Thursday Reads: Enraged Media Strives to Prevent Glass Ceiling from Shattering
Posted: August 25, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Associated Press, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton, media lies, women's liberation, women's suffrage 36 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Once again I’m struggling with a feeling of shock as I look at today’s headlines and listen to the useless TV talkers. I wonder if this sense of unreality will ever pass?
Donald Trump, a blatant racist, nativist, and pathological liar with literally no qualifications to hold any public office is actually running for President of the United States, and he’s getting very little real pushback from the mainstream media. He refuses to release his tax returns, provides only a ludicrous doctor’s letter, and says he’ll let his children take over his business dealing rather than divest himself of financial conflicts of interest. Can this really be happening here? Unfortunately, it is.
Meanwhile the press spends most of its energy running a witch hunt against Hillary Clinton, an eminently qualified candidate with a long history of public service. We’ve heard about her emails every single day for more than a year, and now we’re weathering a storm of attacks on the Clinton Global Initiative and charges that Clinton may have had contact with some donors to the charity while she was Secretary of State, although there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing on her part.
What is going on here? Once again, the only answer I can come up with is that a women is on the verge of becoming POTUS. Once again, Peter Daou has a great explanation: IT’S HAPPENING: The Fury Crashing Down on Hillary Is the Glass Ceiling Starting to Shatter.
America has never heard this crashing noise before. It’s the sound of the gender barrier breaking, of the highest glass ceiling shattering, of institutional gender bias resisting conquest — and losing.
November 8th will be the culminating moment, but the process is happening now: With each passing day, Hillary is powering forward in the face of a furious assault on her lifesaving foundation, her private email communications, her health, her family, her integrity. She is wrestling the monumental forces of misogyny and gaining the upper hand.
America has never been here before. We’ve never heard these thunderous noises. We’ve never navigated this terrain.
And we’ve never witnessed a candidate endure such a vicious double standard, such unrestrained attacks by the establishment media.
This is the process of smashing the ultimate gender barrier, this intense grind forward, this fury raining down on Hillary, this uncontrolled maligning of a powerful, dignified woman.
The conquest of institutional bias doesn’t happen in one day. Election Day is the climactic moment, but now is the time the glass is beginning to shatter and the shards are crashing down.
He’s right. Although the gender bias is often unconscious to those in media who are expressing it, we women can see it. We can hear the dog-whistles and the overt sexism followed by denials. It’s ugly and despicable, but we have to get through it. Hillary has been fighting for us for most of her life, and now we need to be strong for her.
At the Democratic Convention, President Obama said, “Carry her the same way you carried me.” That is what we will do. We will carry her across the finish line on November 8 and we will stand strong for her for the next four years. We must do this for ourselves, for our daughters and granddaughters and for our foremothers who fought for the vote, for the ERA, for reproductive rights, for protection from rape, incest, and domestic violence.
As we’ve seen with the first black President, the battle won’t be won just because we have a woman President, but it will be huge step toward real gender equality. We can tell how huge it is by the way the media is ignoring the historic nature of Hillary’s candidacy and their ravening attacks on her using anything thing think can be twisted somehow to hurt her in hopes of making her break down. They can’t beat her and they are getting angrier and angrier about their failure to destroy her.
And what of those politicians and media people who are enabling Donald Trump? Jorge Ramos writes at Time Magazine: Judgment Day Is Coming For Those Who Stay Silent on Donald Trump.
It doesn’t matter who you are—a journalist, a politician or a voter—we’ll all be judged by how we responded to Donald Trump. Like it or not, this election is a plebiscite on the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figure in American politics in decades. And neutrality is not an option.
The day after the election will be too late. It was too late when we realized that there were no weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That horrible error of judgment by the Bush administration—and the lack of strength by those opposing the war—cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives. And nobody can even say that we won the war. But hopefully we can learn something from it.
Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, we will be asked on November 9th: What did you do? Did you support him? Were you brave enough, ethical enough, to challenge him when he insulted immigrants, Muslims, women, war heroes and people with disabilities? Are you on the record correcting his lies? Did you discuss with your friends and family that in a democracy like ours there is no room for racism and discrimination? Or did you just seat idly, silently, allowing others to decide the future of the United States?
Because you will be asked.
Trump has forced journalists to revisit rules of objectivity and fairness. Just providing both points of view is not enough in the current presidential campaign. If a candidate is making racist and sexist remarks, we cannot hide in the principle of neutrality. That’s a false equivalence.
Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were right; sometimes you have to take a stand. They did it against the dangerous persecutions of Senator Joe McCarthy and in denouncing the pernicious official spin during the worst years of the Vietnam War.
Please read the rest at the link.
For the past couple of days, both big media and social media have been obsessed with a disgraceful story by the Associated Press about supposed conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. (The story has now been updated with reports on yesterday’s reactions.) The AP also sent two completely inaccurate tweets to promote an article that essentially found nothing. Here are some responses to the AP’s claims and their embarrassing refusal to correct their false tweets.
Matthew Yglesias: The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess.
Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press released the results of a review of State Department appointment data that they used to make some striking claims about Hillary Clinton’s schedule as secretary of state.
According to their reporting, Clinton spent a remarkably large share of her time as America’s chief diplomat talking to people who had donated money to the Clinton Foundation. She went out of her way to help these Clinton Foundation donors, and her decision to do so raises important concerns about the ethics of her conduct as secretary and potentially as president. It’s a striking piece of reporting that made immediate waves in my social media feed, as political journalists of all stripes retweeted the story’s headline conclusions.
Except it turns out not to be true. The nut fact that the AP uses to lead its coverage is wrong, and Braun and Sullivan’s reporting reveals absolutely no unethical conduct. In fact, they found so little unethical conduct that an enormous amount of space is taken up by a detailed recounting of the time Clinton tried to help a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s also the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.
The AP spent quite a long time attacking Clinton for meeting with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, whom they failed to note has been close friends with Hillary since 1983.
…the most extensively discussed case the AP could come up with is this:
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest “microcredit” for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank’s board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
I have no particular knowledge of Yunus, Grameen Bank, or the general prospects of microcredit as a philanthropic venture. I can tell you, however, that Yunus not only won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize but has also been honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal. In 2008 he was No. 2 on Foreign Policy’s list of the “top 100 global thinkers,” and Ted Turner put him on the board of the UN Foundation. He’s received the World Food Prize, the International Simon Bolivar Prize, and thePrince of Asturias Award for Concord.
In other words, he’s a renowned and beloved figure throughout the West, not some moneybags getting help from the State Department in exchange for cash. On the level of pure politics, of course, this is exactly the problem with the Clinton Foundation. Its existence turns the banal into a potential conflict of interest, and shutting it down is the right call. But the fact remains that this is a fantastically banal anecdote.
Read much more at the link.
More negative reactions to the AP reporting:
Matthew Yglesias: The AP’s defense of its bad Clinton Foundation story is also bad.
Washington Monthly: How the AP Spun the Story About the Clinton Foundation.
Inside Philanthropy: Once Again, the Media Gets It Wrong on the Clinton Foundation.
Tommy Christopher: Here’s Why Clinton Foundation Must Restrict Donations if Hillary Is Elected.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/768806930584403974
This is only going to get worse. Many “journalists” seems to have turned into ravening wolves, hoping for an opportunity to tear Hillary Clinton into bloody bits of flesh. We can’t let them win. We must standing with Hillary. #ImWithHer
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread, and have a nice Thursday.
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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Hillary will be giving a speech on Donald Trump and the “alt-right” soon. You can watch a live stream here:
Hillary’s speech yesterday was scathing. One pundit said she laid out the evidence against Trump like an expert prosecutor. Me says the voters will come back with a “guilty” verdict for Trump in November.
Have a great Friday, Sky Dancers.
I hope you are right.
