Time for Some Press Pooling Against Pompeo

Sometimes, the press shares. It isn't often.

The media are extremely competitive. Their goals are pretty simple: Get it right, and get it first. One runs into the other sometimes, and it's then that they lose street credibility.

But other times, it's the big picture we need to keep in mind: the very right of the press to function, to gather information and present it. Relative to government, it's the one protection we have to know and understand what our elected officials do so we either keep them elected--or not.

But the present administration has figured some things out. It utilizes and manipulates media to work against itself and, in effect, against us. Spreading disinformation has become an art form, and these people are good at it. An article about the ever-obsequious Rudy Giuliani in last Sunday's New York Times took a moment to explain it:

Shamelessness is not an art or even a skill. It's simply a way of operating in the world that informs all of your actions and interactions, for good or ill. It's a state of mind that [Giuliani] shares not only with [45] but also with a growing number of blatantly dishonest, nakedly opportunistic political figures. What creates the conditions in which such truly shameless figures can thrive? In 2020, the obvious answer is the rise of an all-consuming media ecosystem in which truth is no longer meaningfully litigated. The foundation of that system is partisan media outlets, which allow political leaders--whether [45] on Fox News, Boris Johnson in the Daily Mail or Jair Bolsonaro on the Brazilian network Record TV--to spread disinformation to their supporters with almost no pushback. But it's also enabled by more politically-neutral media organizations, which struggle with how to present the daily onslaught of false claims from public media, which makes no distinctions between truth and lies, and what you end up with is a political conversation without consequences that favors the most outrageous voices. If you reliably make over-the-top claims, you will be rewarded with attention, and Giuliani never fails to make over-the-top claims.

And, of course, so does 45, sometimes many times daily. He's a shyster/huckster who juggles exaggeration with true meaning, so in publishing such comments, one never knows whether he means them or not, and it's left to him as to whether to apply such meaning whenever he feels like it. This projects a kind of medium-warm fear that is never far from being heated to boiling over, as in, Maybe he does mean it. 

Everyone knows this. It keeps the attention right on him. And that is Job One of anyone who gets near him. And this article, written by Jonathan Mahler, points out that the mainstream media becomes the unwitting purveyors of this phenomenon, giving the worst possible person the best possible advantage.

So, too, is it with the unctuous, imperious Mike Pompeo, a 45-wannabe who has taken Mary Louise Kelly of NPR to his devious woodshed for supposedly lying to him about doing an interview the other day in which she challenged him to say exactly how he defended former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich (who was very clearly not defended, because had he done his job and done so, he wouldn't be Secretary of State for long). He tried to humiliate her by making her point out Ukraine on an unmarked map (Kelly has a master's degree in European History from Harvard, so good luck with making her look bad), and then tried to tell the world that she pointed to Bangladesh, which I'm saying here is a damn lie. He's simply taken a page from 45 and utilized it. In backing him publicly the other day, 45, confirmed it.

But Pompeo's not finished. He's banned NPR on his next foreign trip. Press pooling is done for various reasons, but now would not be a bad idea to do it again.

To wit: Make a collective statement by saying what Admiral McRaven said to 45 when the latter took security clearance away from former CIA Director John Brennan: If you do it to him, you should do it to us, too, because we don't want to be involved with this. This is an embarrassment to our country.

At least a collective statement of support for Kelly would be in order. That would be getting up in his face to say: You're actually chicken, big little man, dishing it out without being able to take it. You are the snowflake, Jack. Then I suppose he'd only allow Fox and Breitbart on the plane, though, but the media can get their own transportation if they care enough. And with such reporters involved, the price would be small compared to being shut out from coverage.

But what's "being shut out" mean? If he tells Fox and Breitbart something that they get a 'scoop' on, then the mainstream media will spend the time checking it out and following up and saying it's the same nonsense that they're always putting out there. Their version of "truth" almost never actually is truth (as Rudy Giuliani has said, but that's to prepare us to ignore the mainstream press and rely on the shysters for non-information).

Prime example: The Iranian missile counterattack. First report: No casualties. Second report: 33 casualties. Third report: 33 brain injuries. Latest report: 50 serious brain injuries. And we still don't know who they are. It's an official, and officious, strategy of walking things back.

So who loses at all when Mike Pompeo spews nonsense on a flight? Nobody. It's just another way of saying that he'll tell someone whatever he wants, and just try to discover the whole truth. Just try.

It's a challenge which, I predict, is coming to the whole press from the whole 45 gang of thieves soon--especially if the Bolton intervention into the impeachment process bears fruit. It will signify a new level of fear: not from the press, but of it. It will spark a stifling of press freedoms that we have not yet seen. Just wait. It's right around the corner.

Our challenge to democracy may just be getting started. Its depths are relatively unfathomed, but may be accelerated in the aftermath of impeachment. That day is coming. But the press has to fight back. It has to. Backing away will just encourage these bullies, as it does for all bullies. We can't let the bullies win.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark