Tag: debate 2016
How Trump Dared The Press With A Campaign Built On Lies

How Trump Dared The Press With A Campaign Built On Lies

As Donald Trump’s three-ring circus-style campaign of misinformation winds down, one of the lingering questions is whether the press has helped normalize the kind of post-truth performance that the Republican presidential nominee has so enthusiastically embraced.

Faced with the tricky task of covering a radically different type of candidate who walked away from so many previous norms of American politics (i.e. truth telling for him was entirely optional), the Beltway press faced a defining test: Forcefully call out Trump’s lies, or find wiggle room to politely describe his behavior.

Trump’s not a politician who artfully shades the truth, or who has a tendency to modestly alter his proposal based on whichever audience he’s addressing. He’s just a chronic liar.

On this crucial assignment, I’d give the press a C+/ B- grade.

12 months ago, it was becoming obvious that Trump campaigned as an unrepentant liar and that the campaign press had never dealt with a candidate who felt so compelled to make stuff up while simultaneously refusing to ever acknowledge or correct those fabrications. (Even many conservatives agree on that point.)

In other words, Trump was ripping up the old playbook. No longer concerned with media fact-checkers who proved him wrong, and no longer interested in running any sort of factual campaign, Trump invented his own model and dared journalists to alter their ways in order to adjust to the Trump fabrication revolution.

“Chronic,” “compulsive,” “pathological.” Those are not phrases that most journalists have felt comfortable regularly using when describing Trump’s run, even though when you look at the totality of his nonstop prevarications, those adjectives certainly apply.

For the most part, the press never entirely ripped up its old playbook in order to cover Trump’s radical run. Instead, for too much of the race, journalists often clung to the conventional template to portray Trump as running something resembling a conventional White House run. The press seemed uncomfortable with accurately identifying Trump and his campaign for what they represented. (That includes his TV surrogates.)

And I’m still waiting for journalists to take deep dives into Trump’s troubled personality in search of an explanation for his pathological ways. (Note that the press loves playing armchair psychologist to Hillary Clinton to explain her alleged flaws.)

Here’s a perfect example of how, with just two weeks left until Election Day, the press is still letting Trump get away with his lying game.

Following last week’s final presidential debate, some commentators suggested Trump had done very well during the first half-hour. They contrasted that with the remaining 60 minutes, during which Trump suggested he might not accept the results on Election Day and derided Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman.” Before those colossal missteps, pundits suggested, Trump was on his way to delivering a winning debate performance.

We saw the same widespread media response after the first debate, as well: If only Trump had been able to maintain his focus from the first half-hour, he might have been able to able to post an impressive debate performance.

But here’s the thing: during the first half-hour of those debates, Trump lied constantly.

During the first debate, in roughly the first 30 minutes, the GOP nominee badly misstated facts about job losses in Ohio under President Obama, Ford shipping “small car division” jobs to Mexico, the amount of financial support Trump enjoyed from his father over the years, whether he previously called climate change a “hoax,” the rate of energy production in the United States, the idea Clinton’s been fighting ISIS her “entire adult life,” and why he can’t release his tax returns.

During the third debate’s first half-hour, Trump made stuff up about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clinton’s gun policy, her immigration policy, abortion, being endorsed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, the economic effects of NAFTA, not having a relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. security officials having “no idea” whether Russia has played a role in recent email hacks, and insisting Japan and South Korea pay nothing for American troops being based in their country.

Despite that cabaret of nonstop fabrications, media observers praised those portions of Trump’s debate performance even though they were built around lies and fabrications. The standard that journalists still to use for Trump was that if he looked and sounded presidential while lying during debate, he scored points.

That’s scary.

Beyond those 30-minute sections, the debates represented a forest fire of falsehoods for Trump. According to Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, who methodically fact-checked the three presidential forums, Trump made 104 false statements during the debates, compared to Clinton’s 13. Incredibly, Trump unfurled 37 false statements during the third debate, which averaged out to one whopper for every minute he spoke that night.

