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Sieg Heil, mein fuhrer Trump! Sieg Heil!!

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Author Topic: Sieg Heil, mein fuhrer Trump! Sieg Heil!!  (Read 494 times)
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« on: February 27, 2017, 01:08:02 pm »






from The Washington Post....

Trump called the news media an ‘enemy of the American People’.
Here's a history of the term.


Once, it was used to describe bad leaders. Not anymore.

By AMANDA ERICKSON | 3:44PM EST - Saturday, February 18, 2017

Reporters raise their hands at President Trump's news conference on February 16th. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
Reporters raise their hands at President Trump's news conference on February 16th.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


PRESIDENT TRUMP is not known for his subtlety. But even by this standard, his tweet on Friday night was extreme. Trump called the news media “the enemy of the American People”.



The New York Times, which among others was called out specifically, labeled it “a striking escalation” from a leader who “routinely castigates journalists.”

Gabriel Sherman, national affairs editor at New York magazine, described it as “full-on dictator speak.”

They're not being pedantic.

Enemy of the people is a phrase “typically used by leaders to refer to hostile foreign governments or subversive organizations,” The New York Times wrote. “It also echoed the language of autocrats who seek to minimize dissent.”

Where did the expression come from? In its original incarnation, enemy of the people wasn't code for “enemy of my regime.” In one of its earliest uses, the phrase was used to describe a leader himself — Nero. The Roman ruler was a disastrous emperor, and a careless one to boot. As his country fell into ruin, strained by construction costs and a massive devaluation of the imperial currency, Nero vacationed in Greece. He enjoyed musical performances and theater. He took a chariot to some Olympic Games. He considered whether to build a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth.

When he got back home, the political class was angry. And he didn't do himself any favors by ignoring a revolt in Gaul. The Senate grew so infuriated that they declared Nero an enemy of the people and drew up plans for his arrest and execution. Nero took his own life after a failed attempt to flee.

The term fell out of fashion among the political class, though it popped up in literature and art. Most famously, Henrik Ibsen wrote an 1882 play called “An Enemy of the People”. It features a doctor who's almost run out of town because of an article he's written bashing the government. The idea came to Ibsen after his own brush with infamy — his play “Ghosts” challenged the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, and was deemed indecent.

Adolf Hitler was allegedly an Ibsen fan. (Some historians say they believe that he read the plays as prophecy of the Third Reich.) He reportedly read “An Enemy of the People” closely, even weaving some key lines into speeches. His administration deployed this rhetoric to describe Hitler's main enemy: the Jews. “Each Jew is a sworn enemy of the German people,” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1941. “… If someone wears the Jewish star, he is an enemy of the people. Anyone who deals with him is the same as a Jew and must be treated accordingly. He earns the contempt of the entire people, for he is a craven coward who leaves them in the lurch to stand by the enemy.”

Around the same time, leaders of the Soviet Union were transforming enemy of the people into a major tool for oppression and silencing enemies. Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Bolsheviks, used “the peoples' enemies” as a label to stigmatize anyone who didn't fall into line when the revolution happened. Enemies of the people were ostracized and even their friends were under suspicion.

For foes of Joseph Stalin, being branded an enemy of the people was a death sentence. The Soviet leader deployed that language against politicians and artists he didn't like. Once branded, the accused were sent to labor camps or killed. Best case? An enemy would be denied education and employment. “It is one of the most controversial phrases in Soviet history,” Mitchell Orenstein, professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told Voice of America.

“For both Lenin and Stalin, journalists and intellectuals who didn't share their point of view were among the most hated enemies,” University of Washington professor Serhiy Yekelchyk told VOA. “In attacking them, both appealed to the people.”

Chinese dictator Mao Zedong deployed the phrase against people critical of his policies and dictates. The leader, who created a famine that killed 36 million Chinese, was obsessed with identifying and rooting out his enemies. As Zhengyuan Fu explained in Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics, every member of Chinese society, even children, were called on to root out the landlords, teachers, intellectuals and artists who opposed Mao. He wrote:

Members of society are divided into two major categories: the people and the class enemy. People describes the in-group, within which are workers, poor and lower-middle-class peasants, soldiers and cadres. The class enemies of the people refers to the out group … a highly arbitrarily assigned group whose members are defined by the party state.

