Conservative media, a giant fog machine

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"A safe space for people who want to be told that they don't have to believe anything that's uncomfortable or negative"

The news that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort ought to dominate headlines in every corner of the media world. But if the past week or so is any indication, conservative media is likely to spend most of its bandwidth covering a fake conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of our uranium as secretary of state. President Trump called the bogus Clinton uranium deal a “modern-day Watergate.” A few days later, FoxNews.com amplified Trump’s charge in an article with the headline “Hillary Clinton's ties to Russian uranium deal largely ignored by anti-Trump media, and other media disasters.”The conspiracy is false, but that’s not really the point.

The point is to muddy the waters, to divert attention from actual scandals. This is something conservative media is uniquely good at. The question is, why? Why is conservative media so much better than liberal media when it comes to making its preferred narratives stick? To answer this question, I reached out Charlie Sykes, a leading conservative radio host in Wisconsin for nearly three decades. A vocal critic of Trump, Sykes eventually walked away from his show after alienating some of his pro-Trump listeners. I asked Sykes, the author of the 2017 book How the Right Lost Its Mind, how right-leaning media is able to construct alternate realities for its base, and why it succeeds in ways liberal media does not.


“The conservative media has done a really great job of convincing conservatives that they're under siege,” he told me. As a result, “the conservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told that they don't have to believe anything that's uncomfortable or negative.” Our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

"A giant fog machine": how right-wing media obscures Mueller and other inconvenient stories - Vox

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The spin is deafening, so take a step back and consider the following, a role reversal:

But before we discuss what that means, we have to stand back and marvel at the power of partisanship to shape people's views, at least Republicans'. Try to imagine for a moment what they would be saying if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election and there was either outright proof or convincing evidence of all of the following:

• Russia used a variety of social media in order to attempt to sway the election in Clinton's favor
  
  
• Russia hacked into the email accounts of Republican officials and then released those emails to WikiLeaks in a coordinated effort to embarrass Republicans at their convention
  
  
• Russian hackers also targeted Republican House candidates
  
  
• Russia sent Kremlin representatives to meet with Clinton's campaign manager, along with Chelsea Clinton and her husband, who would later both become key advisers working in the White House, with the promise of dirt on Donald Trump, possibly in exchange for a change in U.S. policy that Vladimir Putin desperately wanted
  
  
• When the story of that meeting became public, the president herself dictated a misleading statement about it obviously intended to throw everyone off the story
  
  
• Russia arranged a series of meetings with people who would become high-ranking Trump administration officials, including the attorney general and the national security adviser, officials who would subsequently lie about those meetings
  
  
• Clinton's campaign manager had a series of complex and sketchy arrangements involving millions of dollars with foreign puppets of Putin
  
  
• Clinton had curious relationships going back decades with a series of Russian oligarchs and mobsters
  
  
• Clinton publicly implored the Russian government to hack into her opponent's email
  
  
• Clinton tried to enlist the director of national intelligence and the head of the National Security Agency to discredit the Russia investigation
  
  
• Clinton fired the director of the FBI and announced on national television that she did it in order to shut down the Russia investigation
  
  
• Clinton told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that because she fired the FBI director, "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off."
  

If all of that had happened, can anyone say with a straight face that Republicans would not have positively lost their minds with rage? That we wouldn't be hearing the word "treason" a hundred times a day? That President Clinton wouldn't have already been impeached by the House and on her way to a trial in the Senate?

With the Russia Scandal Getting Serious, the GOP Spin Machine Kicks Into High Gear

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CNN anchor Jake Tapper admonished Fox News for taking his comments about the deadly terrorist attack in New York City out of context. Fox News published an article with the headline "CNN's Jake Tapper: 'Allahu Akbar' Can Be Said Under 'Most Beautiful' of Circumstances" on Wednesday. The article referenced comments Tapper made on Tuesday after it was reported that the suspect in the attack had at one point shouted "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great." The headline is preceded by a tag reading "OUTRAGEOUS."

But the Fox News headline left out the second half of Tapper's quote, which distinguished Tuesday's attack from the "beautiful" circumstances he alluded to. Tapper said at the time, "The Arabic chant 'Allahu Akbar,' God is great, sometimes is said under the most beautiful of circumstances. And too often, we hear it being said in moments like this."

On Wednesday, Fox News promoted the article with a tweet that distorted his quote even more. "Jake Tapper Says 'Allahu Akbar' Is 'Beautiful' Right After NYC Terror Attack," the tweet said. Tapper did not respond kindly to the misrepresentation of his words. "Fox News is lying," Tapper said in a tweet. "I said it can be said at beautiful moments (wedding, birth) and too often at times like this (horrific terrorist attack)."

