Trump is still only teasing the "Something very big has just happened!".... but news reports say that our forces have killed al-Baghdadi .

Here's how it looks at Trump's Twitter page right now:



A pinned tweet. That's the tweet I called "Kind of disturbing actually" last night. Why "disturbing" when it suggests good news, doesn't it? I found it kind of disturbing because of the oddness of getting news this way — it's coy and it's social media. It feels like the way a friend might begin to tell us that she's fallen in love.

To my ear, the "has" gives it a special feeling. "Something very big has just happened," not "Something very big just happened." The "has" elevates it, makes it feel rather grand.

The NYT story at the moment is "Special Operations Raid Said to Kill Senior Terrorist Leader in Syria/The identity of the target was not confirmed, but President Trump was scheduled to make a statement on Sunday morning":

United States Special Operations commandos carried out a risky raid in northwestern Syria on Saturday against a senior terrorist leader there, two senior administration officials said late Saturday.

A senior American official said commandos and analysts were still seeking to confirm the identity of the terrorist, who the officials said was killed in the operation when he exploded his suicide vest.

But a person close to President Trump and a senior American official said that the target of the raid was believed to be the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A senior administration official said that the president had approved the mission....

That's the form and tone I'm used to reading when the news is serious.

This makes me think of something My name goes here wrote in the comments on last night's post:

In the "old" days an important announcement would be learned and then shared with favored journalists who would then tell all of the other journolists and they would get to be all smug and righteous when they, the favored few, would break the news about this developing story. They would lie to the audience that they are learning about this just now and they are sharing what they learn, then have 3 lined up "analysts" that already know the softball questions to expect to knit the narrative.

As long as Trump is president, it appears that those days are gone. Who did he tell first? Us. Tomorrow when the press carries whatever Trump's announcement is, they will be learning about it for the first time.

I like this. It pulls the Presidency into the 21st century.

I added the link to "journolists" to indicate that it's not a typo.

Will the next President talk to us like this? Trump's antagonists expect him to be gone and to stop occupying the position of President when he is not a real President. Only when he's gone will we see what the presidency has become. Will there be a reversion to the old form, or will the new President step into the new form of President created by Trump? I don't think we can go back, but I also think there can never be another Trump.

"Why did the WaPo state that the incident occurred in her 'late teens' when summarizing the therapist notes, but farther down in the story state that she was 15 and Kavenaugh was 17? Is 15 a 'late teen'?"

Asks NYC JournoList in the comments to my Kavanaugh post "Does it smell funny in here?" I just added an important 5-point statement to that post, so I hope you read that, though it's hidden away in update position on the old post. But it's this "late teens" question that I want to break out into a new post.

The term "late teens" appears in this sentence:

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when [Christine Blasey Ford] was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.

Is that just WaPo phrase or is that the phrase in the therapist's notes? The therapist's notes — from 2012 — are presented as corroborating Ford's story, but if she's saying she was 15 and the therapist's notes say "late teens," then the answer to NYC JournoList's question may be that WaPo was allowing us to see a discrepancy in the corroborating evidence but not calling too much attention to it.

But then why isn't "late teens" in quotes (like "rape attempt")? Maybe the therapist's notes have a specific age, and it really is late teens, and if we knew the actual number, Kavanaugh wouldn't be 17 but 18 or 19 or 20. Which is it?! Kavanaugh would look worse if he were older, but he also wouldn't be in high school any longer, which would conflict with other aspects of Ford's story.

After so many years, Ford said, she does not remember some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said...

Is 15 a 'late teen'?

No. In the parlance of Roe, 'late teen' would imply the third teen trimester, 18 thru 19.

At 15, Ford was in her second teen trimester.

It's all there in the constitution, if you look hard enough at the penumbras!

Word that does not appear on the front-page at CNN right now: Russia.

The narrative has changed. Click to enlarge:



I do see — look closely — "Van Jones: O'Keefe video is a hoax." The video is the one where we hear Van Jones say "That Russia thing is just a big nothing-burger." But the teaser on the front page doesn't give us a clue that the video had to do with Russia, and even when you click through, there's no mention of the substance of what we hear Jones say in the video, just the assertion: "CNN's Van Jones says the ambush video of him done by notorious provocateur James O'Keefe is a hoax."

And how is the video a hoax? I think Jones is misusing the word, because he does not deny that he is the man in the video or that there's some context that would change the meaning of his statement. He indicates that he could have said other things, but not that he did actually on that occasion say more and O'Keefe had it edited out.

ADDED: I'm just noticing that among the things CNN is trying to tease us with this morning is: "Prostitutes: Senate health care bill will devastate us." Prostitutes!

