“The Bandwagon Effect”: How Trump’s Dog Whistles Work
The headline from an article by Jill Colvin and Matthew Daly caught my eye: Trump: ‘A Lot Of People’ Feel That Black Lives Matter Is ‘Inherently Racist.” Here’s the context:
Trump also had harsh words for the Black Lives Matters movement, which has organized some of the protests. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser, labeled the group “inherently racist” over the weekend in an interview with CBS News.
“When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist,” Giuliani said. “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American and it’s racist.”
Asked whether he agreed with Giuliani’s assessment, Trump said the group’s name is “divisive.”
“A lot of people agree with that. A lot of people feel that it is inherently racist. And it’s a very divisive term,” he said. “Because all lives matter. It’s a very, very divisive term.”
We could talk about the racism being expressed by both Giuliani and Trump in that exchange. But the framing of Trump’s statement is something he does very often; “A lot of people agree with that. A lot of people feel…” It is a logical fallacy called argumentum ad populum.
…a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it: “If many believe so, it is so.”
We sometimes call this the “bandwagon effect” captured by the Chinese proverb, “three men make a tiger.”
“Three men make a tiger” refers to an individual’s tendency to accept absurd information as long as it is repeated by enough people. It refers to the idea that if an unfounded premise or urban legend is mentioned and repeated by many individuals, the premise will be erroneously accepted as the truth.
Jenna Jones noticed Trump’s attachment to this fallacy about a month ago and documented how he used it to spread his conspiracy theories. For example, when he was asked to explain a statement about how President Obama doesn’t understand Muslim terrorists, he said this:
“Well,” Trump said on the “Today Show” Monday morning, “there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”
Here’s what he said in an attempt to insinuate that the Clintons were involved in the death of Vince Foster:
“I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it,” Trump said in an interview with The Post in May. “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
Jones points out that this is how Trump maneuvers in order to be able to backtrack when circumstances require him to do so.
Trump frequently couches his most controversial comments this way, which allows him to share a controversial idea, piece of tabloid gossip or conspiracy theory without technically embracing it. If the comment turns out to be popular, Trump will often drop the distancing qualifier — “people think” or “some say.” If the opposite happens, Trump can claim that he never said the thing he is accused of saying, equating it to retweeting someone else’s thoughts on Twitter.
What is important to remember is the part about why he does it in the first place. It is a way for Trump to give a wink and a nod to white supremacists and conspiracy theorists to say, “I hear you, I’m with you.” That is his way of doing dog whistle politics.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 12, 2016
“Reporters Now Face A Choice”: Can Donald Trump Win By Duping Young Voters With ‘90s Conspiracy Theories?
The final week of the Republican primary was essentially a formality, but in hindsight an exceptionally important formality.
As long as Donald Trump still had to go through the motions to fend off candidates whose campaigns had been reduced to simulacra, and as long as his opponents were clinging to the hope of defeating him at the GOP convention, their combat served as a kind of permission for reporters to treat Trump’s campaign as the anomaly that it was.
On the eve of the fateful Indiana primary, when Trump infamously and speciously linked Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “How on earth is the media supposed to cover Trump’s wacky JFK-Cruz conspiracy theory?” Glenn Kessler, who writes the Post’s fact checker column, gave Trump all four of his dreaded Pinocchios. Even the Post’s straight news piece about the supposed Cruz/Lee Harvey Oswald connection lead with an incredulous dependent clause, describing Trump as “Never one to shy away from discussing unsubstantiated tabloid fodder …”
In theory, debunking political whoppers is what the press is supposed to do, but in practice, things aren’t usually so straightforward. Politicians control access to themselves and their privileged information, which gives them outsize control over who breaks news. With their parties and supporters behind them, they can freeze out adversarial reporters and dismiss accusations of dishonesty as media bias. But in Trump’s case, reporters weren’t the lone arbiters of truth during the primaries. Other Republicans participated, too. Ted Cruz called Trump an “utterly amoral” “pathological liar,” a “narcissist” and a “bully.” The press wasn’t adjudicating Trump’s claims so much as they were relaying a cross-ideological consensus that Trump was unglued.
Just a few hours after he addressed the JFK conspiracy theory, Cruz suspended his campaign and the dynamic between the press and Trump changed. Leading Republicans stopped calling Trump a liar and trying to deny him their party’s nomination. In embracing Trump, they essentially rescinded their permission to the press to treat him as an outlier.
Reporters now face a choice between reimagining Trump as a partisan mirror image of Hillary Clinton, or drawing the ire of the broader GOP. Trump can’t become president unless he comes to be seen as on a par with Clinton, and that can’t happen without the assent of the media. So far the media hasn’t granted it, but we’ve seen scattered indicia of how it might happen.
Trump can’t become president unless he comes to be seen as on a par with Clinton, and that can’t happen without the assent of the media.
When Trump swung into general-election mode and indulged the horrific lie, fixated upon by conservative media more than twenty years ago, that the Clintons may have murdered Vince Foster (a Clinton ally who killed himself shortly after joining the White House counsel’s office), the Post rightly described Foster’s suicide as “the focus of intense and far-fetched conspiracy theories on the Internet.” But the same article essentially baptized Trump’s tactics as part of the normal give-and-take of partisan campaigning:
The presumptive Republican nominee and his associates hope that his tactics will bring fresh scrutiny to the Clintons’ long record in public life, which conservatives characterize as defined by scandals that her allies view as witch hunts. Through social media and Trump’s ability to garner unfiltered attention on the Internet and the airwaves, political strategists believe he could revitalize the controversies among voters who do not remember them well or are too young to have lived through them.
Trump’s approach would be perfectly reasonable but for the fact that the “scandals” he has resurfaced have all been either roundly debunked or, in the case of Hillary supposedly enabling Bill’s sexual indiscretions, merited no respectful hearing to begin with.
What Trump and his allies really hope is that they can hoodwink first-time voters or people who weren’t paying close attention back in the 1990s into believing known lies. Only the media can prevent this—but with Trump as GOP nominee, and party leaders rallying behind him, the media suddenly faces fresh incentives not to intervene, and they will become harder to resist over time.
It is possible, even in the context of a general-election campaign, to treat Trump’s embrace of widely discredited Clinton attacks responsibly. The Post, even as it was presenting Trump’s myth-based campaign strategy as a neutral matter in its news pages, ran a story by Foster’s sister, scolding Trump for revisiting “untold pain” on the Foster family, and Kessler gave Trump another four Pinocchios.
Meanwhile, CNN’s Jake Tapper set a standard for reporters who have to cover Trump’s pronouncements, but don’t want to lend credence to false claims, by calling the Foster insinuations “ridiculous and frankly shameful.”
“This is not an anti-Trump position or a pro-Clinton position,” Tapper said. “It’s a pro-truth position.”
The trouble is that unless a critical mass of media figures agrees to treat the things Trump exhumes from the fever swamps of the 1990s with the appropriate contempt, Trump will enjoy the benefit of the doubt most major-party nominees expect. It was easy for reporters to treat Trump adversarially, without fear or favor, when other Republicans were begging them to scrutinize him. Just three weeks later, the same kind of scrutiny presents those reporters with a collective action problem—by admonishing Trump, they might find themselves at a disadvantage to peers who choose to remain in the good graces of both campaigns. And if enough of them are cowed into treating the 20-year-old contents of The American Spectator as fair-game politics, Trump’s plan to dupe the young and forgetful will succeed.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, May 27, 2016
“Creative Video Editing”: In 2016, Journalistic Fraud Still Looms Large
Alas, this is pretty much where I came in. Starting in 1994, when your humble, obedient servant was approached to contribute weekly political columns, I found the behavior of the national political press shocking and alarming.
Today, it’s even worse.
Even so, it’s not every day a TV talker apologizes for broadcasting a doctored video misrepresenting something Bill Clinton said about President Obama. So it’s definitely worth taking note.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did that the other night, at least temporarily persuading me that the network hasn’t yet gone full Fox News.