JJ, not to worry. Hillary will win and be our next POTUS. Trump will start a “pay for subscription” network that will go bankrupt in a year. Bet on it.
Thank you for writing about this BB. I’ve commented here and at other places concerning this effort by some in the MSM to destroy her over what amounts to nothing but conjecture and fantasy, piled on top of innuendo and hyperbole, based on nothing but non-factual alt-right bullshit stories in “Clinton cash” and the diarrhea from Trump’s mouth. It’s made me furious, but in a good way because I’m more determined than ever to vote for her, to support her and to take on her detractors. Good Post and thanks again.
P.S. Julian Assange told FOX last night that he has an “October surprise”, but he also said that whether or not it stops Hillary depends on if it “catches fire” in the news. Hillary’s speech today needs to put Trump away for good. Maybe she can start with this
I cannot believe I once had charitable thoughts about Assange and Wikileaks. Live and learn I guess.
He’s a rapist twit whose only claim to fame is publishing documents that other people have stolen. He never scrubs the emails he releases and one of his last batches released the names and sexual orientation and medical condition of people living in places that could be killed for being gay or having HIV. He releases personal information on innocent people all the time including addresses, phone numbers and socials. He’s a bottom dweller and I hope that somehow authorities can get him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and extradited to Sweden so he can face the rape charges pending against him. Then maybe we’ll get a shot at him where he can stand trial, before American court and jury for Espionage. I think it’s pretty obvious now that Russia is the source of much of his “leak” info.
Yes – I can’t disagree with your assessment.
P.S. The tricycle/tank gif is hysterical!
I love it too! 🙂
I’m proud that I never trusted Assange or Snowden.
Mouse, I love that gif!
Like you, I don’t know where to start. We are witnessing a potential takeover of America by modern day Nazis, and I do not use that term figuratively. “Big Lies” are being manufactured every day by the Trump campaign, wholly in service of trying to engineer this putsch. Goebbels-like, Orwellikan, it is all present. “Hillary Clinton is a bigot” is just another of this “double-think,” this purveying of monstrous lies which are so revulvise and shocking that some people might actually consider them to be true.
This cannot be stopped. What could be done is for the media to report this with the contempt and revulsion it deserves. But the media, for whatever combination of reasons one could suggest, is determined to give all the Big LIes major air time, and to treat them as if they are worthy of debate. The media has reached the nadir of its checkered history, by giving a half-hearted wave of the cape to all the deceits and disinformation the Trump campaign wallows in, while treating Hillary the way that Javert treated Jean Valjean. It’s gotten so bad that not only can I not bear to turn on the news stations, but that when I do for a few minutes, I am left with the sense that I am in some malign carnival house of mirrors.
Does the media think that if they elect Trump, they can survive it? I would say “could America survive it?” (no), but the media doesn’t care about America or Americans, only their own personal spiteful satisfaction, and their ratings. Mr. Ramos is absolutely right: after the election it will be far too late. All the tears will not wash out a word of it. America as we have known it will be forever destroyed; and the planet will pass the tipping point on global warming, and there will be ecological calamities beyound imagining. The media is bringing us to the brink of destruction. Do they think that they will pull back just as the car is a foot from the cliff, as in a fantasy movie? Or are they just so stupid, and so vengefully hating of Hillary Clinton, that nothing else is capable of permeating their consciousness?
William – who on earth thought “Hillary is a bigot” would score points? African-Americans, LGBTQ, women – every marginalized group out there knows full well she’s not. So who do they think they are kidding.
Alt-right loves bigots so maybe they’ll vote for her because she’s such a big. biggoted bigot!!!!lol
William, I agree that Trump has opened a Pandora’s box of evil, but one poll shows today that Hillary leads him by 10 points and 90% of those polled said they wouldn’t change their minds. We should celebrate that.
However, I do worry about the rage and violence kicked up by Trump, but I hope when he loses life will return closer to normal.
I agree with palhart. The danger is what the most rabid Trump supporters will do when he loses. Still, having studied the rise of Nazism in depth in college, I do not agree with people who say what the U.S. is experiencing now is anything close to Weimar. It is not.