ALSO: The Washington Post also has a front page that doesn't mention Russia but does — amazing! — have sex workers. Click to enlarge:



You see the sex workers story: "Everything you were afraid to ask about phone sex workers — in one class-action lawsuit."

Is there some JournoList-like back channel where they're brainstorming about how to titillate people if you can't talk about Russia and coming up with PROSTITUTES!

Dave Weigel's exile from The Washington Post is over.

"The move is a homecoming of sorts for Weigel, who spent three months at the Post in 2010 before resigning amid scandal."

Weigel, who had been tasked with writing about conservatives, was revealed to have disparaged some of his subjects in an off-the-record listserv called "Journolist."

Weigel then spent four years at Slate before joining Bloomberg last September as part of the launch of the Bloomberg Politics vertical helmed by "Game Change" authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. But the New York-based project has struggled to gain traction since launching last year, suffering from internal clashes with the Washington bureau and enduring several embarrassing headlines.

Journolist.

Who they were, where they worked.

(Via Instapundit.)

(If you don't remember what JournoList was, click the tag below for all my old posts on the subject.)

"OccupyDC Emails Show MSM, Dylan Ratigan, Working With Protesters To Craft Message."

Dana Loesch reveals.

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media....

In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)...

We know that the original movement was kicked off by a Soros-funded group called Adbusters; that union groups and radicals routinely overthrow leadership unfriendly to an occupation of the occupation (check out how Occupy St. Louis was hijacked by ACORN off-shoot MORE); and now we know that media, including MSNBC itself, is apparently helping occupiers better influence the public by both writing their messages and giving them a platform.

Here's the searchable data base.

"[E]very functioning society needs a 'backstage' where people can let their hair down and speak without observing social proprieties."

Writes Glenn Reynolds in an op-ed about the Journolist:

But journalists have been destroying that backstage for everyone else for decades. Why should they be permitted to keep one, when no one else is?

No doubt publishing these never-intended-for-publication remarks is, at some level, unfair: The list members were just venting to their friends. But, of course, so were lots of other people whose off-the-cuff remarks have been blown up into national stories by journalists over the years. And efforts to covertly shape the news, hurt competitors, and influence elections (JournoList members referred to themselves as the "unofficial Obama campaign") aren't the sort of thing that journalist think deserve privacy the rest of the time when they're done by people who aren't journalists.

Journolist "took a process that could have been public, democratic and transparent and gratuitously made it private, stratified and opaque."

"This was an odd move for 'progressives' to make when confronted with the revolutionary openness of the Web."

Says Mickey Kaus.

Will Wilkinson and I talk about Shirley Sherrod, Journolist, Top Secret America, Wikileaks, and road trips...

... on the new Bloggingheads.

"Rush is the man," said Jeffrey Toobin on Journolist.

After Sarah Spitz said she'd immensely enjoy watching Rush Limbaugh die:

Rush cannot be replaced. What people miss about Rush is that he is just astonishingly good as a broadcaster.  He is compelling, funny, entertaining. I haven’t heard Thompson often, but he’s probably pretty lame. Ingraham is ok. I never listen to Hannity on the radio. But Rush is the man.

And for that Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller counts Toobin as one of the "Heroes of Journolist."

***

On July 20, Rush talked about Journolist, and mentioned Toobin:

Friend sends me a note, "Rush what do you mean? What do you mean here this 'small time, crazy, left-wing bloggers'? Jeffrey Toobin, Eric Alterman, Paul Krugman Joe Klein are crazy left-wing bloggers? They're treated as giants." Let's take 'em individually. Eric Alterman. Do you know who Eric Alterman is? The left may treat him as a giant. I know that they do. He's a kook! He's a far-left fringe kook. But do you know who he is? Do you? Jeffrey Toobin. You might know who he is. He works for the least-watched cable news network in history, CNN. He also worked there when they had viewers. I know he's considered a giant. He's a "legal correspondent." He's considered to be above reproach.

There is no journalism. These people are not journalists. They're propagandists, whether it's Jeffrey Toobin or Eric Alterman or Krugman. Yeah, he's a New York Times columnist; he's a propagandist. He is a giant because he's in the New York Times. But my point is whether it's people you've never heard of on this list writing for blogs you've never heard of or whether it is names you never heard of, it's the entire Washington media -- and it's pervasive. I really do think that the take here is there is no media. This is the big myth. You know, the German historian Carl von Clausewitz once stated "War is diplomacy by another means." Well, journalism is just propaganda now: The government putting out its agenda by another means. There are no reporters. There is no journalism. It's just liberalism....

"Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture..."

"... to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must now be abandoned. Ezra Klein has already been caught in a bald-faced lie about his discretion in picking members; and the notion that this was simply a water-cooler collection of journalistic thoughts is also belied by the emails now published by the Daily Caller."

