TRADING BLOOD FOR INK: My column this week at Daily Caller, about putting the acrimonious relationship between Trump and press in perspective. Here’s a taste:

“Rachel Maddow can smirk all she likes here in the safety of the US, but she would last for about 10 minutes in the UAE or Bahrain[…]To those who would worry about Maddow’s safety at a Trump rally here in the United States, I’d put her chances at surviving at about the same or better as Sean Hannity showing up at a Black Lives Matter or Antifa rally.”

DEEP-STATE LOGIC AT WORK: In one of the most insane arguments ever made by government lawyers, the CIA is claiming that even though they leaked complete documents to favored reporters, those documents are still not subject to disclosure to the public at large under FOIA. According to Techdirt:

“[T]he CIA would like to be able to selectively leak classified information while retaining the privilege of denying every other member of the public access to these leaks. If the selected journalists choose to publish classified info handed to them by the CIA, only then does it enter the public domain, according to the the CIA. Otherwise, the CIA will decide what’s classified and withholdable, not judges or logic or common sense.”

The intelligence community hates leakers, unless it’s the agencies themselves doing the leaking.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DEDUCTIONS: “In 2017, Amazon paid $0 In U.S. Taxes Despite Making $5.6 BN.”  Remember this, Jeff?

SOCIAL MEDIA FILTER FAIL (PART DEUX): Twitter, like Facebook, seem hellbent on destroying themselves by one dumb move after another. This time, they put a “sensitive material” roadblock in front of porn star Jenna Jameson’s tweet about Hollywood Hypocrisy.™ Here’s the image that they were concerned might “offend” you.

PARKLAND SCHOOL VIDEOS: No matter where you stand on gun-control or school shootings, everyone should support this. Michelle Malkin nails it in The Daily Signal:

“Release the videos. Let the public, especially competent security experts, see them. Without transparency, there can be no accountability. Without accountability, “Never Again” is yet another empty, expedient cable TV sound bite in an ocean of self-serving rhetoric.”

MY WEEKLY COLUMN IS UP AT DAILY CALLER: “Laughably Stupid Media Mistakes In Gun Reporting: How Much Do They Matter?“

SO THIS IS WHAT “AMAZING LEADERSHIP” LOOKS LIKE: Three media companies filed a lawsuit Monday to force authorities to release security camera video footage from the exterior of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to shed light on the actions — or inaction — of law enforcement during the mass shooting.

It’s bad enough there’s a school shooting, it’s bad enough there’s a plethora of evidence that the FBI, the school administrators and the Broward County Sheriff’s office stumbled through a cascade of failures resulting in this tragedy.

No, not bad enough. Now, you have to add Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel refusing to allow the press and public to see videotape from cameras outside the Parkland school on the day of the shooting. Where deputies were not only hiding, but according to later reports, prevented paramedics from entering the building.

THIRTY YEARS LATER: This month marks the 30th Anniversary of Hustler v. Falwell, one of SCOTUS’ most powerful free speech decisions. And yeah, as humor goes, the satire ad at center of the case still holds up pretty well.

WE’RE MSNBC, WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ FACTS: Poor Stephanie Ruhle really ought to check her basic facts before tweeting. She said that:

Also remember that Reagan was surrounded by the secret service in 1981…yet, he was shot. How will teachers with guns protect students? How does the best marksman in the world with a handgun take down a shooter with an AR-15 (bullets travel 3x faster)

Let’s leave the question of armed teachers aside for a moment, and let’s even leave aside the irrelevance of “bullet speed” (what genius made that a talking point?).

What she ought have asked is whether the Secret Service carry only handguns. Um, nope. She could learned in 5 seconds that the Presidential detail carries a FN P90 submachine gun, as well as the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. So very facepalm.
** Disclosure: I used to work with her at Bloomberg, were friends (so I thought) but she was one of the folks who defriended me on Facebook for not being a Clinton cheerleader**

CURING A COLD WITH CYANIDE: My Op/Ed on government attempts to restrict/control political speech, at The Daily Caller.

