Im-Politic: Why America (Desperately) Needs that White House Correspondents’ Dinner

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CNBC John Harwood, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump, White House Correspondents Association, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner

The pre-Trump era version of myself would be heartily applauding part of Margaret Sullivan’s recommendation for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. According to the Washington Post media columnist, this event, “should be the last. It never has been a particularly good idea for journalists to don their fanciest clothes and cozy up to the people they cover, alongside Hollywood celebrities who have ventured to wonky Washington to join the fun.”

The post-Trump era version of myself is more struck by this follow-on Sullivan observation: that nowadays, the event

“has become close to suicidal for the press’s credibility.

“Trust in the mainstream media is low, a new populism has caught fire all over the Western world, and President Trump constantly pounds the news media as a bunch of out-of-touch elites who don’t represent the interests of real Americans.

“The annual dinner — or at least the optics of the dinner — seems to back him up.”

In fact, that points to the reason that I believe and hope the dinner continues: as Sullivan and other defenders of the establishment press indignantly insist that this stereotype is at best completely inaccurate at best and at worst a malicious lie spread by figures – like the President – who hope to destroy this pillar of democracy.

But since the 2016 presidential campaign began in earnest, nothing has been clearer than how the mainstream media’s hostility to Mr. Trump has stemmed from far more than dismay about his personal vulgarity or from journalists’ legitimate concerns about his personal business and possible conflicts of interest. (By contrast, in my view, for reasons described here, the Russia collusion charges look manufactured.) The President’s harsh coverage has also resulted from his strong opposition to the longstanding elite consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policies that too often have put Main Street Americans last, but that the national media has swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Indeed, these reporters and editors and pundits have repeatedly hanged themselves with their own words. Remember CNBC’s John Harwood asking Mr. Trump at an October, 2015 Republican candidates’ debate if he was running “a comic book version of a presidential campaign”? Remember The New York Times‘ publisher acknowledging after the Trump victory that such dismissive (at best) views so pervaded the newspaper’s campaign coverage that it needed to “rededicate itself” to the “fundamental mission of Times journalist. That is, to report America and the world honestly…”?

How nice it would be to report that the Mainstream Media has learned some lessons and changed its tune, or at least its smug posture. But no one who’s literate, who follows many Big Media journalists on Twitter, or who watches the vast majority of news talk shows, could possibly see any progress. In news coverage, the treatment of major issues continues following the apparent rule that the only valid – or indeed, sane – position to take is the one opposite of the President’s. On the televised talk shows, this Trump Derangement Syndrome continues to be invariably accompanied by non-stop sniggering, chortling, and raised eyebrows seem just as common as ever.

So please, White House Correspondents’ Association! Keep holding this so-called “Nerd Prom” (the favorite, false modesty-dripping insider nickname for the event)! In fact, double down on the current format! Keep booking hate-mongering comedians/ennes! Keep hobnobbing with virtue-signaling celebrities! Keep looking like courtiers rather than watchdogs!

In other words, keep taking every opportunity to remind the public how completely you’ve merged with the comfortable you’re supposed to be afflicting! Keep sinking your own credibility beyond repair! And as a result, keep hastening the day when you’ll be replaced by the kind of press corps a healthy democracy needs.

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Following Up: Vital Background on “Idea Laundering” — and Washington Corruption

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Bloomberg.com, conflicts of interest, corruption, hedge funds, idea laundering, Im-Politic, James K. Glassman, journalism, lobbying, Mainstream Media, Nick Confessore, special interests, The Washington Monthly, think tanks

Since I’m a great believer in giving credit where it’s due, I feel honor-bound to report that I just learned that a development I thought I first identified (along with a catchy name) wasn’t spotted first by me after all. At the same time, it’s also a pleasure to make this confession, because it creates a golden opportunity to recommend two excellent pieces of journalism that shine much needed additional light on this development – which has tremendously deepened corruption in American policymaking.

The development? “Idea laundering” – which I’ve defined as the now widespread practice of special interests (like corporations) using think tanks to issue materials that push the particular agendas of these funders while garbing them in quasi-academic raiment to create the impressions of objectivity and intellectual respectability. In other words, it’s become practically standard operating procedure in the policy world for outfits with scholarly-sounding names like “The Brookings Institution” to put out reports and articles that flack for the companies and other donors (now including foreign governments) that pay the rent without disclosing the hand that’s feeding them. Just as bad, journalists almost never reveal these conflicts of interest – or even ask about them.

I thought that I was the first to spotlight and name this deception, in 2006 testimony before Congress on Chinese influence-peddling operations in America. But yesterday, while reading a terrific piece on Bloomberg.com on how hedge funds have been using an especially insidious variant of the practice, I learned that it was first described in a 2003 Washington Monthly article by Nick Confessore, who is now a reporter for The New York Times. Interestingly, the individual at the center of both articles is James K. Glassman, a long-time fixture in the Washington, D.C. chattering class scene who Confessore credited with pioneering this deceitful new version of lobbying.

