full), who had just awakened from an 800-year coma (this was later corrected in dialogue where it was noted that Ham’s coma lasted 1500 years). Ham took the Badger in as a boarder in his castle in return for the Badger’s bodyguard services. Other characters included Norbert’s caseworker Daisy, Vietnamese martial arts expert (and Norbert’s wife) Mavis, and Lord Weterlackus, a demon who empowered Ham until they had a falling out. Prior to his coma, Ham would sacrifice children in his castle in Wales (Ham was placed in a mystical coma for 1500 years by all the other wizards), but after his resurrection he would sacrifice animals (which enraged the Badger) or computer files. Ham would use his power over weather to influence markets and generate wealth for himself; occasionally his supernatural dealings would bring him into conflict with demons, whom the Badger would then be called upon to fight.
(This makes me wonder which Madison Senate or Assembly district Lord Weterlackus represents.)
The most famous film character might be Jack Dawson of “Titanic,” supposedly born in Chippewa Falls. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to read this:
It is unknown who his parents were, but he would remember ice-fishing with his father in Lake Wissota (which in real life would not be formed until after 1912).
Given that we have had two governors who ran for president, I should also mention President Andrew Shepherd of “The American President.”
You know it’s fiction because (1) no one from Wisconsin will ever be elected president, and (2) “President Shepherd” had Aaron Sorkin as his script-writer, and (3) Sorkin wrote Shepherd as Bill Clinton without the peccadillos and pathological lying.
Why aren’t there more Wisconsin settings in fiction? Because Hollywood is lazy, and because to them Wisconsin and Wisconsinites aren’t all that interesting. And it could be worse — we could be portrayed like Minnesota in the movie “Fargo.” You betcha.
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Tonight, I get to have another professional thrill by announcing the WIAA girls basketball state tournament, for the second consecutive season, on this outstanding radio station.
I will be announcing Mineral Point, one year after I announced the Pointer boys at boys state in Madison. This is the first state trip for the Pointer girls in school history, and their radio announcer hopes their state experience ends like mine did.
The only downside of announcing girls state is that it’s at the Resch Center in Ashwaubenon, which is a great facility at an inconvenient end of the state, as I have discussed here before.
The Resch Center works better for girls state in contrast to Madison arenas because it is (1) nicer than the UW Fieldhouse, (2) smaller than the Kohl Center, and (3) not several miles from the UW campus as the Dane County Coliseum — oops, Alliant Energy Center — is. A high school girls game at the Kohl Center is analogous to a state football title game at Camp Randall Stadium, which usually is one-eighth filled. (Which is still better than the last days of Don Mor(t)on.)
The Resch Center is the home of UW–Green Bay’s men’s basketball team, whose announcer made news one day before the Phoenix clinched, the, uh (its? their?) first NCAA berth in 20 years. The Green Bay Press–Gazette reports:
UW-Green Bay men’s basketball radio announcer Matt Menzl briefly was off the air during the game during Monday’s Horizon League semifinal victory over Valparaiso after referee Pat Adams kicked him off press row for what Menzl described as a misunderstanding.
Full audio | Hear Menzl’s ejection here
Menzl said Adams thought he was waving him off after a call went against the Phoenix. Adams thought overwise.
“I talk with my hands,” Menzl said. “I was trying to describe that we had two guys fighting for the ball, and he took it as I waved him off, like saying that’s a horrible call.
“At first he gave me a warning. Then two seconds later said, ‘I want this guy removed and I won’t start the game until he gets removed.’”
Menzl had to hand over his headset to an Oakland play-by-play announcer and went into the tunnel, where he explained the situation to UWGB athletic director Mary Ellen Gillespie and Horizon League spokesman Bill Potter.
Potter told Menzl to go back and that they’d deal with it.
“I maybe missed actual game action, a couple minutes,” Menzl said.
This is what it looked like on TV:
And this is what it sounded like on the air back to Green Bay:
Nation of Blue adds:
Audio has surfaced of referee Pat Adams ejecting the Green Bay radio guy and it makes Adams look even worse than we originally though.
The radio guy appears to be calling the game and suddenly Adams can be heard screaming, “who is this guy?”
After a commercial break, the Green Bay guy is replaced by another radio guy who is filling in.
Given where I will sit for tonight’s game, two-thirds of the way up in the stands, this is not going to happen tonight. However, where I usually sit to announce UW–Platteville games, more often than not courtside, it theoretically could happen, though I would hope I would be professional enough to not get myself tossed or assessed a technical foul. You’d hope the officials would be professional enough to not have rabbit ears, too, but apparently that’s too much to ask in Adams’ case.
Menzl deserves credit for being professional enough to not pop off on the air about Adams’ bullylike behavior. (Adams apparently is a legend in college basketball, and not for good reasons.) There have been announcers over the years who have not been so self-controlled over official calls. That includes legendary Wisconsin announcer Jim Irwin, who would heckle NBA officials on the air during games.
Menzl is not the first radio announcer to be asked to leave a game. Apparently in 2003 during an NCAA tournament game between Cincinnati and Gonzaga at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, this happened:
For a recap of Thursday’s action, we turn to Bearcats play-by-play radio announcer Dan Hoard, who described the key moments of second-half action on WLW-AM 700.
“Coach Huggins has just been ejected, and he’s about to be joined by my partner!”
It was nuts, all right.
With Gonzaga up 47-40, Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins went gonzo on referee Mike Kitts after Bearcats forward Jason Maxiell was called for traveling in the back court when Huggins clearly thought his player was fouled.
Huggins screamed in protest and received a technical for leaving the coaching box. A few seconds later, Huggins was hit with a second technical for refusing to leave the floor. He was escorted away at the 16:17 mark, jawing to police officers as he was led up the corridor.
