Tag Archives: CNN

media news

Memo to CNN: check your anger at the door

Oh, how I hate admitting this, but I feel compelled to do so.

Ari Fleischer — President George W. Bush’s first press secretary — posted a tweet overnight that makes an interesting and quite valid point about CNN’s coverage of all things political.

He said that if you’re an anti-Donald J. Trump (a Democrat) guest, you get all the time in the world to make your case; if you happen to be pro-Trump (a Republican), the CNN anchors will interrupt you constantly. Here’s what he wrote: I’ve been watching CNN’s morning show recently. It seems to have two main topics. 1) What did Trump/GOP do wrong? 2) How bad is the collusion story for Donald Trump. If you’re a Democrat guest , you’re free to speak. If you’re a Republican, you’ll always be interrupted.

I admit to watching it occur in the moment myself. And, oh yes, it annoys me, too.

Let me be clear about something else as well. Fleischer made no mention of the way Fox News on-air personalities treat their pro- and anti-Trump guests. Given that I rarely watch Fox, I am only able to presume that they flip the CNN example on its head, treating the Republicans with fairness and the Democrats with the same level of disdain that CNN shows toward the pro-Trumpers.

I want to hold up an example of how a broadcast or cable news network ought to handle these on-air confrontations: I present ABC News’ “This Week.”

That program, which airs Sunday morning, had former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr on board this past weekend explaining what might drive the investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged involvement with Russian 2016 election hackers. He appeared with ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams. Starr — who ran the investigation that led to President Clinton’s impeachment — could be construed as someone favorable to the current president. Abrams has revealed a more critical bias toward the president.

The two men made their points without interruption. The moderator, Martha Raddatz, didn’t barge in on either man’s time. She let them argue their points to the viewers — and occasionally with each other.

This is the kind of give-and-take we rarely see on CNN — the cable network that calls itself the “leader” in cable news presentation.

I am a fairly regular CNN viewer. As one who takes the presentation of news seriously, I want to echo Ari Fleischer’s assessment of the perception that CNN creates, which is that it does not present the news fairly and without bias.

And just think: This critique comes from someone who is inclined to agree with the point of view expressed by CNN’s talking heads.

My plea is simple. Check your bias at the door, CNN “news” staff, and don’t let your anxiety over the state of play in politics and public policy get the better of you.

national news

The Mooch is wrong: Mueller ‘firing’ story is relevant

Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci has delivered a sparkling example of why he lasted only a few days as White House communications director.

His spinning skills are seriously deficient.

Let’s look for a moment at what he told CNN newsman Chris Cuomo. The Mooch told Cuomo that the New York Times story about how Donald John Trump ordered the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller was “irrelevant” because Trump never actually fired Mueller.

It made me go, “Huh?”

The Times cited four sources in detailing how the president ordered White House counsel Donald McGahn to get Mueller fired from his probe into the “Russia thing.” McGahn said he would quit if the president pushed any harder. Trump then backed off.

The Mooch doesn’t seem to understand, or is ignoring, this basic fact: Trump has said many times he never discussed firing Mueller; he has said the thought never crossed his mind.

The Times story has revealed yet another presidential prevarication, an outright lie. And it’s a doozy, man! Not only did Trump discuss firing Mueller, he actually came within a whisker of acting on it.

To what end? To torpedo Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians during the 2016 election.

From my perch, that looks for all the world like “obstruction of justice.”

Yep. The story is quite relevant.

national news, political news

Now … it’s time for ‘Fire and Fury’

I am happy to report that my copy of “Fire and Fury” arrived in the mail today.

My original plan was to rush out to the bookstore to buy a book off the shelf. Then I realized I could buy the book for a lot less money if I purchased it online.

So I did. I bought the book from Amazon for about half of what I would have paid at the retail outlet.

Michael Wolff has taken some grief in recent days over the book that details a lot of what many of us have suspected about Donald John Trump Sr., and his presidency. It tells of the chaos, confusion and the narcissism that plagues the White House. There also are those notable observations about whether Don Trump Jr. engaged in a “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” meeting with Russians goons who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Critics have wondered about his sources. They have accused him of fabricating quotes. Wolff didn’t acquit himself very well when he got quite testy with CNN talk show host Michael Smerconish, who asked him completely appropriate questions about how Wolff ingratiated himself with Trump’s inner circle.