I do believe that I’ve been writing and warning about idea laundering more than anyone else. But I’m glad to acknowledge publicly that I was beaten to the punch when it comes to parenthood. It’s also great to see that more and more journalists are looking underneath the hood of the writings and Congressional and media appearances that so profoundly shape America’s approach to virtually all foreign and domestic issues.

Unfortunately, as made clear by this recent post, we’re a long way from the point at which reporters name the donors routinely, and when editors demand this vital information just as often. Until they do, the idea launderers and their paymasters will keep winning far too many victories at the expense of Main Street Americans.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Laughable Mainstream Media Ignorance on U.S. China Policy

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Angela Merkel, China, George W. Bush, H.R. McMaster, international order, Mainstream Media, Mark Landler, North Korea, Ooffshoring Lobby, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, responsible stakeholder, Robert Zoellick, The New York Times, Trump, Ukraine

Bad as it was, the worst aspect of Mark Landler’s New York Times piece yesterday about the first year of President Trump’s foreign policy wasn’t his contention that “liberal, rules-based international order” is a reasonable way to describe the international scene in recent memory. I mean, anyone seen much order out there lately? Or any country paying much attention to rules?

Nor was it endorsement of the conviction held by German Chancellor Angela Merkel – and much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment – that Ukraine is “a vital part of the trans-Atlantic relationship.” That’ll come as news to anyone remotely familiar with the history of either the United States or Western Europe from 1924 to 1989 – when the region was a part of the Soviet Union and its admittedly tragic fate had absolutely no discernible impact on any member of the Atlantic alliance whatever.

Instead, the worst aspect of Landler’s thinly disguised paean to the globalist approach to international affairs was his choice of former President George W. Bush’s top trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick as an authority on dealing with China.

Actually, I agree with Zoellick (though for somewhat different reasons) that Mr. Trump has made a major mistake in basing America’s China trade policy on Beijing’s efforts to help resolve the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis peacefully (and on acceptable terms of course). This week, even the president may have acknowledged this, as he’s tweeted criticism of China based on reports that Beijing has been violating UN sanctions by continuing to sell crude oil to the Kim Jong Un regime.

But the choice of Zoellick to make this accusation is laughably ignorant. Of course, it was the entire foreign policy establishment – as well as the offshoring-happy multinational corporations that finance so much of it – that made the historically foolish and dangerous mistake of assuming that indiscriminately expanding the world’s trade and other commercial ties with China would turn the People’s Republic into a country fundamentally easier to deal with on all fronts, and promote economic and political reform of its communist system.

Zoellick, however, took this naivete to a whole ‘nother level. For he was the American leader who, in 2005, declared that the time was ripe to turn China into a “responsible stakeholder” in the “international system.” The then-U.S. Trade Representative acknowledged that China had a long way to go reach this objective.

But this high profile address (to a quintessential Offshoring Lobby organization) unmistakably signaled the U.S. government’s belief that it was eminently attainable (along with the development of a relationship built on “shared interest and shared values”), and specified that its fate depended on the U.S. side on a campaign by that Offshoring Lobby to pacify those Americans who “perceive China solely through the lens of fear.” Is it any surprise that years of coddling China on trade and national security issues followed (including praise for China’s “constructive role” vis-a-vis North Korea)?

And upon considering Beijing’s ongoing refusal to curb its North Korea trade dramatically and its expansionism in the South China Sea, not to mention its intensified crack down on dissent at home and ever more brazen violation of global economic and commercial norms, can anyone reasonably doubt that Zoellick has been spectacularly wrong?

Interestingly, at one point in his article, Landler quotes Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster as admitting that, on foreign policy, the president “has moved a lot of us out of our comfort zone, me included.” It’s a move that Landler, and most of his Mainstream Media colleagues, would be well advised to make.

Im-Politic: An Old Year Rung Out with Fake News

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ABC News, Barack Obama, Bloomberg.com, CNN.com, Gallup, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Marketwatch.com, NBC News, Newsday, Politico.com, The New York Times, Trump, USAToday, Washington Post

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and his first year in office, you can be sure of this: His charges that too much of the Mainstream Media publishes and broadcasts too much fake news will continue – and continue to resonate – as long as their performance in covering a new Gallup survey of the most admired men and women in America keeps typifying their output.

Gallup has asked Americans who they look up to most since the 1940s (for male figures) and since the 1950s (for female figures). As I see it, the 2017 poll’s results were a fascinating mix. They showed that former President Barack Obama and last year’s Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton continued their long strings at the top of their heaps. President Trump came in second on the men’s list – as he has since 2015.

In my view, Gallup played it right in its report on the survey, noting the winners in its lead paragraph and then immediately observing that the Obama and Clinton margins were “much narrower…than in the past.” The firm didn’t highlight that both Democrats’ edge fell at a faster rate than President Trump, but at least its tables made that trend clear.