This is the same Huggins who, last Sept. 28, suffered a near-fatal heart attack in Pittsburgh, a traumatic experience that apparently has not tempered his on-court passion nor his hair-trigger temper.
Meanwhile, courtside, Bearcats color commentator Chuck Machock did not wish to confine his feelings only to his listening audience. When Kitts got within earshot, Machock blistered the referee with a foul-mouth tirade.
Officials of other sports sometimes butt heads with announcers as well:
This also reminds me of my favorite college basketball technical foul, well earned by former Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs:
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Car & Driver contributing editor John Pearley Huffman writes on something possibly inspired by a Nissan truck commercial of old:
Alabama, the author’s Husky, will jump into a truck bed before the tailgate is even down. Another staffer’s Newfie dances around as if her paws were in a frying pan and runs in circles when she hears the word “ride.” Only dogs seem to love cars as much as humans. There’s little (or no) science investigating why, so we invited the experts to speculate.
Dogs experience the world more through scent than sight. Where a human’s nose has up to 5 million olfactory receptors, a dog’s can have up to 300 million. No wonder they like to stick their snoots out the window and into the wind. “I’m not sure they’re getting a high, per se,” says Dr. Melissa Bain, a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, who researches animal behavior and welfare. “But they are getting a lot of input in higher speed.”
Dr. Brian Hare, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University and the founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, says the wind blast may be a sort of sensory overload. “It’s the equivalent of watching an incredible movie or reading the latest issue of Car & Driver,” he says (with a little coaching). “There’s so much information they’re taking in, it’s just ‘Whoa.’ Then again, the simpler explanation could e that it just feels good. And it could also be both.”
The breeze is just part of it, he says. “In most places where you find wolves today, they have to range pretty far. They’ve evolved to go places. They likely enjoy going places. It’s not going to do much good if you’re selected to not enjoy that thing you need to do to survive.” He says it’s possible dogs know the car is going somewhere, “a new place to explore, and there might be other dogs there.” At the very least, he says, “dogs associate the car with a good outcome: ‘When I get in this thing, good things happen.’ At the most they understand that they’re going somewhere.” …
Most of all, he says, dogs are pack animals, social animals. But domestication as tweaked the formula. “If you give that dog a choice between being with a person or with other dogs, dogs prefer to be with people,” Hare says. “They’re the most successful mammals besides humans in the history of the planet,” he continues. “The trust bond with humans has been a huge boost to the domesticated wolves who live with us. Dogs have evolved to be geniuses at taking advantage of the human tool.” It’s dogs’ desire to be with us that makes them eager driving companions. … In other words dogs love cars because they love us.
This (photo taken with my cellphone and blown up) is Max, our PitBasenHerd (also known as the World’s Largest Basenji, given that Basenji are beagle-size, and Max certainly is not), who one day managed to con Mrs. Presteblog into letting him stick his head out the passenger-side window of the van. Now, of course, he wants to stick his head out the window whenever he’s in the van, regardless of weather. (The driver must make sure the power windows are off, lest Max step on the switch and lower the window all the way.)
Our other dog, Leo el Chihuahua obesidad mórbida, sits on the driver’s lap and thinks he’s steering the vehicle. He formerly scratched on the window on the passenger side until the driver let down the window.
Leo and Max are keeping up a tradition started by our two Welsh springer spaniels, Puzzle and Nick, who clamored to go with us wherever we went. Unfortunately for them, kids take up more space and attention, so Leo and Max have less vehicular travel than Puzzle and Nick did.
We once had a car small enough that I could put my arm over the passenger-side front seat. Nick, who often sat in the middle of the back seat, would hang his head over my arm, fall asleep and start snoring while sitting. That worked until my arm fell asleep and I had to move it.
This time of year I am reminded of a Saturday in which the number of high school teams our newspaper had to cover exceeded my ability to cover them. On Saturday morning, I took one of our dogs with me and covered a girls gymnastics sectional meet, then a boys basketball regional final game, while Mrs. Presteblog took the other dog and covered a different boys game. We met in location number four for that night’s girls sectional final game. Puzzle and Nick had no idea where they were going, but didn’t care.
That was back in our pre-child days, when our dogs went most places we went in vehicles, including on overnight trips and to our cut-your-own Christmas tree source. Earlier that year, because there was one game that had to be covered in order to have a sports page that week, we drove to Beloit for a boys basketball holiday tournament game. Since the team we were covering won, the four of us went back to Beloit the next night.
When Mrs. Presteblog flew to Guatemala via Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, we stayed the previous night at a hotel near the airport, since her flight left at 6 a.m. (I don’t remember if the hotel allowed pets or not.) I parked our car in an underground garage. When I returned, I found a note on the car criticizing me for keeping our “poor babbies” in a locked car, despite the fact that (1) they had been there for all of an hour (2) in a covered garage (3) before sunrise (4) with the windows cracked. (Irrelevant aside: That was the same day that John F. Kennedy Jr. made his last flight.)
It wasn’t an overnight trip, but we once went to Door County on a summer day. We stopped at a beach on the Green Bay side, and watched the dogs jump off a seaweed-covered boat ramp. Puzzle had bad back hips due to dysplasia, but powerful front legs and chest. That, however, failed to prevent her from not being able to stop and, though I don’t think she intended to, skid off the ramp into the water. Later, they discovered the joys of rolling in dead fish, and their owners discovered the non-joys of driving 90 minutes back home in a car full of dogs smelling of dead fish.
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… the midst of three straight days of postseason basketball, as you can read about here.
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Since I am doing three or four postseason high school basketball games between now and Saturday night, of course I will be also on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review Friday at 8 a.m. to make my usual appearance relatively close to a holiday of some sort. (If Pets Had Thumbs Day? Holy Experiment Day? Multiple Personality Day? National Frozen Food Day? National Crown Roast of Pork Day? Be Nasty Day? Panic Day? Worship of Tools Day?)
