“Everybody that I know is appalled by this.”

MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2017

Something good from Slate and The Huffington Post:
Believe it or not, something good just happened with the left-leaning press corps.

At Slate and at The Huffington Post, writers presented aggressive reports criticizing the work of Rachel Maddow. In particular, they criticized last Thursday night's 25-minute report about the recent deaths in Niger.

Willa Frej wrote the piece at The Huffington Post. It appeared beneath these headlines:
What The Hell Was This Rachel Maddow Segment?
“Everybody that I know is appalled by this.”
That quotation came from Laura Seay, an assistant professor at Colby College and an Africa specialist. "No, that's crazy," Seay had said about Maddow's speculative insinuations from the night before.

In her own report at Slate, Seay said that Maddow had "crosse[d] the line from reasonable speculation to irresponsible conspiracy-mongering" in her error-strewn Thursday night report about the situation in Chad and Niger. Here's a chunk from that report:
SEAY (10/20/17): Maddow’s approach to this story—“just asking questions” that are neither based in evidence nor likely to contribute to an accurate understanding of what happened in Niger and why—drags liberals down the same path that conservatives traveled with Benghazi, one of irrational, fearmongering claims that only serve to prolong the suffering of the families of the fallen while doing nothing to explain the root causes of the event. In doing so, Maddow also preyed upon Americans’ lack of knowledge about Africa, a widespread problem that ranges from not understanding how large the continent is to major news organizations mislabeling maps for national broadcast.

Maddow’s speculation, which mirrors a conspiracy theory pushed by the Palmer Report, a fringe website, might be tempting to believe, but it makes several key errors.
If you want to know what those key errors were, you can read the reports by Frej and Seay. Also, try this report from Mediaite, or this Politico piece.

Saturday, in a series of tweets, Seay offered this overview:
SEAY (10/21/17): There are 2 possibilities here. One is that @maddow & her team are genuinely confused by these dynamics & not getting help from an expert. The other is that @maddow & her team are deliberately twisting facts to mislead viewers into believing something that isn't true.

As a longtime viewer of the show & fan of @maddow herself, I'm deeply disappointed either way. I really hope that @maddow & @MaddowBlog will call any of the many experts on extremist groups in the Sahel who can sort out the facts here.
In our view, Maddow's error-strewn insiniations were pretty much par for the course for her work. On Friday night, she offered this rather typical, slippery non-reaction reaction to what had been said that day:
MADDOW (10/20/17): Over the course of the day today, lots of people have been very upset with me for reporting that last night, which is fine. I didn't know you cared.

But the upset over my reporting that last night doesn't mean that anything I reported wasn't true. Everything I reported was true.

Now, this doesn't—this also doesn't mean that Chad withdrawing their troops was necessarily the cause of what happened to those U.S. troops who were ambushed. That ambush is being described by the Pentagon a shock, and there's an investigation into what went wrong there, how it was the military had no idea what was coming and they were so unprepared for that.

But, honestly, if you are looking at the central domestic mystery here, which is why didn't the president even acknowledge those deaths in the worst combat casualties of his presidency, he was asked today by NBC News if he had ordered the mission that resulted in those deaths, and the president just walked away without saying anything. He is not acknowledging or speaking to or commemorating in any way the loss of those soldiers. He's made no public pronouncements about it whatsoever.

And if you are interested in the central mystery of why the president is so reluctant to talk about that or take questions on that—well, it really is true that his administration just took what is widely believed to be absolutely inexplicable action to alienate and anger and insult the country that has been our most effective military partner against Islamic militants in the part of the world where these attacks just happened.
You'll note that Maddow never explained what she'd been criticized for. Nor did she invite an Africa specialist to discuss her insinuations from the night before.

Instead, she simply repeated the statements she had made the night before. She failed to explain why Seay and Frey and others said her insinuations from the night before had been absurdly bogus.

(You can base a crazy insinuation on perfectly accurate facts. We feel sure that Maddow knows this.)

Seay said she was disappointed by Maddow, of whom she said she's a fan. That may mean that Professor Seay has never fact-checked Maddow before, and has never watched her cover a topic where Seay possessed expertise.

We have fact-checked Maddow before, many times. The results are routinely quite poor. Beyond that lies a larger story—the many important topics Maddow has aggressively ducked down through the years, giving us mugging and clowning and entertainment instead. Also, pleasing theories designed to make us liberals feel good when we retire for the night!

It's encouraging to see The Huffington Post and Slate speak in detail about Maddow's slippery techniques. We offer this final excerpt from Frey's essay at Slate:
FREJ (10/20/17): “By reducing the story to its mythic fundamentals,” Janet Malcolm wrote earlier this month, “Maddow creates the illusion of completeness that novels and short stories create. We feel that this is the story as we listen to and watch her tell it.”

It’s a tactic that right-wing hosts like Sean Hannity and Alex Jones have perfected, building myths using unrelated or unreliable information in ways that brought us the birther lie and the Benghazi controversy, putting the country on a path to fake news and the Trump presidency.

On Thursday, Maddow reduced the story so thoroughly that it lost any semblance of the larger truth.
We think it's heathly when unimpressed liberals start comparing Maddow to Hannity and even to Jones. For the record, that "Benghazi controversy" is the one Maddow completely ducked in the fall of 2012 when it was dangerous and hot, thus enabling the crazy theories which helped defeat Hillary Clinton four years later.

This time around, in 2016, she completely ducked the July attack launched by Comey the God. Rachel tends to play it safe, correctly assuming that no one in the liberal guild will notice, complain or care.

Massive wealth and massive fame tend to be deeply destructive. Corporate TV star Rachel Maddow has endured a great deal of both.

Greta's her bestest drinking pal. Greta, the birther enabler!

39 comments:

  1. The Somerby playbook:
    Maddow bad;
    liberals stupid;
    conservatives don't lie because no one can say if a misstatement is a lie;
    The NYT is bad, because I found an article about organizing your closet;
    That liberal actor said something that cons might not like: that actor needs to shut up

    Rinse; bellow; repeat.

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  2. The inter-Rachel interstice for this blog is currently at 2 days. Watch as it asymptotically approaches zero over time.

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    1. Did you read the critiques of Maddow's reporting? Over 700 miles from the Chad/Niger border where Chad is fighting Boko Haram; and the al Qaeda ambush on US/Niger troops on the Niger/Mali border. Gee, geopolitics are hard. She should apologize for flaming the administration over this. Plenty of legitimate stories to rail on Trump. Do not need to make shit up. Bad reporting by the liberal's shining pundit just gives credence to NBC is fake news, both sides do it.

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    2. "Mart", gee, apparently you missed the point of my post. Not surprisingly.

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    3. 3:07 PM writes:

      ...is currently at 2 days. Watch as it asymptotically approaches zero over time.

      Ridiculous. The Howler doesn't post on Sundays.

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    4. Mart, this is like saying that Trump couldn't send relief to Puerto Rico because there was an ocean separating it from the mainland. There is no reason why pulling out the Chad troops couldn't have left Niger short-handed and less able to respond to a threat in any part of the country. For one thing, there are criticisms that intelligence was bad. Was intelligence only being done on the ground in the East? Was command and control only in the East? Were logistics only in the East? Could a preoccupation with short-handedness in the West have caused neglect of conditions in the East by command staff? Inquiring minds want to know. Somerby just wants to join the crowd kicking Maddow.

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    5. And 3:44, just what was your point? Facts be damned, just leave poor funny Rachel alone? If she deserves it, and she often seems to, I hope Bob writes about her every day. She gets to be a comedian when she wants to be and reporter when she claims to be that, and everybody should just shut up and like leave her alone? Mart made the same solid point that Bob often makes – namely, if you give a damn about ever getting Trump fans to see that he is doing terrible things wrong, you'll need to rely largely on a media infrastructure that seems at least theoretically capable of fair dealing, where Trump is concerned. It isn't pro-Trump to say this kind of thing, it is pro any possibility of real future success. This kind of "reporting" from Rachel only makes the divide more intractably large, even if it were defensible otherwise.

