Category Archives: media news

media news, national news, political news

Trump changes presidency … not for the better!

Here’s another broken campaign promise from Donald John Trump.

He said he would change his approach if he were elected president of the United States, that he would become “more presidential.”

It hasn’t happened. The 71-year-old man who now is president isn’t going to change. He has demonstrated with graphic clarity his unwillingness to lend dignity to his comportment.

Indeed, this individual is changing the office he occupies.

Think of this for a moment. He goes to war with his foes, critics — and, yes, the media. He does so via Twitter. He has elevated a certain social medium to the level of venue for his policy pronouncements. The Trump White House acknowledges that his tweets become the official word of the president of the United States, our head of state, our commander in chief, the most powerful man on the planet.

Do you get it? He is lowering the office to his level! Rather than elevating his own standing to that of the exalted office to which he was elected, Trump is reducing the office a sort of playground, one populated by an overaged juvenile delinquent.

The president has disgraced his office. I would rue the day that he disgraces the great nation he is supposed to lead. However, the rest of us are better than the man who purports to be our leader.

media news

Violence against reporters? Hmm … you be the judge

The hits just keep on comin’.

The president of the United States — the man with the itchy Twitter finger — has done it again. He has tweeted a video depicting him punching out someone from CNN.

Is Donald John Trump promoting violence against the media?

Take a look right here.

Trump has failed to keep a number of campaign promises. He said he would act more “presidential” were he elected to the office. He promised to unify a nation divided badly by a rancorous political campaign. He vowed to “make America great again.”

The first two pledges have been abject failures; the third one, the “make America great” pledge was empty, as the nation already is great.

He has vented repeatedly on Twitter. He is using the social medium to — in effect — articulate presidential policy. It’s coming to us in the form we are witnessing now with the then-entertainer tackling an individual who he has portrayed as a member of a cable television news network.

What will happen if someone actually acts on what he or she has just seen on Twitter? Is it right to hold the president responsible for such action?

You be the judge.

This individual is a disgrace.

media news

Trump might have a form of ‘keyboard-itis’

A couple of TV talking heads have tossed out a theory in the past few days about Donald John Trump’s tweet tantrums that seems to make sense to me.

It goes something like this: The president of the United States assumes a different personality when he wakes up in the wee hours and fires out those angry, personal and vulgar Twitter messages. He’s not the same guy … they said.

Hmmm. I have given that some thought. It finally dawned on me: Yeah! He’s just like some of my own social media “friends.” I know the type. I am related — truth be told — to one of those individuals.

The word on Trump is that in person he can be kind, generous, affable; I’ve heard it said he’s a wonderful dinner companion. Then he picks up his telecommunications device, or sits behind a computer keyboard and becomes a raging animal. A monster. A sort of Mr. Hyde!

I get some pretty harsh responses to blog posts from some of my own acquaintances. They’re snarky, smart-alecky, borderline disrespectful.

One fellow I’ve known for a number of years actually “unfriended” me from Facebook after we got into a snit over something he had written to a member of my family. He was a constant — and annoying — critic of this blog. I guess you might consider him to be a “troll.” He seemed to pounce like a cat on a rat whenever I wrote something positive about, oh, President Barack H. Obama.

Then we would share a meal somewhere. We got along famously when we sat at the same lunch table. We would talk about this and that, laugh at our disagreements. Then we’d go our separate ways and end our visit with a handshake and a man-hug.

This is my way of saying that I can understand fully that Donald Trump might assume a different persona when he fires off those tweets. It doesn’t excuse his uncivil behavior or his disgraceful demeaning of the exalted office he occupies.

His defenders say he is acting like any human being would act. That’s fine. Except for this little caveat: He isn’t any human being. He’s the president of the United States of America, for crying out loud! He has been elected to the nation’s highest office. He has an obligation, therefore, to conduct himself in a manner befitting his standing as the world’s most powerful man.

Even when he sits down in front of a computer keyboard.

I hope there can be a cure for keyboard-itis.

media news

How about ‘reprehensible,’ or ‘despicable’?

I am growing weary of these tepid responses from Republican officeholders to the tweets that the nation’s top Republican keeps firing into cyberspace.

Donald J. Trump’s itchy Twitter finger keeps degrading the presidency. Yes, many Republicans are speaking out. They are angry, embarrassed and dismayed at what the president is doing.