WHY RELYING ON TWITTER IS JUST PLAIN STUPID: Chris Cuomo does it again, this time retweeting a totally bogus claim — without a lick of fact-checking — that some kid bought an AR-15 without valid ID. Twitter busts him on the fact that the same kid admitted he never bought the weapon, and Ben Shapiro adds that:

“When called on it, Cuomo tweeted, “Isn’t the point that the kid’s age and lack of ID wasn’t a deterrent? and this isn’t all gun shops. Place I bought my shotgun basically goes farther than the law requires and makes judgments about whom to sell to. Point is the system should be better.”

Again, we see an alleged journalist whose purported commitment to principles of accuracy are swept aside when there’s advocacy to be made. CNN’s own guidelines say:

“CNN does not try to appeal to a specific point of view or political constituency. To the contrary, the reporters, producers, editors and writers at CNN aim for comprehensive journalism.”

I wonder if he’s actually read this.

SIT IN ON MY CLASS: Professor Glenn pointed out the unfair criticism of President Trump’s visit to the hospital in Parkland, Florida in the wake of the school shooting here.

I thought some of you might be interested in how a story like this (not slugged “Opinion” or even “News Analysis”) is analyzed in my Media Ethics classes. (Apologies for the PDF link, but that’s the only way to share it.) The yellow highlighted sections are the statements I ask students to challenge, and the red type (I use a Socratic method) reflects the questions I ask my graduate students to discuss.

If “Democracy Dies in Darkness” then we have to admit that “Editorialization is Where Journalism Goes to Die.”

THINGS YOU RUN ACROSS DOING RESEARCH: I’m working on a few essays (more about that soon) and wanted to pull together a list of US efforts to influence or “meddle” (the non-legal legal word du jour) in foreign elections. Of course, anyone with a sense of 20th Century history ought to know this, but obviously our intellectual betters discussing the Mueller indictments seem to conveniently forget this episode of American history.

That said, I thought I would share this little nugget from 2016 — long before Trump allegedly “colluded” with anyone but a porn star: “In unearthed 2006 audio, Clinton appears to suggest rigging the Palestine election.” According to The Week, the Most Qualified Candidate Ever said, regarding Palestinian elections:

“And if we were going to push for an election,” Clinton went on, “then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

I suppose it always depends on whose Gore is being oxed.

THEY MUST HAVE STUDIED LAW UNDER PROFESSOR CHRIS CUOMO: “CIA Argues The Public Can’t See Classified Information It Has Already Given To Favored Reporters.” The Daily Caller reports that:

In a motion filed in New York federal court, the CIA claimed that limited disclosures to reporters do not waive national security exemptions to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently deny records requests on the basis of protecting sensitive national security information, one of nine exemptions written into the federal FOIA law…“In this case, CIA voluntarily disclosed to outsiders information that it had a perfect right to keep private,” [the Judge] wrote. “There is absolutely no statutory provision that authorizes limited disclosure of otherwise classified information to anyone, including ‘trusted reporters,’ for any purpose, including the protection of CIA sources and methods that might otherwise be outed.”

Here’s Chris Cuomo’s “legal reasoning” via Prof. Volokh. (Cuomo: “remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”).
EXTRA IRONY BONUS: CNN — that same defender of transparency and the public’s “right to know” — forced YouTube to remove the video clip of Cuomo’s inanity.

SOMEONE DIDN’T GET THE MEMO: NYT’s Eric Lipton tweets an astonishingly insensitive — maybe stupid is a better word — observation. And of course, the apology after he deleted it isn’t much of an apology.

“Sorry it was read that way” is not an apology: it’s an insult.

AFTER ALL WE’VE DONE FOR YOU? BuzzFeed is being sued by a multimillionaire who says he was falsely connected to the alleged “hacking” in the now infamous “Steele Dossier” that BuzzFeed published wholesale, without any fact-checking.

