The Coop Scoop: The Media Starts Running for Cover

The new FCC Chair is a Project 25 author

November 21

By Marc Cooper

Today I want to write about media capitulation to Trump.  Given the firehose torrent of news about his cabinet, I am going to have to dispense with some of that first.

Trump and his MAGA inner circle have often been described as “clowns with flamethrowers.” Once he takes power early next year he may very well let loose with fiery blasts to wreck the administrative state.

But since the election, its been nothing but a sordid clown show. And one that is already burning a portion of Trump’s political capital before he is even inaugurated. 

Trump’s principal problem is that he – and many of his lackeys-- actually believe their own propaganda.  The notion they are operating on, that he won a “mandate” for radical change is just not true. He won somewhere between a slim and an OK victory, but with only 49% of the popular vote (1.7% more than Harris), picking up only a handful of House seats and 3 or 4 Senators is far from any “mandate.”  Biden’s victory over Trump was by a wider margin. And Trump’s popular vote margin was one of the lowest in more than 20 years.

But these guys are clowns and their leader is mentally scrambled and their arrogant and false swagger about a sweeping mandate might not work with voters, with many of their own voters who want lower prices and not military tribunals, nor do they want supremely anti-qualified sycophants running our life and death departments. The social programs being targeted for cuts by the newly nominated quack Dr. Oz serve something like 160 million Americans or more when you add up Medicare. Medicaid, Obamacare, and other related programs he will be overseeing with Trump encouraging him to “go wild.”  And co-President Musk has said on the record that the coming tax cut for billionaires will be paid by cutting waste, fraud and abuse from Medicare and social security, and that would really mean cutting its recipients and their benefits.

You hardly need me to go over again thee cabinet of horror that Trump wants to appoint.  You are hearing it around the clock. 

I will affirm here, however, that Matt Gaetz is DOA but the media frenzy over this one doomed nomination continues to distract us from other events just as nefarious as this crumb bum becoming AG. Even Trump’s favorite rag, The Murdoch owned New York Post is calling on him to ditch Gaetz and Gabbard.

And that brings us to the media and Trump. Some news organizations are engaged in a pre-surrender capitulation to The Don and this bodes poorly for how Trump 2.0 will be covered.  Given how the campaign was covered, as if Trump was just a normal if somewhat extreme candidate of a normal American political party rather than a muddleheaded incoherent supreme leader of a subversive democratic MAGA movement that swallowed up the old GOP for lunch would suggest that once in power this normal frame will persist.

My former colleague and good friend David Corn conducts a finely detailed run down of how this normalization permeates the daily reporting of outlets like The  New York Times and The Washington Post, who at the same time have also broken some of the most damaging stories about Trump.  Always intermixed, however, with the usual conventional MSM claptrap “balanced” reporting.  Now we are seeing something worse.  Management of news outlets buttering up the same demagogue who calls them “the enemy within.”  Check out this little doozy that Corn reports is happening now:

“ [The] Washington Post is holding a 2024 Global Women’s Summit featuring Kellyanne Conway, a Trump adviser, and Lara Trump, the GOP co-chair and Trump daughter-in-law—two women who are part of Trump’s inner circle. I assume that Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is hoping to financially profit from this conference—being conducted in partnership with Tina Brown Media—and figure it needs Trump and Conway to help them succeed. Does democracy die at fancy confabs that celebrate enablers of autocracy?”

You will remember that Bezos killed his paper’s endorsement of Trump. He has billions in government contracts with the US government which over ride his supposed concern for democracy be it in light or darkness. And it’s no secret he just might dump the WaPo as it loses money and often pisses off Trump.

More sordid than the Post’s genuflection to Trump was the journalistic atrocity carried out by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner  of The Los Angeles Times. His move was an outright capitulation to an authoritarian before he's even seated.

After his own editorial board voted to endorse Harris, the billionaire simply killed it. He posted a cringeworthy tweet more or less apologizing for the LATimes being too liberal (it hardly was and he used more indirect language) and promised a remaking of the paper so that “all voices” would be heard from now on, as if his paper had been a subsidiary of New Left Review.  The LATimes opinion page is full of conservatives and its staff, many of them hard working reporters, are hardly on some anti-Trump jag. Some days later he disbanded his own edit board and named a new one, again promising to “remake” the whole paper and make room for everybody…i.e. Trumpers.

He said the paper would “report only the facts” and that sent a chill through the newsroom when he said a clear separation would be made between news and opinion, as if the LATimes had been a hotbed for biased left wing reporting and he was dissing his own staff.

