Michael1942's Blog

Newton Minow | October 9, 2017 5:36 pm

Newton Minow appears on “Chicago Tonight” in an episode that aired July 23, 2015.
Newton Minow has been a member of the WTTW board since 1967 when he joined as chairman.
In this opinion piece, first published in the Washington Post, he writes: “For the sake of the United States of America and our values, we need your voices now.”

Dear Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama:
I am privileged to have known and worked with each of you and your administrations. I know how deeply you all love our country.
Our nation is blessed to have the five of you and your invaluable experience in the Oval Office — a total of 32 years with your steady hands on the nuclear codes. The time has come to use this unique asset to help the nation deal with our present situation.
Most of us now have very short attention spans. The news comes at us 24/7. One crisis immediately follows another, and we forget what has happened even one month ago. We need to keep reminding ourselves what has happened since President Trump took office:
• The president revealed highly classified information to foreign leaders for no apparent strategic purpose.
• He ignored ethical principles by not fully divesting from his businesses while in elected office.
• He waffled on condemning white-supremacist, Nazi and Ku Klux Klan protesters.
• He pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for violating a direct court order to stop racially profiling people.
• He fired FBI Director James B. Comey, who was supervising an investigation into the conduct of his presidential campaign.
• He persisted in condemning and seeking to discredit judges, science, the news media and, indeed, any source of authority that disagreed with him.
• He has insulted our allies abroad — as well as the leadership of his own party.
And then came two shocking and alarming warnings about the president’s stability. The first was from Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said the president “has not demonstrated he understands the character of this nation” and “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”
Second, former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said: “I really question his ability to — his fitness to — be in this office, and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it.”
These red flags alerted us to be deeply concerned about our current president’s stability. News reports indicate that North Koreans, confused by contradictory messages from Trump and other members of his administration, are seeking out former American public officials to clarify American policy. Wars often start through confusion, miscalculation and failures of communication.
Millions of Americans are talking with friends and relatives and wondering what could happen, but there has been no serious, sustained public examination of the challenge to our nation.
That is why I believe that the five of you, working together, can and should supply the leadership our country is missing. Some of you have already spoken out against Trump’s actions. But together, as a bipartisan group, you could have a greater impact.
You all know that the Constitution and rule of law are only as good as the men and women who enforce them. You know from your time as president what it means to have your hands on the nuclear codes. And you know that the nation cannot risk having an unstable hand.
When our Constitution was enacted, a Philadelphian asked Benjamin Franklin, “What have you given us, a monarchy or a republic?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Americans want to keep our republic, our Constitution and our way of life. People around the world, looking to our country for leadership, now worry about what is next.
I ask the five of you to combine your wisdom, your courage and your patriotism. You can speak out together against current abuses and reaffirm constitutional values. You can lead the nation to explore informal and formal next steps.
For the sake of the United States of America and our values, we need your voices now.

Newton N. Minow, senior counsel at the law firm Sidley Austin, was chairman of Public Broadcasting Service from 1978 to 1980 under President Carter and was appointed to presidential commissions and a Defense Department panel for the George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He also served as an informal adviser to President Obama, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Melanie Schmitz
Oct 10, 2017, 10:36 am
CREDIT: CBS This Morning
In an interview with CBS This Morning on Tuesday, former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called President Trump a “remarkable” and “historic” figure, comparing him to the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson.
“I think Trump is a remarkable figure,” Gingrich said, responding to questions about the president veering off course and antagonizing his own party ahead of a major budget and tax reform battle. “I think he’s a historic figure, he’s certainly probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.”
Despite the fact that it was intended to be complimentary, the Trump-Jackson comparison is unfortunate. Jackson, a historic figure with a number of military achievements under his belt, admittedly shares certain similarities with the current president, including his anti-establishment legacy and, as one onlooker at the time put it, the “rabble mob” he brought with him to the White House after his inauguration in 1829.
But the seventh president is also notorious for a number of troubling, inhumane reasons: Jackson was a slave-owner who offered rewards to anyone who gave escaped slaves especially cruel beatings. At the time of his death he owned approximately 150 slaves, though it’s been estimated that, over the course of his lifetime, he owned over 300.
Jackson is perhaps most famous for engineering one of the worst genocides in American history. A longtime proponent of removing native tribes who were taking up what he considered to be valuable land meant for white settlers, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, eventually forcing nearly 50,000 indigenous people off their lands and into the West. In the winter of 1838 alone, some 4,000 Native Americans died along the Trail of Tears.
In certain ways, the Trump-Jackson comparison seems depressingly fitting: since his own inauguration in January, Trump has become laser-focused on the removal of certain populations of people from the United States, including undocumented immigrants and their children, as well as on banning travelers and immigrants from several Muslim-majority nations. His antagonistic views toward social justice movements meant to draw attention to the deaths of minority populations, such as Black Lives Matter, has also drawn criticism. And as ThinkProgress’ Josh Israel pointed out in March, “Jackson, like Trump, preferred to ignore federal courts rather than enforce constitutional protections for all people.” Donald Trump ties himself to a president remembered for genocide. Trump traveled to Tennessee on Wednesday to visit the grave of Andrew Jackson. But, given Gingrich’s praise on Tuesday morning, it’s clear that many don’t view these comparisons negatively — quite the opposite, in fact.
Trump himself has touted those similarities in the past, using them to prop up his own legacy and play himself off as a change-maker. During a speech this past March at Jackson’s Nashville estate and plantation, The Hermitage, Trump noted, “It was during the revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar?”