Obviously, one of the reasons we know Trump can’t tell the truth is because media fact-checkers have worked overtime to document his trail of deceit. And that’s been the good news. The bad news has been that the polite fact checking sometimes seemed to be cordoned off, and isn’t always used as aggressively in the day-to-day campaign coverage.

As I previously highlighted, last December Trump uncorked the unsupportable claim that the wives of the 9/11 hijackers “knew exactly what was going to happen” the day of the terror attack and had been flown “back to Saudi Arabia” days before the hijacked plane strikes. (Fact: Most of the hijackers weren’t even married.) Addressing the specious claim, The New York Times reported that Trump was “fuzzy” on his 9/11 facts and that the wives tale didn’t “align” with “the timeline and details of the hijacking of the planes.” The Times suggested Trump was simply “having trouble keeping some details straight about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”

But that was timid 2015 Trump coverage, right?  Didn’t the press wise up to his falsehoods in time for the general election campaign? Not always.

Last month, when the Times reported on Trump’s proposal for child-care and maternity leave plan, the paper noted that “in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and ‘never will.’”

False. Trump didn’t ‘stretch the truth,’ he flat out lied: Clinton does have a plan of her own and she unveiled it last year, which the Times itself noted.

Time and again, reporters and their editors, fumbling over polite euphemisms, simply couldn’t summon the nerve to accurately label Trump’s lies for what they were.

And that creates a disturbing precedent going forward. Yes, it appears that Trump’s marathon of lies most likely isn’t going to win him the White House. But his bizarre detachment from the facts did highlight a stress point within the Beltway press: Its lingering hesitancy to call out a bullying Republican who dared journalists to use the “L” word.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Photo: Members of the news media watch on television monitors in the media center as Republican U.S. presidential candidate businessman Donald Trump speaks during the second official Republican presidential candidates debate of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, September 16, 2015. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

American Democracy Meant To Be Messy, Not Ugly

American Democracy Meant To Be Messy, Not Ugly

WASHINGTON — American democracy is meant to be messy, not ugly. This home truth ran through my mind during the third presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

And I had a chance to tell the world about this crumbling character trait as a post-debate guest on BBC World News. Here was a channel to explain Us to Them, across the waves, in the final round of the ugly 2016 campaign.

Nice idea, and London knew what to do. Anchor Mike Embley deftly kept the focus on what actually went down in Las Vegas. Fair enough. Thomas Jefferson, we couldn’t fit your vision into the chatty analysis. Besides, you were very rude to the British ambassador once.

Prepping for debate night, I pulled together some pieces of the puzzling, unconventional campaign. For starters, Americans like to like their presidents; it’s more personal than in a parliamentary system. But this time, there’s not much of that good feeling going around. We are living in scorching political climate change. Trump and Clinton have high peaks of unlikability ratings.

They are familiar, almost inescapable, these October days.

They are classic American archetypes, the big bad bully and the head girl in class, holding all her homework. (The British have another term: bluestocking.) And Las Vegas — the city of spectacle, gaming and bluff — you can’t get more American than that.

The Wild West capstone marked a remarkable journey near the end for each — and we should give them that. Clinton and Trump are the most unconventional candidates to come along in 200 years. He has never ran for political office before and captured the Republican nomination as if it was a reality show, shrewdly picking off people one by one. Senators and governors were helpless in his hands.

As a woman, Clinton is by definition an outsider. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state took a thumping by Barack Obama in 2008 in good form and tried again to reach the glass heights of the White House. One of the most prized traits in American lore is never giving up and she has earned respect for that. To its surprise, the Senate found she was a workhouse, not a showhorse.

Trump, as an outsider, embraced and stoked rising voter anger. The wildly rich New York real estate mogul tried to be Everyman to you and me. But that populist anger is real, right now. Liberals ignore it at our peril.

