Legendary CBS newsman Dan Rather lit into the Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief for saying he was reluctant to call out obvious lies by Donald Trump by saying one had to consider the president-elect's "moral intent."
On Sunday's Meet The Press, WSJ's Gerard Baker was asked about Trump's penchant to blurt or tweet things off the top of his head that have no basis in reality. According to the Baker, calling those things a "lie" would be going too far.
“I’d be careful about using the word, ‘lie.’” Baker said. “‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead…I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective.”
On Facebook, Rather blasted Baker by opening with "A lie, is a lie, is a lie."
"Journalism, as I was taught it, is a process of getting as close to some valid version of the truth as is humanly possible. And one of my definitions of news is information that the powerful don't want you to know," Rather wrote.
"It is not the proper role of journalists to meet lies—especially from someone of Mr. Trump’s stature and power—by hiding behind semantics and euphemisms. Our role is to call it as we see it, based on solid reporting. When something is, in fact, a demonstrable lie, it is our responsibility to say so," he continued. "As I have said before and will say as long as people are willing to listen, this is a gut check moment for the press. We are being confronted by versions of what are claimed to be 'the truth' that resemble something spewed out by a fertilizer-spreader in a wind tunnel. And there is every indication that this will only continue in the Tweets and statements of the man who will now hold forth from behind the Great Seal of the President of the United States."
Rather concluded by warning news consumers, "You as the paying, subscribing public, can use your leverage and pocketbooks to keep those who should be honest brokers of information, well, honest. "
After spending the better part of two days complaining about reporters pointing out that he was seen at the site of President-elect Donald Trump's New Years Eve party, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough sat down with CNN's Dylan Byers to say he's being picked upon only because it was Trump with whom he was having a meeting.
The whole "Trump party" back and forth on Twitter between Scarborough and several reporters occupied most of a slow news day on New Years Day, after NY Times reporter Maggie Habermann tweeted that Scarborough along the Morning Joe show co-host Mike Brezinski "partied" with Trump.
After arguing over the definition of "partied," Scarborough engaged in a highly public argument with journalists on Twitter, claiming he was there to set up an interview with the president-elect for a later date and did not stay to see the new year in.
Speaking with CNN's Byers, Scarborough attacked an assortment of television hosts and journalists who have had personal relationships with politicians over the years who have never come under the scrutiny that he has since covering Trump.
Which brought up the question: why now and why Trump?
"I think it's mainly against Donald Trump. Again, people knew that we went in -- we couldn't explain what we had said with Barack Obama, but when we met with him in the White House for an hour and a half, people knew we went in and met with Barack Obama for an hour and a half. They knew that we were friends with Valerie Jarrett," Scarborough explained.
"The only difference is that Donald Trump is now the person calling us up. So for some reason, this is now shocking and everybody's aghast when the fact is, again, my interactions with Donald Trump are so much more limited than Fareed Zakaria's with Barack Obama or Ben Bradlee's with JFK or Walter Lippmann's with LBJ, or -- you just go down the list," he continued. " Or Chris Matthews with John Kerry. Or Andrea Mitchell with half of official Washington. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, Tom Brokaw went out hunting with Supreme Court justices. That's fine. And it's good for him to do that. And it's good to get to know them so long as you're willing to be tough. And I've got a year of op-eds that show just how brutally honest I can be towards Donald Trump and anybody else."
Continuing with that theme, Scarborough warned that reporters are letting Trump change the rules and their behavior as reporters.
"I do have a message. And it’s something that we talked about this morning on the show, and we’ve been talking about for some time,"Scarborough said. "That, don’t let Donald Trump get into your head. Don’t let him change the basic rules of journalism. You still pick up the phone, you still ask questions. Facts still matter. You still pursue stories that matter to people across the country instead of venting or trying to write the most snide tweet or the most snide article."
Former CNN host Soledad O'Brien lamented over the weekend that 2017 had started out badly for restoring trust in journalism.
In a New Year's Day tweet, O'Brien pointed to "catfights" between MSNBC host Joe Scarborough other members of the media who said he "partied" at President-elect Donald Trump's New Year's Eve bash. Scarborough lashed out, claiming that he was at the event to negotiate an interview with the president-elect, and that he "did not attend the party, and left before any 'partying' began."
Photos, however, show Scarborough mingling with Trump as other guests enjoy champagne.
In a follow-up tweet, O'Brien called out Don Lemon, a former CNN colleague who spent New Year's Eve doing tequila shots on the air.
"A drunk anchorman got his ear pierced live on tv last night," she wrote. "It's a very low bar for credibility."
Welcome to a world where fake news stories are used to manipulate public opinion. Dissent is no longer tolerated and all your communications are monitored; the economy is not functioning and reality TV is used to distract you from harsher realities. Welcome to 2017.