Sullivan seethes.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever.

Devoid of any balls. Sullivan, by contrast, had the balls to question Sarah Palin's uterus.

Oliver Willis, at Media Matters, writes a shamefully dishonest post about me.

Just posted today:

To listen to the conservative media, the Daily Caller has exposed the discussion listserv Journolist as some sort of hotbed of liberal message coordination. Ann Althouse said it "was designed -- apparently -- to figure out how to structure the various news stories to serve the interests of their party," Limbaugh said the emails showed "mainstream coordination with the left," and Beck saw a plot "to help Barack Obama."

This theory of secret list coordinating all manner of nefarious activities gets debunked, however, by the latest Journolist story from the Daily Caller...

The Limbaugh and Beck quotes are supported by links (to Media Matters posts with video), but there's no link for what I said. Why's that? I don't think it's mere sloppiness, because, in fact, he's quoting something I wrote on June 27th, before the Journolist archive became available. I said:

Remember the liberal meme that George Bush was "incurious"? But aren't these liberal journalists incurious? They had this email list that was designed — apparently — to figure out how to structure the various news stories to serve the interests of their party. The Journolist was a self-herding device. They wanted to be good cogs in a machine that would generate power for the Democratic Party, didn't they? For career and social rewards? That's my hypothesis. As an intellectual, I would like to study how that worked. I'll write a book about it if someone will send me the raw material I need — the complete archive of the Journolist. 

I'm hoping to see the archive, because I can test a theory about what was going on. I'm asking questions and using the word "apparently." I don't know the truth. I want to read. Yet Willis presents my quote as if I am already reading, as if I'm misrepresenting what has been published in The Daily Caller. In fact, I've been notably critical of the way The Daily Caller has presented quotes from the list.

Willis writes: "To listen to the conservative media, the Daily Caller has exposed the discussion listserv Journolist as some sort of hotbed of liberal message coordination." My quote couldn't form the basis for an opinion about what the Daily Caller had exposed. It was written before The Daily Caller had published anything from the archive!

Media Matters... indeed...

ADDED: Having written this post and thereby worked through my anger, I must concede to some amusement at the presentation of "the conservative media" as me, Limbaugh, and Beck — in that order!

"On Sept. 8, 2008, five days after Palin’s national debut, some members of the group discussed producing coordinated propaganda designed to wound Palin and boost Obama."

Writes Jonathan Strong in The Daily Caller:

Ryan Avent, then a freelance blogger for the Economist, now an editor there, complained that Obama’s supporters were missing a chance to attack. “If we were the GOP, we’d be taking this opportunity to shout long and loud how unprepared Palin is—‘She doesn’t even know what Fannie and Freddie are…in the middle of a housing crisis!’….That’s the difference in the game as played by us and by them.”

Michael Tomasky responded: “So why aren’t Dems doing that? Just wundrin’.”

Luke Mitchell, then a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, asked Tomasky if his paper would be able to help: “Michael – Isn’t this something that can be fanned a bit by, say, the Guardian?”...

“... [I]t seems to me that a concerted effort on the part of the left partisan press could be useful. Why geld ourselves? A lot of the people on this list work for organizations that are far more influential than, say, the Washington Times.

“Open question: Would it be a good use of this list to co-ordinate a message of the week along the lines of the GOP? Or is that too loathsome? It certainly sounds loathsome. But so does losing!”

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, the founder of Journolist, quickly jumped in: “Nope, no message coordination. I’m not even sure that would be legal. This is a discussion list, though, and I want it to retain that character,” he wrote.

So we see the suggestion of propaganda/message coordination, presented as probably too loathsome to do and then immediately nixed by the list founder, Ezra Klein. The headline of Strong's article is "Journolist debates making its coordination with Obama explicit," suggesting that they were coordinating, but this was just the point where they openly talked about what they were doing... except they only talked about doing it in the future.

"JOURNOLIST: A Vast White-Wing Conspiracy?"

Instapundit links to I Own The World's collection of the names and faces of Journolist. Glenn stresses whiteness, but I Own says "IT LOOKS MORE LIKE THE UPPER WEST SIDE OF MANHATTAN" and the commenters eventually — scroll halfway down — pick up that cue.

"I don't think you can be a journalist and carry water for a politician, and that's what they were doing: 'Here's the line on Palin.'"

"These are political hacks, and I think they should stop calling themselves journalists. It discredits the rest of us."

So said Tucker Carlson, quoted in a Howard Kurtz analysis of the Journolist leaks on The Daily Caller.

Kurtz concludes: "None of this quite adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don't have similar discussions. But there is no escaping the fact that some of the list's liberal literati come off sounding like cagey political operatives."

"Beyond the ethics of lying and smear[ing] one’s opponents, I would think liberals would worry..."