While the
people are described in terms of warmth, friendliness, candor, courage, and everything that is good, the class enemies are depicted as cruel, cunning, morally degrading, always scheming, and evil, Fu writes. In the enemies camp were who often were imprisoned.

Today, enemy of the people is still deployed. But mostly, you hear it from dictators. (Heads of former Soviet countries are particularly fond of the construction. Old dog, new tricks, etc.) It's never before been uttered by the leader of the free world. One more way in which Trump's presidency truly is unprecedented in U.S. history.




• Amanda Erickson writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Previously, she worked as an editor for Outlook and PostEverything.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • Trump calls the media ‘the enemy of the American People’

 • Memo to Donald Trump: Thomas Jefferson invented hating the media

 • That's how dictators get started: McCain criticizes Trump for calling media ‘the enemy’

 • Trump attempts a reset with a rally, new staff and a renewed fight with the media

 • VIDEO: Trump attacks ‘very fake news’

 • VIDEO:Trump — Media is ‘out of control’ with dishonesty


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/18/trump-called-the-news-media-an-enemy-of-the-american-people-heres-a-history-of-the-term



from The Washington Post....

Could reporters be hunted down if Trump goes after leakers?

Some lawyers and academics say it's unlikely that journalists would be included
in a crackdown on leaks. But there's not much that's normal about this era.


By MARGARET SULLIVAN | 4:00PM EST - Sunday, February 19, 2017

President Trump points to a reporter as he takes questions during a lengthy news conference on Thursday in which he scolded journalists for publishing alleged “fake news”. — Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.
President Trump points to a reporter as he takes questions during a lengthy news conference on Thursday in which he scolded
journalists for publishing alleged “fake news”. — Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.


FOR THOSE who care about press rights in America, President Trump's words last week were stunning and disturbing.

The news media is not merely “scum,” as he has said many times before, but now “the enemy of the American People.”

This tweeted pronouncement, with its authoritarian echoes, came soon after Trump's vow to stamp out the unauthorized flow of intelligence-community information to journalists. “I've actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” he said. “Those are criminal leaks.”

Add up these two elements and you get a troubling question: Will the Trump administration's crackdown on leaks include journalists as well as their sources?

Some knowledgeable lawyers and academics say it's unlikely.

“Right now, it's a deviant practice, certainly not in the ordinary course of business, to subpoena a journalist,” said David Pozen, a Columbia University law professor who wrote the landmark study The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information”.

But, Pozen told me: “If we're in a new paradigm, that could change.”

That such things are changing already was evident in Trump's statement, quoted above, about making an assignment for Justice Department officials — who, after all, are supposed to operate with a measure of independence, choosing their own cases, not as corporate functionaries reporting to the chief executive.

As for a new paradigm, it — or something else quite weird — was on full display in that news conference in which Trump hardly stopped attacking the assembled news media. That surreal 75 minutes included mind-spinning contradictions about real leaks somehow creating “fake news.”

But wait, you might say. Why should journalists be treated any differently from any other citizens? Why shouldn't they testify about their sources or even be prosecuted themselves when information obtained illegally is published?

Well, because the democracy is built on their ability to serve as a check on government power. They need to be able to do their watchdog job unfettered, and to tell citizens at least some of what their government is doing in secret. A crucial part of that is the ability to promise confidentiality to sources.

Oddly enough, if the Trump administration goes down the dangerous road of eroding those freedoms, it's the Obama administration that will have set those wheels in motion. Nine times during the past eight years, the Justice Department used the once-obscure Espionage Act to prosecute leakers — three times the usage of any other administration since the law was enacted 100 years ago.

And reporters were drawn into the fray.

Investigative reporter James Risen of The New York Times faced the very real possibility of jail time for protecting a confidential source during the leak investigation of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer. More extreme still was the Justice Department's naming of another Washington journalist, James Rosen of Fox News, as a criminal co-conspirator in a different leak case, thus allowing the government to track his phone calls, emails and trips to the State Department.

And it was partly because of the strong criticism of these efforts — both of which eventually were dropped — that new Justice Department guidelines were agreed upon. Then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. eventually said publicly that he never wanted a journalist go to jail for doing his work. But the blueprint was there.

One of the recent guidelines calls for the attorney general himself to sign off before a reporter is subpoenaed. That sounds like a formidable obstacle, but in his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Jeff Sessions ducked the question of what he would do.

You might think the First Amendment would protect journalists from getting drawn into court. After all, cases that rely on the First Amendment, especially one related to the Pentagon Papers, prohibit the government from “prior restraint” of publication.

But when it comes to the so-called “reporter’s privilege,” case law is notoriously shaky, and Justice Department guidelines enacted in recent years are well-intentioned but toothless.

“The protections are normative, not legal,” said Susan Hennessey, managing editor of the Lawfare blog and a former National Security Agency attorney.

And folks, we don't live in Normal Town any more.

Separately, congressional efforts to enact a federal “shield law” — like those in many states — have seemed promising, but gone nowhere. (Vice President Pence was an advocate for one when he was a congressman.)

Instead, journalists remain dependent on something far less certain: what former deputy attorney general James M. Cole (referring to the Justice Department guidelines that he helped develop) called a “shadow shield law.”

Trump, meanwhile, has seen the enemy. And it is, well, us.

His media attacks apparently signal strength and resolve to his core supporters. Make no mistake: This is a calculated move on his part — and, politically, a proven winner.

Will he or his advisers take the next logical step against “the opposition party,” as they call journalists, and pull them into damaging court battles?

If so, a “shadow shield law” sounds like pretty flimsy protection.


• Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post's media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein: Trump's attacks on the press ‘more treacherous’ than Nixon's

 • Priebus said Trump meant it when he called the press ‘the enemy of the American people’

 • VIDEO: Priebus, McCain react after Trump calls media ‘enemy of the American People”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/could-reporters-be-hunted-down-if-trump-goes-after-leakers/2017/02/18/a0b86f9e-f466-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2017, 01:10:32 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

EDITORIAL: Trump's White House press office
just put up a velvet rope in front of the media


By The LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD | 3:50PM PST - Friday, February 24, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer speaks during a daily press briefing at the White House in Washington on February 23rd. — Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer speaks during a daily press briefing at the White House in Washington on February 23rd.
 — Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press.


BY excluding a number of the country's largest news outlets from the day's official White House briefing in favor of friendlier media, Trump administration spokesman Sean Spicer ratcheted up the White House's war on the free press during Friday to a new level. We obviously have a personal stake in this issue — the Los Angeles Times was one of the outlets blackballed, along with CNN, Politico, The New York Times and the BBC — but the episode ought to disturb anyone who believes presidents should be thick-skinned enough to be held accountable by skeptical journalists.

On the one hand, the excluded reporters might feel relieved at having a day off from Spicer's usual stream of counterfactual spin. This is, after all, the press secretary who began his tenure on a Chico Marx note, telling reporters not to believe what they saw at the inauguration with their own eyes and instead accept the administration's grossly exaggerated attendance estimates.

The session on Friday was less formal one — a “gaggle” in Washington-speak — and it was attended by broadcast and print “pool” reporters whose job was to take notes on behalf of everyone not in the room. And the White House argues that by opening the room to a few extra reporters, it was expanding access, not narrowing it.

That's the kind of argument Chico Marx would make too.

Ninety minutes before Spicer was scheduled to speak to reporters in the White House briefing room, his office alerted reporters that he would be holding an off-camera session with an “expanded pool.” It then conspicuously excluded reporters from selected news media while allowing in three pool reporters and a hand-picked group of eight others, four of them from right-of-center outlets that have been, shall we say, uncritical of the president (such as Breitbart and the One America News Network). Not to put too fine a point on it, but only one of the five major TV news networks that cover the White House was excluded: CNN, a frequent punching bag of President Trump.