Note that PSS, as he is known, made his fortune in the medical equipment business and in 2017 sought but failed to achieve a post in the Trump administration.  Several reports note that PSS is making another run at becoming a Senior Medical Advisor to The Don.  The LATimes has been losing money and its circulation has atrophied and now its boss seems unhappy with it being just a shrinking second-rate paper and now wants to promote it as a subtle Trump ally. Personally, I don’t think Trump gives a damn about that paper as its Washington bureau has broken no important stories about Trump in years.

And now we are seeing the onset of broadcast media capitulation.  The networks are hustling to make good with the newly named chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr – a dangerous MAGA zealot and an Elon Musk puppy dog, he could wreak havoc with American TV news. And his appointment has gone virtually un-noticed because of the media fog generated by the Gaetz appointment.  Carr does not require senate confirmation, so that’s a done deal.

Oh, did I mention that Carr is the author of the FCC chapter in the authoritarian Plan 2025 blueprint? You know that plan to dismantle American democracy that he claims he knows nothing about, just as he claimed he didn’t know Stormy Daniels or E. Jean Carrol.

CNN Reports:

“President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, wasted no time in stating his priorities on Sunday night. Just one hour after thanking the president for the appointment, Carr wrote on X, “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

Carr and Trump’s powerful ally Elon Musk immediately replied with one word of affirmation: “Based.”

The comments from Carr, who wrote the chapter on the FCC in the anti-democratic blueprint Project 2025, signaled that it won’t be business-as-usual at the country’s communications regulatory agency. Past chairs of the agency, both Republicans and Democrats, have emphasized broadband internet deployment and wireless spectrum policy. Carr didn’t mention those issues on Sunday night.

Instead, he took aim at technology companies for “censorship;” promised to hold broadcast TV and radio stations accountable; and pledged to end the FCC’s promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Carr was very clearly channeling the president-elect, who raised all three topics on the campaign trail, often in misleading ways.”

In case you didn’t get it, when this guy talks about “free speech” it’s MAGA code for the media censoring allegedly “conservative” views…and lies.  Carr has been on the FCC since 2017 not as chair, but he was already making threats.

CNN:

“Carr advanced this belief [of the right being censored] in a recent letter to the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple. He predicted that the Trump administration and Congress “will take broad ranging actions to restore” Americans’ First Amendment rights, “and those actions can include both a review of your companies’ activities as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights.”

The letter singled out NewsGuard, a startup that rates the reliability of news websites. NewsGuard said Carr was ill-informed: “Every statement in the letter about NewsGuard is false, citing unreliable sources.”

As chair, Carr could funnel millions in subsidies to Musk’s Starlink. And while uncommon, it’s far from impossible that Carr could move to suspend a network license, though more subtle tactics are probably in store.

The broadcast news media has taken notice of this Trump pawn whose job is to intimidate the media, but they are hardly even covering him. Instead, they are cowardly taking cover.

Last weekend, The MSNBC Morning Joe duo of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who have been calling Trump a fascist and even a Nazi for years now, made the journey to Mar-A-Lago to kiss The Don’s ring. 

Upon their return, Mika read a prepared statement on air, with the tone of a hostage tape, saying they went primarily to restore an “open line” of communication with The Don.  Not only is this a cowardly capitulation, it is classic Access Journalism, of the worst kind. 

If you are doing constant critical coverage of a criminal or a dictator, the last thing you need is ongoing personal access.  What’s the over/under that within a month this dynamic duo will be hosting live phone-in rants from The Don – because there is no greater thrill for him to bring to heel former critics so they can further humiliate themselves.  And, gosh, now that theres open communication the hosts are not about to reject his call-ins. Morning Joe airs from 6 to 10 am and is a must-watch show in the Beltway and its ratings generally climb with each passing hour. But after Mika read her hostage note, 38% of the audience tuned out.

MSNBC is already hemorrhaging viewers as its heavily Democratic audience has figured out that railing against Trump every night did nothing to stop him. Meanwhile, Comcast, NBC’s parent company. is spinning off both MSNBC and CNBC cutting them off from NBC’s vast resources. Scores if not hundreds of producers will lose their jobs and MSNBC faces more than an uncertain future. Do not be surprised if some of the higher profile hosts are also canned as they are expensive. 

The spin offs could take a year to complete and the likely buyers of the CNBC-MSNBC bundle are likely equity groups who tend to be Trumpish.

