Spurned Reporters Should Dump Trump Briefings, Turn to Investigative Journalism

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

DATE

onald Trump was unhappy Saturday that the major media had neglected to report a point made by Herman Cain in an interview on Fox. Cain alleged that in Barack Obama’s first month, the Federal budget deficit rose $200 bn., but in Trump’s first month it fell to only $12 bn. Obviously, Obama had nothing to do with the deficit in his first month– that was a result of the 2008 collapse, which had something to do with Republican policies of deregulating the banks and other mortgage lenders and declining to exercise any oversight over sketchy practices. And Trump had nothing to do with the deficit during his first month in office. That was a result of Obama’s 8 years of pulling the economy back out of the toilet to which the Republican Party had consigned it.

Trump’s petty attacks on journalists as enemies of America, as the worst people, and as irrationally denying him the credit for his 4 weeks of economic turnaround, are deeply worrisome to many Americans sensitive to the danger of a spiral down into authoritarian rule. William H. McRaven, the retired four-star admiral and former Navy Seal who led the raid against Usama Bin Laden, called Trump’s remark on the press as an enemy of the people “the greatest threat to democracy” he has ever seen.

Trump’s immature sidelining of reporters on his enemy’s list kept rolling on this weekend. White House spokesman Sean Spicer was set to do an on-camera press briefing on Friday, and then Donald Trump spoke at the conservative gathering CPAC. It is a custom that the spokesman doesn’t do an on-camera event the same day the president gives a substantial address. So Spicer switched to doing what is called a “gaggle,” a smaller briefing in his office attended only be a few reporters in a pool who then would convey his remarks to others.

Spicer pared down the invitee list to the bare bones. He excluded the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, the Daily Mail and Politico, among others. He allowed ABC, Fox News, Breitbart News, Reuters and the Washington Times. Breitbart is not a news outlet, but a propaganda arm of elements of the Ku Klux Klan who wear suits rather than white robes.

The exclusions were so egregious and petty that the Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine declined to be present. The Washington Post and McClatchy did not know about the disinvitees, and said that if they had been aware of what was going on, they would not have attended, either.

Since Spicer often conveys fake news (the Atlanta Attack) or pro-Trump propaganda at his briefings, it isn’t clear that the excluded media were exactly missing anything.

Then Trump announced that he would be the first president since Tricky Dick Nixon voluntarily to skip the annual dinner of the White House correspondents, where in recent decades the president and the press engaged in some good-natured ribbing. Trump appears to have felt humiliated at one of these events by remarks of then President Barack Obama, pushing back against Trump’s outrageous lies about Obama’s birthplace.

But Spicer’s and Trump’s attempts to exclude so many journalists from a briefing may be all to the good.

Something is broken in American journalism. Maybe it is the “inverted pyramid” whereby US reporters put the “most important thing” first in the article. It has been pointed out that this way of organizing the article gives an unfair advantage to a duplicitous administration, since anything the president says goes first in the article. Bush and his people used this principle to game the press all the time. (When the scandal about US personnel torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq broke on a Thursday evening, Bush quickly came out and condemned the practice. The Friday headlines were “President condemns torture at Abu Ghraib.”)

Or maybe it is access journalism, whereby an administration adopts a few favored writers and feeds them scoops that it suits the administration to go on the front page.

Or maybe it is the news conference. Why privilege an administration’s narrative about itself by doing articles based on nothing more than hot air coming from the general direction of the West Wing?

Most major newspapers in the US, when there were major print newspapers, used to have an investigative journalism team. With the decline of ad revenue and the hard times on which journalism has fallen, investigative journalism has often been abandoned. Administrations and the Washington bureaucracy don’t like a young journalist nosing around. ProPublica, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and some other independent organizations (often with limited resources) have been left to try to fill the gap left when big media cut back on investigative reporting.

But we need that back, big time, in this administration. Everywhere you dig in Trump’s cabinet, you find bodies. So instead of sitting in a room being fed falsehoods by Spicer or Trump, best for the journalists to be working contacts in the White House or at NSC or the Pentagon to get the real story. Enough people in Washington are appalled by the Trump-Bannon attempt to fascize America that they seem willing to leak damaging information all on their own. How much better if a trained journalist got those stories through initiative.

So here’s to Trump excluding virtually all the newspapers and cable channels. Let him. Go get the scoops he doesn’t want you to have.

Someone (probably not George Orwell) once said, ““News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” Whoever said it, truer words were never spoken.

We need less advertising (or “public relations” in some versions), and a helluva lot more journalism these days.

Yes, Mass Deportations Are Coming. And We Know Why.

By Francis Wilkinson, Bloomberg

26 February 17

here are two main questions about President Donald Trump's recently issued immigration policies. First, is the administration embarking on a campaign of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants? Second, if so, why?

Trump's executive orders on border security and immigration require aggressive deportations, which are facilitated by loosening definitions of criminal behavior and making it easier to affix the "criminal" label to almost any undocumented immigrant.

Undocumented immigration is a risky business. From illegal border crossings to making fraudulent representations -- using a phony Social Security number, for example -- many undocumented immigrants improvise to survive. Somewhere along the line, most break a law -- even if it's by driving with a broken tail light. Under Trump's new orders, any such offense is grounds for deportation.    

On Feb. 20, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued two implementation memos that lay out clear directions and protocols for mass deportations.

"We are charged with faithfully executing the laws of the United States and we will not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement," he wrote. Indeed the only class of undocumented immigrants that is clearly exempt -- for now -- is the Dreamers, the fewer than 800,000 immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and registered with the federal government under President Barack Obama.

While Trump decides the fate of Dreamers, immigration agents have been explicitly authorized to pursue other undocumented immigrants wherever they live, work, travel or assemble.

"Department personnel may initiate enforcement actions against removable aliens encountered during the performance of their official duties," Kelly wrote. If no evidence of even a minor crime exists, ICE agents may use their own judgment in determining whether an immigrant is a threat to public safety and thus subject to removal. In addition, DHS intends to enlist local law enforcement to help with deportations.

The effects of these changes on enforcement promise to be stark. Indeed, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that the new policies would “take the shackles off” Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol employees.

So we have a new policy that promises to identify millions of undocumented immigrants as criminals. We have memos from the head of DHS authorizing agents to remove all such criminals. We have new policies to make enforcement actions more aggressive and removals speedier. Finally, we have a direction from Kelly "to expeditiously hire 10,000 agents and officers, as well as additional operational and mission support and legal staff necessary to hire and support their activities."

Roughly 5,800 ICE employees are Enforcement and Removal Officers. Kelly's surge would take that number to almost 16,000, with still more staff to support their removal efforts.

There isn't much doubt about what this adds up to. Trump has laid the legal basis for mass deportations, and Kelly has organized his department to conduct them. In addition, he seeks a drastically larger deportation force, the purpose of which can only be more deportations.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told a town hall in January that "if you're worried about, you know, some deportation force coming, knocking on your door this year, don't worry about that."

Not everyone in the audience was reassured. Because Trump had explicitly promised to deliver pain to undocumented immigrants, Ryan was pressed on the issue again. "Everybody thinks that there's some deportation force that's being assembled," Ryan responded. "That's not happening."

Implicit in Ryan's denial was the notion that a deportation force was too pointless, too arbitrary, too ugly, too thuggish for any responsible American leader to undertake. That was Jan. 12. Yet here we are.

Congress has not yet funded additional ICE agents. But even without a bigger force, deportations are poised to proceed at a rapid pace, and the targets will be arbitrary. The fear and uncertainty that arbitrary detention and deportation breeds will likely add high numbers of "self-deportations" to the growing numbers of forced deportations.

Most undocumented immigrants have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade. Several million have U.S.-born children. Others have American spouses. According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 87 percent of the undocumented population were not priorities for deportation under the Barack Obama administration's 2014 guidelines.

There are fewer undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today than when Obama was elected president in 2008. Mexico, historically the largest source of undocumented immigrants, is growing older and wealthier, sending fewer people abroad in search of work. The flow of illegal immigration has slowed significantly. As my colleague Noah Smith wrote, if there ever was an immigration crisis in the U.S., it is over.  

There are legitimate questions about immigrants using illegal crossings or visa overstays to gain relative advantage over others who wait in a backlogged system. Likewise, blocking illegal immigration altogether is an impossible but understandable goal. But what is achieved by deporting millions of settled immigrants already on the inside, most of whom are integrated into families, communities and economies? (Relationships aside, the disruption to labor and housing markets is significant.) What public goal does mass deportation achieve?

During his presidential campaign, Trump said that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is far larger than the 11 million or so cited by the U.S. government and by experts at both liberal and conservative immigration groups. "I am now hearing it's 30 million, it could be 34 million, which is a much bigger problem," he said.

He repeatedly highlighted violent crime committed by immigrants, and even opened his campaign by calling Mexicans "rapists."

Trump's falsehoods and exaggerations always have a point, even if it's only self-aggrandizement or petty score settling. He hypes the numbers and dangers associated with immigrants because he wants Americans to fear the immigrants who live here, just as he wants Americans to fear the Muslim refugees seeking safety here. Meanwhile, Trump's purported reverence for "law and order" is laughably situational.

Demagogy is always frightening. But like its local variant, bullying, it's also boring and predictable. Trump sows fear and division routinely, because he benefits from directing his supporters' attention toward enemies.

He may benefit from scapegoating immigrants, but the U.S. will not. Businesses will suffer. Wealth will be lost. The character of the nation will be challenged, and likely sullied.

It's important to keep in mind, as the deportations ramp up in the months ahead, the families and lives that will be destroyed. It's equally important to remember why: not for national security, not in pursuit of law and order, not because the American public demands it, but simply because an insecure president is desperate to appear "strong," and undocumented immigrants are easily bullied.