Recently, the Washington Post reported that on average 91 percent of the nightly network news about the Trump administration is negative, with only 6 percent of coverage being positive.
In their nightly newscasts over the summer, the MRC found, the big three networks covered the Russia investigation with 415 minutes (94 percent negative); the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare with 176 minutes (97 percent negative); the North Korean nuclear saber-rattling with 136 minutes (86 percent negative); and Trump’s reaction to the violence in Charlottesville with 97 minutes (97 percent negative). “All Presidents deserve critical news coverage from time to time, but the relentlessly hostile coverage Trump has seen thus far is as much a reflection of the media’s ideological bias as anything else,” conclude Noyes and Ciandella.
Nearly half of voters, 46 percent, believe the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll
Just 37 percent of voters think the media doesn’t fabricate stories, the poll shows, while the remaining 17 percent are undecided.
More than three-quarters of Republican voters, 76 percent, think the news media invent stories about Trump and his administration, compared with only 11 percent who don’t think so. Among Democrats, one-in-five think the media make up stories, but a 65 percent majority think they do not. Forty-four percent of independent voters think the media make up stories about Trump, and 31 percent think they do not.
Among the voters who strongly approve of Trump’s job performance in the poll, 85 percent believe the media fabricate stories about the president and his administration.
So theoretically, even if the mainstream networks did report more positive stories about Trump, the vast majority of the GOP are already pre-disposed not to believe them. That means the media outlets literally have no actual incentive to change their current coverage because even if they did, it would make no discernible difference.
However if they did report honestly more often on the issues that Trump tends to trumpet as his “great successes,” the results still wouldn’t be as positive as the Trumpsters would like.
And the reason for that is that the media’s job is to report what’s actually happening, not just what one party who happens to be in power might like to be reported—unlike Breitbart, Newsmax, and Fox News.
For example, that same WaPo report about the media coverage being 91 percent negative about Trump also says this:
Perhaps it’s as much a reflection of reality as anything else. Take Obamacare: Here, the president promised to do away with his predecessor’s signature domestic program and has failed to deliver. Meanwhile, his administration has proceeded to undercut the existing system. Just what would positive coverage look like? And on the mid-August Charlottesville rallying with neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan groups: One day, Trump was citing problems with “both sides”; then, in prepared remarks, he called out neo-Nazis; then he returned to his both-sides line of analysis. How to engineer a positive spin on that progression?
In order to make these items look “positive,” you’d literally have to lie to the public. The fact is that on Obamacare, the result of repealing the individual mandate is not a “good story.”
Early signs show health insurance companies are trying to exponentially raise prices for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace — and for people who don’t qualify for federal assistance, there’s no relief in sight.
Insurers in Maryland and Virginia are asking for double-digit premium increases to 2019 monthly plans. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield CEO Chet Burrell said that Maryland’s exchange is in the “advanced stages of a death spiral.”
Health experts warned this would happen. In fact, insurers who set the premium rates cautioned that costs would rise if lawmakers continued to undermine the Obamacare exchanges and not shore up the market. A letter issued to lawmakers in November from major health industry players said “[e]liminating the individual mandate by itself likely will result in a significant increase in premiums, which would in turn substantially increase the number of uninsured Americans.”
Trump has argued that his greatest accomplishment to date has been the passage of his tax cut bill, and how this would bring the economy “roaring back” and put more money in the pockets of the average American. Well, that’s not really working out.
Right after Republicans in Congress passed their tax bill, lowering tax rates on corporations, companies delivered a very public thank-you: a series of bonus and investment announcements. It was a major PR opportunity for both corporate America and the GOP, meant to show that American businesses were sharing their billions of dollars in tax cut savings with their workers and the broader economy.
But over the next few months, the real winners from the corporate tax cut became clear – not workers and consumers, but shareholders. Companies have boosted dividends and stock buybacks.
To borrow Collins’ phrasing, this may not have been the intended “purpose” of giant corporate tax breaks, but as Vox’s report makes clear, it’s become the result – just as many Democratic critics of the Republican plan predicted.
There’s plenty of related evidence to bolster the point. Business Insider reported yesterday, for example, “A new survey published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in conjunction with Stanford University and University of Chicago Booth School economists shows [the measures in the new Republican tax plan] have done little to bolster corporate investment plans.”