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  3. What Maddow can't fathom is that she is not a reporter even though she calls what she does reporting here. She's a comedian, entertainer like John Oliver. The things she says are just her take on matters. It's not news. Reporting is for news people. I know it's cable news but in this case it's not news it's entertainment, not anything that should be held to a standard. The proof is in the description of her show. It says it's just her take. despite what she says here, this bull crap about reporting.

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    1. "The things she says are just her take on matters"
      Hey, it's YOUR business if you want to defend Maddow against Somerby's criticism. I wouldn't, but you can if you want. Maddow thanks you, I'm sure!

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  4. Maddow clearly touched a nerve with her Niger reporting. The response has a professional touch, not the usual ham-fisted administration response. First, there is the piling on from several sources read by the left, and second, there is the non-denial denial without any actual refutation of her report.

    Seay says Maddow is mistaken because there is no evidence the attack was caused by the withdrawal of Chad troops. That isn't what Maddow alleged (or implied). Then Seay argues that the region of Niger where the Chad troops were fighting Boko Haram is too far from where the assault took place to have any connection with it.

    This ignores how the military works. US troops were present in support of the Nigerian troops. If extra Nigerian troops were required to replace the troops pulled out of the Diffa region by Chad, there would have been fewer troops active in the region where the US was supposedly helping. As a consequence, the US troops may have carried out actions themselves, exposing them to fire. The Chad troops didn't have to be where the US troops were in order for their withdrawal to have affected the American troops. Since even a moron could understand this, it seems Seay has some ulterior motive for so vociferously opposing Maddow's theory.

    Comparing Niger to Benghazi is specious since the Americans killed were not diplomats and they didn't require security themselves but were active special forces in place to assist Niger in its anti-terrorist activities. There is no similarity but Seay uses the comparison to evoke an emotional reaction in liberals.

    Seay says "Nigerien military forces are so weak that their presence likely would have made little different in the moment of crisis." And yet the American forces were not there in a military but in an advisory/training capacity. If the Nigerean troops are too weak to resist terrorists, what were American troops doing there?

    Then there is the involvement of Blackwater and Erik Prince. This is where I think this coordinated pushback against Maddow is coming from. Those guys are professionals and would know how to organize a disinformation campaign in the US. They would know who to pay and how to plant the news pieces. They wouldn't bother with Sanders and they would have enough leverage to get Trump to keep his stupid mouth shut, as he did again today, walking right by a reporter who asked what the soldiers were doing in Niger without saying a word. There has been complete twitter silence on a military action that would have evoked Trump's cowboy bravado under different circumstances.

    But Somerby is credulous and he will believe anything that is critical of Maddow. Palmer is fringey but he isn't often wrong. Somerby has a worse record when it comes to predictions about current events. Palmer's language is histrionic but his facts tend to pan out, eventually. I think Maddow is on to something and we will eventually find out what and it won't reflect well on Trump or Somerby.

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    1. "The things she says are just her take on matters"
      Hey, it's YOUR business if you want to defend Maddow against Somerby's criticism. I wouldn't, but you can if you want. Maddow thanks you, I'm sure!

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    2. @Anon 4:00pm: "The things she says are just her take on matters"
      I think you posted this in the wrong thread. The commenter above didn't say what was quoted here. That was from another comment by "Spatula Lafarge." Do try to keep up, Anon 4:00 pm.

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    3. It's YOUR business if you want to defend Maddow against Somerby's criticism. I wouldn't, but you can if you want. Maddow thanks you, I'm sure!

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    4. Huh, Anon 4:22? You respond to my correction of Anon 4:00pm's mistake with this? Your response is completely unrelated to my response (Anon 4:06).

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    5. That's to your original response, your defense of Maddow.It's your business if you want to defend Maddow against Somerby's criticism. You can if you want. Maddow thanks you, I'm sure!

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    6. Anon 4:54, you aren't making any sense. I'm not Anon 3:49pm. The fact that you must think so should trouble you. And posting the same thing over and over isn't healthy.

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    7. What you are saying now is completely unrelated to my response! I'm not anon 3:49 either! So that shows exactly what you know about things, doesn't it? The point is that your defense of Maddow as criticism against somerby is your business I'm sure should be thankful about it but you're the one who's reposting and copying and saying things over.

      I kick your ass.

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    8. @Anon 5:12:
      I never defended Maddow, nitwit. As far as 'kicking my ass', that would be a matter for the police...if you'd like to go there.

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    9. I'll take a tennis racket to your nose.

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    10. Yes, the international internet police. That totally makes sense. Just tell me where to show up.

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    11. @Anon 6:07:
      "Just tell me where to show up"
      Sure, no problem. Since you threatened me, give me your address and I'll send you the directions to your nearest police station, or полицейский участок, whichever is applicable.

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    12. 241 2nd Ave N, Minneapolis Minnesota

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  5. "Something good from Slate and The Huffington Post: Believe it or not, something good just happened with the left-leaning press corps."

    Left-leaning? You have gotta be kidding. Imperialist neolib-neocon scum is 'left-leaning' now?

    I sincerely hope you're being ironic here...

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    1. What would be ironic would be saying that Trump is a Republican. Or that Republicans care about the working man.

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    2. "Imperialist neolib-neocon ...."

      Nyet

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    3. "Imperialist neolib-neocon scum is 'left-leaning' now?"

      No. Neoliberal economics is a RIGHT WING ideology. It was pushed by Milton Friedman in the 1980s, and introduced to Britain and the US by Thatcher and Reagan. Once it was in place, any attempts to water it down were attacked by the right wing press, until former left wing parties such as Labour and the Democrats had to accept it as orthodoxy to get elected. Don’t blame the left wing for neoliberalism. It is a purely right wing construct. Check out Milton Friedman, and you’ll see it comes from the Right.

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    4. "It is a purely right wing construct."

      My point exactly.

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    5. Mao: neoliberal scum blah blah blah goebbelsian blah blah blah...Yawn.

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  6. This is on Trump, not Maddow. If Trump isn't going to provide even a vague explanation of what the troops were doing in Niger, then people are going to speculate. Calling such speculation conspiracy theories is loaded language. Maddow has not only the right but the obligation to explore what happened to those troops. She isn't a reporter -- she is a journalist and commentator, someone who interprets the news. This particular news is not only incomplete but gives every sign of being suppressed. That is when our liberal press needs to ask questions and try to shed light on what happened.

    So Trump needs to answer the press and let people know what the hell happened.

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    1. I am appalled that Somerby doesn't get this.

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  7. Hey, Bob, congrats (I guess?) on 'TDH/Maddow' being a troll farm trigger.

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    1. My guess: he's good with anything that increases clicks.

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    2. There are no ads on the site from which he could collect revenue so a lot or little clicks are irrelevant.

      What planet are you people from?

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  8. I have it on the best authority that media people, both left and right, shake their heads at the sad depths to which The Daily Howler has fallen. Once prized as a source for thoughtful media criticism, defending left-leaning politicians against spurious media attacks, the blog has now come to be identified, not with its positive advocacy, but with its increasingly negative, jaundiced views. Said one journalist, who did not wish to be identified by name, "It's sad, really. I can picture Somerby sitting in his lonely, darkened apartment, throwing darts at a picture of Rachel Maddow, issuing forth with ever more obsessive, illogical and intellectually dishonest posts. When he's not busy attacking her, he's doing his best to undermine liberals. Sean Hannity and I were just shaking our heads about it the other day, and laughing."

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    1. Actually the old Howler was better than that, and would take left leaning reporting to tasks when it was deserved. Sometimes, like on Mel Gibson, he could get it way wrong on minor stuff. I think it was when he decided he didn't have to review the Right anymore is when he lost his bearings. "O"Reilly Gets a Pass!!" Nice call, Bob.

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  9. If Willa is a professional writer, why didn't she say "Everyone who I know" instead of "Everyone that I know"?

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  10. On this issue Bob has been 100% correct.

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    1. It's interesting how the very same people who demanded that the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton in particular, should have known precisely what happened, every detail, from the moment it happened in Benghazi are now totally content to need to wait for the details of what happened in Niger 3 weeks since the deaths.

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