This all happened shortly after Trump took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference for a stump speech that began with a salvo against the news media and its use of anonymous sources to bash the White House. (Sample quote: “We are fighting fake news.”)

So what message was the administration sending when Spicer put a velvet rope up outside his office? What could possibly be the rationale for excluding selected White House reporters from an on-the-record session with the White House spokesman in the White House?

If the intent was to intimidate reporters into writing fewer things that the administration does not like, and more things that it does, it is doomed to failure. Bear in mind that the Trump campaign barred several news organizations from attending its events, and that didn't seem to make a scintilla of difference to their coverage.

Nor can the administration expect to have any more success in controlling the coverage it receives. After all, the easiest and least important part of the job is getting what Spicer was denying to some on Friday: the spin doled out at sessions like the daily briefing. The harder and more vital task is to ferret out what's really going on behind the scenes that is not disclosed in the press releases and photo opportunities.

And it's that kind of reporting that has really gotten under Trump's skin. He has railed against stories leaked to journalists by people within the new administration — anonymous sources that Trump wants the public to believe do not actually exist. Granted, these sources may not get everything right; they're often pushing their own version of events. But the ones in the Trump administration are hardly fake — they're just the latest in a long line of government leakers, whistle-blowers and others whose personal agendas don't line up with their employer's.

Trump has betrayed some alarmingly authoritarian notions of the presidency over the past two years, and punishing organizations that run stories critical of the president falls right into that category. It also evokes memories of that most famous White House compiler of an enemies list, Richard Nixon — probably not the president whose footsteps Trump wants to follow.


__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Watch what Trump does about the media, not what he says


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-spicer-excluding-press-20170224-story.html



from The Washington Post....

In December, Spicer said barring media access is what a ‘dictatorship’ does. Today, he barred media access.

Spicer makes an impossible job even harder

CNN, New York Times, other media barred from White House briefing
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« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2017, 01:11:44 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Whose news is fake?
Here's the latest in Trump's war with the press…


By KURTIS LEE | 4:00AM PST - Sunday, February 26, 2017

Reporters stand in the press briefing room of the White House after being excluded from the meeting on Friday. — Photograph: Olivier Douliery/Tribune News Service.
Reporters stand in the press briefing room of the White House after being excluded from the meeting on Friday.
 — Photograph: Olivier Douliery/Tribune News Service.


EVERY PRESIDENT since 1981 has attended the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

That year, President Reagan missed out. The reason? He needed to recover after a would-be assassin fired a bullet into his chest a few weeks earlier.

On Saturday, President Trump announced he will not be attending the annual dinner in April, long considered the premier social event of the Washington press corps and typically an evening of good-natured bantering between presidents and the Fourth Estate.

Trump's announcement added to the ratcheting tensions between his administration and the media. Almost daily, in speeches or on Twitter, he calls particular news outlets fake, disgusting or dishonest — and news organizations have responded by digging in, standing united and devoting more resources to covering a president who has branded the press the enemy.

On Friday, the White House barred reporters from several major news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CNN and Politico, from attending an off-camera press briefing.

The banned reporters stayed behind in the White House press room and the image was striking — a few huddled reporters, staring at smart phones, in a mostly empty room.

“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, said in a statement.

Davan Maharaj, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, said, “The public has a right to know, and that means being informed by a variety of news sources, not just those filtered by the White House press office in hopes of getting friendly coverage.”

“Regardless of access, the L.A. Times will continue to report on the Trump administration without fear or favor,” Maharaj added.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who held the off-camera briefing, has said he wants to be transparent and have a good relationship with the press. In December, while speaking on a panel in Washington, Spicer said open access for the media is “what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.”

The action from the White House on Friday came hours after Trump once again castigated the media as the “enemy of the people,” this time while speaking before supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.

“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It's fake, phony, fake,” he said.

Trump's public complaints about the media have been bolstered by his aides.

At CPAC, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump's senior aide, who once oversaw the conservative-leaning Breitbart News — which was invited to Friday's briefing — framed the administration's battle with the press as an ideological war. He consistently called the media the “opposition party” throughout a panel discussion at the conference.

