Trump’s Dangerous Attack on “Fake” News

CNN home page Feb. 25--after CNN was excluded from White House briefing.

Shouts of adulation greeted President Trump’s strange CPAC speech Friday, a speech that chillingly included his continued assault on what he calls “fake” news.

And then, the same day, the White House excluded certain news outlets from a daily briefing. The excluded outlets included The New York Times, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and POLITICO.

In his Friday speech, Trump in one breath mocked the media for worrying about the fate of the First Amendment—which he said nobody loves more than himself—and then says use of anonymous sources should “not be allowed.”

Trump can’t seem to understand himself. It’s true that many past presidents awarded favorable news coverage with media access, and excluded unfavorable outlets. It’s also true that the Obama administration had a bad reputation for secrecy and pursuing leaks. But Trump’s call for specific practices to be “not allowed” or calling some of the most mainstream news sources “enemies” goes beyond anything I’ve seen before.

It’s chilling. It’s un-American, to quote CNN's Jake Tapper  (although he was talking about the White House exclusion and not the CPAC speech--but I think the same thinking applies). It’s dangerous to democracy.

And it comes from a President who himself can’t tell fact from fiction. Fact check sites lit up like Christmas trees trying to chase after the strange falsehoods in the Friday speech of the President who decries “fake” news.

Among the fake lines in President Trump’s speech:

• He claimed the media dropped the word “fake” from reports about his tweet attack last week, in which he said “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBC, @ABC, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” News reports in all of those outlets quoted the President’s bizarre rant in its entirety, so the supposed exclusion of “fake” was itself fake.

• He claimed he got “many” votes from Bernie Sanders supporters. Well, I supposed that depends on how you define “many,” there certainly were Sanders supporters who voted for Trump, but The New York Times reported that number appeared to range from 3 percent to 13 percent (the variance is because the only data on this point comes from polls, and those with third party candidates included had dramatically different results). It’s a stretch to call that “many.” And since Trump doesn’t believe polls and polls are the only data on this point—where can his information possibly come from?

• He claimed the polls all got the election wrong. In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, as polls predicted. Three key states swung Trump’s way and gave him a narrow Electoral College victory, but that hardly de-legitimizes all polls. And Trump has continued to lie about the elections results, falsely blaming his vote loss on cheating, and staking claim to some grand Electoral College mandate that doesn’t exist outside of his imagination.

• He said the Affordable Care Act took healthcare away from people. Most estimates are that about 20 million Americans gained coverage due to the ACA. Some people did lose their previous plans, but the number of insured American grew dramatically—the uninsured rate dropped to a historic low under the law.

I checked PolitiFact.com, the Washington Post’s fact check site and the New York Times fact check story on Trump’s speech. All had similar long lists of Trump lies. The list of lies above comes mostly from the Times.

You could ignore the list because you think it comes from the “fake” news media. But that means that you’re buying into a delusional and false world view represented by the current liar-in-chief.

Look, I would not claim there is not bias in the media. Certainly, as a group, people who work at large metropolitan media outlets are more liberal than the country as a whole—but that has a lot to do with an education bias. More educated people, as a group, are more liberal than the population as a whole. And journalism as a profession, for various cultural reasons, has always attracted many people with a liberal bent.

But political bias isn’t not the same as “fake.” Unlike Trump, the New York Times takes great effort to verify the facts it reports.

I think it’s OK to worry about political bias in the media, but to me, the greater problem is fact bias among the public. Too many tune out because they're convinced the media lie, especially when that's the consistent message from the Trump camp.

But, Trump—most of us know you lie. Pretty much whenever your lips are moving. And you’ve embarked on a dangerous path—a road that doesn’t lead to democracy, but that is tinged with authoritarianism. The “fake” media are free under the First Amendment, because the founders believed an independent press was necessary for a democracy.

And you don’t seem to get it.

We salute with pride the same American flag. That flag stands for freedom. Your petulant lying attacks on media that you don’t like because they report unpleasant truths about your failing administration do not promote that freedom, but run counter to it.

Sure, your lies are protected the same First Amendment, but all of us have a right to call you on them, too. In my heart, I believe that the flag waves for honest journalists who won’t be intimidated by you.

Some New Student Blog Posts Of Note

Do I have to try Tumblr now? I teach several writing courses in which I require students to maintain personal blogs.

My rationale is that someone who aspires to be a professional communicator needs to be comfortable with sharing personal insights on a regular basis—and blogging is an overt way to publicly do that and also get used to the idea of regularly performing the art of writing before the world.

Blogging exposes the young writer to the possibility of abuse, unfortunately—the internet can be a harsh place—but also the possibility of unexpected success.

In my class, most students gravitated to blogger, although one young woman set her flag into the island of Tumblr. She didn’t exactly claim it as her own, but I guess she did stake out a little territory in that new land.

I’ll be watching with interest to see what develops in the blogosphere. In the meantime, her are just a few of what I consider to be the top student posts:

• “An insight of mine” has a somewhat awkward title, but I found the post to be very engaging and interesting. I don’t know if this blogger will maintain this interesting voice of writing nonfiction like it was short story fiction, but we’ll see. The post is clearly heartfelt, and I like it because of that.
• There is a very different tone in this post. The video was indeed interesting, and the student takes on a trip with her. I encourage students to make their blogs visually interesting, and this one example.
• So is this. The rule of cocktail party etiquette is that, when making chitchat with strangers, you don’t discuss politics or religion. This post on this visually interesting blog is a two-fer—it right away violates both of the cocktail party rules. But it’s such clear and direct writing, we’ll take it.

Other students had interesting blog posts, too, and I’ll try to feature more as the semester goes on.  Keep on writing, students. I anxiously await what you come up with.

Is It Safe to be Back on the Grid?

Not sure how to use this thing. I need my 5-year-old granddaughter to visit.

 More than a year ago, we cancelled our cable TV.

The first-year price deal was gone, and the rate hikes were pretty bad. The TV provider also provided our land-line phone and internet service—and we decided that: A) Even old people don’t need land lines and B) Why are we paying that much for internet service when other providers are less expensive?

So, we bid Mediacom farewell, and, frankly, after the breakup we haven’t missed our ex at all.

But our new internet service provider changed rates for the new year, again after that first honeymoon year was over. Fortunately, they didn’t jack up the rates so badly that we were going to shop around again—and, oddly, the price change included an unexpected deal.

For X a month, you can access Facebook and WordPress and Blogger. For X plus $5 a month, you can also add DIRECTV.

Well, OK. In the past, again when the cable era was ending, we had thought about various satellite options—but we have a jungle to our south. Our yard includes mature oaks, a giant maple tree near the house and a young tulip poplar that is already rivaling it’s much older arbor competitors in height.

My wife pays the bills and texted me about the TV offer. I replied that I thought it was a good price, but I wondered if we would be able to have a dish installed given the treescape.

She said the person she spoke with at DIRECTV said it should not be a problem. I wondered if that were true, but said “OK.”

So today, the Satellite Guy showed up. “Do you have a dish?” he asked. “No,” I said. “OK,” he said, and then we wandered into the backyard. And he looked up and looked a little discouraged.

“Those are some big trees,” he said.

But then he went into the front yard and figured out that at the extreme northwestern edge of our roof, there is a tiny window of open southern sky, apparently allowing the satellite signal through. And so, DIRECTV has been installed.

Up in the sky! Neither bird nor plane. Dish.

Just in time.

What an odd media week this was. I am struggling, a bit, with what to write about for my Corridor Business Journal media column this weekend—it’s supposed to be about local media, but honestly, my thoughts and attention have been mostly national.