Jake Tapper slams Fox News for misrepresenting comments about New York City terror attack - Business Insider

[Admin]

The right-wing media have created a Frankenstein monster:

The turmoil in Republican ranks is often described as pitting the party’s leadership class against an unruly popular “base.” But as scholars of public opinion often point out, few citizens develop strong political opinions or are mobilized to political action without influence from trusted authorities. What’s changed is whom voters are listening to: Unelected elite actors, especially conservative media figures, are gaining influence over the behavior of Republican voters while officeholders and candidates are losing it. (Despite occasional suggestions otherwise, no equivalent purge campaign exists in today’s Democratic Party.)

A number of self-styled “constitutional” conservative elites like Flake were dismayed and baffled by Trump’s ascendance to the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, but Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and combative manner found fertile ground among a Republican primary electorate primed by years of aggressive conservative media messages. Conservative media outlets have incessantly painted conventional party leaders as overly accommodating to liberalism, ineffective in achieving major rightward policy shifts, and inattentive to the costs and threats of contemporary social change. 

In such a context, the Trump campaign’s lack of public support among Republican politicians during the 2016 presidential primaries turned out to be far from fatal to his popularity with party voters. Flake presents himself as far more faithful to conservative ideological principles than the current leader of his party. Indeed, his record in office is staunchly right of center in nearly every substantive respect. According to one political science measure derived from analysis of roll-call votes, he is one of the three or four most conservative members of the Senate — and he is a well-known crusader against legislative earmarks. 

Many Republicans cheered the emergence of the modern conservative media universe during the 1990s and early 2000s as a necessary counterweight to the perceived ideological bias of mainstream journalism. They may regret that support today. Over the past decade, it’s become clear the conservative media can be weaponized against Republican politicians even more easily than against Democrats, since most of its audience is far more likely to participate in a Republican primary than to consider voting Democratic in a general election. 

While the conservative insurgency has few sympathizers in Washington, it is difficult to deny the argument that incumbent Republican politicians have often failed to deliver on their promises — for instance, to achieve a revolutionary reduction in the size of government and a revival of traditionalist cultural norms. Tellingly, Flake’s retirement speech on the Senate floor devoted much more attention to the veneration of conservative principles than to conservative accomplishments during his years in office.

Republican elites cheered the right-wing insurgency. Now it’s coming for them. - Vox

Overall, he wants Republican senators to care far less about what the Chamber of Commerce thinks, and far more about what Breitbart readers think. A source close to Bannon describes his basic pitch to all these disparate groups as a simple one: “The elites have failed us.”

The Republican purge has only just begun - Vox

[Admin]

More fog..

In the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against former Alabama chief justice and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, right-wing news outlet Breitbart is pulling all the stops in an effort to discredit Moore’s accusers. According to a report by Axios, Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon — previously President Trump’s chief strategist — has sent two of his reporters, Matt Boyle and Aaron Klein, to cover the controversy on the ground in Alabama with one goal in mind: to poke holes in the original Washington Post report that detailed the allegations against Moore. “This story is about to get even uglier, if that’s imaginable,” Axios’ Jonathan Swan predicted on Sunday. “I expect more counter-attacks will play out in Breitbart News and other outlets over the coming days.”

So far, that prediction has proved accurate: Sunday evening, overblown headlines pointing a finger at the Post’s reporting were splashed across the Breitbart homepage. By Monday morning, the site had dedicated an entire subsection to its malicious coverage of the story. One headline read, “EXCLUSIVE: Mother of Roy Moore Accuser Contradicts Key Detail of Daughter’s Sexual Misconduct Story. Revealed: False Reporting in Washpost Bombshell.” Another headline ignored the allegations altogether, instead delighting in a poll that found Moore held a “Double Digit Lead Over Democrat Doug Jones” before and after the accusations were made.

Critics are trying to shut down Roy Moore’s accusers using any means necessary – ThinkProgress

[Admin]

Here is the difference with progressive media. 

Take the Al Franken accusations, it's on front page of:

• Think Progress
  
• Mother Jones
  
• Vox
  

The latter isn't all that 'progressive,' it's mostly a wonkblog, but the treatment of Franken is nevertheless highly critical. We saw the same of Harvey Weinstein, which was uncovered by 'liberal' media. 

Compare that to the right-wing media's spin of Roy Moore, or the President, or the enormous hypocrisy with which they used Weinstein to taint all liberals (completely ignoring what was going on at Fox where both the CEO Ailes as its most prominent figure O'Reilly had such sordid histories that in extremis they had to go).

[Admin]

Take this in for a moment:

Moore's defense is a conspiracy theory. He tweeted that this was a political attack by the "Obama-Clinton Machine's liberal media lapdogs." In other words, he’s claiming there is an overarching story that explains the real truth, and it has to do with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the liberal media working together to concoct evidence that he’s a pedophile. The day after Moore tweeted his defense, Fox News host Sean Hannity — the biggest star at the most influential news network in America — legitimized this claim.