Many pundits, though, have said the book is a serious page-turner. They couldn’t put it down.

I now intend to find out for myself.

I’ll get back to you.

medical news

Trump is overweight … enough said

I am not going to get involved in a discussion about whether Donald John Trump is merely overweight, obese, or whether the doctor who examined him is telling us the whole truth about his patient’s medical condition.

I make this declaration as someone who could stand lose a few pounds as well. So I won’t be overly judgmental, except to say that I do wonder if the president actually weighs a “mere” 239 pounds.

Dr. Ronny Jackson, the rear admiral who examined Trump, said the president is in “excellent health.” He attributes “good genes” to a diagnosis offered on someone — the president — who eats fast food, guzzles Diet Cokes and gets no exercise.

Fine, doc.

I’ll just offer this long-distance observation.

The president is overweight. He needs to lose a good bit of weight. I’ve seen the pictures of him in his golf attire. The man has a pot belly and an overly ample caboose.

He’s not an Adonis … even though he might think of himself as one.

I am in no position to determine whether he has heart disease, as CNN’s resident medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, has asserted. I’ll leave that analysis to the medical community. Nor will I determine whether he has lost his marbles. If Dr. Jackson says he retains his full mental acuity, I’ll accept that, too.

However, there is zero doubt in my own mind that the president needs to take better care of himself.

I say this as one of the president’s 300 million-plus employers. He works for us.

Lose some weight, Mr. President. Do as you’re told.

media news, national news, political news

Wolff squares off against CNN host … and loses

I intend fully to read “Fire and Fury” when it arrives in my mailbox in a few days.

My initial intention was to purchase it off the shelf at Barnes & Noble when it was released, then I decided to order it online, via Amazon. It will arrive soon.

There. That said, I watched “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff make an ass of himself on CNN, when host Michael Smerconish sought to ask him what I considered to be a legitimate question.

Smerconish, who told Wolff he “tore through” the book, wanted to know if Wolff misrepresented his intentions to the Trump administration when he gained access to the White House and was allowed freedom to talk to many key aides to Donald J. Trump.

I did not hear any inherent bias in Smerconish’s question. Wolff, though, took extreme offense at the question and the questioner. He ended up saying that Smerconish was “doing the White House’s job” by impugning his integrity.

Actually, Smerconish did nothing of the sort. He asked a perfectly appropriate question in his search for complete context in how Wolff was able to report in his book the statements attributed to the likes of former Trump political strategist Stephen Bannon.

So … Wolff finished the interview. Smerconish has become a sort of media Celebrity of the Moment with his questions and the confrontation they produced with the author of a much-discussed book about the president of the United States.

My advice to Wolff: Settle down, dude. And if you’re going to bristle at questions posed by a middle-of-the-roader like Michael Smerconish, you probably ought to stay away from Sean Hannity and his cohorts at Fox News.

Here’s the relevant portion of the interview. It’s worth your time:

Smerconish vs. Wolff

political news

Birtherism: It’s back!

Political nut jobs have this annoying way of getting attention they don’t deserve.

The newest Exhibit A of this phenomenon happens to be the new Republican candidate for the U.S. senator from Arizona, the former Maricopa County sheriff and convicted (and later pardoned) felon Joe Arpaio.

The ex-sheriff says former President Obama’s birth certificate is a phony document. He doesn’t believe the 44th president was born in Hawaii. He said he has “evidence” that the president served two terms illegally. Will he produce the “evidence”? No, he said on CNN last night.

He had this exchange with Chris Cuomo:

“We have the evidence, nobody will talk about it, nobody will look at it, and anytime you want to come down or anybody we’ll be glad to show you the evidence,” Arpaio said.
Cuomo pressed Arpaio again on the topic: “So you believe that President Obama’s birth certificate is a phony?”
“No doubt about it,” Arpaio said.
Ugghh! No, double, maybe triple ugghh!
This is the guy, lest we forget, who was convicted of disobeying a federal court order that mandated he stop profiling Hispanics in his quest to find illegal immigrants. He then was pardoned by the president of the United States, the nation’s “birther in chief,” Donald John Trump Sr.
Now he wants to serve in the U.S. Senate?
Please. No!

 

media news

Trump is a ‘political genius’?

Stephen Miller is a young man who believes passionately in the agenda of the man he serves.