The week included Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes, and some of the predictable right-wing reaction that “you Hollywood leftists should entertain us and shut up about politics.” That reaction has a bit of a point, because I agree entertainers often speak out politically in ways that feel childish or trite, but Streep wasn’t talking about policy so much as she was taking Trump to task for being, publicly, an appalling communicator—in short, she was speaking in her area of expertise. And, even if she supported Clinton, on this particular subject she was spot on.

Next this week came Obama’s farewell address. It was a little weird, staged as it was in a big Chicago venue—it harkens back to the kind of rally that POTUS held in 2008 when he was first running to be elected. I think he was smart in a way to go with that kind of place because it’s where he is at his best—somehow, playing to a large crowd relaxes him and helps him break out of his often too-stiff persona. It was a powerful, thoughtful speech, and he made some important points about media. We indeed are seeing our democracy threatened by competing media walled gardens that have subdivided the marketplace of ideas.

Wow. It was only Tuesday. And the POTUS-elect hadn’t even yet had his press conference.

And then Trump did. It was awful. I’m not trying to make a political point here—but his demeanor, arrogance, the way in which the press was crowded into his lobby and berated by his own supporters—it may have been effective, it probably did inspire his insipid storm troopers, but it was truly horrible. It was authentic Trump in his repulsive splendor. It was almost heartbreaking to compare the grace and class of President Obama speaking with the petulance and bullying of President-elect Trump.

I mean, really. I felt myself ready to hurl at my computer a couple of times. Trump says he could run his business and be president, and he is the only person who could? It seems he can’t he go on for more than a few inarticulate sentences without spouting shameless nonsense.

And his defense of the obscene behavior he was alleged to have engaged in while in Moscow? That “there are cameras everywhere.” And he doesn’t like germs. His denial was weird and left me wondering how he acts when he thinks that there aren’t cameras around (yeah, I know, we’ve already had some evidence on this point). Even when Trump is correct—and I am not going to defend Buzzfeed for what they released—he can’t help but also be awful.

Well, I viewed the very Putinesque press conference online, not on TV. Streep I caught on YouTube. And the POTUS speech I watched on TV at the gym.

Now, I could watch them all at home on the big screen.

I must admit it’s a bit too easy to curb my enthusiasm. One week before Trump takes office, and I’m ready to view the new post-democracy era in America in HD TV in my own basement.

Yippee.

I Unexpectedly Place in Media Photo Contest

Fourth place photo in one category of a Cedar Lake photo contest. The three photos that did better were, as I recall, all sunset images. Cedar Lake is a great place to shoot sunsets!

Well, it was fourth place, but still. The “Friends of Cedar Lake,” a group that is working to develop a local industrial pond—a swampy area that was used as cooling water for a now closed power plant—into more of a local park and attraction cooperated with The Gazette, the Cedar Rapids newspaper, to run a photo contest of the lake this fall.

There were different categories, such as “wildlife” and “people.” I won fourth place in one of the categories—scenery, or something like it—for an image I made of afternoon clouds reflected in the lake.

I like Cedar Lake, I bike around it often since the most prominent local bicycle trail goes there, and I wish the local lake friends group all the best in its efforts to promote that body of water.

My entry in the photo contest was almost entirely by accident. On this very cold day in winter, it’s interesting to remember back to the extraordinarily warm fall we had. On Sunday, Oct. 30, Mount Mercy University had its “Halloween on the Hill” event, and it was also a production weekend for the “Mount Mercy Times” student newspaper.

I am the advisor to the Times, and so I was headed to campus a bit early that day (the Halloween event was to begin at 5, I think, I and was going to work for a couple of hours at the paper before it). Anyway, because I anticipated taking photographs of my grandchildren at a big party, I was carrying my Nikon camera with my on my bicycle ride. And because the day was so extraordinarily sunny and warm for that time of year in Iowa, I rode the Cedar River Trail down to Cedar Lake at about 3 in the afternoon, and shot some photos while I was there.