“They're corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has,” he said. “Every day it is going to be a fight.”

Is Trump's message getting through? In some ways, yes.

An Emerson College poll released this month found 49% of voters believe the Trump administration is truthful, compared to 48% who do not. By contrast, 53% of voters find the news media untruthful, compared with 39% who find the media truthful.

The poll was split along party lines — especially when looking at the media. Ninety-one percent of Republicans believe the news media is untruthful, and 69% of Democrats believe the press is honest.

As the president faces, among other things, questions about his aides and associates making repeated contact with senior Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, the hashtag #NotTheEnemy has gone viral on Twitter. It's regularly used to highlight journalists who have lost their lives while reporting and to remind the administration that the press should not be viewed as an adversary.

For Trump, barring news organizations that he perceives as unfair is nothing new. Last year, his campaign refused to issue press credentials to some media outlets for his events.

Watching the back-and-forth between Trump and the press are the American people.

In recent weeks, “Saturday Night Live” has poked fun at Spicer, with Melissa McCarthy playing him in spoofs of press briefings.

A Gallup poll released this month showed 36% of Americans think the media have been too tough on Trump, while 31% think the treatment has been about right and 28% say the press has not been tough enough.

Within the poll the partisan divide is stark. Seventy-four percent of Republicans believe the media have been too tough on Trump, compared to 49% of Democrats who believe the press needs to be tougher.

On Saturday, Trump also used Twitter to blast the news media again, complaining it failed to highlight a dip in the national debt.

“The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.,” he wrote. (Although the numbers are accurate, Trump's tweet suggested he deserves credit for something that is largely beyond his control, especially since he hasn't yet given Congress any proposals to change tax laws or the financial industry.)

Even as Trump, who has been a frequent guest at the White House Correspondents' dinner in the past, says he will not attend, the association is forging ahead.

At the annual dinner, the president usually delivers self-deprecating jokes and often is roasted by a high-profile comedian. The president also greets students who win journalism scholarships and awards, a major part of the evening.

Jeff Mason, president of the White House Correspondents' Association, said the dinner “has been and will continue to be a celebration of the 1st Amendment and the important role played by an independent news media in a healthy republic.”

As for Reagan back in 1981, though he missed the dinner, he still called in to offer a few remarks by phone. And in keeping with the evening's tradition, he still got a laugh as he recalled the day he got shot.

"If I could give you just one little bit of advice," Reagan quipped, "when somebody tells you to get in a car quick, do it.”


• Kurtis Lee is a political reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Prior to joining the newspaper in August 2014, Lee worked for three years at the Denver Post and covered state and national politics. He's also reported from the scenes of destructive wildfires and mass shootings and was a member of the Denver Post staff that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Aurora theater shooting. He's a Colorado native and a graduate of Temple University.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Watch what Trump does about the media, not what he says

 • Other presidents have battled the press. But never like Trump.


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-press-20170225-story.html



from Politico....

Sean Spicer targets own staff in leak crackdown

The push includes random phone checks overseen by White House lawyers.

By ANNIE KARNI and ALEX ISENSTADT | 5:25PM EST - Sunday, February 26, 2017

Sean Spicer warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide and Signal was a violation of the Federal Records Act. — Photograph: Getty Images.
Sean Spicer warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide and Signal was a violation of the Federal Records Act.
 — Photograph: Getty Images.


PRESS SECRETARY Sean Spicer is cracking down on leaks coming out of the West Wing, with increased security measures that include random phone checks of White House staffers, overseen by White House attorneys.

The push to snuff out leaks to the press comes after a week in which President Donald Trump strongly criticized the media for using unnamed sources in stories and expressed growing frustration with the unauthorized sharing of information by individuals in his administration.

Last week, after Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communications staffers, he reconvened the group in his office to express his frustration over the number of private conversations and meetings that were showing up in unflattering news stories, according to sources in the room.

Upon entering Spicer's office for what one person briefed on the gathering described as “an emergency meeting,” staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check," to prove they had nothing to hide.