But first, some ancient history on a theme directly relevant to today’s Democratic primary campaign: Hillary the Big Liar.
See, by 1994 I’d been writing professionally for years, mainly as a literary journalist and monthly magazine reporter. The publications I’d written for employed assiduous fact-checkers. Opinions were expected, so long as they were grounded in fact. After all, what’s the point winning an argument if you’ve got to cheat to do it?
However, that’s not how Washington journalism works. One incident in particular astonished me.
In April 1994, Hillary Clinton had given a press conference about the make-believe Whitewater scandal. She answered every question the press threw at her for a couple of hours. The immediate effect was rather like last fall’s Benghazi hearings: her detailed answers calmed the storm. Having previously given sworn testimony to Treasury Department investigators probing Jim McDougal’s failed S & L, she was on solid ground.
Two years further on, ABC’s Nightline dug up a video clip of an answer she’d given about a specific issue and seamlessly deleted two sentences by substituting stock footage of journalists taking notes. Then they pretended she’d been asked a much broader question, and accused her of lying about the information they’d subtracted.
Specifically, Hillary acknowledged signing a letter “because I was what we called the billing attorney” for the Madison Guaranty account. Nightline charged her with concealing exactly that fact. Jeff Greenfield said no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself”—a contemptible insinuation.
Within days, the doctored quote was all over ABC News, CNN, the New York Times and everywhere else. Almost needless to say, Maureen Dowd ran with it. William Safire predicted her imminent criminal indictment.
In short, the theme of Hillary Clinton as epic liar began with an instance of barefaced journalistic fraud.
Everybody involved should have been run out of the profession. It wasn’t exactly an obscure mystery. Video of the press conference existed. The New York Times had printed the full transcript.
But there was no Internet. Beltway pundits covered for each other like crooked cops.
So anyway, last week Bill Clinton made a campaign appearance for his wife in Memphis. If you’d only seen it on MSNBC or read about it in the Washington Post, you’d think he made a political blunder, trashing President Obama as a weak leader.
On Chris Hayes’ program All In, the host chided the former President for going “a bit off message.”
MSNBC aired this video clip:
“BILL CLINTON: She’s always making something good happen. She’s the best change maker I’ve ever known. A lot of people say, ‘Oh well, you don’t understand. It’s different now. It’s rigged.’ Yeah, it’s rigged—because you don’t have a president who is a change maker.”
Full stop.
Ouch! To the Washington Post’s Abby Phillips, “it sounded like he was agreeing with one of [Bernie] Sanders’s central arguments about income inequality—but blaming the sitting president for it.”
Older and thinner, Mr. Yesterday was clearly losing it.
Except he wasn’t. The real villain was, once again, creative video editing. Tommy Christopher at Mediaite.com restored the full context.
So here’s what Bill Clinton actually said about President Obama:
“Yeah, it’s rigged—because you don’t have a president who is a change maker with a Congress who will work with him. But the president has done a better job than he has gotten credit for. And don’t you forget it!
(APPLAUSE)
Don’t you forget it! Don’t you forget it!
(LOUDER APPLAUSE)
Don’t you forget it. Let me just tell you. I’ve been there, and we shared the same gift. We only had a Democratic Congress for two years. And then we lost it. There’s some of the loudest voices in our party say—it’s unbelievable—say, ‘Well the only reason we had it for two years is that President Obama wasn’t liberal enough!’ Is there one soul in this crowd that believes that?”
Judging by the crowd response, there was not.
Mediaite.com’s Christopher put it succinctly: “This is an edit so egregious, it rivals the worst in dishonest political ads, and surpasses them.”
Greatly to his credit (and my surprise), Chris Hayes subsequently rebroadcast Clinton’s remarks in full. “We shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted.
No, they certainly should not.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 17, 2016
“The Real Threat Trump Poses To Hillary—And Us”: Spending Time On Endless, Pointless & Corrosive Questions
Donald Trump says Ted Cruz may not be eligible to be president, and what happens? It dominates the news cycle for three days. Going on four.