I also agree with you, Beata. I was floundering for a description of the populism, violence, authoritarian, and clueless leader, DT, from the spring into summer and couldn’t go as far as calling it Nazism, so settled uncomfortably with “neo-fascism.” Then Bannon was selected and I can’t really fix any name for this racist, violent, absurd campaign. The circumstances here, indeed, don’t mirror ’30s Germany.
As far as the press is concerned – they really remind me of a pack of vultures waiting to swoop in and rip at anything no matter how old and beaten to death it already was.
I had a manager once who did not like me – it was a very cliquey environment there. She and her cronies were so eager to find something wrong with me it was palpable. I just did what I do and now I’m the only person there who hasn’t been laid off after 15 years. Said manager is long gone.
Good for you!
Thank you, we are Americans, and we are stronger together with Hillary Clinton. My tone when watching the news has really changed, this little hick woman will not let Trump win!
Mother Jones:
This Woman’s Reaction to Donald Trump Calling Hillary Clinton a “Bigot” Is Pure Gold
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-bigot-womans-reaction?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
BB have you all seen this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/26/hungarys-pm-plans-more-massive-fence-to-keep-out-migrants
It is spreading, the crazy.
One more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/linguist-george-lakoff-pay-close-attention-trump-means-exactly-what-he-says/
Thanks for that link. Lakoff is good.
This is a global phenomenon, and Europe is ahead of the US. Bannon wants to bring the right wing intolerance here and he’s using Trump to advance his cause. Fortunately, he will fail. Hillary will save us from Trump.
Donald Trump (under new management) has finally gotten to the point where I have to shut the TV off when he speaks. The outright lies and meaness have gotten out of the surreal realm or performance art realm to the realm of reality in the Storm Front World. He’s creepier speaking from the teleprompters. It’s so 1984 that I can’t even ….
I’m using the fast forward button a lot. I can’t watch any news program in real time, because I need to be able to speed through the Great Orange Screamer.
http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/25/msnbcs-joy-reid-explains-alt-right-movement-they-are-basically-next-generation-what-are/212662
It’s interesting she links this movement to the gamergate/youth as well. What these goons are doing to Leslie Jones makes me sick to my stomach. I would love to see some laws passed with regard to online harassment.
Love this! Wonkette has a picture from a fundraiser for Hillary at Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel’s house:
http://wonkette.com/605870/hillary-clinton-justin-timberlake-and-jessica-biel-bring-sexy-back-to-your-weekly-dance-party
It’s awesome sequence from a photo booth.
I hope Hillary is having as much fun with her celebrity endorsers as it appears! They are the greatest!
I have been out all day and frankly I’ve enjoyed not thinking about the latest witch hunt. The allegations about the Clinton Foundation make me sad but I honestly don’t think anyone is being fooled by any of this. I hate the gleefulness of the MSM and I’ve taken Morning Joe off of my TIVO because he has become insufferable. The people who hated the Clintons before the bogus AP story will still hate the Clintons and the rest of us with still believe that they are doing their best to serve their country and their fellow humans. I’m just going to turn off the noise and keep volunteering and donating to Hillary.
Well said, Janice. Thank you for helping Hillary’s campaign. I wish I could do more.
I wish I could do more too, Beata. I can only make calls this time around because of my messed up ankle. Hopefully, I’ll get that corrected with surgery at the end of the month but I wish this all would have happened next year rather than this year. I want to do everything possible to help the Democrats win this year.
Heartfelt post, BB. Yes, we need to stand strong for Hillary and against Trump. Keep the faith!
The false knight on the road in this traditional song ( Child Ballad 3 ) is the devil in disguise, against whom the child stood:
“How will you go by land?” said the knight on the road.
“With a strong staff in my hand,” said the child as he stood.
And he stood and he stood and ’twas well that he stood.
“With a strong staff in my hand,” said the child as he stood.
Thanks, Beata.