Catapulting The Propaganda, Con't

As I covered on Monday, The New Yorker's Jane Meyer dropped a piece that showed just how incestuous the relationship between the Trump regime and FOX News is, to the point FOX News should be considered Trump regime state media. It didn't help that Trump had hired FOX's news division director Bill Shine as White House Communications Director, either.

Now, just days after the piece made it clear that Democrats should be using subpoena power on Shine to answer a few dozen pressing questions, Shine has suddenly resigned from the White House to join Trump's 2020 campaign machine.

White House communications director Bill Shine has resigned his post and will become a senior adviser to President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, officials announced Friday.

Shine, a former top executive at Fox News before he was forced out in 2017, has worked in what's become a high-turnover position in the White House since July of last year.

"Serving President Trump and this country has been the most rewarding experience of my entire life. To be a small part of all this President has done for the American people has truly been an honor. I’m looking forward to working on President Trump’s re-election campaign and spending more time with my family," Shine said in a statement.

He tendered his resignation Thursday night and Trump accepted, officials said. Trump said in a statement that "We will miss him in the White House, but look forward to working together on the 2020 Presidential Campaign, where he will be totally involved."

Shine's resignation came just days after The New Yorker reported on Trump and his administration's unusually close relationship with Fox News, which is still paying out Shine's multi-million dollar contract, including the $8.4 million severance payment he got from the network.

Shine was the network's co-president, but was forced out after it emerged in lawsuits that he'd helped cover up allegations of sexual harassment. 

I mean, Trump really does need an expert on covering up sexual assault for 2020.  His last campaign guy is, you know, going to prison.

Catapulting The Propaganda

A bit of a Monday Long Read for you this morning, but it's a vital piece. New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer takes a hard look at FOX News and its parasitic relationship with the Trump regime as the network has shed any pretense of objectivity and comfortably settles into its role as state media.

The death of former FOX News head Roger Ailes and the White House hiring of Ailes's right-hand man, Bill Shine, as Communications Director has completed the network's transformation into the Trump Network, the kind of organ that you find in any autocrat's airwaves. The two have fed off each other to the point where they are inseparable.

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”

Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

It's not healthy, but it's what FOX News was always destined to become in the post-Obama era.  I have no doubt that Trump would have his own nightly hour show on FOX News if Clinton had won, denouncing the same investigation as a witch hunt.  All of Manafort's campaign wrongdoing would still be sending him to jail, along with Roger Cohen and Roger Stone's dirty tricks, and Trump would be screaming for his followers to all but start shooting liberals.

It's what Trump expected after he lost.  He didn't, and the monster and the creator have become one.

Last Call For Trump's State Media

FOX News is Trump State Media, and they're not even pretending anymore that there's any separation between the White House and the cable network.

It is “in the public interest” for the White House's top communicator to be excused from federal ethics laws so he can meet with Fox News, according to President Donald Trump’s top lawyer.

Bill Shine, Trump’s newly minted communications director, and Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economist, who worked at CNBC before his White House post, have both been excused from provisions of the law, which seeks to prevent administration officials from advancing the financial interests of relatives or former employers.

“The Administration has an interest in you interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

Kudlow, a former CNBC host, received a similar waiver allowing him to communicate with former colleagues.

Including Shine and Kudlow, the White House has granted a total of 20 waivers to provisions of various federal ethics laws and the ethics pledge that President Trump instituted by executive order the week he took office. Federal agencies have granted many more such waivers.

The news media has been a particular object of those waivers. Early in the administration, after The Daily Beast questioned the propriety of then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s communications with employees of Breitbart News, the pro-Trump outlet he led before and after his White House tenure, the White House issued a blanket ethics waiver allowing all senior West Wing appointees to freely communicate with the press.

That move was widely seen as an effort to retroactively cover Bannon for previous meetings that would’ve otherwise run afoul of ethics rules—a move that may itself have constituted a violation of those rules.

FOX News employees run the White House, and the White House runs FOX News.  Considering nearly half of Republicans want Trump to have the power to exterminate news organizations, it won't be long before FOX News is the only game left in DC.  Who will stop him?  A Roberts Court with Kavanaugh on board as the fifth vote?  A GOP Congress?  None of the checks and balances work right now.  Our last chance is November, and both sides know it.

Should Trump succeed in making sure the Democrats don't control the House or Senate in January, we're done as a nation and a republic.

The White House Press Gets A Shine Job

We live in a country where the leader rails against the press as enemies of the people and reporters are shot and killed on newsroom floors.  This isn't some distant communist regime or fictional banana republic, this is the current reality of America today, and Trump just upped the ante on his way with a free press.

The White House took retaliatory action against Kaitlan Collins, a White House reporter for CNN, after Collins asked President Trump questions at an Oval Office photo op on Wednesday. 

CNN, rival networks, and the White House Correspondents Association all spoke out against the administration's action. 

On Wednesday afternoon Collins was representing all the television networks as the "pool reporter" in the room during a meeting between Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission. 

As is customary, Collins lobbed a few questions at the president. She asked about Vladimir Putin and Michael Cohen. Trump did not answer the questions. 

Later in the afternoon, the White House surprised the press corps by announcing a press availability with Trump and Juncker in the Rose Garden. It was said to be open to all press, not just the small pool. 

A few minutes later, Collins was asked to come to Bill Shine's office. Shine, a former co-president of Fox News, is the new deputy chief of staff for communications. Shine and press secretary Sarah Sanders met Collins there. 