I don’t mean our 2017 but an imagined one from 30 years ago. This was the setting for 1987 movie The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bad news? Much of this action-adventure slugfest looks eerily prophetic now that we’re here for real.
In the film, Schwarzenegger plays police helicopter pilot Ben Richards in a 2017 when many people are living on the streets and food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. The movie begins with him refusing to fire on a food riot from his helicopter because the people are unarmed, with women and children caught up in the protest. He gets overpowered by colleagues and the rioters are massacred, with footage of the incident edited to make him the perpetrator – and a useful scapegoat.
The original.Imprisoned for life, Richards is offered the chance to win his freedom by competing in the most popular TV programme in history, Running Man. This state-sponsored show pits contestants against high-profile hunters with extreme weaponry. It’s a Schwarzenegger vehicle from his 1980s heyday, so you can probably guess who wins.
The script by Steven E de Souza loosely adapts a 1982 novel of the same name by Richard Bachman, the pseudonym of horror author Stephen King. The source material is set in 2025 and far less heroic. It ends with Richards hijacking an aeroplane and flying it into the television company’s skyscraper headquarters – stop me if this is sounding in any way familiar.
The film adaptation is a product of its time, with 1980s props that look out of place in the fictional 2017 setting. People carry clipboards instead of tablet computers, use analogue phones rather than mobiles, and store their music on cassette. The Running Man does feature smart home technology, like voice-controlled coffee makers, but the computers are primitive. It’s the satirical touches that stand out most in this film, such as the president of the United States having his own theatrical agent.
When in Rome …
The central conceit of both novel and film – that those in power use mass entertainment to distract the population from reality – is part of a long tradition. It dates all the way back to the Roman empire when the masses were appeased with free wheat and arena spectacles, a tactic described as panem et circenses – bread and circuses.
One of the first writers to transplant this notion to television was Quartermass creator Nigel Kneale in his 1968 play for BBC Two, The Year of the Sex Olympics. It envisaged a dystopian future where the elite maintains control over the people by broadcasting a constant stream of pornography and trash television.
Kneale effectively predicted the rise of reality TV programmes like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here; and much other science fiction has drawn on the same theme. It appears, for example, in Doctor Who in the 1985 adventure Vengeance on Varos – set in a totalitarian world where torture and executions are televised to amuse and divert the masses – and more recently in The Hunger Games trilogy.
The additional element that makes The Running Man even more resonant right now is fake news. The fake footage of Richards’ helicopter massacre is replayed to the live audience in the gameshow studio to coerce them into believing Schwarzenegger’s character is a liar, a murderer and a threat to everyone. The programmers then do the same thing to his sidekick, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), before later faking their televised deaths during the game itself.
It’s not unlike how social media and even some broadcasters have been guilty of distributing and promoting fake news in recent months, especially during the US presidential election. When psychotic Running Man host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) interviews studio audience members in the movie, their simple-minded responses echo footage of real American voters dismissing reality for what they’ve been told on TV or via alt-right news sites.
Muscular politics
Meanwhile, The Running Man cast included not one but two men who would improbably become governors of American states. Jesse Ventura, then best known as a professional wrestler, appears as gameshow veteran Captain Freedom. In 1999, Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota, serving a full four-year term.
Schwarzenegger, a former bodybuilder, was then elected governor of California in 2003 and re-elected in 2006. And having starred in a movie about the potential dangers of reality TV, on January 2 he will become host of Celebrity Apprentice in the US. The person he replaces? A real estate tycoon called Donald Trump who will become the president of the United States in the coming days, despite losing the popular vote.
Trump has appointed as his chief strategist and senior counsellor Stephen Bannon. Until recently, Bannon was executive chair of Breitbart News, a right-wing website accused of massaging facts to promote its agenda and win the election for his new boss. And lest we forget, one key part of Trump’s mandate is to revive an economy that has never recovered from the financial crisis of 2007-08.
Put it all together and the 2017 of The Running Man doesn’t look very far away.
CNN host Don Lemon spent his New Year's Eve doing tequila shots and getting a piercing on live television. And eventually, his network decided to pull the plug.
More than three hours before midnight, Lemon began drinking on the air at a nightclub in New Orleans.
"This is way too early to start this," co-host Brooke Baldwin warned.
As the night wore on, Kathy Griffin, co-host of CNN's New York broadcast, pushed Lemon to get a nipple tattoo. But Baldwin cautioned the anchor not to take off his shirt on live television. Lemon opted for an ear piercing instead.
As the countdown hit midnight, Lemon could be heard telling Baldwin that 2016 was "awful" before CNN quickly cut the audio feed.
About 20 minutes later, Lemon was back on the air, promising that he would not be “as self-centered” in 2017.
“Are we going there, right now?” Baldwin gasped.
“People are saying that I’m lit,” Lemon noted moments later. “Yeah, I’m lit. Who cares?”
A video has emerged of gospel singer Kim Burrell attacking LGBT people as “perverts” and sinners, just days before she is scheduled to appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The video, published December 30 on YouTube, shows Burrell preaching a sermon against homosexuality. "Anyone filled with the homosexual spirit, beg God to free you... That perverted homosexual spirit, and the spirit of delusion and confusion, it has deceived many men and women," she yells in the video.
"You as a man, you open your mouth and take a man’s penis in your face, you are perverted. You are a woman and will shake your face in another woman’s breast, you are perverted. And it has come into our church and embarrassed the kingdom of God."
Burrell also said that Bishop Eddie Long, who is rumored to be suffering from HIV or AIDs, was an "embarrassment to the church" because of his alleged illness, suggesting it was related to homosexual activity.
Burrell is scheduled to appear January 5 on The Ellen Degeneres Show to perform “I See Victory” with Pharrell Williams.
Watch the sermon below:
Burrell on Friday night posted a Facebook Live video responding to the controversy stirred up by her sermon.
“We’re not in a war against flesh and blood," she said. "I came on because I care about God’s creation and every person from the LGBT and anything else, any other kind of thing that is supporting gay -- I never said LGBT last night. I said S.I.N. and whatever falls in the sin was preached.”
"What I posted was not all I preached to... isn't that something? That is design of the enemy to make it look like I have a personal agenda against people... to the carnal all things are carnal, and to the spiritual all things are spiritual."
Watch the Facebook Live video below:
Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, who is gay, said in a series of tweets that Burrell's sermon was a "reminder that, for many of us, the church is a space of faux liberation and hypocritical theology."
Former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh kicked off an online firestorm when he said on Thursday that Pres. Barack Obama has always had an agenda against Israel because Obama is secretly Muslim.
In recent weeks, ex-Congressman Walsh had won the tentative embrace of some Democrats for his principled stand against the incoming Trump administration and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. However, the accused deadbeat dad and former Tea Party darling reverted to form in his attack on the president.
The "Obama is a Secret Muslim" canard is one of the enduring phantasms of the right-wing "post-truth" era, a throwback to when Republicans simultaneously accused Obama of being a Muslim while loudly declaiming his Chicago Christian pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Conservative Republican Rep. Trent Franks reacted to the Obama administration's fresh sanctions against Russia for election meddling by praising the hackers who penetrated the servers of U.S. political organizations and published what they found online.
"Most of what we're talking about is based on leaks," Franks said. "If anything, whatever they might have done was to try to use information in a way that may have affected something that they believed was in their best interests."
He went on, "If Russia succeeded in giving the American people information that was accurate, then they merely did what the media should have done."
An English language newspaper in Mumbai, India accidentally published a string of "F-words" in an otherwise mundane article about local restaurants on Thursday.
Mediaite.com said that the Mumbai Mirror's copyeditor must have overlooked what was meant to be a note for the layup team.
In a listing of romantic restaurants, the Mirror invited readers to "indulge in fire cracker rolls (F*ck f*ck f*ck, just saying f*ck so you notice that you have to select one picture and mention which pic lalala), cherry-smoked chicken and truffle koftas" in a blurb about Chef Farrokh Khambata's restaurant Amadeus.
The copyeditor, sadly, didn't notice.
As Mediaite noted, "Placeholder text is common. Sometimes, editors forget to remove it."
Rarely, though, do such mistakes involve such colorful language.
Hours before the stroke that ultimately killed Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, the actress and dancer turned to her son Todd and said that she missed her daughter Carrie Fisher -- who died Dec. 26 following a heart attack -- and wanted to be with her. They were among her last words.
AlterNet reported on Thursday that "broken heart syndrome" is a real lethal disorder identified by neuropsychologists that has a history stretching back thousands of years.
"There's been a beautiful history that you can die from misery or loneliness or literally from a broken heart," said stress psychophysiology specialist Prof. Brian Hughes to AlterNet's Alexandra Rosenmann.
, "broken heart syndrome" is what is known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It is a temporary heart condition brought on by intense or prolonged stress. And in some cases, it can be fatal.
“Women are more likely than men to experience the sudden, intense chest pain -- the reaction to a surge of stress hormones -- that can be caused by an emotionally stressful event," says the AHA. "It could be the death of a loved one or even a divorce, breakup or physical separation, betrayal or romantic rejection,”
"The ancient Greeks and Romans felt that many emotions were reflected in the body and the people with different characteristics and different personality types have different body shapes and body functions," said Hughes, who is the president of the international Stress and Anxiety Research Society (STAR).
