Vox: "Eleven House Republicans — Ron DeSantis, Andy Biggs, Dave Brat, Jeff Duncan, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Jody Hice, Todd Rokita, Claudia Tenney, and Ted Yoho — have signed a joint letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling for the criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton and a variety of other Obama administration appointees, career FBI officials, and even Trump appointee Dana Boente, who is currently the FBI’s general counsel."
Two things:
• Remember when President Obama refused to prosecute Bush-era torture suspects because he wanted the country to move forward? Republicans apparently don't, or don't care.
• One nice thing about Republican administrations is that the GOP jeremiad against Hillary Clinton used to take a few months off now and again. When she ran against Obama in 2008 there were even some "strange new respect" noises from the right. Those days are over. The jeremiad is eternal now. And why not? It keeps attention off what ... the Republican administration is doing.
The city of Memphis could lose a quarter-million dollars as punishment for removing statues of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis last year.
The Tennessee House of Representatives voted Tuesday to strip the money from next year's state budget. The sum had been earmarked to go toward planning for Memphis' bicentennial celebrations next year.
A key thing to understand here: Memphis is 63 percent black. Tennessee is 83 percent white.
What you have here is a white state punishing a black city for not honoring the heroes of racism. Disgusting.
Two stories in the New York Times this morning highlight a problem with the Trump presidency.
Actually, it's two problems, but they're related. The first is that no one but President Trump reliably speaks for President Trump.
President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.
The rift erupted into open conflict on Tuesday when a White House official blamed Ms. Haley’s statement about sanctions on “momentary confusion.” That prompted her to fire back, saying that she did not “get confused.” The public disagreement embarrassed Ms. Haley and reinforced questions about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy — and who speaks for his administration.
The second: Not even President Trump reliably speaks for President Trump:
After publicly flirting last week with having the United States rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Trump appeared to rebuff the idea once and for all late Tuesday.
In a Twitter post at 10:49 p.m., Mr. Trump said that although Japan and South Korea would like the United States to join the 11 other nations in the multilateral trade agreement, he had no intention of doing so. The decision put an apparent end to a meandering trade policy in which Mr. Trump pulled out of the deal in his first week in office, before suggesting last week that he was having second thoughts.
President Trump's statements are like the weather: If you don't like them, wait five minutes. Somebody will surely argue that this is a smart way of being president — keep everybody off guard — but it isn't. "Mercurial" is interesting in TV show characters, maybe. It's bad governance.
Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.
The problem, though, isn't Sinclair-owned stations. The problem is this: TV news, for the most part, isn't news.
I spent part of my career in a combine TV-print newsroom, so I've produced my share of packages and short readers. The station I worked for was an exception to this rule — which, I suspect, is part of why that station no longer has a newscast.
They say politics is show business for ugly people. Well: TV news is show business for pretty people who can't act or sing.
How you can tell this is true at the national level: If cable news was news, you'd see a lot more taped pieces telling stories and explaining stories than you do. Instead, what you get is panel after panel debating the headlines and screaming about them. Check out this NYTMag story from last year for a detailed look at how making CNN isn't really any different from producing sports - which is entertainment - or, ahem, "The Apprentice."
It's different at the local level, but there's still a problem. It's long been understood that TV news focuses on crime and disaster to the exclusion of other types of news stories — "if it bleeds it leads" — and thus presents its audience with a distorted view of their communities. And they do it because it's easy:
Violent crimes such as murders, robberies, and
rapes are newsworthy because of identifiable elements. These elements are ideal for the art of story
telling: definable events between individuals are concrete rather than abstract; dramatic, conflict-filled
and intense stories are seen as interesting; crime is seen as disrupting order and threatening the
community; TV news emphasizes short, simple and verifiable stories; and crime is visual and may be
easily videotaped.
Newspapers cover crime, too. But they also cover City Hall and the Planning Commission and those stories that require some level of expertise to tell and explain — stuff that's important to the community but lacking the show-biz drama or surveillance video of a robbery.
The recent assent of Sinclair changes the dynamic: Now local news doesn't even matter at a number of local stations. They're being Fox News-ified, turned into right-wing propaganda mills. That's ... not local news.
There are exceptions to all of this, of course. And when news is breaking - the kind of stuff that has good video - TV news is a good place to in the first formative moments.
After that? There's a reason Dan Rather explained a complicated story by asking viewers to read a newspaper the next day. The problem? They probably didn't. We're a nation of people who think they're in the know, but aren't. TV news is part of the problem.