Few major news organizations followed suit.

USAToday‘s headline, for example, blared, “Barack Obama beats Donald Trump for most admired man, Hillary Clinton tops list again in Gallup poll.” Reporter Ashley May never mentioned their diminishing leads.

CNN.com did better. Its header announced “Gallup: Obama, Hillary Clinton remain most admired” and noted the Obama dip in the second paragraph. But the Clinton fall-off wasn’t reported until the fifth (of ten) paragraphs.

The ABC News headline – “President Trump is America’s second-most admired man, poll finds” – at least accurately reflected the disparaging tone of the full article. “Digital reporter” Karma Allen led off by observing that “President Donald Trump snagged a major legislative victory with the signing of his landmark tax reform bill last week, but he’s still living in his predecessor’s shadow when it comes to public admiration, according to a new poll.”

He continued with the factoid that the results marked “one of the very few times in recent history that an incumbent president hasn’t taken the top spot.” (It’s actually 13 out of 71 times.) And he simply ignored the declining Obama and Clinton numbers.

Bloomberg,com chose as its headline a reasonable “Obama Tops Trump as Most Admired, Gallup Poll of Americans Finds,” but although specifying that the margin was “close,” never mentioned the weakening Obama or Clinton ratings, either. The same held for the article run in Politico.com. The New York Times headline was a similarly accurate “Clinton and Obama Top U.S. Poll on Most Admired People” but the article neglected to include the trend over time as well.

The two worst performances? The Washington Post‘s headline was a gratuitously snarky “Obama beats Trump where it will sting: He’s the most admired man in America.” A graphic made clear the closing Trump-Obama gap, but this development never made it into the article itself. However reporter Philip Bump did consider it important to write that the overall results “coming at this moment, will probably be somewhat galling to Trump.”

Whoever wrote the headlines for the coverage by Long Island’s Newsday seemed like he or she was auditioning for a job at the higher profile Post. “Gallup ‘most admired’ poll is an ‘Obamanation’ for Trump,” was the first description of the survey the paper’s readers saw. The second description, in a subhead? “He just can’t win the popular vote.” The article itself, by William Goldschlag, simply continued in this vein.

But I’d be just as remiss as much of the Mainstream Media by failing to mention journalists who recognized the deteriorating relative Obama and Clinton ratings. So Rachel Koning Beals of Marketwatch.com and Phil Helsel of NBC News, please take richly deserved bows. Let’s all hope your news judgment spreads to many more of your colleagues in the New Year!

Im-Politic: More Fake News on Trump and Muslims

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Barack Obama, CAIR, Council on American-Islamic Relations, George W. Bush, Hamas, Holy Land Foundation, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Muslims, Politico, Sally H. Jacobs, terrorism, travel ban, Trump

American’s mistrust of the Mainstream Media is so great that even the Mainstream Media is getting worried. If these reporters and editors keep turning out slanted stories like Politico‘s article yesterday reporting a growing national shortage of Muslim clerics, their trust deficit can only deepen.

The main message that author Sally H. Jacobs and the Politico staff wanted to send is stated clearly in the headline and subhead: “America is Running Out of Muslim Clerics. That’s Dangerous: How Trump’s travel ban worsened a shortage of qualified preachers – and why that’s dangerous.”

And the piece does contain several anecdotes about imams from Muslim countries invited to serve mosques in the United States being turned away during the last year by U.S. immigration authorities. Moreover, it leads off with a story about one of those congregations being unable to generate enough volunteer imams from its own ranks, ostensibly because of studies showing that violence against American Muslims has been rising since the 2016 election that put Mr. Trump in the White House.

But there are two enormous, related problems with these points – one which Jacobs and her editors don’t appear to be aware of but should have investigated further, and one they clearly are aware of (which of course is a clear indication of bias).

The problem that’s known to the Politico team is that the only big decrease in the numbers of imams permitted to enter the United States that emerges from the best data available took place under former President Obama. How do I know that this is known to Jacobs and the Politico staff? Because it’s mentioned in the article:

“In an effort to stem fraudulent applications for such visas, the number of R1s [a U.S. visa issued for temporary religious workers] issued during the Obama era declined significantly from 10,061 in 2008 to 2,771 in 2009. In the following years, though, the number rose steadily and in 2016 the government issued a total of 4,764 R1s.

“It is unclear whether or by how much those numbers have dropped during the Trump administration, as statistics for fiscal year 2017 will not be available until next year, says a U.S. State Department spokesman.”

And something else crucial should be apparent from these sentences: The reason that the Obama administration cracked down – even as the Muslim population of the United States kept rising, thereby boosting the demand for clerics – is because it perceived a phony imam problem that needed to be nipped in the bud. This problem, moreover, surely grew under the presidency of George W. Bush – who so many Never Trump-ers across the political spectrum are now portraying as a paragon of tolerance.

If only these vital points hadn’t been buried in Jacobs’ piece!