That man happens to be the president of the United States, Donald John Trump Sr.

Miller took a turn this weekend on CNN’s “State of the Union” and argued vehemently with moderator Jake Tapper. He got in Tapper’s face about the Republican Party base’s loathing of CNN. He declined to answer direct questions about whether the president was privy to a meeting with between Don Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner with a Russian lawyer who purportedly had “dirt” on Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Miller kept referring to the president as a “political genius.”

Well, I won’t belabor the point, but I will offer only this:

A political genius wouldn’t have sent this young firebrand to meet with the media, to hurl insults, to denigrate a questioner posing legitimate inquiries about a story that has grown more legs than a centipede.

Here’s the interview. It’s a beaut.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/01/07/white-house-adviser-stephen-miller-full-interview-sotu.cnn

 

national news, political news

Turn off the TV, Mr. President

Donald J. Trump told us he wouldn’t tweet once became president of the United States.

“I’ll be too busy” making America great again, building a wall, defeating ISIS and bringing back jobs that had been shipped to “China and Mexico,” the president said.

The president has gone Twitter crazy. He can’t stop tweeting policy decisions, criticism of foes, friends and the media.

He also told us he wouldn’t have time to play golf, that he doesn’t even think he’ll take vacations once he took the presidential oath. How’s he done there?

Trump is set to play more golf in his first year than his predecessor, Barack H. Obama, did during his eight years as president.

He’s now zero for two.

OK, now he says he doesn’t watch much television. No time for that, either. The president says he reads “a lot of documents.” Is he telling the truth on this one? The New York Times reports that Trump watches more than four hours of TV daily; it might be as much as eight hours.

He watches CNN, Fox, a little MSNBC, perhaps a broadcast network news show or two, according to the Times. Then he tweets almost immediately after hearing the news, whether it’s “fake” or whether it comes from Fox — his favorite news network.

So, by my score, the president is zero for three on these promises and declarations.

Oh, but what the heck. He “tells it like it is.”

national news

POTUS revives phony ‘birther’ issue

Allow me to express my absolute disgust, disdain and dismay at the president of the United States.

While calling this week for a boycott of CNN and retweeting vicious anti-Muslim videos — two things worthy of criticism as well — Donald John “Smart Person” Trump Sr. decided to reignite the phony birther issue involving the man he succeeded in the White House.

Sources told CNN that Trump believes he would have done even better in the 2016 election had he kept hammering at the bogus notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to run for president of the United States.

How else can one view the president’s notion here … except to declare him to be racially motivated? It’s fair to ask whether the president harbors racist sentiments. Why does the idiot in chief keep insisting that this is a real issue?

See the CNN story here.

I suppose I should note briefly that the story is bogus on another level as well. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in August 1961; he has proven it.

However, his mother was an American, a U.S. citizen, which granted him American citizenship immediately upon his birth.

This … is a non-story. It’s phony. The “birther” issue is yet another lie.

Disgusting.

media news

POTUS declares war on media

It’s been on-going ever since Donald John Trump declared his presidential candidacy in June 2015.

He’s been at war with the media that seek to report the news relevant to his campaign and now, his presidency.

As Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican Party political activist, has noted: Trump now has all but declared Fox News to be the state’s official news medium. Why is that? Because Trump just relishes the network’s obvious bias in his favor.

Other media outlets? They’re all the “enemy of the American people.” The president, with his alarming and frightening petulance toward the rest of the media, has broken with a couple centuries’ worth of tradition involving presidential relationships with a free press.

Consider, too, the words of a longtime public servant who now works as a “contributor” to CNN. Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden — the former head of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency — laid it on the line.

Hayden fires back at Trump

Hayden wrote this on Twitter: “Until now it was not possible for me to conceive of an American President capable of such an outrageous assault on truth, a free press or the first amendment.”

Think not just of what Gen. Hayden said, but also consider that this man would say it. Michael Hayden served with distinction and honor under presidential administrations of both major political parties.

Hayden was responding to this tweet from Trump: “Fox News is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly.”

I get that Trump gored Hayden’s proverbial ox with that ridiculous message. However, I believe Hayden’s description of Trump’s view of the media is correct. He is conducting an “outrageous assault on truth, a free press” and, yes, on the First Amendment.

This individual, the president of the United States, is a disgrace to the high office he occupies.