Did you hear the one about President-elect Trump’s off-the-record meeting with 30 to 40 media representatives? No joke. “It was like a f–ing firing squad,” an unnamed source told Mother Jones last week. “Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.”
Trump is halfway right for the wrong reasons. Consider past mainstream media reporting about the Mideast alone, from Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs to the existential threat from Libyan leader Gaddafi to the ‘moderate rebels’ fiction in Syria. Inconvenient facts that don't fit the narrative have long been dispensable.
In contrast, the news monoliths' straightforward recitation of Trump’s serial lies and contradictions constituted some fairly consistent truth-telling.
Faith in traditional media is at an all-time low in the U.S. As a result, Trump supporters were inoculated against verifiable information about their idol from the New York Times and other bastions of the so-called “liberal elite” (outlets that truly did give the venal Hillary Clinton a free ride, by the way).
Mix this curdled attitude toward old-school newsmongers with social media, where algorithms offer news items tailored to users’ browsing patterns. Sprinkle in some disinformation from Internet trolls, heat with divisive commentary from bloggers left and right, and let sit for an election cycle. That makes for one spicy stew of Confirmation Bias.
Eat up, ‘Murica. The facts have been fudged for your convenience; you just can't be sure which ones.
The U.S. federal election offered voters a choice between a cataclysm and a catastrophe. The Democratic Party owns this one, having put forward one of the worst presidential candidates in living memory. They can hardly call cry foul over suspect voting patterns in some U.S. states (with Trump winning by highly improbable one per cent margins) when they stole primary votes from Bernie Sanders to anoint the Queen Bee.
The hawkish Hillary hardly made the odious Trump shine in comparison. The problem with lesser-evilism as a political philosophy is that better options — the Naders and Steins — are consistently marginalized by the press during elections yet cursed afterwards by electors as self-indulgent, divisive vote-splitters.
So now we have tweeting Trump twice demanding an apology from the cast of the Broadway play Hamilton, for an after-performance speech directed at Vice President-elect and playgoer Mike Spence. This is something new in America: a president in waiting issuing direct commands to particular citizens to behave, like some tin-pot dictator wielding a bullhorn and enemies list.
Short of military invasion, U.S. foreign policy has long been about supporting authoritarian regimes, fronted by strongmen willing to sell out their country’s resources and assets for the benefit of themselves and international banksters. Batista, Somoza, Pinochet, Rios Montt, Noriega, Stroessner, Suharto, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, Marcos, Hussein, Mubarak. That’s just the short list of U.S.-supported thugs from the past 60 years.
American mainstream media commentators have long pitched foreign invasion and covert ops as spreading freedom (at best), and the failure of good intentions (at worst). And last week, some of these stenographers to power gathered to be harangued by an orange-skinned creature from reality TV. However could this ever have come to be?
Well, vast stretches of the U.S. are now functionally at Third World levels, so who better to take the reins than a despot-in-training? Trump’s infamous tag line — “you’re fired!” — is just right for deindustrialized America.
The Banana Republican’s bluster has yet to be field-tested in the oval office, but he will be backed by the National Defence Authorization Act, signed into law by Obama in 2011. The point is not that Trump WILL take advantage of a bill that supposedly allows the president to detain Americans indefinitely without trial. The point is that he CAN.
The “cult of American exceptionalism” did not impress the late, great American writer Joe Bageant, who wrote on how a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations had exploited the U.S. rural underclass for decades. “Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause... Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade," he wrote shortly before his death in 2011.
www.geoffolson.com