That means, in addition to the radio stations I’ll be on tonight through Saturday night, you can hear me Friday on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at http://www.wpr.org.
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The Daily Caller reports:
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump doubled down on his promise to open up the country’s libel laws and warned that reporters they will “regret … all of the bad stories they write.”
During a campaign speech in Huntsville, Alabama Sunday, Trump talked about the “heat” he received from the media since saying on Friday he would push to make it easier to sue journalists over “purposely negative and horrible and false articles” about him.
Trump told the crowd in Huntsville, “I said to the press they have to report accurately and if they don’t report accurately, we — all of us — should have the right to sue them, OK? You know what? This has nothing to do with freedom of the press, which I believe in totally,” he said.
“But when they don’t report accurately, we should have the right to sue them to get them to report accurately and also damages, because right now, we have libel laws that don’t mean a thing. I will tell you it’s going to be tougher because they will be tougher on me now. They are so dishonest,” he explained. …
He added, “But here’s the story, when they write inaccurately, we have to have the right to hold them to what they write and if it’s inaccurate we have the right to get damages. Right now we get nothing. They are going to regret, all of them, all of the bad stories they write.”
Trump defended his stance to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday earlier in the day.
“In England, I can tell you it’s very much different and very much easier,” the New York businessman said.
“I think it’s very unfair that The New York Times can write a story that it’s very much false, and they basically told me is false,” he said. “All I want is fairness.”
Trump has threatened and slapped libel and defamation lawsuits on the press and private civilians in the past. He lost a libel suit in 2011 against Timothy O’Brien, author of the 2009 book TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald. Trump accused O’Brien of committing “actual malice” by referencing three anonymous sources who said Trump’s net worth is estimated between $150 million and $250 million.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Trump’s lawyer said it was “proven conclusively” that Trump’s net worth to exceeds $7 billion.
Trump hit Sheena Monin, a Miss USA pageant contestant from Pennsylvania, with a $5 million defamation lawsuit in 2012 after she questioned the integrity of the pageant’s results in a Facebook post.
That makes Trump the right-wing (assuming that’s what he really is) equivalent to the left-wingers screaming to ban “hate speech” — that is, speech they disapprove of for identity-group reasons.
That makes Newspaper Association of America president David Chavern observe:
The first thing to understand is that under the landmark Supreme Court case of New York Times vs. Sullivan, it was determined that news organizations could be found liable when they deliberately publish false information. The specific standard is “actual malice.” So if Mr. Trump wants to address media organizations that “write purposely negative and horrible, false articles” then the law is already established as to his rights to do that.
But we all know that Mr. Trump isn’t interested in legalities in this case. He is clearly just trying to intimidate news organizations and bully them in providing more positive coverage of him and his candidacy for President. He should pick a different target. Newspapers have dealt with more intimidating figures than Mr. Trump.
Newspapers, actually, have a long, long history of responsibly speaking truth in the face of great power. One could think of Watergate or the Oscar-nominated movie “Spotlight” for some better-known examples. Throughout history, those in power have complained about newspaper reporting when it didn’t meet their agenda and the number of instances where the reporting has been found to be on target has vastly out-weighed any circumstances where it wasn’t. The fact is that our society relies upon the newspaper industry to be a consistent, challenging voice to the wealthy and powerful — and newspapers have a long history of carrying out that mandate with care and a deep sense of responsibility.
Newspapers have successfully stood-up to sitting Presidents, vast religious organizations, governors, mayors and immensely powerful corporations, among many others. If Mr. Trump wants to try to bully news organizations into providing reporting that he likes, then he will have to do a whole lot better than making weak, misguided promises about changes to a law that aren’t needed in the first place.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple adds:
An attack on media law is a logical extension of Trump’s rhetoric, not to mention a threat to American democracy. After all, he has displayed a highly undemocratic annoyance with the idea that the media is independent. For months he has been attempting to get the cameras at his rallies to properly pan around the thronged arenas, the better to capture his out-of-control popularity, even when the camera operators’ job is to stay on him. He has ridiculed reporter after reporter for reporting the facts of Trump’s march through the GOP primaries. Whenever he has been busted out by investigative journalism, he has attacked the institutions that have compiled it.
Though Trump in his remarks issued no specifics — he never does — about the shortcomings of existing policy or the exact changes he’d make, he appears to be upset with the degree to which media outlets are protected by longstanding First Amendment law. And protected they are, especially when reporting on people like Donald Trump, the sort of person that libel law sees as “public figures.” Media types can go after public figures with a great deal of aggressiveness because the law of the land sees those in the public eye as inviting scrutiny and thrusting themselves into the glare of accountability.
Wind the clock back to March 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan. At issue was not an article but rather an advertisement in a 1960 edition of the New York Times that an Alabama elected official, L.B. Sullivan, found particularly injurious. The record concluded that some of the criticisms in the advertisement were inaccurate.
No matter, wrote William J. Brennan for the majority, in an opinion that appeared to foresee Trump himself:
Those who won our independence believed … that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.
Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
From this decision has arisen something of a two-tiered libel arrangement throughout the land. There’s one standard for Joe Schmo, who has to prove only that a media outlet acted with negligence in order to secure a favorable judgment. For public figures — they have to prove a standard known as “actual malice,” that the offending statement “was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.”
What’s so comical and pathetic about Trump is how, as per usual, he speaks so loudly without knowing anything about the topic. Roll back the tape on one part of his riff: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
Trump wouldn’t need to “open up our libel laws” in order to accomplish this end. As currently laid out, our libel laws enable him to do just that. In fact, the “actual malice” standard discussed above applies almost precisely to those instances when news outlets write “purposely negative and horrible and false articles.”