Hannity hosted Moore on his radio show and allowed him to paint the allegations as a political attack. Hannity later went on his Fox News show and spent 15 minutes lecturing his viewers about why they should give Moore the benefit of the doubt, and he somehow included Bill Clinton and 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died in Baltimore police custody, in his argument. Hannity’s defense of Moore was egregious enough that some advertisers dropped their sponsorship of his show.

But looking at Hannity's history, this was hardly surprising. I analyzed the past two years of transcripts from Hannity, his Fox News program that airs every weeknight, and found a show that peddles conspiracy theories more than any other news show in the US. Hannity often mirrors the language of online conspiracy forums, and it's only gotten more frequent since Hannity's friend and fellow conspiracy theorist Donald Trump became president.

Sean Hannity has become the media’s top conspiracy theorist - Vox

The biggest star at the most influential news network in America is.... a conspiracy con artist.

[Admin]

How about this for alternative reality.. 

Despite overwhelming analysis from non-partisan tax organizations that indicate the GOP tax plan overwhelmingly benefits wealthy Americans like him, Trump dismissed that “Democratic talking point” as “garbage” and even suggested his own taxes would be higher as a result. Batiromo goes on to ask Trump, “So you don’t mind individually paying a higher tax yourself because it means a 2 percent corporate tax rate is going to have an impact on the economy move us up in terms of growth?”

What Batiromo fails to mention, however, is this plan will directly benefit wealthy heirs like Eric Trump.

Under the GOP tax framework, owners of “pass-through entities” would be able to pay a tax rate of 25 percent, instead of at their own individual rate. Republicans are selling this as a “small business tax cut” but small business owners already pay a rate of 25 percent or lower on their share of profits. This leaves room for owners of large pass-through businesses like hedge funds or one of the over five hundred pass-throughs that are owned by the Trump Organization (run by Eric Trump along with Donald Trump Jr.) to re-characterize their personal income as profit and pay a tax rate of 25 percent instead of 39.6 or 35 percent.

Fox News praises Eric Trump for welcoming higher taxes under dad’s plan. (He gets a huge tax cut.) – ThinkProgress

Trump Jr. argues that his father's tax proposals will lead them to pay higher taxes, that's as blatant a lie as possible..

[Admin]

Not good, this..

Meredith Corp., a publisher backed by GOP mega-donors Charles and David Koch, announced on Sunday it was buying Time Inc. for $1.8 billion, according to multiple reports.  The publisher said it would acquire Time's outstanding shares for $18.50 per share, Reuters reported. The two companies said the deal had been unanimously approved by their respective boards and would close sometime early next year, according to the Associated Press.

Time Inc. to be acquired by company backed by Koch brothers | TheHill

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) slammed a Koch-backed publisher's acquisition of Time Inc. on Sunday, joking that Time Magazine's next "Person of the Last & Next Century" would be libertarian and conservative icon Ayn Rand.  "Get ready for next year’s new Time Magazine feature “Person of the Last & Next Century” Ayn Rand," Boyle tweeted.

Dem lawmaker rips Time acquisition: Get ready for Ayn Rand as next 'Person of the Last & Next Century' | TheHill

[Admin]

So this is what conservatives have come to..

The Washington Post says that a woman approached the newspaper and falsely claimed that Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore impregnated her when she was a teenager — seemingly as part of an undercover operation with a conservative activist. The woman told the Post in a series of interviews that she had a sexual relationship with Moore in 1992, became pregnant and had an abortion at Moore's urging when she was 15.

Post reporters questioned the woman about inconsistencies in her story and found a GoFundMe.com campaign under her name that said the person “had accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.” The woman also asked reporters if her story would cause Moore to lose the special election. She repeatedly denied to the Post that she was working with any groups targeting the media.

Post reporters saw the woman entering the New York offices of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses undercover operations to target the media and left-leaning organizations. Her car was reportedly in the parking lot of the offices for more than an hour. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe declined to talk to the Post about the claims.

WaPo accuses conservative activists of pushing fake Moore allegations | TheHill

It went a little different than Veritas had planned..

On Monday afternoon, James O'Keefe, Project Veritas' founder, defended the group by launching a series of attacks against The Post. "Hitting export on hidden camera footage into Washington Post shortly," O'Keefe wrote on Twitter. "Project Veritas vs Bezos 100mm monopoly. Fasten your seat belts." O'Keefe reportedly put out another statement Monday, in which he appeared to confirm that the organization attempted to swindle the Post: "Following months of undercover work within The Washington Post, our investigative journalist embedded within the publication had their cover blown."

Conservative operative tried to embarrass The Washington Post with fake Roy Moore story - Business Insider

Yea, your cover blown and you are exposed as the liar, not the fake media. Their DD turns out to be a little more rigorous than you bargained for..