As for the public, a CNBC poll, released yesterday, found that a majority of Americans have seen “no change in their paychecks” as a result of the new tax cuts.
In addition to that, although some corporations such as Disney and Walmart offered up to a $1,000 bonus to certain employees (in Disney’s case only if they signed an oppressive anti-union agreement, and for Walmart only if they had already been an employee for 20 years or more), other companies actually decided to take their tax cut money and lay off workers.
Last week, Donald Trump appeared remotely on two giant monitors before the White House press corps to personally thank corporate America. “The historic tax cut I signed into law… is already delivering major economic gains,” the president boasted, ticking off a series of announcements from big business about one-time bonuses, 401(k) contributions, workforce and infrastructure investments, and even higher wages. “I want to thank all of the companies that worked so hard to do it.”
...
The Comcast and AT&T bonuses were also announced late last year, allowing them to be written off as a business expense in 2017. If a business gave a bonus in 2017, it went against the 35 percent corporate tax rate then in effect. If were to give one this year, the bonus would only go against the new 21 percent rate. In other words, it was cheaper for businesses to announce bonuses in December than January, suggesting we may not see much of their kind again.
But Comcast and AT&T in particular serve as the poster children for dishonesty in this matter. Because around the same time that they made a big show of rewarding employees with bonuses, both companies quietly engaged in layoffs. Comcast fired 500 members of its sales department before Christmas, and AT&T is eliminating “thousands” of jobs, according to its union, the Communications Workers of America. “We believe there's more than 4,000 people AT&T has (notified of layoffs) across the country,” Larry Robbins, vice president of CWA Local 4900, told the Indianapolis Daily Star.
AT&T’s one-time $1,000 bonus to 200,000 employees cost them about $200 million, while the layoffs of 4,000 employees based on a mean income of about $59,000 could bring them a net windfall of $236 million, which is more than the cost of the bonuses. According to economist Dean Baker, AT&T will ultimately see a benefit of about $2.4 billion from the new lower corporate rate provided by Trump’s cut. Their bonuses in this case are really just theater and nowhere near what the company is gaining from the tax cut itself.
But then the mainstream media that is so biased against Trump hardly mentions any of this.
The unemployment rate has indeed hit a record low over the past 17 years, and is now at 3.9 percent. That’s a good thing, and perhaps the media should indeed talk about that more. Although that story should generally run about five to 10 seconds long and not really be the subject of much discussion or screen time, unless they happen to also discuss the fact that if the unemployment rate was still continuing to decrease at the rate we saw during Obama’s last eight years, it would actually be a lot lower than the 3.9 percent it’s at now.
The U.S. economy added an estimated 313,000 jobs in February, keeping the unemployment rate at 4.1 percent, where it’s held steady for the past five months. And the good news is, experts agree, that it still has room to improve.
But there’s even better news if you look closely: The lowest unemployment rate most economists think we can reach is still too high.
For various reasons, the unemployment rate actually froze at 4.1 percent for nearly six months through the latter half of 2018, and only recently began to move down again to 3.9 percent in the latest report. If it had dropped the same 1.0-1.5 percent that it had during 2015 or 2016, it would be at 3.0-3.2 percent right now. But it’s not. This slowdown might in fact be the first sign that unemployment may soon begin to rise again if something were to happen to destabilize the economy. We’ll just have to see if there are other indicators of potential instability.
Something like, for example, the coal industry diving into a flaming magma crater.
Despite President Trump’s repeated promises to resuscitate the collapsing U.S. coal industry, top energy-industry analysts project a faster than expected pace of coal plant retirements in the coming years.
Over the next decade, 73 gigawatts of coal will retire — representing one quarter of current U.S. coal capacity — according to Bruce Hamilton, a Director in Navigant Consulting’s Energy Practice, which has analyzed every U.S. plant.
“That’s more than twice what we projected last year at this time,” Hamilton said at the American Wind Energy Association’s Windpower 2018 conference Tuesday, Forbes reports. “The economics of coal have gotten worse,” he explained, “with costs going up, while the competition for coal — that is, gas, wind and solar — has all gotten cheaper.”
Another agenda item for Trump is of course U.S. manufacturing, and Vice President Mike Pence has shouted to the winds that U.S. manufacturing is “roaring back.”
Vice President Mike Pence touted the latest jobs report as proof that “manufacturing is roaring back.” The previous administration made a similar claim, but experts then and now said it’s premature to declare a manufacturing renaissance.
The economy added 196,000 manufacturing jobs last year — the most in any year since 2014, when the economy added 208,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the manufacturing sector has yet to fully recover from the Great Recession.
As of December 2017, there were 12.5 million manufacturing jobs – 1.2 million fewer than there were in December 2007, when the recession started, BLS data show. At last year’s growth rate, it would take until nearly 2023 just to recover the jobs lost during the recession.
So yes: manufacturing jobs have come back during Trump’s first year almost as well as they were coming back during Obama’s sixth year. But even at that, it’s not nearly enough to get us back where we were in 2007. Private sector jobs have also been coming back, but you know what would have made things even better? It would have been better if GOP governors around that nation hadn’t taken a battle axe to public sector jobs, which still lag far behind the rate of private and manufacturing job recovery.
The conservative Republicans who took power in Pennsylvania in 2010 have had a busy year. Republican state legislators, empowered by new control of the governorship and the state house, proposed one of the most stringent mandatory ultrasound bills in the country. The House passed a voter identification law that could block 700,000 Pennsylvanians from voting, most of them young, of color, and poor. Meanwhile, the same state legislators led a successful charge to shrink public employment. The number of government employees fell over 3 percent that year, one of the sharpest declines in any state. Before the cuts, “Pennsylvania [had] the second lowest number of state workers per capita, already,” said Rebecca McNichol, Pennsylvania state director of the CLEAR Coalition. Yet, she says, “this past year the budget was devastating” in deeper cuts.
Pennsylvania isn’t alone. Republicans seized control of both branches of the legislature in 11 states after the 2010 elections. It’s in these very states that public sector layoffs are disproportionately concentrated, leading to one of the biggest rounds of job losses for the public workforce since record keeping began. Governors and state legislators promised to focus on creating jobs and balancing budgets during campaign season—even newly elected Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett still claims that creating jobs is one of his “top priorities.” Instead, these newly Republican states are targeting public workers, causing a significant drop in employment in the public sector that has threatened the entire economy.
Again, overall unemployment would be much better and much lower if the GOP hadn’t had their foot stomped on the brakes of public sector jobs for the past eight years. And also, these efforts have not resulted in the cuts and balanced budgets that were promised—particularly not for Pennsylvania in 2017.
State Treasurer Joe Torsella warned Thursday that the commonwealth could run out of money to pay its bills by the end of August unless the legislature quickly passes a responsible revenue package to balance its budget.
That’s alarmingly early in the year, said Torsella, who said he also fears that the state’s cash-flow problems could last for a worrisome eight straight months.
“That’s not some distant prospect,” said Torsella, a Democrat. “There is going to come some real trouble soon.”
Now Trump and his people have argued that their tax cuts not only would put more money in the pockets of “the forgotten Americans,” they’ve also argued that they would “supercharge” the economy and boost the GDP all the way up to 4 percent or even greater.
Today President Donald Trump and the Republican congress will unveil a dramatic, pro-growth tax reform plan that will allow most Americans to file their taxes on a postcard.
“The Republican tax reform plan will turbo-charge the economy, create millions of new jobs and make America the best place in the world to invest, build and create,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform
Yeah, okay: so did that happen?
Nope. Not yet.
Although before the tax bill passed there were indeed two back-to-back quarters of +3 percent GDP growth during 2017, something the mainstream media hasn’t bothered to report is the fact that in 3Q2017 and 1Q2018 the GDP has dropped back down to 2.9 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. That is, in fact, the exact opposite to everything we were told was supposed to happen.
Trumpers like to claim that Obama’s after GDP growth rate was only about 2 percent, however they don’t mention that this includes the -8 percent GDP shrinkage that was happening when he took office or that fact that in 2014 GDP exploded to over 4.6 and 5.2 percent for successive quarters. Did anyone even notice? Nope.
Here’s another little thing that the mass media isn’t reporting. Trump has been talking about how well the Dow Jones and stock market are doing under his watch, ignoring the fact that the stock market nearly always does well unless it’s on the verge of a crash. So how’s it really been doing lately?
Well, ever since Trump announced his plan to implement $60 billion tariffs against China and Europe: not that great.
Feb 5, 2018 After being on cruise control for months, the stock market hit a giant speed bump on Monday, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged — tumbling more than 1,500 points at one point after sinking 665 points on Friday.
By the close, the Dow had lost around 2,200 points since Jan. 26, closing in on a 10% decline — which would mark the start of an official “correction.”
Starting in February, things started to get bumpy and so far they’ve stayed that way for the last three months, rather than continuing on the normal upward pattern that’s been standard since 2010.
Fortunately we don't have any other sudden bumps in the road to worry about which might cause problems in the markets and economy. I mean, it’s not like Trump might suddenly announce he’s going the slam sanctions back on Iran and drive up oil prices or anything, right?
Oh ... oops.
Global oil supplies were already getting tight before Trump vowed on Tuesday to exit the Iran nuclear deal and impose "powerful" sanctions on the OPEC nation.
Energy industry insiders say Trump's tough stance on Iran will probably keep oil and
gasoline prices higher than they would otherwise be.
Iran ramped up its oil production by 1 million barrels per day after sanctions were lifted in early 2016. At least some of that oil will now be pulled from the market — at a time when oil prices are already rising because of production cuts by OPEC and Russia as well as instability in Venezuela.
Dan Eberhart, CEO of oilfield services company Canary LLC, drew a direct connection: "Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal will support higher oil prices."
Trump telegraphed the move, and oil prices shot up in recent weeks as traders anticipated it. Crude topped $70 a barrel this week for the first time in nearly four years. Hours before Trump's announcement, federal government forecasters raised their estimate for 2018 oil prices by 10.5% to an average of $65.58 a barrel.
That just might hit the “forgotten man” in the pocket book, especially since the tax cuts really just left them with only a few “crumbs.”
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said ordinary Americans would only get “crumbs” from the Trump cuts. The federal agency that does the math says those crumbs amounted to as much as $30 billion in January.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis raised its estimate of how much U.S. incomes rose in the first month of the year in response to widespread reports of businesses handing out onetime bonuses after the tax cuts became law. If those bonuses hadn’t been included, incomes barely would have risen in January.
The BEA also estimated that the tax cuts reduced personal taxes in January by a $115 billion annual rate.
The result: Disposable income — mostly what Americans take home after taxes — posted the biggest one-month gain since 2012. Disposable incomes leaped 0.9%
Yeah, that 0.9 percent increase in disposable income is going to do wonders for that 10 percent increase in fuel costs. And totally erase the layoffs. You betcha.
Next, as we all well know, the GOP is full of deficit hawks who absolutely live to bring down the federal debt. We can’t leave all the debt on the backs of our children, yadda yadda. How’s that going, now that Trump got his tax cut bill passed?
The combined effect of President Donald Trump's tax cuts and last month's budget-busting spending bill is sending the federal deficit toward the $1 trillion mark next year, according to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO report says the nation's $21 trillion debt would spike to more than $33 trillion in 10 years, with debt held by investors spiking to levels that would come close to equaling the size of the economy, reaching levels that many economists fear could spark a debt crisis.
Republicans once laced into President Barack Obama for trillion-dollar-plus deficits but mostly fell quiet on Monday's news.
CBO says economic growth from the tax cuts will add 0.7 percent on average to the nation's economic output over the coming decade. Those effects will only partially offset the deficit cost of the tax cuts. The administration had promised the cuts would pay for themselves.
Yeah, “not paying for themselves.” Not at all.
In response to the growing deficit, Trump has of course done the entirely reasonable thing. He’s increased the defense budget and recommended cutting $7 billion from the Children's Health Care Fund, because clearly all those sick kids are hiding a ton of spare change in their pockets.
President Donald Trump will request a package of $15 billion in spending cuts from Congress on Tuesday, including some $7 billion from the Children’s Health Insurance Program championed by Democrats, senior administration officials said on Monday.
One official said the targeted cuts would cover “unobligated balances” or money that is not being spent. He said the cuts would not have an effect on the CHIP program itself.
The cut will “not have an effect” on the program, they say. Really? I wonder why I’m a bit skeptical of that.
Trump has also claimed that he’s “keeping America safe” from the foreign hordes who are invading us from the southern border. However, the number of people deported under Trump during his first year via DHS is actually lower than the deportation numbers reported by President Obama during his final two years in office.
In FY2016 DHS had a total of 240,255 deportations which went down to 226,119 in FY2017 despite the Trump administration claims that they are making the border “safer”. Why? Because arrests at the border by CBP are down massively from 67,493 in FY2016 to just 59,540 in FY2017, which is a 10 percent drop. This could be because potential border crossers have been intimidated by Trump, or it could be because they’ve increased their use of coyotes and smugglers to cross the border and completely avoid CBP and the wall. This of course will have put them in debt to these smuggler from between $6000-$13,000 each making them vulnerable to the drug trade, human trafficking and very likely prostitution — increasing the number of them vulnerable to sexual assault. [Mexicans are rapists?]
While that’s been going on DHS has indeed increased their deportation of “criminal aliens” by about 12% they also increased their deportation of those who may be undocumented by have no criminal record by 173% going from 5,014 to 13,744.
The priority here is not criminals.
Fewer actual people are being deported and/or blocked at the border while more people who’ve committed no other crime are being ripped away from the life they’ve peacefully led for years and their children who depend on them. So yeah, that’s pretty vicious and heartless and
even some conservatives communities in deep red places like rural Tennessee think so after seeing their friends and co-workers grabbed up by ICE.
Further Trump’s actual deportation are really down dramatically when you
compared with the early portion of Obama’s administration.
This chart doesn't break down which of those deported were “criminals” but the accompanying documentation states that for FY2015 91% of interior removals had a criminal record. You can see here that compared to Trump’s internal deportation totals of 81,603 for FY2017 which is more than 65,332 for FY2016 and 69,478 for FY2015 which is mostly associated to their increased deportation of Non-criminals the real numbers for were 102,224 for FY2014, 133,551 for FY2013, 180,970 for FY2012, 223,755 for FY2011 and at least 234,000 from FY2008 - FY2010. This means that Obama's internal deportation peak rates were nearly four times higher than Trump's are.
Before I’m done I have to say that there is, of course, some good news. The administration managed to bring home hostages from the North Korean regime, which is an amazing feat of deft diplomacy that we should all feel proud about and loudly applaud. Just look at this great coverage they received for it from CNN.
Two Americans who spent months imprisoned in North Korea are back on U.S. soil, after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered their release.
They were freed following a rare visit to the secretive East Asian nation by a top U.S. official, who brought with him a letter from U.S. President Barack Obama.
Oh wait, I’m sorry, that report was about the release of North Korean prisoners Kenneth Bar and Matthew Miller in 2014, during the Obama administration. My bad.
A plane carrying Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller, the last two American citizens known to be held by North Korea, landed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state late Saturday.
The two men got off the U.S. government plane -- Bae first, then Miller -- and walked into the welcoming arms of smiling relatives who were waiting on the tarmac.
"I just want to say thank you all for supporting me and standing by me during this time," Bae said in brief comments to the media at the base.
He thanked Obama and the State Department for securing his release -- and he also had words of gratitude for the country that held him prisoner for two years.
And we won’t even mention that there is still one more American hostage still in North Korea who wasn't released this week. Nope, not even going there.
So in summation, the mainstream media has indeed failed to inform the American people by being constantly infatuated and obsessed with Russia-Stormy-Cohen-Pruitt-Gate. Yes, they could be talking more about jobs, wages, the economy, the deficit, and the GDP. But I trust that if they really did that honestly and truthfully
they might have a 99.9 percent negative percentage of coverage for Trump—except of course for the release of three Americans from North Korea. And Melania. Well, when she’s not
plagiarizing something again.
Frankly, Trumpsters should be happy with their positive 6 percent and go home. They don’t really want to see how bad it could get. But then even if the media did bother to report any of this, the self-admitted “deplorables” still wouldn’t believe any of it.
They don't believe anything unless their precious Dear Leader endorses it.
Sunday, May 13, 2018 · 5:21:50 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
My writing here — like that of so many others — is voluntary. If you appreciate this article any and all support you can offer to make more and better diaries in the future would be deeply and sincerely appreciated. And we could really use a little boost right now for some critical bills. Thanks very much.