Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson: How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump
“At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?
President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack…
Don Lemon, Joy Reid and Jim Acosta, exiled or extricated from their networks, are now on Substack, trading sleek studios and “pancake makeup
Jessica Testa at NY Times:
Should Jim Acosta wear a tie?
For the last two months, since the former anchor quit his job at CNN, Mr. Acosta has been broadcasting online several times per week, usually from his dining room, using his iPhone. Often, he is troubleshooting in real time, far from the high-gloss desk and sophisticated cameras of his CNN set.
One question he faces is how many “frills” to add to his interviews with the likes of Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, or Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat.
“The magic here is not killing or messing with this organic nature of the show,” said Matt Hoye, Mr. Acosta’s newly hired executive producer and a 30-year veteran of CNN, who is leaning “no” on adding neckties but “yes” on graphics.
“The Jim Acosta Show” streams live on Substack, a platform that has recently cemented itself as a harbor for stranded television anchors.
In January, the start-up best known for email newsletters gave all users the ability to publish live video. Now it is home to a handful of cable stars marooned from their mainstream media jobs amid reshuffled lineups, salary cuts and other controversies. On Substack, where politics is the most popular and lucrative category, anti-Trump publishers have been performing particularly well.
Joy Reid began regularly posting to Substack in March, after her MSNBC show was canceled. On Friday, the former CNN anchor Don Lemon joined Substack after a year of livestreaming on YouTube. They join established chart-toppers, like Mehdi Hasan (the former MSNBC host) and Dan Rather (the onetime face of CBS News), along with various CNN expatriates: Norm Eisen, Jessica Yellin, Chris Cillizza, Elise Labott and Alisyn Camerota.
This new TV diaspora has one central proposition: The future of news is casual. Sometimes very casual. Anchors can lose their seats and still hold on to their star power, so long as they give modern audiences what they want. “What’s most important in my business now is authenticity,” as the Fox News host turned YouTube star Megyn Kelly recently told The New York Times.
[...]
Katie Couric, who started an independent media company in 2017, has found the accelerated decline of linear television “at times upsetting,” she said: “I used to anchor the ‘CBS Evening News’ and the ‘Today’ show, and I’m doing Instagram Lives now.”
Today, however, with a few dozen employees and a newsletter nearing one million subscribers, she more often feels legacy media is “late to the party.” Broadcasting on social media is “authenticity on steroids,” said Ms. Couric, who recently paused shopping for an Oscars party dress to livestream a breaking-news discussion on Ukraine, parking herself on the couch of a fashion brand’s showroom, wearing no makeup, she pointed out.
[...]
Some networks have tried to incorporate more of the internet’s casual and chaotic offerings into their sleek lineups, as when ESPN acquired the freewheeling “Pat McAfee Show” or Fox News developed a show with “a signature podcast style” around Will Cain.
Journalists such as Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, and Don Lemon have traded on-air roles at major cable outlets that have fancy studio setups for more modest digs and post on Substack with more editorial freedom.
If history is going to pin a name on this period during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, it ought to be Red COVID.
The current viral surge is in red states, or more specifically, red counties – as opposed to blue ones.
Republicans and their Propaganda Ministry, Fox News, have made vaccine resistance and opposition to masking a point of cultural pride for the MAGA crowd. In the process, they have condemned many of their own followers to death.
Once this is all finally over, we need to take a serious look at the history of the response to the pandemic the way the 9/11 Commission investigated the September 11th terrorist attacks. We need to learn from the grievous mistakes made early on as the pandemic was spreading through the US.
With 706,522 Americans now dead because of COVID-19, we are within sight of the death toll for the US Civil War which has been estimated at 750,000.
Donald Trump was not treated as badly as Abraham Lincoln (who was assassinated) – as Trump once bizarrely claimed. But we’re closer to the point when we can statistically say that Trump treated the US worse than any other president thanks to his incompetent and highly politicized pandemic response.
Don’t mind me, I’m just sharing our communist-CNN takes on how GameStop’s stock is Trumpism. Damaging the wealthy elite is bad, donchaknow.
Happy our DNC-sponsored Socialist Chris Cillizza is around to give out marching orders to card-carrying U.S. Communist antifa super-soldiers like myself.
On Tuesday, in an interview with The Washington Post, CDC Director Robert Redfield issued a somewhat dire warning about the coronavirus -- and how long it might be with us.