Even NPR has gotten into the go-easy on Trump train. (Disclaimer:  I cannot bear listening to NPR which ought to be served with a Soy Milk cappuccino though I an aware there is nothing else to listen to on the radio).  I prefer road noise) or Bluesville on Sirius). The precious vocabulary used by NPR to describe public figures are tortured acrobatics aimed at allegedly showing no bias but resulting in covering up more sharped edged truths.  Apparently NPR has also hired a clairvoyant as it claims to know what RFK Jr is actually thinking and they know what he really wants to tackle. His controversial views on vaccines? Is this 20 questions where we have to guess what is controversial or is it too difficult to just say he’s a staunch anti-vaxer wjo spread dangerous conspiracy theories during the pandemic, And how do fewer vaccines “tackle chronic diseases?” Oh, that’s for you to figure out because NPR is not about to just come out and tell you that simple truth.

When I used to teach basic journalism classes I warned my students to NEVER tell us what somebody is thinking because we do not know. Tell us only what they said or did. (Dear NPR I am available for basic workshop training but I take my cappuccino with whole milk).

MAGA legislators have made clear their intention to defund public radio, so I would expect even more tone changes in NPR’s coverage – if that’s even possible.

This is more in the trivia category, but too much fun to skip over, Cenk Uygar, the blowhard chieftain of the YouTube show The Young Turks (which also shows up on some streaming platforms), is also doing his own suck up to the new powers to be. Cenk is a long time grifter who has run a couple of half-assed political campaigns as a candidate but he has a large audience among what I call the Twitter/Youtube Left.  It’s a daily show that is a superficial vehicle to deliver big chunks of red meat to hungry “progressives” yearning to hear the same old same old.  It’s also a nexus for absurd feuds among the others of his ilk. I first met him about 25 years ago at a garden party when he was in a dyed in the wool Clintonite and an ardent defender of NAFTA.

Sometime around a decade ago, he decided to latch onto the anti-Trump train and TYT took off as a platform mostly for self-declared progressives who wanted a daily reminder that the Democratic leadership was centrist. Duh.

I don’t think Cenk has much influence outside a small circle of like-minded friends and goes ignored by just about everybody in Washington.  But as a long time hustler, he can also see which way the wind is blowing and the other day issued two-mind blowing tweets, certainly confusing at least a few of his independent thinking followers .

This tweet was so self-congratulatory and absurd I thought it was sarcastic, But no, this crank was dead serious. Here’s his follow up tweet.

This tweet came because Musk replied to him asking what his ideas are. Now, you can figure out which side is which Cenk is referring to. But of course, Musk and Trump are more interested in some left winger’s ideas than the Democratic coalition is. They are so much more open!

I guess he’s joining the ranks of the likes Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges and other pseudo-lefties who argue the Democrats are so awful you might as well give Trump a spin.  Mostly, he has to be worried about the sharp drop off in audience for liberal and progressive and all political media that began since the election was over and like the LaTimes might now be open to “all voices,”.

I’m cool with Cenk’s ridiculous tweets as they gives me two more reasons to never tune in to TYT.

I had one subscriber today write me to say they were uncomfortable with so much Trump bashing from The Coop Scoop and would rather want to know who to support, what to do, what can be done.

I’m offering the same answer as I have for the last few weeks.  Nobody is coming to save us. Not Congress, not the courts, not Chuck Schumer and most certainly not the media. Or, God Forbid, The Young Turks. What an irony that for at least one day the throwaway tabloid, The New York Post, demonstrated the boldness that we ought to see in the more stately metro dailies that parse every sentence to not offend anybody.

We have to organize ourselves in rational non-sectarian ways to confront what is coming.  And while we don’t know yet what Trump can and will do, just a few weeks after the election it is obvious that Trump is over-reaching.  Fear is pointless and should be replaced by earnest indignation and even a dash of guarded optimism.  Trump the Clown is dominating over Trump the Fascist and if he’s not more rational, which is unlikely, he may soon find himself like an over-hyped lame duck with fading support. Yes, the MAGA congress is a rubber stamp for now. But the public discomfort with Gaetz is telling. When you lose voters, you begin to lose congress members.

In the meantime, we should prepare for the worst and get our local and networked organizing off the ground.  The cabinet picks are mostly a sideshow and threaten to backfire. 

We are going to have a lot of opportunities to push back as Trump’s personal incoherence has now been impressed onto his politics. His cabinet picks confirm he is fixated on retribution and vengeance and has nothing to offer 90% of the country.

Trump has promised big action on his first day in office.  In his own bumbling way he has nefarious plans to enact 60 days from now. NO doubt starting with round ups of immigrants where he will probably create even more chaos. He’s ready. What are our plans? ++

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