Then, after Halloween on the Hill and after more work at the MMU paper, I got home a bit late, but was glancing through the Sunday Gazette. I don’t recall the section it was in, but the paper had an announcement of the lake photo contest, which it was sponsoring along with the Friends of Cedar Lake.

Well, as chance would have it, I luckily had some nice images I had taken with my nice camera, which I rarely have with me when I ride my bicycle by Cedar Lake, so I figured, what the heck? I went online and entered a few photos—five, I think, since I have a folder on my PC desktop labeled “Cedar Lake” with five images in it.

I had shot the images in late October and entered them in the contest the following week, Nov. 1 or 2 or so. And weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything, so I figured I hadn’t won. I am happy to report I was wrong in that assumption.

I remained in ignorance of the contest results until my wife, who skims the weekly “Milestones” section in the Sunday Gazette, saw an image I shot printed in the Jan. 1 edition of the paper.

Well, cool, I guess. Although it might be nice to let a photographer know when he has won a minor bit of recognition. The Friends of Cedar Lake stated on a Facebook post that 50 photographers had submitted images, so I guess fourth place finish is OK.

The day I shot the images at the lake, I wrote this post for by bike blog. As you can see, I was pretty photo happy that day—sun drunk, I suppose. We don’t often have butterflies and bees on the day before Halloween in Iowa.

Well, seeing my picture in The Gazette was an interesting way to start 2017—an unexpected appearance in media. Here are the other images I submitted to the contest, by the way:

 

What Will Media Mean in 2017?

Mainstream media took it on the chin in 2016, condemned from the right for not respecting Donald Trump and from the left for respecting Donald Trump.

It feels a bit like we’re in a fact-free social media universe, and pointing out that the emperor has no clothes or the new President has no clue is not a way to win hearts and minds these days. If anything, as a culture we’re too heart oriented anyway, with feelings easily trumping facts.

Well, I’m not sure what the New Year will bring. Frankly, it was a mystery to me that anybody ever paid any attention to Breitbart News in the wake of the 2010 Shirley Sherrod scandal. Then again, that was six years ago in another time and place, a country BT (before Trump) when quaint things called “facts” were sometimes shared and understood.

So, good riddance to 2016, year of the “fake news.” Let’s hope you were some kind of nadir, because if we’ve not hit bottom yet, I’m not sure I want to experience how low we can go. Then again, it remains to be seen what four years of a presidency dominated by an ignorant narcissist with low regard for facts and little knowledge of the First Amendment will do.

Anyway, while the national mainstream media are in full post core meltdown mode, there are changes that are important, if less momentous on the local level.

I wrote about changes in local media for my column in the Corridor Business Journal.

Since that November column, it’s been revealed that two mainstays of journalism at The Gazette are retiring—George C. Ford, a business writer; and Orlan Love, who covers the outdoors and environmental issues.

The Gazette had interesting stories about both. It’s business editor wrote this about Ford. A former metro editor wrote a very nice guest column about Love.

Monarch this summer at Cedar Lake. My photo.

Love is more prominent in my mind, although, I admit, that’s partly because I’m more of an environmentally aware gardener than a business aware person. I actually sought out Love’s stories in the local newspaper. I enjoyed his insights. Although he is a hunter and a fisher—two things I am not—as a gardener and bicyclist, I still enjoyed his outdoor adventures.

This year, I wanted to start an effort to plant milkweed at the university where I teach. Nothing has come of that effort yet, but I plan to pursue it next year. Anyway, I wrote about the idea on my gardening blog, and referenced a story by Love in that post.

Love received what seems to me to be one of the most meaningful legacies a reporter could hope for. A donor in summer announced that a $200,000 donation will be made to create a pollinator habitat in his honor, as reported in this Gazette story. It's not exactly a Pulitzer Prize, but still--it's an entirely appropriate ongoing remembrance of an important local writer.

