The Atlantic’s Anonymously-Sourced Article Jump Starts The Permanent Pre-Election Anti-Trump Crisis News Cycle
As with Russia collusion reporting, expect bombshell media reports implicating Trump in wrongdoing, often dropped just before a weekend, to create a 2-4 day media feeding frenzy. As each crisis news cycle peters out, another bombshell is dropped, rinse and repeat.
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The media attacks on Trump have followed a pattern for years: A bombshell media report implicating Trump in wrongdoing, often dropped just before a weekend, which creates a media feeding frenzy for 2-4 days before it is completely disproven or seriously cast into doubt. As that crisis news cycle peters out, another bombshell is dropped, rinse and repeat.
It’s what I called in 2018 the Permanent Crisis New Cycle:
Since Mueller was appointed in May 2017, after James Comey was fired as FBI Director, we have been in a perpetual 3-5 day “scoop” news cycle based on the Mueller probe.
For over a year barely a week goes by that some publication doesn’t publish a “scoop” about what Mueller is thinking, who his team is talking to, what they might do or might not do, and so on. The Mueller probe is the media gift that keeps giving, usually based on anonymous sources.
Just as each breathless and frequently demonstrably inaccurate media firestorm has died down — Wait, another Big Scoop. Let’s start a new news cycle. It never ends ….
This permanent crisis news cycle reporting is reflected in an article in The Atlantic, conveniently dropped just before a long holiday weekend, which follows on the heels of a bombshell and since discredicted CNN report that Trump suffered ‘mini-strokes’. As the ‘minti-stroke’ feeding frenzy was petering out, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. Based entirely on anonymous sources identified only as former Trump administration officials, the heart of the controversy is Trump supposedly canceling a trip to an American military cemetary during a trip to France in 2018:
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Those claims are denied not only by Trump, but on the record by several officials who were present during discussions about canceling the trip to the cemetary.
All have denied any such statements were made. Even John Bolton, who is clearly hostile to Trump, denied it.
Former White House national security adviser John Bolton said in comments published Friday that he never heard President Trump refer to slain American soldiers buried at a French cemetery as “losers” and “suckers,” after the allegations were made in a bombshell report published Thursday.
“I didn’t hear that,” Bolton told The New York Times. “I’m not saying he didn’t say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion.”
The Atlantic story on @realDonaldTrump is total BS. I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion – this never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching…
— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 4, 2020
Regarding the lede of this story: I obtained documents from the Navy via #FOIA about Trump's 2018 trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris and the documents say his transport was canceled by the Navy due to rain. https://t.co/oNWsvAPy1z pic.twitter.com/keFtW7QC8b
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 4, 2020
Why would Jeffrey Goldberg risk competely trashing The Atlantic’s reputation? What reputation? The Atlantic is now owned by Steve Jobs’ widow, who has donated at least a half-million dollars to Biden.
It’s also suspicious that an anti-Trump group Vote Vets had polished ads on air within hours of the story breaking. It smells like collusion.
As for other news outlets “confirming” the allegations, what confirmation is that? From the same anonymous sources? That’s not corroboration, that’s simply repetition. People anonymously shared disinformation with multiple news outlets doesn’t corroborate anything.
.@JenGriffinFNC Are they the same anonymous sources the Atlantic relied on? If so they are not confirming anything they are simply repeating it. https://t.co/9O1JxR1wKZ
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) September 4, 2020
I agree with Kurt Schlicter, this was originally supposed to be an October surprise, but Biden’s slippage required them to pull the trigger sooner:
I expect that this veterans hoax was originally scheduled to come out in a couple weeks – note that they had all the ads prepared in advance – but between Biden’s disastrous performance and Botox’s hypocrisy, plus the polls, they had to go early.
I’ll take the position I took on Russia collusion — I don’t believe anything the mainstream media says about Trump to pump up these crisis news cycles unless there is visible and verifiable proof. If there is audio, play it. If not, it’s just people trying to interfere in our election.
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Comments
Goldberg is the toadying scumbag who transcribed Obama’s insult of Netanyahu as “chickensh*t”. Kind of ironic that Obama used that term on Bibi when Barry was hiding behind the skirts of an alleged “journalist”.
Yeah, the Obama-worshipping media never actually analyzed why Obama would stoop to displaying such infantile and uncalled-for hostility towards Netanyahu.
To me, it’s obvious. It’s because 1) Obama was ideologically hostile to the concept of Israel, and, to Israelis, having marinated for decades in the Dhimmi-crat radicals’ poisonous and fallacious mythology of contrived/alleged Arab Muslim jihadist “victimhood,” at the hands of the alleged Israeli “oppressors;” and, 2) Obama, transparently insecure and pathologically vain, felt intimidated in the presence of Netanyahu, a real man, compared to his empty-suit man-child.
This was also the meeting at which Obama stated the following to Bibi, in true self-reverential, narcissistic fashion; a perpetual believer in his own mythology:
“I’m a black man raised by a single mother, and I live in this house, the White House. You talk to me like I don’t know anything about this stuff, but, I do.”
What self-respecting, confident and poised American, much less a President, would ever speak such a whiny and thin-skinned rant, brimming with insecurity and egotism, in the same sentence? It’s unreal.
IMO, this is a simple political hatchet job. Trump is not very shy or restrained in his speach. If he had actually made these statements the supposed accusers would be on the record and not anonymous. Frankly they would have pushed this story out at the time.
As I recall the MSM tried to make Trump skipping one of the memorials into something then. To be honest, I can see Trump saying this. That’s why I don’t believe it. Someone would have leaked this out at the time had he done so.
As it is, I agree that this is a rush job for what was to have been an October suprise. The elephant in the room that isn’t being addressed is the accuracy of the statement being anonymously attributed to Trump.
Most people would likely agree that US involvement in Vietnam under the ROE and political constraints forced upon the military by a d President, Johnson, and the so called ‘whiz kids’ was a disaster. Compounding the error were the dubious draft deferrals system also put in place by d.
The totality of the U.S. experience in Vietnam was, IMO, the largest display of the early modern deep state/uniparty/elites that Eisenhower warned about; the military industrial complex.
“To be honest, I can see Trump saying this. That’s why I don’t believe it. Someone would have leaked this out at the time had he done so.”
Perfectly put: agreed; and highly likely.
This “crisis news cycle” has all the potential hallmarks of a proved-fake CNC that, back in 2004, Dan Rather led by reporting in a series of broadcasts on 60 Minutes Wednesday, the so-called “Killian Memos,” which were materially subject to then-president George W Bush’s 1972 administrative “scandal” in relation to his Texas Air National Guard unit, the Houston-based 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, and its possibly eventual Vietnam tour of duty.
Like today, the president was running for reelection and the claimed historic event — in Bush’s case, 32 years, compared with Trump’s merely 2 years, earlier — was raised to press-reporting level in September of the respective presidential-election year.
The aforementioned, key memos were proved by technical printing experts to be contemporary forgeries, generated on a Microsoft Word processor, rather than on an IBM Selectric II typewriter, the non-computing, top-drawer office document-producing device on the market in 1972. (It was, you might recall, the appearance to typewriter and typography experts of the former’s 2004 computer-contoured, proportional-spaced font, unavailable, of course, via the latter’s 1972 replaceable typing element’s use that largely nailed the fake news story’s coffin shut.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#Killian_documents_PDF_files
Anyway, CommoChief, your above quote was, to my mind, the germ of Rather’s and CBS News’s subsequent, firm, yet highly dubious defense of the entire CNC: Rather insisted, on a later CBS Evening News comment, about the whole, earlier Killian affair, essentially that, while the “relevant” articles themselves were later found to be inauthentic, the story itself, concerning GWB’s oddly curious ANG past, particularly how he was, purportedly, somehow exempted from earned discipline for an apparently noncompliant duty record, and even from serving in Vietnam, as other Texas Air National Guard interceptor fighter pilots had, was basically true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_military_service_controversy
Unfortunately, in just like today’s unsubstantiated way, based both fundamentally and repeatedly, rather than corroboratively, on “anonymous sources”: maybe inauthentic, but basically true seems to be the gist of the CNC.
Unsubstantiated but true (thanks to the postmodernist propagation and widespread adoption of the subject-centered “my truth,” rather than the classical, well-worn, scientifically-geared and reliably fact-based notion of an “objective truth”).
If unsubstantiated but true isn’t the essence of fake journalism, but, rather, of propagandist advocacy and its phenomenal CNC during the current election cycle, I don’t what would be.
Correction, please:
“If unsubstantiated but true isn’t the essence of fake journalism [ie, propagandist advocacy] and its phenomenal CNC during the current election cycle, I don’t [know] what would be.
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