Spicer, who consulted with White House counsel Don McGahn before calling the meeting, was accompanied by White House lawyers in the room, according to multiple sources.

There, he explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, according to multiple sources in the room.

The phone checks included whatever electronics staffers were carrying when they were summoned to the unexpected follow-up meeting, including government-issued and personal cellphones.

Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media. It's not the first time that warnings about leaks have promptly leaked. The State Department's legal office issued a four-page memo warning of the dangers of leaks, and that memo was immediately posted by The Washington Post.

But with mounting tension inside the West Wing over stories portraying an administration lurching between crises and simmering in dysfunction, aides are increasingly frustrated by the pressure-cooker environment and worried about their futures there.

Within the communications office, the mood has grown tense. During a recent staff meeting, Spicer harshly criticized some of the work deputy communications director Jessica Ditto had done, causing her to cry, according to two people familiar with the incident. “The only time Jessica recalls almost getting emotional is when we had to relay the information on the death of Chief Ryan Owens,” Spicer said, referring to the Navy SEAL killed recently in action in Yemen.

Ditto also denied the accounts. “This is 100 percent not true,” she said on Sunday after the incident was reported. “Sean and I have a great working relationship.”

Spicer declined to comment about the leak crackdown.

The campaign to sniff out a series of damaging leaks, which Spicer is convinced originated from his communications department, has led to a tense environment in the West Wing. During meetings, the press secretary has repeatedly berated his aides, launching expletive-filled tirades in which he's accused them of disclosing sensitive information to reporters and saying that they've disappointed him.

As word of the hunt has ripped through the office, talk has turned to the question of whether firings are to come.

Spicer was particularly incensed by the leaks last week that Michael Dubke had been tapped as the new White House communications director — a hire that became public before it was officially announced.

“In general,” said one senior administration official, “there is a lot of insecurity.”

While other parts of the White House appear to be stabilizing, the press shop is often a center of frustration about how things are going — and not just from Spicer, who fumes to aides about stories he doesn't like.

For Trump, a cable TV addict who has long obsessively tracked news coverage about himself, the ongoing turmoil in the White House communications wing threatens to derail the media narrative that will help to define the opening days of his presidency. His decision to hold a free-flowing news conference last week, two senior officials said, stemmed from a recognition that he was no longer breaking through in a news cycle that had turned against him.

“He reached a breaking point where he wanted to do it himself,” said one senior White House aide.

It has not been lost on senior White House officials that Spicer is overseeing an overwhelmed press office, where work often begins just after 6 a.m. and ends close to midnight.

To help streamline the office, the administration has tapped Dubke, a veteran under-the-radar Republican operative known for his organizational skills. Yet the move has infuriated Trump campaign aides, who argue that someone who'd been a vocal Trump supporter — which the establishment-minded Dubke hadn't been — should have gotten the job.

“People are on fire about it,” one campaign veteran said of the Dubke hire.

Multiple former campaign aides said they were under the impression that RNC veterans pushed through Dubke, who is close with Republican strategist Karl Rove, with relatively little consultation with others in Trump world. (Several other people interviewed for the post, including Jarrod Agen, a spokesman for Vice President Mike Pence, and Scott Jennings, a former political aide in the George W. Bush White House.)

To some degree, the challenge Spicer and other press aides face is unique — they are working for a president who takes an unusually intense interest in the work his communications office does. Trump is known to watch Spicer's daily press briefings while eating lunch in the White House dining room. While the president was critical of his press secretary in the administration's first month — especially after he was parodied on “Saturday Night Live” — he more recently has offered the press secretary his private assurances that his job is safe.

The push to crack down on leaks follows a week in which the president ratcheted up his criticism of the press and condemned the free flow of information from parts of his administration. On Friday, Trump called the media the “enemy of the American people” during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he railed against journalists for using anonymous sources.

“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It's fake, phony, fake,” Trump said. “A few days ago, I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people’, and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.”