Read carefully, in other words, Trump’s words delivered a thundering endorsement of the status quo in libel jurisprudence. Surely he didn’t mean as much — if elected he would doubtless move ahead with this plan to make it harder for news outlets to call him out. Though for a guy who spends much of his day writing over-the-top slams of other public officials, maybe Trump should give thanks for the First Amendment.
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Author and new Facebook Friend Peter Manso wrote this for Car & Driver:
In this wacky election cycle of ours, I’m being asked by some of my academic neighbors here in Berkeley to generalize on how racers vote. My answer is simple: The majority of car people, especially racers, are righties. As evidence, I offer Richard Childress and his years of serving on the NRA’s board of directors; Roger Penske as one of the country’s herculean big-money contributors to presidential candidates; and “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, who years back ran as a candidate for Florida’s 5th Congressional District, calling for the FBI to”turn up the heat” on any American failing to espouse patriotic beliefs. The question of a racer’s GOP affinity is not “if” so much as “why,” and the answer is that conservative politics mirror who and what these guys really are.
What’s the difference between a liberal and a conservative? For the quick and easy answer we must go to John Locke and Edmund Burke, the two 17th- and 18th-century philosophers who cemented the left-right distinction for all of modern times. The liberal, per Locke, believes in the perfectibility of mankind, whereas Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a bestselling pamphlet when published in 1790, preached human limitation and the doggedness of original sin. For the conservative, government is suspect. To the liberal, society should be improved through human intelligence, which is the seed of all human progress. Conservativism sees human beings as bestial and selfish; people are basically competitive, as well as unequal in their abilities or value to society, and those who contribute most deserve greater rewards. The well-intentioned collectivism of the liberal, the conservative argues, only deprives society of its vitality and inhibits the achievement that comes with individualism.
Leave it to Richard Petty: “The majority of the people I associate with are conservative because they make their own decisions on what to do on the race car, when to make pit stops. They’re very individual people. … City people wind up more liberal because they’re depending on somebody to own their house or clean their streets.”
There have been exceptions. Ayrton Senna gave huge sums to Brazil’s poor, and Paul Newman’s charities and support of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern put him on the left. But the racer’s task, first and foremost, is to test himself. He is not a normal person, no 9-t0-5’er with the security of dental insurance, but a self-absorbed, self-enmeshed figure. His job is to live on the edge and do so unrelentingly, with the knowledge that there can be a very steep price to pay for failure. …
Like many an artist, he’s driven, and it’s not hard to see that he’s simply too focused, too self-centered to spend much time thinking about homelessness, racism, unemployment, or the unbalanced economy. “It’s me and me alone” is the mantra. …
Who do you hear more clearly here, Clinton or Trump-Cruz-Bush & Co.? It’s been said that no one with a heart can resist being a liberal, and that no one with a brain can resist being a conservative. But the answer for a racer, I think, is obvious.
You can quibble with some of Manso’s characterizations (conservatives, even non-wealthy conservatives, donate more to charity than liberals, and no one who thinks people are “bestial and selfish” is likely to support self-government) and yet still agree with Manso’s argument. American conservatism is about freedom much more than American liberalism is today.
The junction of transportation and sports is a good example. Liberals are considerably more likely to favor mass transit, the exact opposite of transportation freedom. Liberals thought Barack Obama’s Cash for Clunkers was a great idea, probably because it served to make used cars more expensive. (Obama should have been impeached for Cash for Clunkers.) Liberals favor high taxes to discourage such behaviors as driving (high gas taxes and low speed limits), smoking, drinking (Prohibition was the crowning failure of the we-can-improve-mankind Progressive Era), eating the wrong foods, owning firearms and ammunition, and other lifestyle choices of which they disapprove. Liberals are also more likely to oppose hunting and fishing, which tend to be activities favored by those who know who Richard Petty is. (He ran for North Carolina secretary of state in 1996 as a Republican, but lost.)
It’s certainly dangerous to make blanket statements about athletes and their political beliefs as far as what they are or should be. (Nor should a conservative want to politiize everything more than our world already is politicized. The phrase “the personal is political” was not devised by a conservative.) One reason why sports is vastly preferable to politics is that there are clear-cut winners and losers in sports. The human drama of athletic competition, as ABC-TV’s Jim McKay termed it, is about making yourself better, both vs. yourself (improving running or swimming times) and against your competition, the latter of which involves taking advantage of opportunities your opponent(s) presents you. The liberal obsession with income inequality and equality of result would seem the polar opposite of what world-class athletes do.
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My favorite conservative humorist, P.J. O’Rourke, writes to … P.J. O’Rourke, circa 1968:
I (you) need your (my) help preventing a disaster 48 years in the future. If you think the politics in “Amerika” is a bummer in 1968, wait until you see 2016.
Unless you do something, a terrifying idiot is going to be president of the United States.
Otherwise, things have turned out groovy. You’re a little soft around the middle but still have your hair. Wife’s a cool chick. (I’d tell you more about her, but she’s currently in third grade.) The kids don’t yell at you as much as you yell at dad. You survived riding motorcycles. (When you take that hard right off High Street on to South Campus, some old bitch in an Oldsmobile is going pull out in front of you.)
Yeah, you’re a 68-year-old living in Squaresville, but mellow. (Wish I had that baggie of 20-toke “Are-we-high-yet?” Mexican ditch weed. This 21st century super-THC pot makes me paranoid, even though it’s legal.)
But that’s not what I’m writing you about. You’re a student activist (between beers) and an anti-war protestor. (I’ve still got the “Girls Say Yes To Guys Who Say No” button.)