"... about the fact that a large portion of liberal media is dedicated to lying to liberals. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information."

Writes Matthew Yglesias, except I replaced his word "conservatives" with "liberals" (as devilishly and aptly suggested by my darling husband Meade).

"Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News" headlines The Daily Caller in a weak effort to exploit the Journolist archive.

Jonathan Strong provides new extracts from the Journolist. I'm struggling to understand exactly what was said and meant, so work through this with me.

Strong begins by stirring up outrage over Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, writing that if she saw Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack, she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.” I get it. Liberals hate Limbaugh. And, in casual company, people who aren't too prissy and think they are funny don't mind saying they'd like it if people they hate would drop dead. This has nothing to do with Fox, of course.

Next, Strong has some discussion of whether the town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 reminded people of the early stages of the Nazis rise to power. The material here is, to me, pretty tame. It's actually a pretty cliché question to raise, and Strong presents us with no overt attempts to coordinate news stories about the meetings to push this Nazi comparison. It's standard and not shocking to muse over whether things seem fascist. (Ask Jonah Goldberg.)

Finally, we get to material about Fox News.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. 

Okay, you're writing about overreaction, and you use the phrase "paroxysms of rage"?

When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down. 

I want to see is the actual proposal to shut down Fox News.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

Libel law allows individuals to sue over damage to their reputation. Private lawsuits. That would not be the government taking action against the network, and it's certainly not a proposal to shut down Fox News.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

What's the big deal there? Scherer isn't proposing that the government shut down Fox News. He's criticizing Fox News as not following good principles of journalism. It's not even a complaint about the conservative slant.

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Is there a quote we are not getting? The material in quotes is not a proposal to "yank Fox of the air." It's a question — a question I read as critical of government action against Fox. Clicking some links, I finally figure out the quoted question is from Scherer, not Zasloff.

But Zasloff stuck to his position. 

What position?!

“I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

So that's the worst of it? Zasloff thinks the government could or should limit access. That's not shutting down Fox!

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

Zasloff got pushed back.

John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship.

Censorship? What censorship?

“Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”

"Scherer's questions"? What questions? I see one question from Scherer in the article. I'm interested in this contrast between principle and tactics, but I can't understand what it refers to!

The Daily Caller needs to do a whole lot better with its own journalism if it wants to hit the big time criticizing journalists. This is weak!

***

I go back to the text of the article, and I see that it's been rewritten, without a notation that editing has taken place. The Scherer-Zasloff part that puzzled me so much now reads:

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

And so a debate ensued. Time’s Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Zasloff asked a question. He's a law professor. Yes, it's inflammatory, but so what? He's getting a discussion going, and nobody goes for it. Broadcast licenses do require stations to serve the public interest, so there is a real topic to be discussed, and Zasloff isn't some weird crazy to ask. It's within the realm of law. What's notable is that the Journolist members don't support that kind of action against Fox.

***

My conclusion remains: The Daily Caller's article is weak. And I'm inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.

Andrew Sullivan: Journolist was corrupt collusion.

"[T]his collusion is corruption.... [T]his was an attempt to corral press coverage and skew it to a particular outcome.... I'm glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun.... [S]ocialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media."

How far were Journolisters willing to go to help Obama win the election?

Jonathan Strong, at the Daily Caller, quotes from that email list known as the Journolist:

Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC..."

Kill ABC because in an ABC News debate, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos had pressed Obama with questions about Wright.

"...and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

Interesting double use of the word "kill." We need to kill ABC before ABC kills the discourse.

“We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

Throw chairs now. Kill. Rather violent ideation there. Imagine if a tea partier had used such language. Look at what Spencer Ackerman wrote:

"I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

"And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

Smash... through a plate-glass window... snapshot of the bleeding mess... live in a state of constant fear...

Ackerman got some pushback, but only, it seems, because his strategy appeared ineffective. Mark Schmitt thought it would be bad to make the campaign "all about character" (as opposed to substance), and Kevin Drum said that it would be counterproductive because "the Obama brand" was about being above it all.

The Daily Caller may be picking the juiciest bits from the prize archive it has acquired. I would like access to the whole set of documents so that I can see for myself. The liberal/lefty journalists were eager to help their side, and perhaps conservative journalists do the same for their side. Is Strong smashing Ackerman's head through a plate glass window — rhetorically! — or is this an admirable study of ethics in journalism?

The Davids, Weigel and Frum on Bloggingheads.

They talk about Weigel's recent Journolist-related ouster from the Washington Post, among other things. I haven't watched yet, so I can't vouch for how interesting the discussion is. It's interesting that they're on, so that's how my interestingness standard is met. Will they push each other or just natter on? Maybe listen while you're cooking dinner or something.