“And so the President sent his press secretary out to tell us all what Redfield said -- what he has not disputed he said! -- wasn't actually what he said. We probably shouldn't expect anything different from a President who famously/infamously said: "Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. ... What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."”
Tonight, after President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union speech and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams deliver the official Democratic response to that speech, Bernie Sanders will have his say.
I read this piece two weeks ago, and since Senator Sanders has announced his candidacy today, I thought I’d take a moment to break down this commentary from CCN Editor-at-large, Chris Cillizza.
Chris wanted to know why Sanders would feel compelled to give his own State of the Union Response when Stacey Abrams was giving one for the Democratic Party. In spite of not understanding why Sanders would do this, he asserts that it was a “very bad idea for Sanders” because some Democrats still have ill will towards him because he ran against Hillary Clinton, and they question his commitment to the Democratic Party. You’ve heard it before, I’ve heard it before. Let’s all say it together:
But he’s not a real Democrat!
So, let’s dive right in with Chris saying “what Sanders is doing by giving his very own SOTU response is sending a very clear sign that he's different than the rest of the Democrats running for office. I'm in my own party and I'll give my own State of the Union response!“
That’s certainly one way to look at it. I mean, it’s wrong in the sense that Sanders isn’t in his only party, hence being an independent. At the same time, it is correct that by issuing his own statement, he is making himself stand out. That may not be a bad thing. Cillizza references in the next paragraph that the Democratic presidential field is full of heavyweights and rising stars. With a larger field, why wouldn’t you want to stand out? Cillizza admits earlier in the piece that Kamala Harris, also a 2020 nominee for President, recorded her own pre-buttal. It’s the same thing! They’re both trying to stand out. In a crowded field of candidates, you want to stand out. This is smart politics.
Next, Cillizza says “Democratic voters in 2020 will have candidates who not only represent their own liberal views but also have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party their entire lives.”
To this, I’d be really curious to know what percentage of voters actually care if a candidate has been a Democrat all their lives, or if this is just a talking point that mostly people in Washington D.C. care about. I can’t find polls on this. If you know of one, let me know.
More importantly, Chris conflates Sanders’ self-descibed socialism with other candidates’ liberalism. These are not the same. Moreover, a number of candidates being labelled as progressive in the Democratic field have come to advocate for progressive positions fairly recently, particularly in the wake of 2016. This leads to an interesting question:
Should we be more concerned about someone’s loyalty to a party, or should we be more concerned with their loyalty to an ideology, policies, constituencies, and issues? Something to consider there.
And as for loyalty, Cillizza notes that Kamala Harris has always been a Democrat, and Sanders hasn’t. Okay. Hillary Clinton wasn’t always a Democrat. Donald Trump was not always a Republican. They both won their parties’ elections in 2016. Their supporters did not seem to care about this. Why does it matter for Sanders?
Also, Cillizza references a 2014 interview where Sanders discusses running as a Democrat versus a third party candidate, which he replies to by saying “that is, in essence, Sanders acknowledging that he couldn't have a realistic chance of running as a third-party candidate, and therefore decided to run as a Democrat.” This is meant to paint Sanders as opportunistic, but in reality, it’s true that running as an independent is practically an impossibility in this country due to financial, legal, and electoral constraints. Third party candidates get bogged down in legal battles over ballot access which take time and lots of money to resolve, and these difficulties are exacerbated by the two major parties.
The two major parties have made it nearly impossible to run as an independent for president.
And this is an interesting catch-22: either you run as a Democrat and have your loyalty questioned and you get smeared for your independence, or you run as a third party candidate with no chance at winning, and because you have no chance of winning, people then smear you and question you for running when you literally cannot win.
To close, I’d like to make an important note about the nature of parties. This whole argument of Sanders--or anyone else--not being a Democrat, underlying that argument is the wrong belief that parties are stagnant, unchanging entities. This is not true. The Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson was different than the one under Woodrow Wilson or FDR or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Likewise, the Republican Party underwent major changes between Lincoln and Eisenhower, Reagan and W. Bush. The parties transform and change over time. This is normal.
It seems to me that the people in the media who are most concerned about an independent running as a transformative candidate for the Democratic nomination are those who may have the most to lose from such a shift in the Democratic Party. And that’s something we should consider when hearing arguments as to why a candidate should or should not receive our vote.