You’re hip to what’s happening. Like the 1968 presidential race. You think LBJ’s a bad trip? How would you like an LBJ in a skirt?
We’ve got one of those like groupies have crabs.
Incidentally, in about 10 weeks LBJ will tune in, turn on, and drop out. Drop out, anyway. For real.
“The Making of the President, 1968” is about to turn uglier than a Mazola party in the DKE House basement passion pit on Sadie Hawkins Day.
Fat-ass, flap-jaw, party hack Hubert Humphrey, Gene “Roast A Weenie for Peace” McCarthy, and smooth operator, oh-now-you’re-against-the-war Bobby Kennedy will be scamming for the Democratic nomination.
Trying to rip off the Republican nomination, there’s the pig Nixon, the capitalist pig Nelson Rockefeller, and the pig who’s blown his mind George Romney. (“When I came back from Viet Nam, I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”)
The racist pig George Wallace will run as an independent on the Racist Pig Party ticket.
Come November, the result will be as bad as a couple of weeks ago when you swallowed the tab of STP.
How, you ask, can things in futuristic, ultra-modern 2016, be worse?
Trust me. I am you. Trust yourself. Things are worse.
Dig this: A dude who’s more of a capitalist pig than Nelson Rockefeller, exploiting the proletariat with a TV show dumber than Lawrence Welk’s, who’s got all the peace and love vibes of Richard Nixon and is a bigger racist pig than George Wallace.
That’s the Republican front-runner.
Because… Because the American public flipped out. Long story. You’ll see when you get here.
And the Democratic front-runner is, as mentioned, Lyndon Johnson wearing a dress. (Actually, she wears a pantsuit. It’s something a guy named Yves Saint-Laurent invented in 1966, but you’ve never seen one. The co-eds at Miami of Ohio aren’t crazy.)
There are some other bad candidates.
There’s one called Ted Cruz that you can’t do anything about because he hasn’t been born yet.
There’s a black Barry Goldwater. Hard to get your head around. But he’s fading in the polls.
However, there are also some candidates who are … well, they’re bad too. But they’re like “I Like Ike” bad. They’re not heavy, freaky bad. They’re squares. They’re uptight. But they’re regular. You know, like dad.
And I really wish you hadn’t yelled at dad over Christmas break when he put up the “George Romney—Great for ’68” yard sign. Dad turned out to be okay.
Anyway, your mission, should you chose to accept it (and, yes, that’sstill a popular culture catch phrase) is to make sure that neither Pantyhose-In-Cowboy-Boots nor the Pig from Uranus gets elected.
(Consult Issue #1 of Wonder Wart-Hog, Hog of Steel, winter 1967, “Wonder Wart-Hog Versus the Pigs from Uranus” by Gilbert Shelton for clues to the vulnerabilities of the latter. It’s on the floor under your mattress.)
The reason I’m choosing you (us) is because we’re about the same age as these jerks, which means that they are (were), like you are (I was), members of the “Youth Culture”—back when that meant something besides Botox. (Our wife will explain what Botox is later.)
In your day being young is a bond. It’s membership in a private club. “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” There’s even a secret recognition hand signal. I still use it, without the index finger.
You can get next to these people.
The awful Republican is named Don Trump. He’s a senior at Penn.
The awful Democrat is named Hillary (two l’s) Rodham. She’s a junior at Wellesley—exactly the same age as us.
It’s possible we know Hillary already. She went to Maine East High in Park Ridge outside Chicago, right up Harlem Avenue from Oak Park where we went to high school. She was in a Methodist Youth Group. We were in a Methodist Youth Group. We may have dated her. And erased the memory.
So I have a plan. I’ve enclosed money. (No, you didn’t get rich. A buck is only worth 15 cents in 2016.)
This Don Trump is the easy part. Skip some classes. I seem to recall you’re ahead of me on that part of the plan. But (I checked our transcript) your grades are shit this semester no matter what. Fly Youth Fare standby to Philadelphia.
Trump is the campus loud mouth New Yorker. You won’t have trouble finding him. Tell him you’re part of a commune that wants to pay too much rent for a crappy place in a bad part of town.
He’ll be glad to have coffee or a mu tea or whatever with you. (You’ll have to pay.) Slip the STP in his java. He’ll freak. He’s on the verge anyway. The cat’s been a space case since birth. Skip town before he starts peaking.
Way to go!
I just checked the mental hospitals in New York. A “Donald Trump Jr.” has been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue since January 1968. Good karma, man.
Getting rid of Hillary Rodham is more complicated. First we have to have a little talk with ourselves about politics.
Hillary Rodham—she’s “Hillary Clinton” these days because she married… What a long, strange trip it’s been… Oops, that Grateful Dead album won’t be released for another two and a half years…
Hillary Rodham has a longer radioactive half-life than the Grateful Dead, and half of them are—I regret to inform you—dead, gratefully or otherwise. But they’re still packing venues. (Joke from the future: “What’s a Grateful Dead fan say when he runs out of pot? ‘What a shitty band.’”)
But I digress. We were talking politics. Hillary Rodham Clinton has only one serious opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination.
He’s Bernie Sanders, a “New Left” type, and you think you agree with him.
Our politics will change over the years. Right now, you’re under the impression that you’re into communism. Like, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” says Marx. Far out. It’s the monthly check from dad.
Actually, a French socialist, Louis Blanc, said that. But, since you’ve never even read the Cliffs Notes for Das Kapital, I won’t hassle you.
Sometime in the 1970s you’ll finally get a job. You’ll be paid $150 a week. But when you get your first paycheck you’ll find out you net $78.63 after deductions for federal, state and city income tax, Social Security, union dues, pension fund contribution, etc.