Later on Friday, Spicer blocked certain media, including CNN, The New York Times, BuzzFeed and POLITICO, from attending an off-camera press briefing in his office. Time and The Associated Press boycotted the briefing out of solidarity.

On Saturday, Trump said he would not attend the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington.


__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • White House goes to war with the media


http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/sean-spicer-targets-own-staff-in-leak-crackdown-235413
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« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2017, 02:57:29 am »




Washington Post: fake-news partner with the CIA

by Jon Rappoport

February 28, 2017

Let’s frame the situation in simple terms. You work for a company that has a very lucrative partnership with a big-time money man. That money man gives you a piece of information and tells you it’s important.

What you do every day is spread information. That’s how you earn your living.

Are you going to take that piece of info from the money man and spread it, or are you going to question it and research it and shoot back hard-edged questions to the money man?

If you’re a loyal employee, and if you want to keep your job, and if you’re smart enough to understand how things work, you’re going to spread the money man’s piece of info and keep your head down.

You’re not going to worry your pretty little head about whether the piece of info is true.

Unless you’re a complete dolt, you certainly aren’t going to spread the info with a disclaimer stating that your source, the money man, has a major business contract with your company.

Getting the picture? The truth is irrelevant.

Here are key statements from Norman Solomon’s AlterNet article about the Washington Post, its owner, Jeff Bezos, and the CIA (12/18/13):

“The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon — which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon.”

“Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago.”

“And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech ‘cloud’ infrastructure.”

“Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, ‘We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA’.”

“As Amazon’s majority owner and the Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers.”

“Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s ‘national security’ establishment. The media watch group FAIR pointed out what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: ‘WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website’.”

“How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know?”

“Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a petition that says: ‘The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA’…”

“While the Post functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity — read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world.”

“Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the Washington Post were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society.”

“’The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media’, journalism scholar Robert W. McChesney points out. ‘Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself’.”

“In a statement just released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, McChesney added: ‘If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation — say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government — the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine’.”

You may recall that the Washington Post was a main player in launching stories about fake news sites after the presidential election.

One of the biggest fake news outlets in the world (cough, the Washington Post) took the lead in “exposing fake news.”

Then, on January 8, 2017, the Post ran a piece headlined: “It’s time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news’”. That was an attempt to stop the bleeding, because independent news sites all over the world were pointing out that mainstream news outlets had long been the biggest purveyors of fake news. The Post writer, Margaret Sullivan, stated:

“But though the term [fake news] hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say ‘Pizzagate,’ the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things…”

Actually, the term has been around for quite a while. I named my site nomorefakenews.com in 2001. And the term, in 2016, wasn’t “co-opted.” It was turned against news outlets, like the Post, who were attacking independent media.

The Post is in bed with the CIA to the tune of $600 million. If that isn’t the foundation of fakery on a grand scale, what is?

Try to find one major news outlet that has exposed and pounded on this Washington Post-CIA marriage. You can’t. You see, the fakers protect their own. It’s a club. If you join, you keep your mouth shut about the inherent unholy alliances within the club. It’s a rule.

Memo to the New York Times, LA Times, CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, Reuters, AP: If you want to prove you’re not fake, go after the Washington Post, hammer and tongs, on their marriage to the CIA. Don’t let up. Demand conflict of interest statements from the Post, for starters.

And here’s a talking point for you. Was Jeff Bezos’ cash purchase of the Washington Post a mere coincidence, placed next to his $600 million contract with the CIA, or did he buy the Post so he could offer the CIA an even tighter relationship with the number-one paper of record?

Get it? Or am I going too fast for you?

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/washington-post-fake-news-partner-with-the-cia/
« Last Edit: March 02, 2017, 03:03:11 am by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2017, 11:45:17 am »


Ah, yes....1975....that would have been just after Donald Trump dodged the draft for the umpteenth time.

When The Donald's country needed him, The Donald turned into a spineless, gutless coward and hid from doing his military service.

Funny thing, though....the Donald is talking war, which means he doesn't think there is anything wrong with sending today's young American men off to to do what he (Donald J. Trump) shirked from. That is the 45th president of the Fascist States of America.
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