So, there have been a number of media changes in 2016. I hope that 2017 doesn’t stack up to be too similar a year. Journalists have a duty to try to persevere through adversity and to serve the truth. These are not easy times for that effort. But may it carry on.

Bring a Hankie for These Blog Posts

That's a big hankie. My picture from 2010--was it really 6 years ago? Mount Mercy College had just become Mount Mercy University. And today, I'm pretty proud of my MMU writing students. Keep your blogs going, students ....

OK, that headline is a bit tongue in cheek, but still …

There are several writing classes that I teach at Mount Mercy University were I require students to maintain personal, public blogs. It’s partly because these are classes that attempt to teach professional writing skills, and professional writers need to be used to the idea that their writing is public performance. Of course, the downside of blogging is that it doesn’t teach another key point—that if you are a professional writer, you have a right to be paid for your work, but that’s a rant for another place and time, especially since I’m writing this as a blog post for free.

The blog assignment also serves to introduce students to the genre of blog writing. Doing multiple types of writing in different voices and genres is something media pros must be comfortable with—and, these days, students have to get used to thinking about their personal online “face” or media “brand”  to the world, too.

Anyway, I’ve given this assignment for several years. Many semesters, it feels like students resist and resent the blog assignment. It seems to be that something  different happened this semester.

I don’t’ know if the students who started personal blogs plan to continue them, although I hope they do. I check the blogs on a two-week rotation, and I just finished a two-week cycle.

And, well, wow. There is lots of good writing here. Writing that shows my students have the chops to be media communication pros if they keep at it. And writing that stands on its own, that’s just good to read.

Here are some examples of what was a very good recent cycle of blog writing:

• If had fairy dust: “Race: The Factor.” A half Black, half White student writes movingly about her racial identity and what it means. “Almost any time I meet someone, I get the famous question ‘Well what are you?’” I suppose homo sapiens is really the correct answer. To quote the font of all knowledge (Wikipedia): “Homo sapiens is the binomial nomenclature for the only extant human species.” And in biological terms, it wasn’t all that long ago that all of us emigrated from Africa, a fact we sometimes seem to want to forget. Anyway, please read this post. It helped me as a middle-aged White man see the world a little bit through a different lens.

• My life, My life, My life: “#JusticeforDanky.”  “Danky” is the nickname for an African American young man who was shot by police in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. My student writes movingly on what this case means and how she honestly feels about it. It’s a sad situation that is still unfolding, and I join her in hoping it doesn’t tear our town apart.

Well, there you have two posts on the rather heavy topic of race in America. I’ve been hoping for a sports theme for the next Fall Faculty Series, but maybe race needs more attention now in a semester-long conversation.

And, as they say in only the best quality “as seen on TV” ads: But wait, there’s more. Race wasn’t the only topic that prompted deep thoughts and good writing on recent student blog posts:

• IowaMatt: “Transcending Baseball.” I’m not personally a baseball fan, but I like his insight into the World Series this year from the point of view of a Cubs fan. Sure, he’s happy—but he’s thinking we all need uplifting, and I think he’s right.
• Courtney K. Snodgrass, Most days, I write: “The First Novel.” May she get to revising it so we can experience her finished product. Anyway, what does it really take to be a writer? It’s something this blogger considers.
• One of These Snow Days: “True Heroism.” This student makes me want to see a Mel Gibson movie, which is no small feat. Then again, given that my daddy served in the ETO in WWII, I guess I’m a sucker for a WWII story.
• Life As Kaylee Rae: “I Am Who I Am Because …” She has a positive take on small-town Iowa life, and I would want her to explore the downside, too, but if you ever wondered why people love “fly over” country, this is a good post to read. It’s only Iowa, it’s not Heaven, but there is much to love about Iowa life.

That seems like a high note to end on. There were other good blog posts in this cycle, too—interesting reviews of recent Netflix series, a track athlete’s rumination on the end of the season, a food review that made me a little hungry—but you’ll have to click the links and see what you think.

And it only seems appropriate that I promote my own blogs here, too. Check out some fall photos on my bike blog, or see my wrap-up of the 2016 Fall Faculty Series at MMU on my general blog.

I do hope that my students keep writing. They have worthwhile things to say.Check out their posts and leave them some comments--show them someone is reading!

Trump v Hamilton—Who Looks ‘Overrated?’

Anybody who knows me knows I’m not a fan of Donald Trump.

In fact, the president-elect has made almost uniformly abysmal choices for his new administration so far, and I’m not expecting a great four years. It took President Bush 8 years to bring the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse—I’m just hoping Trump isn’t such a “great” leader he can pull that trick off before mid-term elections, but I’m not betting.

Here’s hoping that there are no wars started during President Trump’s term.

So it may come as a surprise that I partly agree with The Donald, in that I think the cast of “Hamilton” went over a line. When Mike Pence, the vice-president-elect, attended the theater Friday night, he was a patron, a member of the audience. The play should speak for itself, and any statement a cast member or cast members wants to make should have been saved for another time—a public note to Pence thanking him for coming and expressing the fears that many Americans have, for example.

Still, the statement that was read in the theater after the play was a pretty tame affair. “We hope this show has inspired you to work on behalf of all of us.” As rude behavior goes, this was about as mild and polite as behavior can be. And it happened after the show was over, so it didn’t spoil anything for Mike Pence.

Indeed, Pence himself has been pretty mild about the kerfuffle. Not so Pence’s boss, the soon to be POTUS. He soon began unleashing his inner Tweets: “Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing. This should not happen!”

OK, I also found what the cast did mildly irritating, possibly bordering on rude, but “harassed?”

Trump was not done—in subsequent Tweets he said the theater must be a “safe and special place.” How, again, was it not safe or special? And then Trump started to give his thumbnail review, saying “Hamilton” is “overrated.” He also stated, in a Tweet that was deleted, that the cast didn’t memorize it’s lines (because Brandon Victor Dixon read the statement?).

The whole sequence of Tweets is disturbing on multiple levels. One is that I’m blogging about it, pretty much in the same news cycle when Trump settled a fraud lawsuit for $25 million (the next president of the U.S. is a shoddy, shady business person who runs fraudulent enterprises) and the other weekend dustup was the reaction to Sen. John McCain saying that torture can’t be authorized by President Trump because it’s not legal, while Pence says, however, it can.

Trump U and torture are much worse and more dangerous than being booed by a Broadway audience.

A POTUS has to recognize that many people, Broadway actors included, are going to say all kinds of things—some true, some less true, some fair, many unfair—about him or her. And that’s OK. It’s the nature of the beast. Besides freedom of speech, the First Amendment specifies we can “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Sadly, I think, given the mercurial character of the new POTUS, there will be a lot of grievances in the next four years.

When a president or president-elect wants to answer back, he or she can use the bully pulpit to make a point loudly and clearly. But Trump didn’t just call out the cast of “Hamilton,” he demanded an apology. Future POTUS, you can’t do that. Well, you can, but it makes you look churlish and small. And it makes you look like you oppose the people’s right to discuss you and your administration in open and often rough terms.

And didn’t someone send Trump the memo about what a VP is for? A VP is supposed to be the attack dog, and the POTUS is nice cop, in a normal administration. Yes, yes, I know, whatever the Trump administration will be, it certainly will be abnormal.

A CNN writer said that the “Hamilton” controversy is Trump’s “dead cat.” That is, it is a diversion from other issues. Maybe it is.

But in any case, Trump’s White House staff has a tough job: Find and hide the smart phone from the the crazy man with the orange hair—the petulant toddler who also has nuclear codes. Man. It’ll be a long four years.

That is, unless Trump manages to get himself impeached before then. Maybe he’s up to that. Communicating like a president? At that, Trump certainly is already overrated.