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Tag: james fallows
Friends And Colleagues Mourn Admired Media Critic Eric Boehlert, 57

Friends And Colleagues Mourn Admired Media Critic Eric Boehlert, 57

Eric Boehlert, the incisive and prodigious media analyst who became one of the most respected critics of right-wing disinformation and mainstream fecklessness, died on Monday evening in a tragic bicycle accident. He was struck by a commuter train while cycling in Montclair, New Jersey, where he lived with his wife Tracy Breslin and children Ben and Jane. He was 57 years old.

His dear friend, journalist and filmmaker Soledad O’Brien, announced his passing on Twitter, describing him as “a fierce and fearless defender of the truth,” and “an awesome human being, handsome/cool/witty dude who kicked ass on our behalf. Crazy devotion to facts, context, and good reporting, enemy of BS, fake news.” He was, she wrote, “Brutal to bad media on Twitter, sweetest guy in real life.” She was far from alone in that assessment.

To readers of The National Memo, Eric was a familiar and welcome byline whose writing appeared in these pages nearly from the beginning a decade ago. He was a former colleague of editor Joe Conason at Salon.com and a longtime friend.

“We were always thrilled to share Eric's articles,” said Conason, “first from Media Matters for America, later from Daily Kos – and over the past two years, he honored us by allowing frequent reprints from the PressRun site that he created in 2020.”

Kind and warm as well as astute, Eric was broadly admired despite the fact that he routinely published harsh judgments on the work of other outlets and reporters. He didn’t take himself too seriously but believed deeply that improving political media was crucial to the survival of a democratic society. He worked hard at that mission. And wherever he worked, he was loved for his humor, generosity, and friendship.

In the hours following his death, hundreds of tributes appeared on social media, where he had long been a powerful presence.

Media Matters, Salon, and Daily Kos issued moving statements recalling his contributions to their pages.


James Fallows, both a pathbreaking journalist and a penetrating critic of press myopia, explained why he will be missed. “I had met Eric only once in ‘real life. But I corresponded with him with increasing frequency over the years, especially this past year, and considered him a conscience and inspiration,” wrote Fallows on his own Substack. “He was fearless and absolutely unsparing in his writing about this era’s mainstream press.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted her appreciation of Eric, who began to exercise his independence from herd journalism when her husband was president.

Articulate and telegenic, Eric made many appearances on all kinds of media -- he was a popular guest on major television broadcasts but often lent his talents to far smaller independent media outlets. Among those who featured him most frequently was MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid.


The Serial Prevarications Of The Reality TV President

The Serial Prevarications Of The Reality TV President

There is almost nothing real about “reality TV.” All but the dullest viewers understand that the dramatic twists and turns on shows like “Bachelor” or “Celebrity Apprentice” are scripted in advance. More or less like professional wrestling, Donald Trump’s previous claim to fame.

Welcome to the reality TV presidency. Nothing President-elect Trump says is to be taken literally, nor evaluated for its truth content. His surrogates have made that clear. Once and future sidekick Corey Lewandowski recently admonished journalists at Harvard University.

“This is the problem with the media,” he scolded. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes—when you have a conversation with people…you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

So when Trump claimed that he saw Muslims in Jersey City celebrating 9/11 on TV, he was just blowing smoke like some guy in a bar.

And so what if he kept his opposition to invading Iraq a secret?

When Trump denied mocking disabled reporter on national TV… Well, who are you going to believe, the president-elect or your lying eyes?

Then there’s the president-elect’s latest whopper. Providing zero evidence, he claimed that “millions of people” voted illegally last November, and that “serious voter fraud” had taken place in Virginia, New Hampshire and California—three states he lost.

Otherwise, see, Trump believes he’d have won the popular vote decisively, instead of trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by 2.5 million votes—a bit more than 2 percent. Far from being the people’s choice, Trump eked out the narrowest electoral win in U.S. history.

An ordinary egomaniac would fake humility and try to win the citizenry over. But that’s not the Trump way. When journalists challenged his assertion, try to believe that the future president re-tweeted one “Filibuster,” a Beverly Hills sixteen year-old: “Pathetic—you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.”

No, and nobody can prove that there are no unicorns in Oklahoma. Or that Melania Trump isn’t a Russian spy. Is it that Trump has no grasp of elementary logic or that he believes most voters don’t? Either way, the nation is screwed. Bad president-elect!

GOP stalwarts—Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus—were all over the talk shows making variants of the same claim: just because there’s no evidence of voter fraud doesn’t mean it might not be true.

Sure, and Melania Trump might be Vladimir Putin’s lover.

Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers tried to stop Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s (pointless) Michigan recount by arguing “[a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

But it was left for Trump spokesblonde Scottie Nell Hughes to push this nonsense to its ultimate end. Appearing on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Hughes chastised unimaginative pundits: “One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people who say ‘facts are facts,’— they’re not really facts….Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.”

Certainly not in Trumpworld. To be fair, it wasn’t clear Hughes thinks this is a desirable state of affairs. But she was reacting to a question about James Fallows’ blog at The Atlantic, documenting and rebutting Trump’s serial prevarications. Last time I checked, the list was up to 155.

Things are getting serious. Fallows posted one American diplomat’s reaction to Trump’s voter fraud falsehood:

“Embassy staff in China or Russia are bound to be told, ‘It doesn’t look like your governmental system is doing so well, does it? See, your future President is saying that your elections are rotten with fraud.’

