.
2/25/17, "Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story." NY Times, Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum
"Mr. Trump may
be noisier and more confrontational than many of his predecessors, but
he is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the
iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and
federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully....(parag. 17)
This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic,
write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional
of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political
press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of
federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has."...(parag. 3)
"A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story."
.............................
Added: The tip of the Deep State's spear:
3/1/17, "How the Press Serves the Deep State," Consortium News, Daniel Lazare
"Exclusive: Mainstream U.S. media is proud to be the
Deep State’s tip of the spear pinning President Trump to the wall over
unproven allegations about Russia and his calls for detente, a rare
point where he makes sense."...
"Iron triangle? Permanent government? In its tale of how Trump went
from being a favorite of the New York Post and Daily News to fodder for
the big-time Washington news media, the Times seems to be going out of
its way to confirm dark paranoid fears of a “deep state” lurking behind
the scenes and dictating what political leaders can and cannot do. “Too
powerful to bully” by a “write-your-own-rules president” is another way
of saying that the permanent government wants to do things its way and
will not put up with a president telling it to take a different
approach.
Entrenched interests are nothing new, of course. But a major news outlet bragging about collaborating with such elements in order to
cripple a legally established government is. The Times was beside itself
with outrage when top White House adviser Steve Bannon described the
media as “the opposition party.” But
one can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about since an alliance
aimed at hamstringing a presidency is nothing if not oppositional.
If so, a few things are worth keeping in mind. One is that Trump was
elected, even if only by an Eighteenth-Century relic known as the
Electoral College, whereas the deep state, permanent government, or
whatever else you want to call it was not. Where Trump gave speeches,
kissed babies, and otherwise sought out the vote, the deep state did
nothing. To the degree this country is still a democracy, that must
count for something. So if the conflict between president and the deep
state ever comes down to a question of legitimacy, there is no doubt who
will come out ahead: The Donald....
Basically, they’ve been seized by the idée fixe that Russia
is a predator state that hacks elections, threatens U.S. national
security, and has now accomplished the neat trick of planting a Kremlin
puppet in the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter that evidence is lacking or
that the thesis defies common sense. It’s what they believe, what their
editors believe, and what the deep state believes too (or at least
pretends to). So the purpose of the Feb. 16 press conference was to pin
Trump down as to whether he also believes the Russia-did-it thesis and
pillory him for deviating from the party line....
The press played straight into Trump’s hands, all but providing him
with his best lines. “Well, I guess one of the reasons I’m here today is
to tell you the whole Russian thing, that’s a ruse,” he responded at
one point. “That’s a ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we could
get along with Russia, just so you understand that. Now tomorrow,
you’ll say, ‘Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is
terrible.’ It’s not terrible. It’s good.”
The prose may not be very polished, but the sentiments are
unassailable. Ditto Trump’s statement a few minutes later that “false
reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake
reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia.
… And that’s a
shame because if we could get along with Russia – and by the way, China
and Japan and everyone – if we could get along, it would be a positive
thing, not a negative thing.”
If the Washington Post and the Times do not agree that bogus
assertions about unauthorized contacts with Russia are not poisoning the atmosphere, they should explain very clearly why not. They should
also explain what they hope to accomplish with a showdown with Russia
and why it will not be a step toward World War III.
But they won’t, of course. The media (with encouragement from parts
of the U.S. government) are working themselves into a fit of outrage
against Vladimir Putin just as, in past years, they did against Daniel
Ortega, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam
Hussein (again), Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor
Yanukovych. In each instance, the outcome has been war, and so far the
present episode shows all signs of heading in the same direction as
well.
Reporters may be clueless, but working-class Americans aren’t. They
don’t want a war because they're the ones who would have to fight it [and watch their tax dollars funneled to war profiteers]. So
they’re not unsympathetic to Trump and all the more inclined to give
the yapping media short shrift....
Today’s liberal
media are obliging Trump by behaving in a way that is even sillier than
usual and well ahead of schedule to boot.
A Fragile Meme
The anti-Russia meme, meanwhile, rests on the thinnest of foundations. The argument that Russia hacked the Democratic National
Committee and thereby tipped the election to Trump is based on a single report
by CrowdStrike, the California-based cyber-security firm hired by the
DNC to look into the mass email leak. The document is festooned with
head-spinning techno-jargon....
Impressive? Not to independent tech experts who have already begun
taking potshots. Sam Biddle, The Intercept's extremely smart tech
writer, notes that CrowdStrike claims to have proved that Cozy Bear and
Fancy Bear are Russian because they left behind Cyrillic comments in
their “metadata” along with the name “Felix Edmundovich,” also in
Cyrillic, an obvious reference to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder
of the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known.
But, Biddle observes, there’s an obvious contradiction:
“Would a group whose ‘tradecraft is superb’ with ‘operational security
second to none’ really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief
imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these
groups really be dumb enough to leave Cyrillic comments on these
documents? … It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were
hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign
intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they
screwed up over and over again.”
Indeed, John McAfee, founder of McAfee Associates and developer of
the first commercial anti-virus software, casts doubt on the entire
enterprise, wondering whether it is possible to identify a hacker at
all. “If I were the Chinese,” he told TV interviewer Larry King in late
December, “and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I
would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian
techniques of breaking into organizations. … If it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you: it was not the Russians.” (Quote starts at 4:30.)
This may be too sweeping. Nonetheless, if the press really wanted to
get to the bottom of what the Russians are doing, they would not begin
with the question of what Trump knew and when he knew it.
They would begin, rather, with the question of what we know and how we can
be sure. It’s the question that the press should have asked during the
run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but failed to. But it’s the
question that reporters should be asking now before the conflict with
Russia spins out of control, with consequences that are potentially even
more horrendous.
It’s not easy making Donald Trump seem like a peacenik, but that’s what the billionaire’s press has done."
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