Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare gets a taste of the new Administration in his teeth:
Here’s what [White House spokesman Sean Spicer] said:
As you know, the President was at the Central Intelligence Agency today, and was greeted by a raucous overflowing crowd of some 400-plus CIA employees. There were over a thousand requests to attend, prompting the President to note that he would have to come back to greet the rest. The employees were ecstatic to see the Commander-in-Chief, and he delivered them a powerful and important message. He told them he has their back and they were grateful for that. They gave him a five-minute standing ovation at the end in a display of their patriotism and their enthusiasm for his presidency (emphasis added).
Let’s leave aside certain factual, uh, issues in Spicer’s claims—like the bald-faced lie that there was a five-minute standing ovation at the end of Trump’s speech. (As you can see from the video, the agency’s brass is clapping politely, and relatively briefly, and with butts firmly planted in chairs). I want to focus here on the bizarre decision, more characteristic of totalitarian dictators with cults of personality than of the White House press office, to describe the emotional state of government workers on meeting their fearless leader. I simply cannot remember a time when the White House declared that a group of civil servants were “ecstatic” to be graced by the presence of the president, were “grateful” for what he said, much less that they went through the ceremony of hosting him in a display of “enthusiasm for his presidency.”
The video link is here, which appears to be a Sean Spicer announcement – I didn’t actually see a video of the CIA meeting, which I may have simply missed in the longer report.
But here’s the thing: There are two sources of information here: Mr. Wittes, who reportedly has many years of experience as a lawyer in this area, working with NSA, CIA, etc.; and the Trump Administration.
Which signal has more power behind it? The White House is a bonfire the size of a city, while Lawfare is a blog with a very limited, specialized readership – a little match in the darkness. For those who follow politics, who’ve seen the factual analyses of Trump’s statements, who are aware of how Trump’s team also indulges in misstatements of fact, and the Trumpian blame of the intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, for the Iraq War, well, it’s easy enough to put Benjamin’s report together with everything else and shake our heads in dismay.
But, again, that’s a relatively small group. Most of us folks don’t have the time, the patience, the opportunity to seek out information such as Benjamin’s. Instead, if the Trump Administration version shows up on the news, hey, it becomes fact. It becomes fact for the couple who just finished a ten hour day of work and just wants to go bowling and drink their beer.
The Trump Administration is trying to build a story of success, partly to feed the ego of the President, partly to begin the re-election campaign (yep, it’s already started, as un-American as it can be) four years hence. And this is why the Trump Administration, as we see in that video, is absolutely furious with a free press that refuses to roll over and echo their words. The New York Times, WaPo, CNN are just some of the Big Media sources which have given up on their mistaken stance of utter opinionless neutrality and begun labeling lies told by politicians as, well, lies. Politicians of the right OR left persuasion. (For those who think Obama would have fared poorly under such treatment, I have little hard data, but I really rather doubt it.)
Given the sheer amount of information out there, I believe merely reporting on the utterances of politicians – or anyone else – has been a fool’s errand. Skeptics have been bemoaning the credence given by the press to anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists for years as claims of scientific controversy are, in their eyes, not true. For them, the opposition has abandoned science for ideological and political power reasons. And these can be hard topics to understand and realize there’s not much true controversy left, if any.
But when it comes to political lies it’s not so hard. Yes, Trump was for the Iraq War. It’s on tape – he was not prescient. Yes, all those jobs Trump claims to have saved, he had nothing to do with. You might argue that the Carrier claim works, dubious as it is; but the rest reflect the work of months or years on the part of the companies responsible, and Trump has had zero effect.
So, given our information-rich environment, it’s absolutely necessary for news outlets to label lies as lies – and be willing to admit fault when they screw that up. Without it, our over-worked citizens have little chance of really perceiving the truth of what’s happening.
And in a democracy where they vote on who’ll represent them, that’s a critical problem.