“What could our people then say? For the sake of truth and the honor of the country, they can’t agree; but to disagree is to call their future boss a flagrant public liar. That he is in fact such a liar is, in that situation, beside the point. Our ability to advocate for our country is being recklessly endangered simply to satisfy Trump’s vanity.”

Meanwhile, hippy-dippy leftists used to be accused of feckless relativism. Now it’s so-called “conservatives” who argue against objective standards of evidence and proof.

Writing in 1943, Orwell thought it all came down to power-worship. Contemplating Hitler and Stalin, he wrote that “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

But for all the boasting and bullying of Trump supporters, Americans do expect better of their president. Already mistrusted by the majority, if Trump doesn’t clean up his act—a psychological impossibility, I fear—they’ll soon want to change the channel.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump looks out at Lake Michigan during a visit to the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin August 16, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Thayer/File Photo

Vendetta Or Paranoia? The ‘Times,’ The ‘Beast,’ And The Clintons

Vendetta Or Paranoia? The ‘Times,’ The ‘Beast,’ And The Clintons

When Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast showed up in my email yesterday, asking me to talk about the New York Times and the Clintons, I should have known what to expect. I’m sure Grove did his best (and I appreciate the link to our new e-book, The Hunting of Hillary), but his post left much to be desired.

Grove’s fundamental mistake is to skew the discussion of alleged Times bias against the Clintons as Pulitzer-winning Times editors and staffers versus “diehard Clinton loyalists” and “allies.” Evidently, anyone who criticizes media coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton falls in that latter category — and so he condescends to describe me as such. Whatever my views about the Clintons, however, my concern is fairness and accuracy, not loyalty to any politician. Are James Fallows, Rachel Maddow, Jay Rosen, and Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor — all of whom have lamented evidence of Times bias against Hlllary Clinton — also “loyalists”? I don’t think so.

In my 2008 columns on the Democratic presidential primary for Salon and The New York Observer, Hillary Clinton suffered much tougher treatment than Barack Obama. It isn’t hard to look them up. I also assigned tough stories about her campaign, notably a major exposé of Mark Penn’s anti-union consulting. None of that was the work of a “Clinton loyalist.” Now I edit The National Memo, and Hillary Clinton has received no special dispensation here, either.

As for the question of bias in today’s Times, I sent Grove an email listing specific examples that he naturally ignored:

When Gene Lyons and I wrote The Hunting of the President in 2000, we showed how Times reporting on Whitewater had been slanted and woefully inaccurate from the beginning. Our viewpoint about that “scandal” was thoroughly vindicated. But unlike some other prominent journalists who were once obsessed with Whitewater, the Times editors never acknowledged its central role in that fiasco.

Over the years since, the paper’s coverage of the Clintons has veered back and forth, sometimes wildly — and particularly whenever Hillary Clinton is or appears to be a presidential candidate. Anybody looking for a Times bias can cite several glaring examples: the inaccurate front-page story about the Clinton Foundation’s supposedly shaky financing; the first inaccurate story about foundation donor Frank Giustra and Kazakhstan; the second highly misleading story about Giustra, Kazakhstan, and Uranium One; the peculiar “deal” that the paper did with Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer; and the series of stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails, based on leaks from the Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi — which culminated in the embarrassingly wrong “criminal referral” story.

Reviewing the Times’ role in promoting the Whitewater “scandal,” Grove is more misleading than revealing — and prefers assertions to basic facts. On the Pillsbury reports that exonerated the Clintons, for instance, he links to a tendentious article by Jeff Gerth and Stephen Engelberg claiming that James McDougal, the Clintons’ crooked and deranged Whitewater partner, somehow “protected” them from a financial loss. Actually, McDougal swindled the Clintons and secretly disposed of Whitewater assets for his own benefit.

Indeed, Times editors and reporters repeatedly sought to minimize the exculpatory findings of the Pillsbury report. They also failed to correct the false suggestion at the heart of Gerth’s original “exposé” — namely that Bill Clinton’s banking appointees somehow protected McDougal and his bankrupt Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, when in truth Clinton’s state government did everything in its power to shut him down.

In an email to Grove, Gene Lyons pointed to this crucial problem, noting “the fact, which I think has NEVER been reported by the NYT, that [Arkansas] regulators removed McDougal from his own [Madison Guaranty] S & L and urged the Feds to shut it down long before they did.”

On the upside, I was amused by Gerth’s pompous assertion that his Whitewater reporting has withstood “the test of time.” (Equally comical is a quote from disgraced former Times editor Howell Raines praising Gerth as “one of the best investigative reporters ever.” Now there’s a reliable source!)

The test of time? A conservative estimate of the amount of taxpayer treasure wasted on “investigating” Whitewater – a money-losing venture that ended years before Bill Clinton ran for president – is around $100 million. Which doesn’t include the huge opportunity costs for the country, Congress, and the president, as well as the damage inflicted on many innocent people in Arkansas and elsewhere.

That enormous waste of time and money spent probing a defunct real estate deal is Gerth’s principal legacy to American journalism.

Interested readers can find a thorough accounting of media errors in covering Whitewater – and the troubling way that Republican lawyers and businessmen used both Gerth and the Times – in The Hunting of Hillary. It’s a funny story, if you appreciate dark humor. And it’s still available, free.

File photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is joined onstage by her husband former President Bill Clinton after she delivered her “official launch speech” at a campaign kick off rally in Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City, June 13, 2015. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri