President Trump and the Press

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Big Red Car here after the bad weather in the ATX. All is well with your Big Red Car, not to fret, dear reader. All is not well between President Donald J Trump and the press.

So, the Big Red Car is listening to a guy ranting on the big screen about how President Donald J Trump is violating his role under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

“Whoa, President Trump, we can’t have any of that, now, can we?” sayeth the Big Red Car.

So, the Big Red Car does what he always does, he does a bit of research and reads the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (which is real easy as he keeps a pocket version of it right next to the keyboard for moments just like this, y’all).

CONGRESS shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Turns out the admonition as to making of ” … no law respecting … abridging the freedom … of the press…” is an admonition to the United States Congress and doesn’t even mention the President or the Internet.

Which brings us to several interesting observations:

 1. The press in the United States is overwhelmingly Democrat, meaning they support the Democrat party in thought, word, deed, and voting. When persons observe they are the “opposition party,” is there something missing that indicts that obvious statement of fact?

The press is an arm of the Democrat party. They are not objective; they play favorites. They even play favorites within the Democrat party such as giving one or another candidate debate questions before debates. Unsporting of them, also.

 2. To keep this interesting, the Big Red Car suggests a wager of sorts:

For every registered Republican you can identify and verify amongst the press, the Big Red Car shall give you $5; if for every registered Democrat the Big Red Car can identify, you will give the Big Red Car $2. 

Seems fair, no? Simple enough notion and sort of fun if you take it as the sporting jest the Big Red Car advances, no? React quickly, as the Big Red Car has his eyes on a new paint job and wants to fund it thusly.

 2. The terms “press” and “journalism” are hopelessly severed. The press does not even pretend to practice the arcane and honorable art of journalism — all that tiresome verification of “facts” and multiple sourcing of bits to be printed. So tedious, time consuming, and, often, a hurdle to what the press wants to do — support their obvious and apparent biases.

My favorite recent tactic is saying,

“Over on CNN, they’re reporting that the Trump family has regular Tuesday night Satan worship services. We, over here at ABC, don’t know whether that is true or not, but, Hell, they’re reporting it over at CNN and we have a bad sense of FOMO (fear of missing out, sort of like athazagoraphobia). So, there you have it.”

 3. The press believes it can insult and hurl unpleasantness at its targets while expecting a curtain of protection under some bastardized notion of the First Amendment. Nay, no so, dear reader. If the press hurls insults at a person (ahhh, we’re talking about President Donald J Trump, y’all, just felt the need to clarify), then that person may exercise his right to “freedom of speech” to return the favor.

The First Amendment does not provide the press an unfettered right to insult folks and the ability to hide behind it when those folks return fire.

 4. Let’s face it — FAKE NEWS is a real thing and when the press prints something, now moreso than ever, there is a decent chance it is fabricated of the whole cloth, anonymously sourced (some guy who I can’t tell you his name told me something particularly shitty about some guy I don’t like — that kind of anonymous source, y’all), or a half-truth.

My favorite recent one was the Russian government hacking invasion of the Vermont based utility (intending to seize control of the American electrical grid and turn out the lights in Georgia) which turned out to be a employee who got a ransom virus on his personal laptop. Ouch!

 5. The President of the United States may determine who he invites to his White House (actually, it’s OUR White House, Big Red Car, felt the need to qualify your faulty utterance before it became a trigger of some sort) to chat with his press secretary and that same press secretary is able to decide with whom he chats from time to time.

This has been going on since the Eisenhower administration and is not a deviation from the norm. (Do we still adhere to norms anymore?)

It’s like if you come to a person’s house for a party and misbehave — get drunk and tell folks the host’s wife is ugly — you may not be invited a second time.

The press has no right of attendance at anything. Re-read the First Amendment to the US Constitution above. It’s all about what Congress cannot do and doesn’t even mention the White House or the press secretary.

Let’s end this little discussion with the assertion by the Big Red Car that BRC is a huge supporter of a free, competent, skillful, hard hitting (in a speaking truth to power sort of way), and skeptical press. The Big Red Car looks forward to the day when the United States plays host to such an institution.

Until then, will the press stop whining and try not to be so damn obvious in their support of the Democrat party? Play fair, press persons, and who knows maybe y’all will get an invite to the Tuesday night Satan worship. It could happen.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. Be good to yourselves and start thinking about the NCAA basketball tournament. cropped-LTFD-illust_300.png

12 thoughts on “President Trump and the Press”

    • .
      The Big Red Car does not have policies. It is not a discussion if everyone agrees. That is an echo chamber.

      In five years, the Big Red Car has never had to delete a comment even for bad language though it would not hesitate to if a commenter expressed themselves in a churlish of offensive manner. Style, not content.

      When ideas wrestle, the result is better ideas. Wrestle!

      BRC
      https://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

  2. You say, “Turns out the admonition as to making of ” … no law respecting … abridging the freedom … of the press…” is an admonition to the United States Congress and doesn’t even mention the President or the Internet.” Yes, it turns out the 1789 First Amendment doesn’t mention the Internet. And it doesn’t mention the President, or mention the prohibition of state governments from abridging freedom of the press or religion. It also turns out that the First Amendment has been gradually integrated into our national laws, and into our state laws, for two hundred years. You aren’t just discovering it. The federal courts, including the Supreme Courts over two hundred years, have found it reasonable to believe that if the Constitution forbids Congress from abridging the freedom of the press and religion, the intent is also to forbid the President and the states from abridging those freedoms. For instance, if a President tried to give preference to Muslim applicants for refugee status, as Trump falsely claims Obama did, this would have been a violation of the First Amendment Clause forbidding the Congress/government from discriminating on the basis of religion.

    You say, “The press believes it can insult and hurl unpleasantness at its targets while expecting a curtain of protection under some bastardized notion of the First Amendment.” In fact, anybody reporting on public figures does enjoy more First Amendment protection from libel suits, under New York Times v. Sullivan, than when reporting on ordinary private citizens. To be subject to libel suits for reporting on public figures, reporters have to have reported lies with “actual malice,” which means legally they knew or should have known, that what they said was false. In reporting on non-public figures, any false statements make a reporter liable, even if the reporter believes them to be true. The Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan is not “some bastardized notion of the First Amendment,” It is well-established law, and an attack on the protection it affords is an attack on the democratic process, since absolute financial liability for every innocent mistake would cripple the press’s mission to find and publish the truth.

    FAKE NEWS – the assertion of “facts” that a reporter knows or ought to know are unsupported by any known evidence – is certainly a real thing, but it is not the mainstream media that purvey it. It is Trump himself that is the main purveyor of fake news today. He regularly amplifies the voice of bizarre outlets like Infowars, where he gets the completely made-up “news” that three million aliens voted in the presidential election.

    I agree with you that barring the mainstream media from press conferences (while allowing in Breitbart News) probably does not fall under the purview of the First Amendment. No journalists are reporting that it does. It is just stupid. The attempt to falsely brand the media as the enemy of the people is a barefaced fascist move, ginned up with the fascist “big-lie” technique, where if Trump repeats the same lies often enough, people will believe them just because the lies seem too outrageous for Trump to claim if they weren’t true.

    Your only example of “fake news” is something that nobody even suggests was an attempt to deceive. The electric utility itself believed a laptop had been infected with Russian malware. Initially, company officials publicly said they had detected code that had been linked by the Department of Homeland Security to Grizzly Steppe, which U.S. officials have identified as the Russian hacking operation. The FBI considered the facts serious enough to warrant an investigation. To sum that up as “fake news” on the part of a news organization is disgraceful. This is like somebody saying work you did in good faith (in whatever your line of work is) was a criminal conspiracy because somebody else got their facts wrong.

    There has arisen a common cowardly practice of taking a few journalistic mistakes (known about because a news organization itself caught the mistake and publicly apologized for it) and trying to smear the entire American news media with charges of fraud and lying and “fake news,” while at the same time completely accepting as true the obvious bald-faced lies of Trump and the sources he gets his “news” from, like Infowars, the absolute epitome of fake news, which Trump has publicly affiliated himself with.

  3. They really were hysterical yesterday! Pearl Harbor type of headlines.

    I told a friend this morning how we can thank for the media for one thing: They surely helped DJT get elected. You see, it was a shoe in win with a 98% chance of victory by their eye. This probably helped a certain presidential candidate choose to sit on her laurels and fine tune her rope-a-dope campaigning skill set (Don’t tell BRC that I stole rope-a-dope from him). Furthermore, I’m sure a lot of dem voters found other things to do on election day since the election was all but over before the opening bell rang. The polls never lie!

    So thank you Media from the bottom of my right-wing, put America first, heart.

    I do sense an upcoming post from the BRC within a year as the media resurrects Mr. O to lofty levels. I see tell tale signs of it already starting. But maybe that’s a good thing, as now they can all move on with their regularly scheduled lives of living in a fantasy echo chamber.

    I won’t take you up on your bet, but will crash a Tuesday night Satan worship with ya some time.

    • .
      Pres Obama — ooops, FORMER President Obama led the Democrats to a Republican Senate, a Republican House, more Re;publican Governors than ever, and huge majorities in statehouses. This is the work product of former President Obama.