And you’ll say, “Wait, I’m a communist. I’ve protested for communism. I’ve demonstrated for communism. I’ve vandalized for communism. I’ve been tear-gassed for communism. And then I get a job with a big capitalist corporation and I find out we’ve got communism already. They just took half my paycheck! I’m not Nelson Rockefeller!”
Nonetheless, you and I continue to share basic political principles. As you put it to dad at Christmas, “Get off my fucking case!”
This Bernie Sanders is on your case. Or he would be if you let him. He’s six years older than we are and still hanging around campus, mostly at Goddard College in Vermont, which even you call “Flake Acres.” He belonged to the Young People’s Socialist League when he was at the University of Chicago. You know the type.
Bernie wants to “organize” you. If you aren’t careful he’ll talk you into going door-to-door trying to get “underprivileged” people to register for food stamps and vote. Since the underprivileged people in southern Ohio are rednecks with shotguns who’re voting for George Wallace, you could get seriously shot.
When Bernie is rapping and you’re stoned, he sounds like he’s making sense, in a commie way. But he puts out bad vibrations. He’s not a head. He doesn’t smoke dope. But he’s too smelly to be a narc. He’s been married and divorced, and he’s going to try to grope spaced-out Sunshine who’s not wearing anything under her mumu.
And Bernie “doesn’t like” rock. He likes country music. Loretta Lynn singing “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).”
It’s the 1960s! That’s where you’re at. Meaning, Bernie doesn’t like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or “Their Satanic Majesties Request” or “Surrealistic Pillow.” Bernie doesn’t like Jimi Hendrix.
If Bring-Down Bernie gets elected, all of life will be like being trapped in a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society writing the Port Huron Statement until the end of time.
He probably won’t get elected. But that’s only because of LBJ avatar reincarnation of Shiva the Destroyer Intercontinental Ballistic Sister Hillary Rodham.
You know that art major who chews her hair and thinks she’s a witch? Hillary is a witch. Wait and see the spell she casts on this guy Bill she’s going to marry who is the Town Dog-Catcher in East Jesus, Arkansas, or something, and the next thing he knows he’s on trial in the U.S. Senate for getting head.
Unless you make her chill out.
Wellesley is near Boston. Hillary’s a grind. She’ll be in the library. She wears a headband like our 10-year-old sister and the same big, ugly glasses as mom. Has a favorite pair bell-bottoms with weird (don’t look at them on acid) stripes. Kind of cute but a major frowny-face. You’ll spot her.
Wellesley’s an all-girls school so you’ll need and excuse to be there. Say you’re an SDS organizer. Hillary’s just starting to get lefty. Keep it platonic. (You’d know what that means if you’d done the reading for your philosophy survey course—“Deep Thinking for D Students.”)
Tell Hillary there’s this lefty deep thinker she just has to meet. It’s only 200 miles from Wellesley to Godard. The two of you can hitch.
(“Candidate Sanders: Hitchhiking should be legal, and made easier”—that’s a newspaper headline four years from now when Bernie runs for governor of Vermont as a lefty deep thinker and comes in fourth in a three-man race.)
Hillary will love Bernie. She’ll cop to his whole scene. She’ll never become a Democratic Party big wig working the levers and pulleys of power. She’ll never be The Man.
She’ll get stuck in Vermont, living in a yurt, chairperson of the Save the Snakes Coalition, one more old hippie burn-out.
Bernie will ruin her life. He’s already walked out on his marriage and he’s about to get some other chick knocked up.
And she’ll ruin his. Believe me, I have seen what Hillary can do to a guy. There’s this poor dweeb Joe Biden… But that’s another story.
Do your thing, young me. Let it all hang out.
And 48 years from now all we’ll ever hear about Bernie and Hillary will be in the Burlington Free Press under the head “Domestic Dispute.”
P.S. If you can get some nude Polaroids of the two, slip them inside the dust jacket of The Making of a President, 1968 by Theodore H. White, on the PoliSci shelves at Miami’s King Library. The book will come out in June 1969, and nobody has touched it since.
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J.K. Trotter performs a flagrant act of journalism:
Hillary Clinton’s supporters often argue that mainstream political reporters are incapable of covering her positively—or even fairly. While it may be true that the political press doesn’t always write exactly what Clinton would like, emails recently obtained by Gawker offer a case study in how her prodigious and sophisticated press operation manipulates reporters into amplifying her desired message—in this case, down to the very word that The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder used to describe an important policy speech.
The emails in question, which were exchanged by Ambinder, then serving as TheAtlantic’s politics editor, and Philippe Reines, Clinton’s notoriously combative spokesman and consigliere, turned up thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2012 (and which we are currently suing the State Departmentover). The same request previously revealed that Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, promised to deliver positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate exchange, permitted Reines to ghost-write an item about the State Department for Politico’s Playbook newsletter. Ambinder’s emails with Reines demonstrate the same kind of transactional reporting, albeit to a much more legible degree: In them, you can see Reines “blackmailing” Ambinder into describing a Clinton speech as “muscular” in exchange for early access to the transcript. In other words, Ambinder outsourced his editorial judgment about the speech to a member of Clinton’s own staff.
On the morning of July 15, 2009, Ambinder sent Reines a blank email with the subject line, “Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?” His question concerned a speech Clinton planned to give later that day at the Washington, D.C. office of the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential think tank. Three minutes after Ambinder’s initial email, Reines replied with three words: “on two conditions.” After Ambinder responded with “ok,” Reines sent him a list of those conditions:
From: [Philippe Reines]
Sent: Wednesday, July 15 2009 10:06 AM
To: Ambinder, Marc
Subject: Re: Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?3 [conditions] actually
1) You in your own voice describe them as “muscular”
2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys — from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something
3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!