"They said 'You are dis-invited from the press availability in the Rose Garden today,'" Collins said in an interview. "They said that the questions I asked were inappropriate for that venue. And they said I was shouting." 

A video clip of the exchange shows that Collins was speaking the same way journalists in the press pool usually speak. 

Collins said she reacted by saying, "You're banning me from an event because you didn't like the questions I asked." 

Collins said Shine and Sanders asserted that "we're not banning your network. Your photographers can still come. Your producers can still come. But you are not invited to the Rose Garden today."

This is definitely the work of disgraced former FOX News chief Bill Shine as the White House's new communications head, a move so blatantly obvious and shocking that even White House State Media took notice.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents reporters seeking access to the White House, also issued a statement protesting the action. 

“We strongly condemn the White House’s misguided and inappropriate decision today to bar one of our members from an open press event after she asked questions they did not like,” wrote WHCA president Olivier Knox. “This type of retaliation is wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak. It cannot stand. Reporters asking questions of powerful government officials, up to and including the President, helps hold those people accountable.” 

Collins, who referred questions to CNN representatives, detailed the episode on CNN, prompting anchor Wolf Blitzer to say the White House should issue a formal apology. “This is outrageous,” said Blitzer, a former White House correspondent. “It doesn’t happen and shouldn’t happen in the United States.” 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who was on CNN when the news was announced, said, “This kind of, really, violation of a reporter’s rights is an offense against the First Amendment interests of all of us.”

In response to the incident, Fox News anchor Bret Baier tweeted his support: “As a member of the White House Press pool- @FoxNews stands firmly with @CNN on this issue and the issue of access.”

For the WHCA to actually develop a spinal column and for anyone from FOX News to make a peep over this makes this huge.  Steve M. points out over at his place that Collins was a former Daily Caller reporter before joining CNN, and that's why FOX's Bret Baier is clearly worried.

Still though, keep an eye on Bill Shine, and keep in mind his culture of constant sexual harassment when running FOX News.  It's no wonder then that his first two notable acts upon joining the White House was to punish two conservative media women for not being sufficiently deferential to Trump: to hang Sarah Huckabee Sanders out to dry earlier in the week and to punish Kaitlan Collins yesterday.

Shine is sending out a message to his own staff and now to the WH press corps.  The question now is if anyone will choose to do anything about it.

A Sudden PR Opening At Mordor, Inc

Now that former disgraced FOX News chief Bill Shine (canned a year ago for aiding and abetting Roger Ailes's culture of sexual harassment at the network) has settled into his new job as Trump Regime Propaganda Head, it seems his first job is to shuffle the deck chairs on the Trumptanic and to let Politico know that current Mouth of Sauron Sarah Huckabee Sanders will soon be departing.

Bill Shine, the newly appointed White House deputy chief of staff for communications, has quietly begun asking friends and associates for their opinions about who could succeed Sanders if she leaves in the coming months, according to two people familiar with those conversations.

Shine, in a brief interview, denied having such conversations. “I have not had a meeting or discussion about this,” he said last week, noting he had been on the job for only a short time. Shine praised Sanders and called her a “total team player."

Although no decisions have been made about successors, an unofficial shortlist is already emerging among Trump White House alumni, former campaign aides and other backers of the president.

At the top of the list is Heather Nauert, the current State Department spokeswoman and former Fox News host. Nauert has impressed White House aides with her steady performances in Foggy Bottom. Multiple people close to the White House pointed out that Nauert remained in Trump’s good graces even when the president soured on former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Nauert’s Fox News pedigree, paired with her close relationship with Trump and her ability to stay on message and remain calm under pressure, makes her a “no-brainer” for the job, according to one person close to the White House. Nauert, who did not respond to a request for comment, has told associates that she’s unsure whether she would want the job, but people who know her believe she’d take it if asked.

Other possibilities include Bill Hemmer, a Fox News reporter; Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host who recently left the network to join a pro-Trump outside group; Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh, who worked closely with the White House on its overhaul of the tax code and used to be a Fox News contributor; and White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah.

Guilfoyle is dating Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., a fact that could complicate her appointment as press secretary, and several associates of the president said she is unlikely to get the job.

“There will be people who will want the job,” said former George W. Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. “The best way to get the job is not to apply.”

The prospect of losing Sanders, who is widely liked in the White House and is seen by her colleagues as a deft communicator and defender of the president, has some close to Trump in panic mode, worrying that it’ll be difficult to find a suitable replacement who can stand up to withering scrutiny from the public.

“Who would want that job?” one former administration official asked, summing up the feelings of many in Washington, who note that being the public face of Trump’s presidency can be a thankless and frequently impossible task.

Now I'm not sure if Sanders wants out, or if Shine doesn't think she's up to it any more (and both can be true) but to have your new boss come in and then two weeks after he arrives a story pops up in Politico about your eventual replacement, well, you're not long for your current position, sorry.  I won't be sad to see her go, and I don't have any sympathy for her enabling this regime to lie on a daily basis to the American people and the world.

It's clear that Shine was brought in to coordinate the regime's response with the state media officials at his old network as the Mueller probe moves into the endgame stages, and Sanders is not up to that task. Her replacement has to be far more ruthless and sinister instead of the "slightly baffled soccer mom about to call your district manager" routine Sanders brought to the table for the last year or so.

I do know this, whoever does replace Sanders will have to be a better liar than she is, because she's terrible at it.  Her tell that she's lying is "her mouth is open".  And frankly, I'd like her to get a new job at a federal prison as an inmate depending on what she was party to. 

Of course, that goes for a lot of current regime employees.