      He allowed OFA (the remainder of his presidential campaigns) to become a shadow DNC and thereby denied the DNC resources and leadership. More OFA will get you more of the same results.

      The election of former Labor Sec Tom Perez as head of the DNC, an Obama acolyte, is more of the same lack of success.

      Bring it.

      I understand the Tuesday night meetings serve cheeseburgers. Great cheeseburgers. Fabulous cheeseburgers. Huuuuuuuge cheeseburgers. With AMERICAN cheese.

      BRC
      https://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

  4. Nice!

    Just pull out the Constitution and actually read what the heck it actually does/does not say!

    I don’t know what the heck to do about nearly all the press — especially NYT, WaPo, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC — so have adopted a simple response: Ignore them, that is after I sent e-mail to the publisher of the NYT saying that his paper was “dead to me”, mentioning that I didn’t have dead fish heads to wrap and that my kitty cat has plenty of cat litter, even without greasy ink on it.

    Or they can publish their fake stuff, nonsense, grab’m by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, garbage, but I don’t have to pay any attention to it and I haven’t at all for months and haven’t much for decades.

    I remember on TV seeing some Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s where the Hardy character was laughing at things printed in newspapers: Okay, even then the movie director knew that the movie public would go along with laughing at the content of newspapers.

    Then, of course, there is the Thomas Jefferson letter reproduced at

    http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs29.html

    that fully excoriates, eviscerates, mutilates, etc. the press of his day. So, the press was selling used toilet paper in 1800 even before there was toilet paper, was still selling it in the 1930s, pushed out trillions of tons of it for Hillary, and is still pushing their unique effluent. I won’t read it.

    Let that MSM cabal just go out of business: For what Trump actually said, there’s Twitter and YouTube. For a lot of what is old, there is Wikipedia.

    Generally the old press has no chance of competing against the Internet. So, the MSM are going out of business. Maybe their current flood of fake, distorted, fabricated, lying excrement is their last effluent before they are finally totally dead and buried.

    I was screaming outrage at the media going way back; I thought I saw some dirt there; I was slow to see that it is 99 44/100% dangerous excrement. So, let them just go out of business.

    As we might expect, the flip side of such an extreme, extremely incongruous, situation should be an opportunity: (1) Be a news aggregator, e.g., Drudge Report. (2) Be a search engine to find stuff, old up to recent, on some topic, e.g., Google. (3) Be a Web site newspaper, e.g.. LifeZette. (4) For background stuff that changes slowly, be Wikipedia. (5) For finding something with desired meaning among content that changes not very fast, there’s my project. (6) For what someone actually wrote or said, there’s Twitter, YouTube, and various Web sites. E.g., if Trump wants to say something in 1000+ words, then he has at least two Web sites where he can publish those words — and announce such on Twitter or at a news conference — just as he wrote them and totally free of distortion, etc.

    Net, now nowhere do we need used toilet paper effluent from excrement on results of chopping down trees or the equivalent on new Web sites of old newsies still doing what billions of people, myself, Andy Hardy, and Jefferson saw. We just don’t need or want made up, fake, distorted, fabricated, lying nonsense. No time or room for it. Just don’t want it, and with the Internet don’t have to take it anymore. Kaput. Over with. Done. .

  5. Dang! I will not be able to buy a cup off coffee at Starbucks, er, I mean my local coffee shop since that costs 5.91.

    • I’m currently boycotting Starbucks. I want them to hire 10,000 Americans and/or Veterans before putting 10,000 Islamic migrants 1st in cue.

      • .
        The chap who runs SBUX is a weird lefty. I know this because I used to talk race with the baristas, remember that?

        Like most lefties, they care more about refugees (future Democrat voters) than Veterans.

        Why? Cause they think our freedoms are free. They don’t want to know what it costs to be a free people. No skin in the game.

        So, I am with you. Let’s put 10,000 VETERANS (folks with skin in the game, no?) to work before we put Islamic migrants to work. And, why isn’t that plain old fashioned discrimination?

        But, that’s just me.

        Full disclosure: The Boss, his father, his mother — Veterans all.

        BRC
        https://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

        • I had missed the baristas being ordered to talk race with customers. That’s just disturbing. I wonder what their orders were to say to white men? Oh, think that I already know…

          Goodbye starbucks. Hello In and Out Burger!

          I don’t get lefties. Just how it became cool to throw Americans, Veterans, and even Christians under the bus for a ideology that blatantly goes against all of what they claim to hold so near and dear to their hearts, makes no sense.

          Spock would say “illogical”.

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