CSotD: Lügenpresse, California Style
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Pat Bagley expresses the situation well: As firefighters struggle to control the wildfires in Southern California, the press also struggles with disinformation about those wildfires.
The press wouldn’t be stuck with a mere squirtbottle if the only problem they faced were the normal flow of rumors and misconceptions that plague every major news event.
But in the past, theories about grassy knolls and second shooters were promoted, if not by the obvious crackpots who denied the moon landings or the death of Elvis, at least by marginal figures whose credibility was compromised.
Granted, the government hasn’t always been honest with us. The fanciful tale about the alleged attack on the Turner Joy and the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin was an excuse for American troops to actively enter the Vietnam War, while the Bush/Cheney administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to promote their invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps the ease with which people accepted tales of a connection between Iraq and 9/11, and believed in magical disappearing weapons of mass destruction was part of a general slide into misplaced loyalty.
So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at semi-official lies about the wildfires, but our divisions over Vietnam were an unintended result of the lies eventually unearthed in the Pentagon Papers.
We’ve now got purposeful lies and accusations in which dividing the American people against each other is not an accidental by-product but the purposefully intended goal, and, as Tom the Dancing Bug suggests, the paper that once unveiled the corruption of Watergate is not fighting the effort:
For those too young to remember, there were major newspapers that went along with the dismissal of Watergate as a “third rate burglary,” even after evidence of payoffs and widespread corruption went far beyond the break-in at Democratic headquarters. And there were people who believed them.
But the oft-forgotten part of both Watergate and the Pentagon Papers was how the New York Times and the Washington Post competed to put the truth in front of the American people.
Meanwhile, the papers that actively backed Nixon’s version of events were not hard to dismiss as, if not crackpots, at least unreliably partisan. As facts emerged, their influence waned.
Nixon famously hated the press, and his speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, came up with clever, insulting phrases for VP Agnew to throw out about “nattering nabobs of negativity” and so forth.
But Nixon let Agnew play the bad-boy role, compiling his enemies list in private.
Trump is under no such restraints, as Michael de Adder depicts it, openly calling the press not just wrong or prejudiced but the enemy of the people, and encouraging his followers to hate and threaten reporters. He even jokes about the shooting of reporters.
It is reminiscent of when the Third Reich weaponized the German term “lugenpresse” — lying press — to strengthen their grip on the Official Truth.
In 1992, I toured the Washington Post with a group of newspaper educators, and they brought us to a conference room with famous WashPo quotes on the wall. I said to myself, “I know one that won’t be there,” but there it was: “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”
Perhaps you had to be there. The Post is now in a new building, Katharine Graham has been dead for two decades and her old newspaper is hemorrhaging both talent and credibility at a prodigious rate. And it’s not alone.
Not only is our new version of Nixon bolder in his willingness to say anything and do anything to gain power, but our new media, as Ella Baron points out, is acting as his collaborators rather than our watchdogs. And it’s not just Zuckerberg and Musk, but the owners of the Post and of the LA Times that have decided to cooperate with, or at least not to oppose, the government.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Note that it’s easy to explain Kallaugher’s cartoon, given the more than 30,000 lies Trump told in his first administration and the transparent lies about water supplies, as well as the childish nicknames, he has hurled at the Democratic governor of California in the midst of a tragedy.
Kelley faces more of a challenge, because what Newsom has said about the fires has been verified, and he has even set up a page to help people wade through the misunderstandings and outright lies being told about the wildfires.
That page even addresses, and dismisses, the false information about delta smelt that Summers capitalizes on: The steps taken to preserve endangered species have been happening somewhere else. California is a large state with many rivers, not all of which flow towards Los Angeles.
Politifact not only backs up Newsom’s defense of water supplies and forest management, but notes that Trump also spread lies about Democratic responses to hurricanes in Puerto Rico and North Carolina.
However, to be fair, he did fly down to Puerto Rico to toss paper towels at hurricane victims.
MeidasTouch Network refutes more MAGA lies, including that the LA Fire Chief is a DEI hire and that the LA fire department budget had been cut, and provides a list of MAGA legislators who voted against fire prevention proposals but are now crying crocodile tears over the fires and blaming Democratic policies.
Meanwhile, Bill Bramhall takes a wider view of the growing tragedy, pointing out that denial of the obvious is not simply dishonest in the present but represents a refusal to make moves on behalf of generations to come.
And Cathy Wilcox suggests that whatever damage is being done by the wildfires, and however many lives are being lost, the real destruction is of truth and facts and a willingness to make appropriate decisions.
There is this, however: As de Adder shows, Canadian water bombers are on the scene, and social media has also been full of pictures of Mexican firefighters who have come to help. So much for xenophobia.
Moreover, Jen Rubin has quit Washpo and set up a superstar Substack to counter the coming flood of lies and the acquiescence of cowardly media.
It’s one example of an emerging samizdat which may get us to the midterms.
At which point, voters will become either firefighters or arsonists.
Your choice.
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