One minute later, Ambinder responded:
From: Ambinder, Marc
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:07 AM
To: Philippe Reines
Subject: RE: Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?got it
Ambinder made good on his word. The opening paragraph of the article he wrote later that day, under the headline “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Smart Power’ Breaks Through,” precisely followed Reines’ instructions:
When you think of President Obama’s foreign policy, think of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That’s the message behind a muscular speech that Clinton is set to deliver today to the Council on Foreign Relations. The staging gives a clue to its purpose: seated in front of Clinton, subordinate to Clinton, in the first row, will be three potentially rival power centers: envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, and National Security Council senior director Dennis Ross.
Based on other emails released in the same batch we received, Ambinder’s warm feelings toward Clinton may have made him uniquely susceptible to Reines’ editing suggestions. On July 26, 2009, he wrote to Reines to congratulate his boss about her appearance on Meet the Press:
From: Ambinder, Marc
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2009 12:05 PM
To: Philippe Reines
Subject: she kicked Aon MTP
On November 29, 2010, he sent along another congratulatory note, apparently in regard to a press conference Clinton had held that day to address the publication of thousands of State Department cables by WikiLeaks:
From: Ambinder, Marc
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2010 12:05 PM
To: Philippe Reines
Subject: This is an awesome presser…She is PITCH f#$*& PERFECT on this stuff.
The emails quoted above are particularly remarkable given Ambinder’s understanding of Clinton’s press strategy, as he articulated in a column for The Week last year. Predicting how Clinton’s widely documented aversion to reporters would play out in the 2016 presidential race, Ambinder wrote, “The Clinton campaign will use the press instrumentally. … Good news for us, though: The reporters covering Clinton are going to find ways to draw her out anyway, because they’re really good, they’ll give her no quarter, and they’ll provide a good source of accountability tension [sic] until Walker (or whomever) emerges from the maelstrom.”
When asked for comment about his correspondence with Reines, Ambinder wrote in an email to Gawker, “I don’t remember much about anything, but I do remember once writing about how powerful FOIA is, especially as a mechanism to hold everyone in power, even journalists, accountable.” When asked to elaborate, he followed up with a longer message:
Philippe and I generally spoke on the phone and followed up by email. The exchange is probably at best an incomplete record of what went down. That said, the transactional nature of such interactions always gave me the willies…. Since I can’t remember the exact exchange I can’t really muster up a defense of the art, and frankly, I don’t really want to. I will say this: whatever happened here reflects my own decisions, and no one else’s.
In a subsequent phone exchange, Ambinder added:
It made me uncomfortable then, and it makes me uncomfortable today. And when I look at that email record, it is a reminder to me of why I moved away from all that. The Atlantic, to their credit, never pushed me to do that, to turn into a scoop factory. In the fullness of time, any journalist or writer who is confronted by the prospect, or gets in the situation where their journalism begins to feel transactional, should listen to their gut feeling and push away from that.
Being scrupulous at all times will not help you get all the scoops, but it will help you sleep at night. At no point at The Atlantic did I ever feel the pressure to make transactional journalism the norm.
Ambinder emphasized that the emails did not capture the totality of his communication with Reines, and said they were not indicative of his normal reporting techniques. When asked if the exchange was typical of the magazine’s reporting and editing process, a spokesperson for The Atlantic told Gawker: “No, this is not typical, and it goes against our standards.”
Reines didn’t respond when we asked if he engaged in similar transactions with other reporters covering the State Department. But on the day of his trade with Ambinder, at least one other journalist used Reines’ preferred adjective—“muscular”—to describe the speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thatreporter was none other than Mike Allen of Politico:
Allen even took note of the seating arrangement, just as Reines had requested of Ambinder:
A look at the CFR’s guest seating chart shows that arrayed in the front row will be top members of her team — the envoys she has called her “force multipliers”: Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, Philip Goldberg and Stephen Bosworth.
We can’t say for sure that Reines implored Allen to describe Clinton’s speech as “muscular” and emphasize where particular audience members were seated, but that kind of request would hardly be out of the ordinary. As we noted above, Allen allowed Reines to ghost-write an item for his Playbook newsletter; and, in the course of attempting to secure an interview with Chelsea Clinton, told Reines he was prepared to submit interview questions to Clinton’s team in advance for their approval.
Allen referred our questions to Politico’s spokesperson, who told Gawker via email: “Mike’s preview of this speech includes multiple ‘aides say’ qualifiers and is transparent in that it’s based on ‘prepared remarks’ and a ‘seating chart.’” (If Allen and Reines did indeed email about Clinton’s speech, however, we expect to receive a copy of their correspondence in a subsequent batch as the State Department continues to process our request.)
In any case, Reines’ strategy worked out nicely. For an article aggregating Allen’s piece, New York magazine quoted his use of “muscular” in the headline, and even commissioned an illustration of Clinton wearing the arms of a body builder.
The most recent batch of emails revealed another notable sausage-making exchange between Reines and a prominent reporter. In several emails sent in early September 2009, Mark Halperin—then at Time, now at Bloomberg News—appears to have arranged for a computer pre-configured with Microsoft’s Outlook calendaring software to be delivered to Reines’ house in Washington, D.C., so that Reines would be able to open particular documents in his possession, including Hillary Clinton’s travel schedules during the 2008 presidential campaign, and relay their contents to Halperin. In one email, the reporter writes to Reines:
the computer is ready to be delivered. I could have it there in 20-25 minutes
It has a newly downloaded version of Outlook, which has not been installed, because it has to be done linked to an email. I am hoping/assuming you can do that.
Is now a good time to have it brought over? Should it be left with a doorman or left upstairs?