But get this, from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, one of my favorite Republicans and the guy I wanted to see win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

He calls the president’s latest tweet tirade “unacceptable.” He said it is “unfortunate.”

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said the other day that Trump’s attack on MSNBC broadcaster Mika Brzezinski was “inappropriate.”

That’s it? There’s been more of that kind of lukewarm language coming from GOP leaders.

Check out more tweets here.

I’d settle for terms like: reprehensible, despicable, disgraceful, degrading, frightening … you know, language that expresses genuine outrage.

Will any of it matter? Will that kind of response get to Donald J. Trump, making him think better of his intemperate use of a social medium?

No. It just would send a signal throughout the country that it might be dawning on Republican leaders that the guy who occupies the presidency is unfit for his high office.

media news

Trump keeps up drumbeat of insults … arrgggh!

I am running out of ways to express my outrage at the conduct of the president of the United States of America.

It’s not enough that Donald John Trump decided to attack a broadcast journalist with a vulgar attack via Twitter. Or that he refuses to acknowledge that his conduct is unpresidential, unprofessional, undisciplined, indecent and maybe even immoral.

His fellow Republicans implore him to stop. They say it’s beneath the office he occupies. He denigrates the presidency, demeans the country he was elected to lead and lends credence to those — such as yours truly — who question his fitness to govern.

He keeps it up. Today was no different for Donald Trump. He fired off another of those idiotic, moronic and despicable tweets in which he blasts the MSNBC talk show host and her broadcast partner.

I’m out … for the time being.

International news, media news, national news

Golden Rule, Mr. President?

One of the aspects of this latest feud that’s erupted between Donald J. Trump and the media involves its timing.

The president decided to go after MSBNC morning talk-show host Mika Brzezinski with a hideous tweet about her supposedly “bleeding from a face lift” while she and fiancé and fellow co-host Joe Scarborough sought to visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

The president is angry over “negative coverage” delivered by the MSNBC hosts. So he decided to make it personal.

Let’s consider a fairly underreported aspect of this spate uncivility. It comes just after the death of Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Carter from 1977 until 1981. The elder Brzezinski, who died on May 26,  was an avid anti-communist; he fled his native Poland, which would be taken over by the communist government that followed orders set down by the Soviet Union. Zbig, as he was known to his friends, became a naturalized American and then became one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Soviet Union. He was a great man who, quite obviously was revered by his family, including his daughter Mika.

Why couldn’t the president have honored Mika Brzezinski’s grief? Why did he feel compelled to launch that Twitter tirade while she is still hurting?

Oh, I almost forgot. That would require a sense of human decency, which the president seems to lack.

I am reminded of a New Testament passage. It’s in the Gospel of Matthew, referring to the Golden Rule. The New Living Translation instructs us as Jesus Christ taught: Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.

How might the president have felt had someone attacked him so directly — and so personally — so soon after the death of a loved one?

I’m guessing he’d get real angry … real fast.

media news

POTUS meddling with media?

Try for a moment to process what MSBNC “Morning Joe” co-hosts — Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough — said today about their relationship with the president of the United States.

According to Scarborough, Donald J. Trump’s White House called Scarborough and asked him to apologize for the “negative coverage” he and Brzezinski have done on the president. In return, again according to Scarborough, the president would call his good friend who runs the National Enquirer and spike a story that the publication is going to run about Scarborough and Brzezinski.

See the story here.

So, if I have this right — and if Scarborough is telling the truth — the president of the United States is now taking time away from matters of state to engage even further in a petty and petulant quarrel with the media over “negative coverage.”

Are there any more examples needed to demonstrate that Donald J. Trump is categorically unfit to hold the office of president?

media news

Hell freezes over: Fox News anchor defends Obama

When a TV anchor for Fox News Channel — the outfit formerly known for its “fair and balanced” mantra — comes to President Barack Obama’s defense, well, then you’ve got my attention.

So it was this week with Julie Banderas, who scolded Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel’s feeble attempt at defending Donald J. Trump’s vulgar tweet about another news talk show host, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski.

Banderas noted that Obama’s critics called him all sorts of names, heaped all sorts of unfair and inaccurate criticism on him. She told McDaniel that the former president responded with dignity and decorum. He chose not to fire off angry tweets in the wee hours of some morning to answer his critics.

Banderas said: “People used to call him a Muslim. People used to call him under-qualified, a sellout to America, a hater of Israel. I mean they called him every name in the book, but you didn’t see him lash out.”

Here is the Fox interview

“Today, the president acted like a human, and he pushed back,” McDaniel told Banderas.

Sorry, Mme. Chairwoman. A “human” doesn’t have to resort to such degrading personal attacks to make whatever point he sought to make. Someone will have to inform me on precisely what the president’s point actually was.

He tweeted something about Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a facelift.” He called her “Crazy Mika.” He attacked yet another female in public life, using language not fit for a junior high school playground, let alone from the commander in chief and head of state of the world’s greatest nation.

Chairwoman McDaniel’s use of the word “human” also should include the word “decency.” If the president had a hint of human decency buried somewhere in his DNA he would have refrained from attacking another human in such a personal and undignified manner.

Julie Banderas was absolutely correct to call the president out for his latest moronic Twitter tirade.

local news, media news

Police risk their lives daily … if not hourly

I had a chance this week to renew an acquaintance with a member of Amarillo’s police department. He’s now a captain, but when I first met him more then a decade ago he was employed as an officer on bike patrol. He rode a bicycle around high-crime neighborhoods as part of the city ‘s community policing effort.

I won’t tell you his name, because he doesn’t know I’m writing this blog.

The young man had some nice things to say to me about the work I did back in The Day, when I wrote for the Amarillo Globe-News.

But I want to take a moment here to restate what I’ve noted already, which is that police officers have no greater fan or friend than yours truly.

My very first full-time reporting job was back in Oregon, at the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier, which was a small-town afternoon daily newspaper that published five issues each week, Monday through Friday. I would start my day before the sun rose visiting police department dispatchers, collecting information about the calls that came over the past 24 hours. I would look for possible news stories to report on for that day’s paper.

I developed good relationships over the years with cops, with chiefs of police, county sheriffs and dispatchers. I came to understand early about the dangers these folks face every time they report for work. One sheriff scolded me once for writing the words “routine traffic stop,” and he informed me that “there ain’t no such thing as a ‘routine stop.'” I got it.

Did I encounter some bad actors along the way? You bet. One sheriff’s deputy in Oregon City was caught stealing drugs from the evidence property room. A sheriff I knew — also in Oregon City — got entangled in a controversy involving arms deals in southern Africa. One officer in Amarillo detested me because I wrote editorials critical of the police association’s efforts to get a dramatic increase in pay.

But the vast majority of officers and their bosses did their jobs well, with dedication and with honor.

I was given a bit of an up-close look at police operations as a member of the Citizens Police Academy. I had written a column that was mildly critical of something I witnessed involving a police officer. The young captain I saw this week reminded me of that column and of the time we first met while I was attending those academy classes. One of the senior officers at APD read my column, then called me out, telling me in effect that I needed to get a more detailed look at police work. He invited to apply for the Citizens Police Academy; I did and got accepted.

Yes, I read news stories about police officers acting unprofessionally. I understand fully the anger among some communities about cops who harass citizens needlessly, or who demonstrate racial or ethnic bias against citizens. Many of these incidents end tragically and I generally am sympathetic with those who call for reforms within various departments.

However, my support for police remains resolute. My admiration for those who do their jobs well is as strong as ever. I’ve had the pleasure and the honor of knowing many of them over many years in journalism and, yes, I understand the inherent tension between cops and the media.

My professional experience with police in my chosen career has loaded with many pleasant memories of what I’ve witnessed. They have earned my undying respect.

media news

Twitter insult might doom health care overhaul

Donald J. Trump’s latest Twitter tantrum bodes potentially disastrous for a legislative goal he and congressional Republicans have established.

They want to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. A U.S. Senate bill is hanging by a thread. Senators postponed their vote on it until after the Fourth of July recess.

So what does the president do? He fires off a vulgar, insulting tweet this morning about two MSBNC talk show hosts, ratcheting up his idiotic war against the media. The tweet makes some bizarre reference to Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a facelift.” He refers to her as “Crazy Mika” and her co-host Joe Scarborough as “Psycho Joe.”

Republicans upon whom the president depends to help him approve this ACA repeal/replace idea now are running like thieves away from Trump.

It’s fair to wonder: Is the president’s lack of discipline, decorum and dignity going to cost him a victory that — frankly, it must be said — was tenuous?

This is no way at all at how you govern.