"Nowadays we often feel that these notions are myths and superstitions, or in the case of fiction, artistic license," he continued. "However there's actually a very consistent line of research linking emotional function to the brain and to physical health and disease in the body and one of the most compelling examples this relates to cardiovascular function and especially to the notion of cardiovascular stress reactivity."
The University Hospital of Zurich has conducted a long-term study of "broken heart syndrome," following 1,000 patients who have been diagnosed with the condition.
Their research specifically examines the link between brain activity and heart function. Many of the patients affected by the syndrome, they say, are women over the age of 50.
"We know from experiments on animals that long-term stress can be fatal. Under fire from too much adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, a whole range of organs start to fail after certain time and the animal dies," said University Hospital's Lutz Jäncke.
Actress and aspiring lifestyle maven Gwyneth Paltrow believes that her "conscious uncoupling" with ex-husband Chris Martin of the band Coldplay has "contributed something positive to the culture of divorce."
Paltrow -- who runs the lifestyle blog Goop.com -- announced in 2014 that she and Martin were splitting after 10 years of marriage. Citing the work of what Skyes calls a pair of "New Age doctors" Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, the actress called the process a "conscious uncoupling" and now appears to believe that her and Martin's divorce can be a model for married couples everywhere who are reaching the end of their relationship as spouses.
"So not only does Gwyneth have the perfect career, hair, and skin tone; she also has the perfect divorce. And she’s not afraid to tell you so," wrote Sykes.
Martin, Paltrow said, is "at my house every single day. We still have our family life.”
“To this day, Chris would take a bullet for me, even though I’m not his wife. I honestly think Chris and I have contributed something positive to the culture of divorce," she told InStyle.
Paltrow has taken heat in the past for the impractical, out-of-touch and often very expensive life, health and beauty advice she doles out at Goop.
“It used to be that I would talk about something or write about it, and people would be like, ‘What the f--k is she talking about? She’s a witch!’ And then later on it would sort of catch on... I’m like, this is my role. I’m here to do this. A friend told me if you’re a trailblazer, you’re the first one through and you get the cuts because you’re hacking the path," she enthused.
A Brazilian news anchor has attracted attention around the world for all the wrong reasons after an on-air joke about the death of actress Carrie Fisher fell flat, leaving his fellow panelists in a stunned, awkward silence.
Mediaite reported that anchor Jorge Pontual was pretending to quote Star Wars character Chewbacca the Wookie when he let out a guttural moan during Tuesday evening's broadcast on GloboNews.
Fisher passed away on Tuesday at age 60 after a massive heart attack left her in intensive care. The actress and author was most famous for her role in the Star Wars films.
“Many people telling how much they loved Carrie Fisher, many celebrities remarking on this loss,” Pontual said. “But the most emotional reaction was from Chewbacca, that Star Wars character. He said, ‘HHHGGRRRRGRAAAARRR.'”
The other panelists and an in-studio host all froze for a moment in stunned silence before resuming the broadcast.
The immediate media uproar prompted Pontual to post a photo of Fisher as Leia hugging Chewbacca on Twitter.
The overdose death of an 18-year-old high school football player in Ragland, Alabama has spurred his mother into action against the national epidemic of opiate abuse.
According to WIAT, Dylan "Jhase" Thompson was a popular college-bound senior with good grades, but on a morning in November, his mother Aprille Thompson found him dead in his bed of a heroin overdose.
"(A)s much as I try not to have that vision in my mind, I will have that vision until the day that I die,” she said of the discovery of his lifeless body.
Dylan tried heroin for the first time months ago, Aprille Thompson said. He quickly became addicted and the drug took his life. Thompson said that the struggle to try and save her son is something she wants to protect other families from.
“Once your child is using, your nightmare has already started,” she told WIAT. “It’s important to get in front of this drug before the use starts, because it’s just a demon, it’s an evil that is almost impossible to beat.”
She went on, "I’ve read message after message, and post after post of parents who have seen their family members struggle with this for years. I struggled for five months, and it was a living nightmare every day. I can’t imagine a years long struggle.”
Dylan was scoring heroin within blocks of his family home. His mother says she tried everything to intervene.
“He was getting drugs two blocks from where we live, he was buying it for less than his school lunch cost for a week,” she explained. “He died in the security of our home, so it’s coming into people’s homes, so there is no safe place.”
Now she wants to spread awareness of the seriousness of opiate addiction and save other families from what she went through. She has spoken to local law enforcement, the Ragland city council and local churches in an effort to raise awareness.
“My message to the children would be: Know what this choice can do,” she said.