It’s unclear from the exchange whether Reines actually provided any documents to Halperin or simply relayed the information therein. But perhaps the more interesting aspect of Reines and Halperin’s correspondence is that, the day after Halperin had the computer delivered, Reines began asking Halperin whether he and his co-author John Heilemann would include him in Game Change, the book-turned-movie they were writing about the 2008 campaign: “Do I have a big enough role to warrant a role in the movie, a la Jeremy Bash in Recount?” To which Halperin responds: “Well, the first response is, do you want that?” The thread continued:
Reines: “Yes, I want to be an amalgam like he was!”
Halperin: “ok then. the book doesn’t do amalgams. but the movie just might. let me puzzle on that.”
Reines: “There’s gotta be a scene where I hand the phone to CVC: That’s good TV.”
Halperin: “agreed, although hard to get your name in the film in said scene.”
Reines: “True”
Halperin: “we could make you the kennedy character or the mills character. going all postal on the wednesday call.”
In the end, Reines rated only two mentions in the finished book—on pages 46-47 and page 52 in the paperback—and none in the movie. (Neither Reines nor Halperin responded to a request for comment.)
You’ll find highlights from the last two rounds of Reines emails we received from the State Department’s FOIA office. (The release from December 31 consisted of only 211 pages, so we consolidated it with the January release.) You can read and search through the rest of the emails on DocumentCloud.
Page 58 — Reines emails Andy Alexander, then the ombudsman of The Washington Post, to complain about sexism in Howard Kurtz’s profile of Chuck Todd “What does it say when a paper’s ombudsman takes a paper to task for sexist writing and then only days later features a piece laced with so much blatant sexism that it’s laughable (profile of Chuck Todd)?”
Page 75 — After asking, on page 72, for quotes about Politico’s newsroom culture, Jeremy Peters of The New York Times praises Reines’ response (“If a lightbulb is out that’s a story”): “That’s brilliant. You should totally let me use that on the record. … That’s great. Anything else you can recall like that—their greatest hits of non-news—would be great.”
Page 79 — Reines appears to flirt with a Miami-based media personality named Tara Gilani: “How did I look in HD?” To which Gilani responds: “You look/are the same: cocky, smart ass. Don’t take it as a compliment—it’s not.” To which Reines responds: “Oh yeah it is.”
Pages 110 through 111 — Greta van Susteren emails Reines a photo of Reines laughing with the subject line: “what is so funny?”
Page 151 — Van Susteren complains to Reines about a grudge she perceives Bill Clinton to be holding against her:
I think it weird — if bill clinton is holding a grudge against me that is really weird I think I may be the only one in media who has never been smarmy towards him or repeated stuff that I have heard from him or hugh or dorothy etc which I know was said off the record because they feel comfortable talking in front of me. I have always carefully drawn the line with the clintons (and others) because I hate the media trying to destroy. I admire people in public service and never do anything rotten to people in govt so it is stunning that bill clinton would hold a grudge against me. I will still be one hundred percent fair with him (bill richardson did something really dirty to me and I have never retaliated — I have continued to do my job fair) but I am curious if it is clinton or matt [Bill Clinton spokesperson Matt McKenna] thinking he is clinton and creating problems.
Pages 227 and 250 — New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick appears to engage in—or deny engaging in—some sort of quote approval protocol with Philippe Reines: “I can’t imagine I imagined a quote approval since I cleared them all, so as I said, I’m puzzled.”
Page 518 through 519 — These pages contain and unusually large redaction, apparently based upon a personal privacy exemption, that appears to concern something Reines ate while aboard a State Department aircraft.
Page 551 — Reines asks ABC News reporter Dana Hughes to “add a line taking a small poke at ‘BuzzFeed and others’ for getting this wrong,” a favor for which he would be “very appreciative.” According to the finished story, Hughes appears to have complied with Reines’ request.
Page 607 — Kimberly Dozier, then at the Associated Press (and now at The Daily Beast), appears to allude an interaction she had with Michael Hastings in an email to Reines: “I just read you had with another member of the press, who shall remain nameless in this email. I’ll tell you my run-in with the same person, over a drink sometime, if I run into you at State Dept. event.”
Page 740 — Tina Brown emails Reines about an upcoming forum called “The Hero Summit,” scheduled for November 14-15, 2012 and headlined by David Petraeus. However Petraeus does not appear to have attended the event, given that he resigned several days prior to it over his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
Page 748 — Here you can find the official copy of Reines’ infamous email exchange with Michael Hastings.
Pages 830 through 832 — Reines emails with Maureen Dowd and her research assistant, and claims that he was fired that last time he helped Maureen Dowd with a column.
Pages 971 through 980 — The State Department redacted the entirety of what appears to be ten pages of email correspondence between Reines and Carolyn Greenspan Rosen, a producer at Entertainment Tonight. The pages are marked with the exemption code “B6,” which is used to justify withhold information that, if disclosed, “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Page 1030 — Greta van Susteren emails Reines: “How come you ignore my emails?”
Page 1082 — Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post emails Reines: “I know you’re on the other side of the earth, but if you get bored in a meeting, want to send me some examples of politico’s most flagrant stupidity or errors?”
Page 1155 — Tara Palmeri of the New York Post writes to Reines about Hillary Clinton’s plans to endorse a candidate in the 2013 New York City mayoral race: “I wanted to reach out to you about Hillary’s status on Weiner. Last time we chatted you said she would likely endorse him for Mayor of New York over Bill de Blasio. In light of recent events, will Hillary still endorse Weiner for Mayor?” To which Reines responds (after asking Palmeri to identify him as a “friend”): “Her support of him remains unchanged.”
If the national news media had integrity, Ambinder, Allen, Halperin, Peters, Kirkpatrick, Hughes and Kornblut would be unemployed. Cozying up to a source to the extent demonstrated here is reprehensible, and proves every stereotype about liberal media bias you’d care to create. It also says a lot about Clinton that she would employ someone with the lack of scruples of Reines.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 