Clinton, as schooled and sophisticated as an outsider can be, appealed to our heads, not our hearts. She has called up a vision of the future, breaking and making American history anew just as Obama had.

A simple line of hers from a 2008 Democratic debate still floats over her attempts to bond with the American people: “I don’t think I’m that bad.” Maybe you’ll never love me, she is saying then and now, but let’s be friends.

Even as Trump mocked her repeatedly, violating taboo by calling her a “liar” and a “nasty woman” at the debate, she didn’t flinch or respond. Wearing white, looking above his slings and arrows, she kept a smile on her face and took it with a grain of grit.

And Chris Wallace, the heavy-handed moderator and Fox News anchor, did nothing to quell Trump’s vicious asides. Zero. Should that surprise us?

Trump’s metamessage, when he taunted Clinton for spending time practicing for debates, is that studying policy was just revenge of the nerds. Judgment and temperament were his departments. A master of the universe has no need for details — please. Trust me, I’m Mr. Trump, I know best. And I’ll let you know what I think about a peaceful transfer of power when the time comes.

That threat was a gauntlet thrown by a man who hates to lose so much that democracy might prove inconvenient. Big boys can’t lose to girls, after all. They hate that.

“That’s who Donald Trump is,” Clinton said on his record of belittling women, adding that his “mindset” was funny yet darkly troubling.

We must know by now that Trump means what he says. It’s not over until he says so. So get ready for an Election Day that breaks all the records. It’s bound to be ugly, not messy.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

Photo: Donald Trump listens as Hillary Clinton speaks. REUTERS/Joe Raedle/Pool

Chris Wallace And The Banality Of Conservative Dishonesty

Chris Wallace And The Banality Of Conservative Dishonesty

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace has received widespread praise for his performance as moderator of the final presidential debate, despite repeatedly injecting right-wing framing and misinformation into his questions. The celebration of Wallace’s performance highlights the extent to which conservative spin has become normalized in national politics.

Following the October 19 debate, commentators across the political spectrum praised Wallace for his performance as moderator. Wallace was lauded for his “blunt questions,” “evenhanded approach,” and “sterling performance,” and he was even described as the “one clearcut winner” of the debate.

Some of this praise is legitimate — Wallace repeatedly grilled Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on questions of policy and at times forced him to stay on topic in his answers. And the most newsworthy moment of the debate — Trump’s refusal to say whether he’d accept the results of the elections — came in response to Wallace’s pointed, repeated questioning near the end of the event.

But Wallace also exposed his audience to a large dose of right-wing misinformation:

  • His question about the economy began with the false premise that President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan damaged the economy.
  • His question about immigration took Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2013 comments about “open borders” grossly out of context.
  • His question about abortion access invoked the right-wing myth of “partial-birth” abortion, a non-medical term invented by anti-abortion groups.
  • His question about the national debt falsely alleged that programs like Social Security and Medicare are going to run out of money and add to the debt absent short-term cuts, echoing Republican talking points about entitlements.

Wallace also failed to fact-check Trump’s frequent falsehoods — following through on his promise not to be a “truth squad” during the debate.

Wallace’s rave reviews from Republicans and Democrats alike highlight the extent to which right-wing dishonesty — made ubiquitous by Fox News and conservative media — has become normal in national politics. Wallace’s network has spent years repeating and mainstreaming these types of lies — the stimulus failed, Democrats want open borders, et cetera. Viewers have heard them so often that it can feel passé to go through the motions of debunking them over and over. Journalists become so numb to the talking points that they can hear them being repeated by a debate moderator during a presidential debate without batting an eye.

That’s how political propaganda works — not by outright convincing people, but by treating a lie as so routine and unremarkable that people slowly stop being suspicious of it.

