Saturday, August 17, 2019

Russigate: Times Admits Collusions Time's Up, Time to Push Racism

Via The Wombat's In The Mailbox: 08.16.19, Legal Insurrection tells the tale, Leaked Audio – NY Times Shifts Attacks On Trump From Collusion To Racism,
In an astounding audio transcript leaked to Slate, NY Times executive editor Dean Baquet reveals what we all knew: The NY Times is out to get Trump. It’s deliberate, it’s planned, and it’s shifting after Russia collusion failed to portraying Trump as racist.
. . .
That the Times is hyper-sensitive to reader complaints explains why the Times became part of #TheResistance in pinning its hopes on Robert Mueller. But when Russia collusion fell apart after the Mueller Report was released, the Times has decided to focus on Trump being racist, Slate writes:
The closest Baquet came to identifying a moment when the paper had misjudged current events was when he described it as being “a little tiny bit flat-footed” after the Mueller investigation ended. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,’” Baquet said. “And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago.”
By this account, the question of how to address presidential racism was a newly emerged one, something the paper would need to pivot into. “How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?” he said. “How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time?”
Here’s the key passage from the transcript (emphasis added):
Dean Baquet: If we’re really going to be a transparent newsroom that debates these issues among ourselves and not on Twitter, I figured I should talk to the whole newsroom, and hear from the whole newsroom. We had a couple of significant missteps, and I know you’re concerned about them, and I am, too. But there’s something larger at play here. This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [inaudible] … went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that. As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.
The Times has a vision of coverage moving forward, and it’s all about portraying Trump as racist. From the transcript (emphasis added):
Baquet: OK. I mean, let me go back a little bit for one second to just repeat what I said in my in my short preamble about coverage. Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?
I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.
This is a smoking gun. It shows the most powerful news organization in the country congratulating itself for setting the anti-Trump narrative on Russia collusion, and seamlessly transitioning to setting a narrative of Trump as racist after collusion flopped.
Allahpundit at Hot Air falls in line, NYT Editor Sets New Narrative In Staff Meeting: The Trump Story Is Shifting From Russia To Race
What’s revealing about that is how explicit Baquet is in framing the recent coverage of Trump and white nationalism as part of a grand anti-Trump narrative comparable to Russiagate, a new “chapter” in how Trump’s presidency will be organized by historians. He could have presented the paper’s coverage lately as a matter of simply following where the news leads. There was a terrorist attack by a racist in El Paso; Trump has in fact been sparring with a series of minority pols, the Squad foremost among them; therefore the paper needed to devote resources to both stories and whether they converge. Instead Baquet is explicitly focused on what the paper’s anti-Trump readership wants to see as a means to the end of ousting him.
So it's all really just fake news.

At NR, Andy McCarthy tells how Hillary Ruins the Plan while pushing his new book A Ball of Collusion
There really was a collusion plot. It really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion you’ve been told about for nearly three years. It was not “Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia.”

Here is the real collusion scheme: In 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A imploded — which all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen . . . which is why you could bet the ranch that it would.

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations of her felonious and politically disqualifying actions.

Plan B was the insurance policy: an investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he was elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton-campaign-generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-reelectable under the guise of building an impeachment case. . . .
At Town Hall, Matt Vespa has new information on where to find Hillary's missing 30,000 email; just ask Google. Hillary’s IT Guy Created An Encrypted Gmail Account And Sent All Of Clinton's Emails There. I don't know what's worse, having to ask China to give us a peek or Google. Both of them are anti-American actors, but at least the Chinese are more or less open about it.

Politico plumps for House Intel Committee could bolster Dem case for impeaching Trump and from the WaFreeBee, MSNBC Host, Analysts Speculate About Removing Trump From Office using the 25th amendment. What the hell have they been smoking?

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