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Again we see that the truth is often subverted to sensationalize events and spread misinformation (alternative facts). The article below shows how many times we are subjected to erroneous information for the sake of garnering attention rather than presenting facts that will create an informed public. MA

The Washington Post
Paul Farhi 8 hrs ago

© Lauren Victoria Burke/AP The Justice Department declined to bring charges against Lois Lerner , a former IRS official caught up in a controversy over the processing of applications for tax-exempt status.
It all seemed to add up. At least it did then.
The Internal Revenue Service, according to outraged Republicans and many media accounts at the time, targeted tea party organizations and other conservative nonprofit groups that were seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012. Critics said the tax agency had subjected the targeted groups to extra scrutiny, questioning and long delays, largely because their names suggested they would be political opponents of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
The allegations formed one of the best-known scandals of former president Barack Obama’s administration and led to months of congressional hearings, official investigations and damning news coverage.
A report released Thursday by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax matters indicates that the IRS also singled out nearly 150 organizations whose names suggested they were affiliated with liberal organizations. Without specifically characterizing the politics of the groups, the report said the IRS initiated reviews when applicants’ names included words such as “occupy,” “progressive” and “green energy” between 2004 and 2013.
The same Treasury watchdog had said in 2013 that the IRS reviewed about 250 conservative-sounding groups, with names that included words such as “tea party” or “patriot.” That report fueled the scandal narrative: “This was a targeting of the president’s political enemies, effectively, and lies about it during the election year so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House oversight committee, said at the height of the controversy in 2013.
The new finding suggests Republicans and the media provided an incomplete or even misleading account of what the IRS was up to when it was reviewing political organizations that sought tax-exempt status. While not of the order of the news media’s credulous (and flawed) reporting about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003, the report offers a check on the prevailing narrative of the time.
It may also offer a measure of vindication to Obama, at least according to one of his senior advisers.
“The Obama administration was often accused of Nixonian wrongdoing,” Eric Schultz, the former president’s spokesman and a deputy White House press secretary under him, said Thursday. “At some point, I lost track of how many Watergates we had. But we live in an environment where the more hyperbolic your allegation is, the more likely it will get headlines, no matter its veracity. This report substantiates our argument that our White House did not politicize the IRS, but those allegations, A1 material at the time, have lived online for four years and now that the public has moved on, they’re proven false.”
The original allegations were given broad play by mainstream media outlets, including The Washington Post. In May 2013, it was the subject of thousands of news articles and TV segments. A CNN reporter framed it this way at the time: “The smell of scandal has given this administration, suddenly, the appearance of having been thrown off-balance.”
The story line was perhaps most eagerly embraced by conservative media outlets, which cited it as evidence of corruption by Obama and the IRS. The characterization of one-sided treatment persists; Breitbart News reported last month that the Department of Justice was declining to investigate “IRS suppression of tea party groups” (Breitbart’s editor did not return a request for comment).
To be sure, the head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division, Lois Lerner, contributed to the furor at the time. As the controversy began in early May, Lerner apologized to tea party and conservative groups for unwarranted scrutiny; she also cited the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify before Issa’s committee.
“We were deliberately kept in the dark,” said Kurt Bardella, Issa’s spokesman at the time. “If the IRS had said ‘We don’t know,’ it would have been better than saying nothing.”
Gray areas did emerge during the controversy. In a front-page story in July 2013, the New York Times reported that a “more complicated picture [was] now emerging,” based on investigations by Congress and the IRS that showed that liberal groups had been subjected to long delays in approving their applications, too. The Post reported a similar story a few days later.
By that time, however, the burst of news coverage of the issue may have done its damage. When the story first gained traction in mid-May, Obama’s approval rating in a CNN poll was 53 percent. By mid-June, it had slumped to 45 percent in the same poll, a level it stayed at for many months.
The issue might have become part of what Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the “scandal attention cycle” — the rapid surge of attention as reporters race to cover an issue followed by a similar decline as the news media loses interest. “The problem is that it often takes time for the full set of facts to come out,” Nyhan has written. “By that time, the story is old news and the more complex or ambiguous details that often emerge are buried or ignored.”
Indeed, the original claims by Republicans were widely reported “without much investigation,” said DeWayne Wickham, dean of the journalism school at Morgan State University and a former columnist for USA Today.
News organizations, Wickham said, “do too much repeating and not enough reporting. As a result, journalists often use the work of other journalists as the primary source of the news they report. In the case of the IRS story, this problem was compounded by an obsession that a lot news organizations have with proving they are balanced in their coverage of the warring between the political right and left.”
The lesson journalists can learn is to be much more skeptical of what seems clear-cut, said Lisa Shepard, a media ethics professor at the University of Arkansas. “I’ve learned from studying the fake-news phenomenon in depth that if something taps into your, ‘That’s outrageous’ button, you need to slow down [and] go deeper into exploring that it might not be true,” she said.

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