Journalists’ willingness to accept and overlook Wallace’s bullshit is even greater when it’s being compared to the absurdity of Donald Trump. When Trump is on stage claiming his opponent should be disqualified from running for office or suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, it feels nitpicky to worry about the misleading nature of many of Wallace’s questions. Trump’s unhinged, out-of-control campaign style makes everything around him seem normal and tame by comparison. We’re willing to forgive Wallace’s occasional dishonesty because we’re so grateful that he pointed out Trump is literally threatening a core democratic principle.

But becoming numb to Wallace’s casual, subtle dishonesty is incredibly dangerous. Fox News’ modus operandi is making right-wing misinformation so pervasive and constant that it becomes unnoticeable — it becomes part of the noise we just take for granted in American politics. What makes Wallace such an effective purveyor of dishonesty is that he’s good at playing the part of the reasonable, “even-handed” journalist, even when what he’s saying is wrong.

It’s easy to challenge bullshit when it’s being delivered wildly by Trump on a debate stage. It’s much harder to challenge it when it’s being subtly baked into questions from a moderator whose employer has spent years trying to blur the lines between serious journalism and right-wing fantasy.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Questions Chris Wallace Should Ask In The Final Debate — But Probably Won’t

Questions Chris Wallace Should Ask In The Final Debate — But Probably Won’t

On October 19, moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News will have the last opportunity in a 2016 presidential debate to ask either candidate a direct and meaningful question about abortion — an opportunity that, if history is any guide, will likely be ignored.

Throughout this election cycle, reproductive rights advocates have been pushing for debate moderators to #AskAboutAbortion. Unfortunately, given the history of debate questions asked about reproductive rights topics since 1960, if Wallace does ask about abortion it will most likely be framed in the context of the candidates’ faiths or preferences for judicial nominees.

On October 12, the Commission on Presidential Debates released the topics for the third and final presidential debate — a list that includes debt, immigration, the economy, and the Supreme Court. Although abortion is not among the given topics, it could play a significant role in any comprehensive conversation about the candidates’ policies for addressing economic insecurity or even immigration.

Here are the debate questions Chris Wallace should — but probably won’t — ask about abortion in the final debate:

1. Debt And Entitlements

The intersection between entitlements and federal support for reproductive health care is both substantive and significant in the wider landscape of abortion access advocacy.

Since 1977, the Hyde amendment has restricted federal funding — and in particular, Medicaid funds — from supporting abortion services. The amendment has been re-enacted annually to prevent the use of federal funds for abortion care, except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother.

Because of its restrictions, the Hyde amendment has created a significant barrier for low-income patients attempting to access safe and legal abortion care. In a July 2016 study, the Guttmacher Institute found that the “number of women potentially affected by the Hyde Amendment is substantial” given the significant number of women dependent on federally subsidized medical services.

As Medicaid is an entitlement program, asking about abortion in the context of entitlements would be particularly appropriate given that both Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, have taken an explicit stance on the Hyde amendment.

As Rebecca Traister explained in New York magazine, Clinton was the first presidential nominee to speak out against the Hyde amendment when she decided to “publicly do battle” against the restriction in January. The Democratic Party also formally adopted repealing the Hyde amendment as a priority in its platform — marking the first time a major political party has targeted the anti-choice restriction on this scale.

In contrast, Trump has committed himself to making the Hyde amendment “permanent law” in order to prevent “taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.”

2. Immigration

Abortion access is also a fruitful topic for discussion in the context of U.S. immigration policy, particularly the impact of reproductive health care policies that disproportionately affect Latinas and mixed immigration status families living in the border state of Texas.

Disparate access to health care coverage is an issue impacting many immigrants — both documented and undocumented — in the United States. As the Kaiser Family Foundation explained in a January 2016 brief, “Immigrants, particularly those who are not citizens, historically have faced disproportionate barriers to accessing health coverage and care.” These findings affirmed a 2014 study done by the Pew Research Center which concluded that “Hispanic immigrants are more than twice as likely to not have health insurance as Hispanics born in the U.S.”

