The Media Learned Nothing From 2016

The press hasn’t broken its most destructive habits when it comes to covering Donald Trump.

6:15 AM ET

James Fallows
National correspondent at The Atlantic

We’re seeing a huge error, and a potential tragedy, unfold in real time.

That’s a sentence that could apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment. What I have in mind, though, is the almost unbelievable failure of much of the press to respond to the realities of the Trump age.

Many of our most influential editors and reporters are acting as if the rules that prevailed under previous American presidents are still in effect. But this president is different; the rules are different; and if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.

In some important ways, media outlets are repeating the mistake made by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his book about the Mueller investigation, True Crimes and Misdemeanors (and in a New Yorker article), Jeffrey Toobin argues that Mueller’s tragic flaw was a kind of anachronistic idealism—which had the same effect as naivete. Mueller knew the ethical standards he would maintain for himself and insist on from his team. He didn’t understand that the people he was dealing with thought standards were for chumps. Mueller didn’t imagine that a sitting attorney general would intentionally misrepresent his report, which is of course what Bill Barr did. Mueller wanted to avoid an unseemly showdown, or the appearance of a “fishing expedition” inquiry, that would come from seeking a grand-jury subpoena for Donald Trump’s testimony, so he never spoke with Trump under oath, or at all. Trump, Barr, and their team viewed this decorousness as a sign of weakness, which they could exploit.
George Packer: We are living in a failed state

Something similar is going on now with many members of the press.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/

Covid Thoughts

Help Oregon and Washington residents affected by the wildfires

The Northwest Response Fund has been activated and donations will go to the American Red Cross.

Credit: KGW
Author: KGW Staff
Published: 4:48 PM PDT September 8, 2020
Updated: 10:04 AM PDT September 12, 2020
PORTLAND, Ore. — In partnership with KGW and KING-TV in Seattle, the American Red Cross has activated the Northwest Response Fund to help Oregon and Washington residents who are affected by the wildfires across the region. U.S. Bank has partnered with KGW and the Northwest Response Fund and will also be accepting in-branch donations at all Oregon branches at this time.
Donations support the work the American Red Cross is providing to families that have been displaced or impacted by the active and growing wildfires and can be made through a special link created for KGW viewers.
The Red Cross has shelters open in Springfield, Redmond, Salem, Glide, Chiloquin and Colton, Oregon, and Puyallup, Tacoma, Spokane, Wenatchee, Selah and Kennewick, Washington.
Your support enables the Red Cross to prepare for, respond to and help people recover from disasters. Your generous donations make it possible for the Red Cross to provide food, water, showers, first aid and emotional support.
The American Red Cross name and emblem are used with its permission, which in no way constitutes an endorsement, express or implied, of any product, service, company, opinion or political position.
For more information about the Red Cross, please visit www.redcross.org.

https://www.kgw.com/mobile/article/news/local/help-oregon-and-washington-residents-affected-by-the-wildfires/283-1ffd3c38-e4b7-45a6-b66f-7d418491d88c

Is this why Munchkin took action against Derkach?

Was it a smoke screen?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nyfd-says-treasury-withheld-dollar37m-from-9-11-first-responder-fund/ar-BB18WiLy

FDNY says Treasury withheld $3.7M from 9/11 first responder fund

Strange Biden/Harris fundraiser on Facebook

A post showed up in my Facebook newsfeed that was supposedly from the Biden-Harris campaign saying that today was Kamala’s birthday and would I like to make a donation? Since today is my birthday I almost took bait. But further research indicated that Kamala’s actual birthday is in October and I now suspect that it was a fake fundraiser on Facebook. I thought I had changed my Facebook profile settings last night to make my birthday private, but it didn’t work and today I received a lot of nice birthday wishes in spite of my efforts to keep a lower profile. I now wonder if the “coincidental” Harris birthday ask was related to that.

They licked it!!!

10 Portland things coming to your city if Biden wins, as Trump warns (commentary)

By Lizzy Acker | The Oregonian/OregonLive
In his speech from the White House to the Republican National Convention Thursday night, President Donald Trump said that if Joe Biden wins the election in November, Democrats “will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon.”
If you heard that message from another city, you might be scared. What if your city did look like Portland? What would that mean? Should you be worried?

Feds, right-wing media paint Portland as ‘city under siege.’ A tour of town shows otherwise
Here are 10 things you may see in your city or town, if it begins to look like Portland.

https://www.oregonlive.com/trending/2020/08/10-portland-things-coming-to-your-city-if-biden-wins-as-trump-warns.html

It's Friday night ...

Aristus?

Portland's version of The Newsroom?

Dan Haggarty on Sports Protests

HOW ARE CRIME AUTHORS GOING TO ADDRESS THE PANDEMIC IN THEIR NEW BOOKS?

Only when an entire decade had passed had I gained distance and perspective to revisit that idea. Nightwatcher (HarperCollins), about an unhinged killer preying on vulnerable New Yorkers in the days after the 9/11 attacks, was published eleven years after I’d conceived it, in September, 2012.

Flash forward to March, 2020. I was between books, having just finished revising my upcoming release The Butcher’s Daughter (William Morrow, September 2020) and about to begin writing a new one, when the world was again irrevocably altered. My husband returned to his midtown office after lunch to find the building cordoned off, surrounded by law enforcement, the press, and medical teams in hazmat suits. It turned out that the first confirmed local case of Covid-19—the New Rochelle man whose illness would result in a cluster and the nation’s first lockdown right here in Westchester—worked in the building.

In short order, things escalated—Governor Cuomo closed the universities, the NBA curtailed its season, and businesses skidded to a halt. No more commuting to Manhattan for my husband and our older son; no more college for our younger son, two months shy of graduation and plucked from his Ithaca apartment to be locked down with us in his childhood bedroom.

With four of us suddenly stuck under one roof 24/7, perpetually short on supplies, with illness and death surging all around us, I put my new proposal aside for a while. My time was encompassed with domestic tasks that had become pervasive and logistics-challenged. When I wasn’t scavenging local shelves for paper towels and yeast, I was hiking in the woods to preserve my sanity and some semblance of fitness, and chasing grim nightly news reports with lullaby-esque Friends reruns. Throughout, my Writer Brain was in overdrive and the What Ifs kept coming—several ideas for crime novels that would take place, could only take place, amid this grim new world of quarantining and social distancing. But once again, it was all too raw, too fresh, as yet unfolding.