See a pattern here? You should. A few months ago people used to ask, “What impact is Donald Trump having on the race”? Now we know very clearly exactly what it is. He takes over the news cycle. He says something about one of his rivals—or occasionally about an issue, although it’s always un-substantive and full of untrue assertions—and it sucks all the other oxygen out of the room. The rivals have to answer Trump, and the cable shows do panel after panel on whether what Trump said is true, whether it even matters whether it’s true, how so-and-so handled the response, and how it’s going to change the polls.
It’s happened over and over again. In fact it’s happened pretty much nonstop. Trump says Jeb is “low-energy”; Jeb has to prove he’s high energy. He hammers Marco Rubio for this, Chris Christie for that, and now Cruz. In a nutshell, this is the campaign, at least the campaign that those of us who aren’t in Iowa or New Hampshire see.
The effect has been to turn the campaign into a vacuous, reality TV dick-swinging competition. And bad as that is, the effect has been far worse when Trump makes one of his assertions about the country or world. He says these things about the world that are either just false or crazy, and everybody has to spend three days explaining why it’s false or crazy. He saw “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9-11 attacks. That was eventually debunked. But it took nearly a week. And by the way, it hasn’t been debunked everywhere; certain web sites on the right spent days if not weeks defending Trump.
This is the real Trump Effect: He forces us to spend an endless series of three-day cycles debating at best pointless or at worst toxic and corrosive questions. That week we had to spend proving that American Muslims didn’t celebrate 9-11 wasn’t just a stupid and wasted week. It was a hatefest week that pulled an entire country in reverse, unlancing boils, raising temperatures. It was the same, more or less, when he said what a great guy Vladimir Putin was.
No. These are things we know. Putin is not a great guy. He’s a thug, just like you, Donald. We may not know for a fact that he’s had journalists killed, but a lot of anti-Putin journalists have died mysteriously. American Muslims did not cheer 9/11, bub. The government of Mexico is not “sending” rapists. And on and on and on.
But this is our level of discourse with Trump in the race. I’ll grant him that it’s a skill, of a kind. He says things in a hot-button way, a way we’re not accustomed to hearing from most politicians, certainly most presidential candidates, who usually strive for some simulacrum of dignity. It’s catnip, especially for cable news. He gets ratings. Every night all the shows get their figures on how each individual segment did in the crucial 25-49 demographic. Undoubtedly, the Trump-Cruz segments right now are doing better than the North Korea segments. And in any event, it’s not like the media can just totally ignore the demagogic claims of the Republican front-runner.
What a way to elect a president. The process has been corrupt enough. The billions of dollars spent by the rich, the dishonest attack ads, the stupid emphasis on things like who we’d supposedly rather have a beer with.
But now, we’re really going down the sinkhole, and Trump is leading us. Republican primary contests lately have not exactly been flower gardens of new policy ideas, as candidates in 2012 and this year basically just compete against each other to see who can offer up the most irresponsible tax cut and who can sound toughest on immigrants and moochers and terrorists. But there are a few ideas out there, and a few interesting differences. We hear about them a little, but then Trump comes along and says something and he smothers everything.
And yes, it can get worse. Imagine Trump as the GOP nominee. Imagine a general election run like this. General elections, underneath all the spumes of nonsense, actually are contests of ideas. There were clear and important policy differences between Barack Obama and John McCain, and between Obama and Mitt Romney, and they had to talk about them.
There will be clear and important policy differences between Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the difference is we’re not likely to have a real debate about them. Instead, we’re going to have more of this. Clinton is going to give some normal and slightly over-earnest speech about paid family leave. Important thing. And Trump will respond…not by stating his counter-position, but by saying something about how women want to be paid to sit at home and watch soap operas, and we’ll spend three days on it. And of course he’ll issue an endless stream of false or over-the-top statements about Whitewater and Vince Foster and, as he’s promised, Bill’s sex life.
And the campaign will just be that, over and over and over. Trump says crazy thing A. Cable shows salivate. A few responsible outlets read by 4 percent of the population point out that what Trump said isn’t true. Clinton spends three days repeating that. Upshot: Much of America is left with the impression, because Trump will be attacking and Clinton will be responding, and in TV land that’s what mostly matters, that it’s probably true. And then he’ll say crazy thing B, and then crazy thing C…
There is no force that can stop it. Well, maybe the Clinton campaign. They’ll sure need to figure out how, if Trump’s the nominee. I don’t think he can beat her, barring really bizarro circumstances or developments, but it’s not her losing I’m most worried about. It’s us.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 8, 2015
“Clinton Cash”: Yet Another Charles And David Koch Production
Endorsements from mainstream media figures have provided a scrim of credibility for Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, the Hillary-and-Bill-bashing book just published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins. Without the explicit support of respectable institutions such as the New York Times and Washington Post, Schweizer’s lengthy record of inaccuracy and extremism – not to mention the dozens of errors in the book itself – would have doomed his project to the same irrelevance as so many others of its all-too-familiar type.
More than once in recent days, for example, Joshua Green of Bloomberg News has spoken out to defend the far-right author. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, during the pre-release publicity push for Clinton Cash last week, Green said of Schweizer: “He tends to kind of get smeared, but it’s worth remembering this is a serious guy who has done serious work that led to a serious article,” said Green, who went on to complain that Schweizer – whose previous works and connections with far-right dark-money sources were scrutinized by Media Matters, among others – is a victim of “character assassination.”
Character assassination is apparently the least of Schweizer’s worries, if the guy was being serious during his May 4 appearance on former Breitbart blogger Dana Loesch’s radio show. Her very first question recalled a loony wingnut legend concerning the tragic 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, deputy counsel in the Clinton White House:
“I know you don’t want to talk too much about it, but there is that, there is always that concern for anyone who goes up against the Clinton machine that they could be Vince Fostered,” she ventured, “and I’m sure that that was something that you took into consideration.”
In reply, Schweizer swiftly abandoned any semblance of seriousness:
“Yeah, I mean look — there are security concerns that arise in these kinds of situations. You know, you don’t like to go into too much detail, there were some things that were going on that we felt needed to be addressed. The decision on security wasn’t actually made by me, it was made by board members of Government Accountability Institute, and you know, it’s I think showing an abundance of caution. The reality is we’ve touched on a major nerve within the Clinton camp. They are very, very upset, and they are pulling out all the stops to attack me in an effort to kill this book off.”
Kill? Oh dear.
Keep this bizarre exchange in mind when journalists like Green insist that everyone must take Schweizer seriously. By contrast, Green tried to undermine me as an “inveterate Clinton defender” when we appeared together briefly on NPR’s On Point. As I pointed out later, he obviously hadn’t read any of my critical columns on Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign. (Incidentally, Schweizer declined to appear with me on that broadcast, with his Murdoch publicist offering one feeble excuse after another — but I would be happy to debate him about his outlandish charges against the Clintons any time.)
The Vince Foster reference reflects on the mental state of Tea Party cartoon characters like Loesch, who remain obsessed with the most deranged legends about the Clintons. But it is also a timely reminder that the Vince Foster nonsense, like other “Clinton scandals,” was promoted by the late Republican billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who spent millions on the clandestine “Arkansas Project” in pursuit of the Clintons’ political destruction.
The true story of those covert activities — or as a famous woman once put it, the “vast right-wing conspiracy” — is told again in our new (and free!) e-book, The Hunting of Hillary, excerpted from The Hunting of the President.
Today, Scaife’s role is played by the secretive financiers of Schweizer’s “institute” — namely, the Koch brothers and their network of Republican billionaires, whose plotting and financing of this attempted “character assassination” of Hillary Clinton is the best endorsement of her that I can imagine.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, May 5, 2015
Share This Blog
mykeystrokes.com- “The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton July 28, 2016
- “Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump July 24, 2016
- “Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter July 24, 2016
mykeystrokes.com 