Now, trying to prove the truth of what they published after the fact, BuzzFeed asked the DNC for records that would help them in their defense. “No dice” said the DNC:

Now, BuzzFeed is taking the Democratic National Committee to court in an attempt to compel it to turn over information it believes will bolster its defense against Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian business magnate who says he was libeled in the dossier when it tied him to the Russians’ alleged hacking of the D.N.C.’s e-mail servers. In a nutshell: BuzzFeed believes the D.N.C. has information that could show a link between Gubarev and the e-mail hacking, which would undercut his libel claim.

The DNC says that “In legal papers, the D.N.C. has argued that disclosing the digital signatures, supposedly left by the Russia-directed hacking organizations known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, would inevitably expose details of the D.N.C.’s information systems, possibly making them more vulnerable to another hack” according to Vanity Fair.

If the DNC hasn’t secured their IT systems at this point, I suppose they could use a server located in a bathroom closet in Chappaqua, NY that isn’t being used at the moment. What a clown show.

YOU GO, GIRL! The Washington Post announced today that the inestimable Megan McArdle will now be writing an OpEd column there. More like this, please. It’s about time they had a conservatarian columnist (my characterization) who, unlike Jennifer Rubin, is not a token conservative cum incoherent strawman.

BEN RHODES WAS RIGHT: Katie Couric, the ̶b̶u̶b̶b̶l̶e̶h̶e̶a̶d̶e̶d̶  bubbly journalist is mocked for showing her intimate knowledge of people in European cities, telling us rubes that people in Amsterdam skate everywhere all the time:

“As you all know, it has lots of canals that can freeze in the winter,” Couric said, “so for as long as those canals have existed, the Dutch have skated on them to get from place to place, to race each other and also to have fun.”

Now, this. Either the guys in the control room were really hungry for generic Chinese food, or they need to buy an atlas. Ben Rhodes was right: they don’t know anything.

PUT THE POM-POMS DOWN AND START ACTING LIKE REPORTERS: The commitment to principles over “motives” or “cui bono” is writ large here, and Judicial Watch — generally considered a “right-leaning” outfit — deserves credit for filing this FOIA suit.

Judicial Watch, a local legal watchdog organization, announced Feb. 9 that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for Secret Service travel-expense records related to expenses incurred protecting President Trump and his family while they traveled between June and October 2017

If only more journalists put their pom-poms down and remembered their mission is to “seek truth and report it” without regard to who it “helps” or “hurts.”

*updated for Latin spelling*

NOT A GOOD LOOK: Rep. Nunes (R-CA) is being accused of creating an “alternative” news site by Politico, and it looks pretty nailed down:

“Resembling a local, conservative news site, “The California Republican” is classified on Facebook as a “media/news company” and claims to deliver “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis. But the website is paid for by Nunes’ campaign committee, according to small print at the bottom of the site.”

Because the server at www.carepublican.com seems to have crashed, it’s hard to see whether it passes the tests for credibility as a “legitimate” news site. On the one hand, whois records show it uses a real person, not a private secret registration, as fake sites do. By the same token, that person, Alexander Tavlian, according to Politico, runs a company called Sultana Media who allegedly paid Nunes’ campaign $7,773 since July for “advertising; digital advertising management.”

At the moment, that URL is redirected to a Facebook page, and that page does not disclose any masthead, leadership or ownership. That’s usually the sign of a fake news site. Opacity is always bad.

I can’t see any laws being broken here, unless there’s some campaign law I’m missing. And I do believe that everyone who feels mistreated by the press (and Nunes has some genuine gripes in that regard, perhaps even against me) has the right to engage in counter-speech. Koch Industries — the favorite whipping post of the left — has a brilliant spot on their website where they have occasionally taken to task what they feel is unfair reporting. Similarly, Exxon-Mobil used an internet page to challenge a series of news articles with which they took issue. Good for both of them.

The part that’s a “bad look” for Nunes is that the Facebook page has no ownership disclosure, and even if the website has a small print disclosure, pretending that he’s running a “Media/News Company” just doesn’t pass the straight face test. But my grandfather’s caveat serves us all well: “never attribute to malice what you can account for with stupidity.” 