In particular, Latinas’ access to reproductive care is significantly impacted not just by the Hyde amendment but also by the financial and logistical barriers created by anti-choice restrictions in states, like Texas, that have a high percentage of Latinos.

An independent analysis of Texas’ 2014 abortion statistics data by the Texas Observer pointed out the disparate loss of access to abortion experienced by Texas Latinas after the anti-choice law HB 2 went into effect. As Alexa Garcia-Ditta reported, “In 2013, over 24,000 of Texans who got abortions were Hispanic; in 2014, that number decreased by 18 percent to under 20,000.” In comparison, she noted, there was “a 7.7 percent decrease among black Texans who got abortions” and a “6.7 percent drop among white Texans, after the law went into effect.”

In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) argued that the additional barriers to abortion access created by HB 2 would be particularly devastating to undocumented women, who would face “[b]order patrol agents and internal immigration checkpoints” when forced to travel farther for health care due to clinic closures.

3. Economy

Chris Wallace could use the economy category as an opportunity to discuss the myriad financial obstacles individuals confront when trying to obtain abortion care.

As Salon’s Christina Cauterucci explained, “Studies show that poor women take up to three weeks longer than other women to secure an abortion” partly because of the time necessary to gather the money for the procedure. In a July 2015 report, the National Women’s Law Center noted that low-income persons are also put at a substantial financial disadvantage because they “may have to postpone paying for other basic needs like food, rent, heating, and utilities in order to save the money needed for an abortion.”

This financial challenge of covering the cost of an abortion adds to the usual barrage of anti-choice restrictions already complicating access to abortion care. Between mandatory waiting periods, long wait times to get an appointment, and the great distances many patients must travel to reach a clinic, abortion care is already out of reach for many — circumstances media frequently ignore or underestimate when talking about abortion.

Given the numerous financial considerations that can make both abortion and wider reproductive health care inaccessible, Wallace should use the economy category during the debate to ask the candidates a substantive question about abortion care.

4. Supreme Court

In a recent report, Media Mattersanalyzed all abortion questions asked in presidential or vice presidential debates from 1960 to 2012 and found that 56 percent of questions were framed around religion or used abortion as a litmus test for judicial appointments. Media Matters found that since 1960, a total of 34 moderator or panelist questions cited abortion, and 23 of those were framed in terms of religion or judicial appointments or presented abortion in a stigmatized and negative way.

This framing for questions is ineffective, unilluminating, and ultimately fails to provide the American public with any understanding of how presidential candidates would support or inhibit access to essential reproductive health care.

The second presidential debate was a good example of the limited and ineffective nature of this framing. During the October 9 debate, the only mention of reproductive rights came during a question about the nomination of Supreme Court justices — when Clinton mentioned that her ideal nominee would support upholding Roe v. Wade.

Questions like this — although useful in a limited sense — clearly do not go far enough in pressing candidates to explain and defend their positions on an essential reproductive health issue and the ramificiations of upending abortion law. As a possible solution, the reproductive rights advocacy group Ultraviolet has been conducting acampaign encouraging individuals to submit questions about the issues that “have taken a backseat in the news coverage this election” but that “they think are the most important questions facing women.”

In a petition, NARAL Pro-Choice America further explained why it is essential that Chris Wallace take advantage of the final opportunity to ask about abortion in a 2016 presidential debate:

Donald Trump has said women should be punished for accessing their right to abortion, and suggested doctors who provide abortion care be thrown in jail.

A candidate’s position on abortion speaks to their position on gender equality, to whether or not they think all people, regardless of gender, should be able to plan their families and determine their futures for themselves. Such a crucial issue cannot be left unaddressed on the national stage this election year.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Photo: Fox News Channel anchors and debate moderators (L-R) Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier await the start of the debate held by Fox News for the top 2016 U.S. Republican presidential candidates in Des Moines, Iowa January 28, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria