Political Theatre category archive

Shorther Catherine Rampell: Look at Mark Whitaker’s resume.

At the Des Moines Register, Michael Bugeja considers how “social” media has changed the news. A snippet (emphasis added):

The audience no longer seeks information; it wants affirmation. That’s the cover-up.

What about coverage?

Two factors play into the media culture of lies. In the past decade, newsroom employment plummeted by some 23%. Increasingly, people rely on social media for news. According to the Pew Research Center, about two-thirds of American adults (68%) get their news from applications like Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat and the biggie, Facebook. An estimated 67 percent of Facebook users — and that’s a humongous amount of people (about 1.5 billion worldwide) — rely on the platform for affirmation.

Shaun Mullen is still an optimist.

Full Disclosure:

I have met Shaun. I had breakfast with him (mumble) years ago and that breakfast is one of my treasured memories.

I arrogate that it gives me the right to pull his chain.

Joking aside, I have nothing but respect for his reportorial skill, experience, and expertise. As I recently said to him, while I snipe from the sidelines, he digs into the details.

The Tamba Bay Times has a time line.

Werner Herzog’s Bear looks back at World War I and then at the fool who declared that the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow signified “the end of history,” and observes that

History does not end and it does not stop. Its dark waters flow and can break their banks and drown us in the flood. The world today is dominated by a wave of bigoted nationalism that our media mistakenly calls “populism.” The earth’s most powerful nation is led by a dangerously unhinged narcissist wannabe dictator who sows chaos with his every move. We are staring a near future of climate change dystopia straight in the face. A hundred years after the guns of the Great War went silent, we still stand at the river’s edge, uncertain of how long the ground under our feet will hold out.

Follow the link for the full post.

Read more »

Shaun Mullen admits that he is an optimist.

David argues that high voter turnout is good, even if many of the voters are uninformed. He makes some interesting points.

Jay Bookman suggests that, as regards his selecting Mark Whitaker as “acting Attorney-General,” Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing. A nugget:

. . . Trump didn’t handpick Whitaker because of his stance on past Supreme Court cases — Trump doesn’t know about or give a damn about such things. Instead, Trump installed Whitaker as head of the U.S. Department of Justice because he sees Whitaker for what he is, a political hack who will do the president’s bidding.

Follow the link for the rest.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., notes Donald Trump’s fear of being asked questions. A snippet (emphasis added):

As the quotes at the top (of the article–ed.) attest, Trump is hardly the first chief executive to disdain reporters. But the vast majority of his predecessors nevertheless endured journalistic scrutiny with the understanding, as George W. Bush once put it, that news media are “indispensable to democracy.”

(snip)

But Trump is different. And perhaps that’s no surprise, given that he’s a con artist who has spent decades shucking, jiving, deflecting and blustering his way past every moment of accountability. The man with no answers naturally fears the man asking questions.

David and his caller discuss the end of facts as a factor in elections.

Elie Mystal.

Just read it.

Via Job’s Anger.