Nunes should take a cue from POTUS and get himself a .50 cal Twittergun. There, I fixed it.

PICK A STORY AND STICK WITH IT, FFS: For the past several weeks we’ve been told by our intellectual betters at MSNBC, Washington Post and The New York Times that daring to question the FBI’s actions was “unpatriotic” and a “national security risk.” (These are the same hypocrites who are wetting themselves over Meryl Streep’s performance in “The Post” when such questions were considered legit).

Notorious moron Adam Schiff even went as far as saying on live television that Tucker Carlson was “carrying water for the Kremlin” by daring to ask such questions.  So what should cross my wire today but a press release from the ACLU stating that it may sue the FBI:

What seems to be a made-up term raises concerns that the FBI created the designation to enhance government scrutiny of Black activists, including people involved in Black Lives Matter, which some wrongly blame for incidents of violence and label a hate group. By focusing on ideology and viewpoint in defining what constitutes a so-called “Black Identity Extremist,” the FBI is spending valuable resources to target those who object to racism and injustice in America.

The mask slips further. In 2018, if a truth-seeking question’s answer might provide succor to your political opponents, it’s a Russian plot and you are unpatriotic. If the same reasonable – no, important – question supports a DNC-approved minority, then it’s your duty to ask the question. Poor Kathryn Graham, it’s almost a blessing that she’s not around to see this perversion of “truth-seeking.”

HARD TO BELIEVE HE SAID THIS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE:

“Gingras said Google was “in the trust business” and felt “an extraordinary sense of responsibility” about the reliability of information highlighted by its search engine and news app.”

They keep insisting that they are a mere conduit, a common carrier like the phone company. But one look at “Google News” shows a selection and arrangement evidencing an editorial skew than simply cannot be attributed to a mere algorithm. And that skew extends well past editorial content: Google was fined $21 million by India’s competition commission for abusing its dominant position in the local search market for online general web search and web search advertising services.

“Don’t be evil”?

SHARYL ATTKISSON: “I’VE NEVER SEEN JOURNALISTS SO UNCURIOUS ABOUT SPYING” On Tucker Carlson’s show last night, Attkisson pointed out that in her extensive experience as a political and investigative journalist, she has never seen reporters so obliquely refuse to read — let alone report on — a government document. Carlson nails it when he says it’s stunning to hear reporters (who by trade are trained to seek out as much information as possible) say “tell me no more.”

Now you may believe that Nunes is a dope, a stooge, a liar, crazy (or in the fevered mind of Representative Schiff, a Russian agent). But that sidesteps the real issue for me as a journalist and media ethics specialist. As Attkisson points out, our newsrooms have never been so heavily populated with political operatives, and I would add that too many reporters are so saturated with fear and loathing of Trump that committment to their core principle (“Seek Truth and Report It“) has been swept aside. Read the documents, evaluate them for their probity and *then* decide what is and isn’t reportable. To go backwards and discredit anything because of Nunes’ shortcomings (which are many) is a public disservice.

STATING THE OBVIOUS: It doesn’t appear that the Girl Scouts offer a badge for enterprise, but if they did, this young lady deserves one. According to CNBC:

The San Diego Girl Scout council is looking into whether a scout who was photographed selling cookies outside a marijuana dispensary broke any rules […] Urbn Leaf founder Will Senn said the girl was with her parents and was just passing by with her wagon. He said he likes to support local fundraising efforts. “Cannabis is now legal in California and a direct result of that is the munchies a lot of times,” he joked.

PLACE YOUR BETS, FOLKS: Forcing bakers to make gay wedding cakes violates free speech, a California judge rules. The court said:

“A wedding cake is not just cake in Free Speech analysis. It is an artistic expression by the person making it that is to be used traditionally as centerpiece in the celebration of marriage. There could not be greater form of expressive conduct. Here… They plan celebration to declare the validity of their marital union and their enduring love for one another.”

Who wants to take bets that the Cal Supremes will flip this, or if they don’t, lawfare activists will try a writ of mandamus in federal court?