I don’t make a habit of whining about media malfeasance — it’s just too common to get worked up over. But a glut of minor sins made for annoying reading this morning.
First up: Reporters had a day to read the transcript of James Comey’s closed-door testimony to a House committee, which Democrats and Comey himself called yet another rehash of The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use. Every outlet ran a story. Most led with utterly unremarkable news — that Trump wasn’t one of the subjects of the initial Russia investigation, that Mueller wouldn’t answer questions about the ongoing investigation. Only one, the Wall Street Journal, headlined Comey’s most interesting revelation — that Comey suspected its rogue New York office was leaking information about that probe to Rudy Giuliani. (This explains Giuliani’s obsessive interest in this case — he did as much as anyone to undermine the Clinton campaign, and he can only hide that if Trump triumphs.) Ironic, isn’t it, that only a Rupert Murdoch paper dared incur the wrath of the referee-working right by highlighting that facet of this polished turd.
Next up: The Washington Post, whose “fact-checker” gave “four Pinocchios” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a tweet comparing the Pentagon’s lack of fiscal accountability to the hand-wringing over what Medicare for All would cost. This critique points out the obvious dishonesty of equating AOC’s wonk-failure tweet with Trump’s worst lies, but my pique derives from a more basic flaw here: How the fuck do you call it a “fact check” when every column concludes with the writer’s opinion of where it falls on his personal dishonesty scale? That nobody at the newspaper appears to care about or even notice this contradiction says all you need to know about how often critical thinking invades a newsroom.
Andrew O’Hehir surveys the early Democratic presidential landscape and worries because Biden and Sanders currently poll 1-2. Two white guys born before the end of World War II project exactly the wrong image for a party of women, minorities and young people.
John Kelly has been canned, gone by the end of the month according to Trump, who has never lied about anything like this so go ahead and book it.
Why is Michael Cohen going to jailgoing to jail while Michael Flynn is not? Because Cohen clammed up rather than spill the beans on all he knows about the Trump Organization. Apparently when you’re in cahoots with Russia — essentially a criminal enterprise armed with nukes and teams of assassins — prison seems like a good alternative.