The problem that Jacobs and the Politico staff may not be aware of (but arguably should have been) is that the main hate crimes figures cited in the piece come from a source that, to put it mildly, has reputational and objectivity problems: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Just one such problem: In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. government (under George W. Bush) “has produced ample evidence” to establish CAIR’s association with groups like the Holy Land Foundation (an Muslim charity convicted in the United States of funding Islamic militants) and Hamas (listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization since 1997).

There’s no denying that an actual or impending shortage of American Muslim clerics is an important and interesting development in its own right. And it raises the at least as important and interesting question of why Jacobs and Politico were so determined to turn a real news story into a fake news attack on President Trump?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: More Childish Attacks on Trump

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alliances, allies, Council on Foreign Relations, foreign policy establishment, George H.W. Bush, Greece, IMF, International Monetary Fund, international organizations, internationalism, Iran deal, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, journalists, Mainstream Media, media, military bases, NAFTA, New Zealand, North American Free Trade Agreement, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paris climate accord, Philippines, Richard N. Haass, Ronald Reagan, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, UN, UNESCO, United Nations, Withdrawal Doctrine, World Bank, World Trade Organization, WTO

I’m getting to think that in an important way it’s good that establishment journalists and foreign policy think tank hacks still dominate America’s debate on world affairs. It means that for the foreseeable future, we’ll never run out of evidence of how hidebound, juvenile, and astonishingly ignorant these worshipers of the status quo tend to be. Just consider the latest fad in their ranks: the narrative that the only theme conferring any coherence on President Trump’s foreign policy is his impulse to pull the United States out of alliances and international organizations, or at least rewrite them substantially.

This meme was apparently brewed up at the heart of the country’s foreign policy establishment – the Council on Foreign Relations. Its president, former aide to Republican presidents Richard N. Haass, tweeted on October 12, “Trump foreign policy has found its theme: The Withdrawal Doctrine. US has left/threatening to leave TPP, Paris accord, Unesco, NAFTA, JCPOA.” [He’s referring here to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that aimed to link the U.S. economy more tightly to East Asian and Western Hemisphere countries bordering the world’s largest ocean; the global deal to slow down climate change; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the official name of the agreement seeking to deny Iran nuclear weapons.]

In a classic instance of group-think, this one little 140-character sentence was all it took to spur the claim’s propagation by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Marketwatch.com, Vice.com, The Los Angeles Times, and Britain’s Financial Times (which publishes a widely read U.S. edition).  For good measure, the idea showed up in The New Republic, too – albeit without mentioning Haass.

You’d have to read far into (only some of) these reports to see any mention that American presidents taking similar decisions is anything but unprecedented. Indeed, none of them reminded readers of one of the most striking examples of alliance disruption from the White House: former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw American defense guarantees to New Zealand because of a nuclear weapons policy dispute. Moreover, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush engaged in long, testy negotiations with long-time allies the Philippines and Greece on renewing basing agreements that involved major U.S. cash payments.

Just as important, you could spend hours on Google without finding any sense in these reports that President Trump has decided to remain in America’s major security alliances in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (along with a series of multilateral regional development banks).

More important, you’d also fail to find on Google to find any indication that any of the arrangements opposed by Mr. Trump might have less than a roaring success. The apparent feeling in establishment ranks is that it’s not legitimate for American leaders to decide that some international arrangements serve U.S. interests well, some need to be recast, and some are such failures or are so unpromising that they need to be ditched or avoided in the first place.

And the reason that such discrimination is so doggedly opposed is that, the internationalist world affairs strategy pursued for decades by Presidents and Congresses across the political spectrum (until, possibly, now) is far from a pragmatic formula for dealing with a highly variegated, dynamic world. Instead, it’s the kind of rigid dogma that’s most often (and correctly) associated with know-it-all adolescents and equally callow academics. What else but an utterly utopian ideology could move a writer from a venerable pillar of opinion journalism (the aforementioned Atlantic) to traffick in such otherworldly drivel as

“A foreign-policy doctrine of withdrawal also casts profound doubt on America’s commitment to the intricate international system that the United States helped create and nurture after World War II so that countries could collaborate on issues that transcend any one nation.”

Without putting too fine a point on it, does that sound like the planet you live on?

I have no idea whether whatever changes President Trump is mulling in foreign policy will prove effective or disastrous, or turn out to be much ado about very little. I do feel confident in believing that the mere fact of rethinking some foreign policy fundamentals makes his approach infinitely more promising than one that views international alliances and other arrangements in all-or-nothing terms; that evidently can’t distinguish the means chosen to advance U.S. objectives from the objectives themselves; and that seems oblivious to the reality that the international sphere lacks the characteristic that makes prioritizing institution’s creation and maintenance not only possible in the domestic sphere, but indispensable – a strong consensus on defining acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

One of the most widely (and deservedly) quoted adages about international relations is the observation, attributed to a 19^th century British foreign minister, that his nation had “no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Until America’s foreign policy establishment and its media mouthpieces recognize that this advice applies to international institutions, too, and start understanding the implications, they’ll keep losing influence among their compatriots. And rightly so.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Media Again Foster NAFTA Myths and Think Tank Corruption

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Canada, donors, Google, Im-Politic, Japan, Korea, Mainstream Media, media, Mexico, NAFTA, Navistar, New America, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Reuters, tariffs, think tanks, Trade, trucks, Trump, Washington Post, Woodrow Wilson Center

Although Donald Trump’s presidency might still turn out to be a watershed for U.S. trade policy, it already seems clear that trade policy coverage from the Mainstream Media will remain uniformly terrible, and unmistakably slanted toward the conventional approach that candidate Trump promised to disrupt. As recent articles from Reuters and the Washington Post remind, the bias takes both subtle and non-subtle forms.

Both pieces deal with the talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which have resumed in Washington, D.C. this week. Despite its failings, Reuters correspondent Sharay Angulo’s article on the talks’ possible impact on multinational truck manufacturers contained some important information. For instance, she reported that 98 percent of the trucks exported from Mexico are sent to the United States and Canada – which oddly precedes a claim that most of these truck companies “have a similar strategy of building in Mexico to export to countries other than the United States.”

We also learn from her that more than half the “original parts” of U.S. firm Navistar’s Mexico-made trucks come from the United States and Canada (although this information comes from Navistar itself, and like other company-specific information re NAFTA, offshoring, and trade in general, so far can’t be independently verified). In addition, the article (again citing Navistar statistics) states that the firm exports fewer than half its Mexico-made vehicles to the United States – which seems to differentiate it sharply from its competitors.

Where the report veers sharply from the rational is in its unquestioning acceptance of the claim that “Higher tariffs on imports or reduced trade flows would raise the cost of production and of exporting to the United States. That would make trucks more expensive for all Navistar’s customers….”

What’s somehow missed by the author (and all the “experts” consulted by Reuters who allegedly agreed with this contention) is that this result would unfold only if Mexico retaliated against any Trump administration tariffs on its exports to the United States with new levies of its own that would hit manufacturers like Navistar. Given Mexico’s heavy dependence on parts imports to support its export-oriented truck and other industrial production, why on earth would its government take this step? Such retaliation would “raise [its] costs of production and of exporting to the United States” yet higher. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Also missed by Angulo – how higher Mexico production costs could well achieve Mr. Trump’s revamp objectives by shifting truck manufacturing back to the United States. She’s correct in suggesting that low tariffs on Mexico exports to the United States may not suffice. But a logical (and seemingly obvious) implication is simply that higher tariffs will be needed.

The less subtle form of bias came in an October 6 Washington Post article previewing the latest NAFTA talks, and although it’s a more common variety, it was especially flagrant. One big problem is the authors’ (and their editors’) decision, with a single exception, to quote only critics of the Trump administration’s efforts.

Thus, readers are presented with the perspective of a Canadian trade lawyer, a former Mexican trade negotiator who now works for a D.C.-based consulting firm with many offshoring companies as clients, a Mexican business lobbyist who officially advises his country’s NAFTA negotiators, a former Canadian official, a former Obama administration economic aide, and four specialists from two Washington, D.C.-based think tanks.

A second big, and related problem – at a time when the intellectual integrity of such think tanks has come under a positively stygian cloud due to the uproar over New America’s firing of several researchers who ran afoul of big donor Google, the Post piece makes absolutely no mention that both of these organizations depend heavily on contributions from both companies and foreign government organizations with vital stakes in maintaining the NAFTA status quo.

For example, the latest info from the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center (itself a recipient of U.S. taxpayer funding), base for one of the specialists showcased in the piece, reveal that the organization receives contributions from no less than six big Mexican companies, plus Wal-Mart (a big importing business) and the main trade association of the American pharmaceutical industry – which manufactures in Mexico for export to the United States.

The Canada Institute, where the other quoted Wilson Center specialist is based, lists the Canadian government as a donor.

As for the other think tank relied on by the Post for (supposedly objective) expertise, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), among its U.S. and foreign multinational funders that produce in Mexico for export to the United States are Toyota, GE, Caterpillar, IBM, Ford, GM, Samsung, John Deere, Procter & Gamble, and Mitsubishi.

PIIE also takes contributions from three foreign government entities that help their countries’ companies engage in export-oriented operations in Mexico: the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, the Korea Development Institute, and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

In addition, in recent years, the Peterson Institute has also cashed big checks from Mexican building materials giant Cemex, and from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the organizational spearhead of America’s corporate offshoring lobby.

As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the point here is neither that these think tanks’ findings and opinions lack merit, or they or their donors have no right to weigh in on important trade and other policy debates. It’s that these ostensible research groups should make clear who’s paying their rent – and that if they continue with what I’ve called deceitful idea laundering on behalf of their sponsors, the press should call them out.

The Mainstream Media, however, keeps failing to fulfill this responsibility – which can only deepen already profound suspicions that it’s abandoning its watchdog role and turning into an establishment lapdog instead.

Im-Politic: Fake Hate Group Facts from the Washington Post

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Abha Bhattarai, ACT for America, Center for Immigration Studies, CIS, hate groups, Im-Politic, Islamic terrorism, Mainstream Media, Mark Krikorian, Muslims, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, terrorism, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post

What on earth gives with journalists at the Washington Post? Both editors and reporters alike? I ask this because of the outrageous headline in today’s edition, accompanying an equally outrageous article, sliming an organization that’s concerned about the spread of Muslim extremism and terrorism into the United States as a “hate group.”

Not that there’s anything new about mainstream news media and their staffs being dismissive about these dangers. And not that there’s anything new about these newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks, and websites using as their guide to hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – even though this organization’s definition of an anti-Muslim extremist can be wildly offbase.

What’s new, and upsetting, about this incident is that the Post itself recently published an article – by the head of the restrictivist immigration organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – that its appearance alone (let alone the evidence it marshaled) revealed that the paper itself took most seriously the case that SPLC hate group ratings are simply biased garbage.

As noted by its Executive Director Mark Krikorian in a Post article just last March, SPLC has labeled CIS a hate group since February.  But as Krikorian also pointed out:

“CIS has testified before Congress more than 100 times over the past 20 years. We’ve also testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and our work has been cited by the Supreme Court and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. We’ve done contract work for the Census Bureau and the Justice Department. Our director of research was selected by the National Academies of Sciences as an outside reviewer for last year’s magisterial study of the fiscal and economic impacts of immigration. Our authors include scholars at Harvard,Cornell University, Colorado State University, the University of Maryland and elsewhere. We are one of the most frequently cited sources on immigration in the media (including in The Post).”

And he sensibly concluded:

“Equating a group that has such a track record of engagement in the public policy debate with, for instance, the Holy Nation of Odin has nothing to do with warning the public of ‘hate.’ The SPLC’s true purpose can only be to deprive the American people of points of view they need to hear to make informed and intelligent collective decisions.”

Yet this morning, just six months later, a Post headline declared that “Marriott says it will not cancel conference hosted by anti-Muslim hate group.” In other words, this development was portrayed as a fact. But in the third paragraph, reporter Abha Bhattarai (and clearly her editors) show that the paramount basis for this description was that same Southern Policy Law Center.

Now the group so labeled – ACT for America – is completely separate from Krikorian’s CIS. Here’s how it describes it purpose:

“ACT for America educates citizens and elected officials to impact public policy and protect America from terrorism. As a result, ACT’s grassroots network has driven the education process toward the successful passage of 84 bills in 32 states. ACT for America is continuing to expand its nationwide volunteer network that trains citizens to recognize and help prevent criminal activity and terrorism in the United States while preserving civil liberties protected by the United States Constitution.”

Bhattarai attempted to buttress the SPLC’s finding by reporting that ACT was

“behind anti-Muslim demonstrations across the country this summer that attracted white supremacist groups.

“‘I don’t believe in having Muslims in the United States,’ Francisco Rivera, of the white supremacist group Vanguard America, said at one of the demonstrations.

“‘Their culture is incompatible with ours.’”

Sounds like guilt by association to me. Moreover, there are reasons to view Bhattarai’s verbal brush as excessively broad in a more fundamental sense. Here’s how another big national news organization, The Los Angeles Times, depicted these activities. ACT, it stated, “has supported President Trump’s restrictions on refugees and travel from Muslim-majority countries. It organized protests throughout the country this summer against sharia law, which the group says is incompatible with Western culture.”

That appears to be much more precise — and less damning — phrasing. And I’m inclined to trust in it because the Times handled the headline for its version of this story properly, too:

“Marriott won’t cancel convention of what critics call anti-Muslim hate group.”

So the Times, unlike the Post, seems to understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. But the Post‘s failure in this regard is even less excusable because it had recently run material casting major doubt on the SPLC’s bona fides. In other words, it seems that its own reporters and editors don’t read a lot of what the Post produces. Maybe the rest of us should take this as a hint?

Im-Politic: Why Washington’s Latest Think Tank Scandal Should Matter – but May Not

Tags

corporations, corruption, democracy, Google, idea laundering, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, New America Foundation, Silicon Valley, special interests, think tanks

Slowly, and not so surely, the American media is waking up to the pervasiveness of corporate corruption of the nation’s think tank complex. I say “slowly” because revelations of the way these special interests – which include foreign governments – have used these supposedly quasi-academic institutions to promote and defend their own selfish agendas has tended to drip out in individual exposes usually separated by years (literally). And I say “not so surely” because these reports rarely connect any of the important dots. Worse, it’s ever clearer that the Mainstream Media itself is a big part of the problem.

The latest example: the uproar set off by revelations that the New America Foundation (NAF) recently fired a team of analysts because it started goring the ox of one of the organization’s main funders, Google.

It’s been gratifying to see that nearly everyone who has commented on this incident considers NAF and Google to be in the wrong, and no one whose work I’ve seen has given the slightest credence to the organization’s insistence that the team was canned because he wasn’t sufficiently collegial in his work habits.

Much less gratifying has been the almost equally widespread tendency to interpret the incident as a sign that Google itself has become way too powerful on America’s policy and intellectual scenes, and in underhanded ways. Or that Silicon Valley itself is now exerting way too much of this power just as sneakily, and without adequate checks.

That’s all true, and important. What’s been almost completely missed, however, is that Google’s muscle-flexing is anything but limited to Google or to the tech sector or to the New America Foundation. It is now Standard Operating Procedure in the think tank world, which has become what I’ve called an idea-laundering racket. That is, donors use the tanks they support to dress up various self-serving ideas in respectable-looking scholarly raiment that can be sold to policy-makers as the products of disinterested truth-seeking.

Not that special interests lack the right to bring their concerns to official-dom. But they should be correspondingly obligated to display some transparency – and where they’re determined to be secretive, or to capitalize on the general public’s understandable unwillingness to investigate the information they do need to disclose, the press needs to step in. Sadly, it’s almost unheard of for journalists to link think tank staff quoted in news articles as scholarly experts to the donors that pay them and the agendas they’re pushing.

Indeed, as I’ve documented, there’s a strong tendency on the part even of news organizations that have reported on think tanks’ corporate and other special interest connections to ignore their own findings and permit idea laundering as usual.

One big reason that’s become clearer to me than ever as I’ve been looking into the NAF scandal is the remarkable extent that journalists have formally been part of its operations and structure. The informal connections between journalists and think tankers have always been important, however neglected. Think tank staff and establishment journalists tend to come from the same kinds of fairly affluent backgrounds, have attended the same kinds of schools, graduate with the same kinds of ideas, and – since so many are clustered in Washington, D.C. – live in the same kinds of neighborhoods, send their kids to the same schools, and generally move in the same social circles.

Moreover, it’s been routine for media figures to take sabbaticals at think tanks to write books or just get some relief from the day-to-day grind and study subjects in depth. How realistic is it to expect any of them to turn around and then bite the hand that literally fed them?

The inevitable result is downright scary if you believe (as you should) that a robustly functioning democracy depends in large measure on individuals and institutions playing distinct roles that enable them to function as balancers and watchdogs or simply reinforcers of needed degrees of political and social pluralism. When they interact too closely and especially too systematically, temptations to scratch each other’s backs inevitably mushroom.

But perhaps more subtly, and therefore more importantly, these actors (especially the individuals) just as inevitably begin to know and understand each other too well, to like and admire each other too much, to recognize each other’s wants and needs too willingly, to agree with their legitimacy too thoroughly, to avoid any potential awkwardness or unpleasantness, and to cut them considerable slack when any kinds of trouble arise. And as these patterns emerge and consolidate, the lines separating these actors blur, their independent outlooks start dissolving, and they begin to merge into a genuine establishment (or “swamp,” if you will) with a common mindset, a consequent tendency toward group-think, and an increasing dedication to promoting and protecting its position – which tends to be pretty privileged.

In this vein, NAF’s journalistic connections are truly eye-opening. Its first board chairman was The Atlantic‘s James Fallows. An early president was Steve Coll, formerly with the Washington Post and The New Yorker. One of its board chairs today is National Review Executive Editor Reihan Salam, and he’s joined on this body by Fallows (still with The Atlantic), Steven Rattner (a New York Times columnist and financier), David Brooks (another New York Times columnist), and Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria.

NAF also has developed a network of “media partners” that regularly publish its material via syndication deals. These news organizations include The Atlantic, Quartz.com (which is owned by The Atlantic‘s parent company), Slate, National Review (Salam’s publication), and TIME.  

The organization’s governmental connections are extensive as well. Like more and more think tanks, NAF also gets funding from the U.S. and foreign governments and international organizations. These official donors include the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development, the U.S. government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace, the European Union, the European Commission, Norway’s foreign ministry, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Germany’s Embassy to the United States. (See NAF’s latest Annual Report for documentation of current Board members and donors.)

Again, it’s been encouraging to see NAF take its lumps. But real progress toward breaking up the Washington swamp won’t be made until journalists and policymakers start treating the think tanks with the skepticism they deserve, and if not ignoring the information they generate, at least considering the source much more exactingly before internalizing and further propagating it.

And all RealityChek readers will easily be able to tell whether the NAF scandal brings genuine change. Check your favorite news sources to see whether NAF staff keep appearing as founts of scholarly wisdom – and when they are used, if the reporters or anchors in question tell you whose signing their paychecks, and what stakes these donors have in the issue in question. And look for the same treatment for all the other major think tanks. Even better? Start giving them heck in their comment sections and on social media when they don’t.

Im-Politic: Dumping on Trump by Trashing History

Tags

arts, culture, Francisco Franco, Im-Politic, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Center, Mainstream Media, Pablo Casals, Philip Kennecott, Spain, Trump, Washington Post

Since Philip Kennicott has won a Pulitzer Prize, and has been writing on architecture and music and culture for the Washington Post since 1999, I’m sure he knows a lot about these subjects. What he doesn’t seem to know anything about is American diplomatic history, but neither he nor his editors let that failing prevent him from writing about the intersection of the arts, politics, and foreign policy as long as the objective was dumping on President Trump.

These biases could not have been clearer in Kennicott’s article yesterday dealing with the President’s recent decision to pass up attending this year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for fear of distracting from the upcoming December awards to “five artists whose talent and ingenuity have enriched and shaped cultural life in America.” As the author noted, Mr. Trump is slated to become only the third chief executive in the ceremony’s 39-year history to sit the event out.

Kennicott rightly observes that this Kennedy Center controversy – which also featured three of the five honorees declaring their refusal to attend a traditional pre-ceremony White House reception – demonstrates that ‘”the rift between the administration and the larger arts world is now total” in large part because major arts figures believe that the President has “embodied a leadership style antithetical to values that have become sacred within most contemporary arts communities, including tolerance, service and egalitarianism.”

The author also makes clear his own view that Mr. Trump is largely to blame for this rupture because he won the White House “based on divisive and racist rhetoric” and has largely continued down this dangerous road – as so many Americans believe.

Although Kennicott can be faulted for overlooking the big racism and sexism and political tolerance problems that the American entertainment community itself has failed to deal with – at least judging by critics in its own ranks – he’s also made some compelling points about the President’s leadership failings so far. In particular, as revealed just this month by his various remarks since the Charlottesville demonstrations and violence (and as I’ve also suggested), he has fallen short when it comes to “sustaining social bonds” and “dramatizing the presidency as service to the nation, not a perk of electoral victory.”

But Kennicott is deeply wrong in assuming that the arts community’s views on these subjects always or even often deserve to be taken seriously, and totally off base in viewing an episode from the days of John F. Kennedy’s presidency as an example of how well artists judge matters of public life.

The author began his article with a description of an evening in November, 1961, when the President and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hosted a White House performance by renowned Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. In Kennicott’s words:

“For years, Casals had boycotted performing in the United States in protest of the nation’s support for the brutal right-wing Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, but he was heartened by Kennedy’s election campaign and finally accepted an invitation to the White House.” For Kennicott, his appearance before the First Couple and “a glittering crowd of political and cultural leaders” would “become a defining moment in the administration’s embrace of both the arts and the image of elegant cosmopolitanism.”

Certainly the Camelot image fostered so successfully by the Kennedys and their cheerleaders proves that Kennicott is right about the visual message sent by that star-studded evening – about a political world and a cultural world jointly prodding the nation and humanity overall toward greater enlightenment. But Casals’ judgment about Kennedy’s Spain intentions and policy turned out to be as pathetically wrongheaded as Kennicott’s myopic Kennedy worship.

It would have been great had Kennicott mentioned at least in passing Kennedy’s gaping flaws, which ranged from out-of-control womanizing that might have presented national security risks to anti-communist hawkishness that verged on the catastrophically reckless (Google “Missile Crisis, Cuban”). But he could counter that this dimension of the Kennedy record is well known. For his article to stand as journalism, however, or even opinion journalism, Kennicott needed to tell readers at least something about the former President’s dealings with the Spanish fascist leader. Because it would have revealed that Kennedy was a Franco-phile before his truncated term in office, and as President continued the exactly same U.S. policies that Casals considered so unacceptable.

As a Congressman in the 1950s, he supported military aid to Franco. As President, he maintained tight security ties and the only concerns he expressed about the country’s internal affairs focused on the increasing the odds of a smooth transition of power once the then-septuagenarian caudillo passed from the scene. During his years in office, his top foreign policy aides often actually emphasized in meetings with Franco’s representatives how pleased the Kennedy administration was that relations had im. (See here and here for examples.) Indeed, in a May 3, 1963 meeting with the Spanish ambassador, Kennedy himself asked the envoy “to convey his best wishes to” the dictator and emphasized “the interest of the United States in maintaining and promoting close, friendly and cooperative relations with Spain.”

This history is so easy to look up that it’s hard to escape three conclusions. First, like most of the Mainstream Media, Kennicott loathes President Trump fundamentally for an intertwined combination of stylistic and anti-populist prejudices. Second, he reveres Kennedy because, like most of the bipartisan national political and cultural establishment for decades, he’s mistaken glamour and sophistication for decency and accomplishment. And third, as soon as someone clued him in on the Casals performance, he jumped to blurt out his preconceived conclusions – without caring whether they were remotely accurate or not.