Opinion

The Washington Post responded to Saturday's report by the New York Times that Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has cost the company $13 million in payouts to women who accused O'Reilly of sexual harassment with a Sunday editorial called "Bill O'Reilly, an awful, awful man."

By Marty Kaplan/AlterNet

Since his shocking election last fall, the media has coalesced around a narrative that millions of Americans across the country voted for Donald Trump on the assumption that he'd be able to recrown King Coal. In West Virginia alone, he captured nearly three times as many votes as Hillary Clinton.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

It’s been a busy few weeks at the Center for News Literacy, as “fake news” and finding ways to fight it have been front and center in many conversations about what’s happening in the world. I’ve had the opportunity to give training workshops at community colleges around Illinois, and to talk to librarians about how they can help engage people in talking about these issues.

Trump’s technique for dealing with bad news is to create enough confusion and partisanship to envelope it in dense fog.

Several weeks ago now, Republican Congressman Steve King tweeted that Dutch far right politician Geert Wilders rightly understands that whites cannot restore Western civilization with someone else’s babies. By someone’s else babies, he meant non-white babies. King believes Western civilization is white civilization and therefore only pure white people can perpetuate Western civilization.

What does a portrait say? Jeff Sessions may have signaled more than he intended when he decided to redecorate the Justice Department’s 5th floor conference room. Sessions reportedly replaced the portraits of Democrats that were hung during the Obama administration with portraits of Republicans. The one portrait of a Republican that was on the wall during the Obama years was that of Elliot L. Richardson. As Attorney General, Richardson stood up to President Nixon and refused to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. In what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Richardson’s resignation marked a turning point for Nixon who resigned less than a year later. During Watergate, Sessions was a young Republican who received his J.D. degree from the University of Alabama. In 2017, Sessions conspicuously decided to remove Richardson’s portrait.

The idea of Ivanka Trump as a secret liberal operative, embedded and awaiting activation, was always an illusion at odds with the material evidence. On the campaign trail, she was deployed as the genteel good cop to her father’s uncouth—and unashamedly racist and sexist—bad lieutenant. It was an image almost solely built on the superficial appeal of pastel dresses and quasi-liberal aphorisms, coupled with the long-standing typecasting of rich, telegenic, media-trained white women as inherently trustworthy. Take away the hollow rhetoric, and it’s clear that Ivanka is a loyalist wolf in her own fashion line’s sensible sophisticate clothing. Like every other aspect of her dad’s campaign, the marketing of Ivanka as a force for good behind enemy lines is a lie that withers upon contact with observable reality.

The White House has announced that Trump will name his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run a new Office of American Innovation – described as a SWAT team of strategic consultants staffed by former business executives, designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington and help make government work more like a business.

Once upon a time, there were presidents for whom English seemed their native language. Barack Obama most recently. He deliberated. At a press conference or in an interview — just about whenever he wasn’t speaking from a text — his pauses were as common as other people’s “uh’s.” He was not pausing because his vocabulary was impoverished. He was pausing to put words into sequence. He was putting phrases together with care, word by word, trying out words before uttering them, checking to feel out what they would sound like once uttered. It was important to him because he did not want to be misunderstood. President Obama valued precision, in no small part because he knew he lived in a world where every last presidential word was a speech act, a declaration with consequence, so that the very statement that the sky was blue, say, would be scoured for evidence that the president was declaring a policy on the nature of nature.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, in his press conference following the demise of his bill to replace Obamacare, blamed Republicans who had failed to grasp that the GOP was now a “governing party.”

Donald Trump ran on a campaign to “Make America Great Again,” and in that vein during a recent visit to the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home, Mr. Trump said he sees Jackson as a reflection of himself. The latter point is not surprising since the current President had previously hung a portrait of Old Hickory in the Oval office. There have been several apt comparisons of the two men, but most have missed an important point.