The Rise Of Trump's State Media

The running joke for years is that FOX News has been the propaganda arm of the GOP and in many ways it has been, replete with attacks on Democrats and liberals for well over a decade, but here in the Trump era there's a far more sinister attack on on the nation's free press, and it isn't coming from cable news at all.

Rather it's coming from your local network news affiliate, and those affiliates are increasingly owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative far-right media conglomerate that has been quietly buying up the news stations that you've watched and trusted for years.  I've talked about Sinclair before as they moved to buy dozens of local TV stations in markets across the country and then forced those stations to run pro-Trump segments on their local news broadcasts and "terror alert" segments that attack immigrants and especially Muslims.

Now Sinclair is forcing their local anchors to attack non-Sinclair stations as "fake news".

Seattle-based ABC affiliate KOMO-TV says its owner, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, is forcing its reporters to air pre-scripted segments about fake news media, in an attempt to undermine non-Sinclair stations.

Sinclair has long produced “must-run” segments for its stations, dispersing them to its various subsidiaries and requiring the local stations to run controversial, typically conservative commentary promos alongside their regular news coverage. However, in recent weeks, it’s begun turning its sights on the competition, throwing in mentions of “fake news,” among other things.

“The promos, which began airing on the station last week, are part of a Sinclair campaign that forces local anchors to read Sinclair-written scripts warning of the dangers of ‘one-sided news stories plaguing our country,'” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on Thursday.

The Post-Intelligencer published one of the scripts this week; in it, the authors lament the “trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories” and the “sharing of biased and false news,” referencing President Trump’s preferred term for the press, “fake news.”

These Sinclair stations are literally being given scripts to read, because they are Trump state media stations now.

(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.

(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

Don't believe me?  Here's video of Sinclair station anchors all over the country in the last couple of weeks reading this exact script.

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018

This would be cute if Sinclair wasn't so obviously sinister.  And yes, these are all Sinclair stations in America.

Sinclair regularly runs disinformation segments favorable to President Trump: one of its staples is a recurring pre-taped segment featuring Sinclair’s chief political analyst, Russian-born former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn. As ThinkProgress previously reported, those segments frequently include misleading talking points and misinformation from the Trump administration, packaged as actual political analysis and news coverage.

Another previously recurring segment, “Behind the Headlines” with Mark Hyman, Sinclair’s vice president for corporate relations, frequently parroted administration talking points on controversial subjects like health care, immigration, free speech, and extremism, functioning as right-wing and white nationalist propaganda.

More recently, Sinclair pushed a must-run segment featuring former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka complaining about the existence of the so-called “Deep State,” and unelected group of government officials who are supposedly manipulating policy and controlling the public narrative. The segment was reportedly produced by Sinclair national correspondent Kristine Frazao, who previously worked at Russian state-run media outlet RT.

If you're getting your news from one of these stations, be aware they are Sinclair-owned and producing pro-Trump propaganda on a regular basis.  They have been for years now.  Here in Cincy they run the CBS and CW affiliate, WKRC, the area's most popular local news station, where you get happy stories like this about the "Deep State".

Welcome to the era of the regime's state-run media.  You're living in it, and odds are increasingly goo that you and your family are getting their local news from it too.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Ahh, it's Friday News Dump time for more Trump/Russia fun, and this week doesn't disappoint.  First up, more news on Donny Junior's meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016:

Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.” 

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim. 

The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said. 

In the past week, Ms. Veselnitskaya’s allegations — that major Democratic donors were guilty of financial fraud and tax evasion — have been embraced at the highest levels of the Russian government. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics. A state-run television network recently made them the subject of two special reports, featuring interviews with Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Chaika.

The matching messages point to a synchronized information campaign. Like some other Russian experts, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow with the nonprofit American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, said they indicate that Ms. Veselnitskaya’s actions “were coordinated from the very top.”

The Trump Tower meeting is of keen interest to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as he investigates Russian efforts to help Mr. Trump’s campaign. At least one participant at the meeting has already testified before a federal grand jury.

We're now seeing what was waiting in store for a Clinton administration if Hillary had won: a coordinated GOP push along with Russia to go after the biggest Democratic donors for tax evasion.  This was planned from the beginning as part of the arsenal Putin had on hand to bring the US to its knees, buried under disinformation and Republican shamelessness.

As I've said before, the GOP/Russia side has moved to a new level as the Mueller investigation draws closer to completion.  The rush to discredit Mueller and Comey as working for the Clintons is laughable, but the goal is to put enough doubt on the side of the balance that the legitimacy of any recommended indictments are thrown into question, enough so that naturally it will be acceptable when Jeff Sessions and the DOJ take no action...and maybe decide instead to take action against Clinton.

Vox's Zach Beauchamp sets up the playing field for story number two on Cambridge Analytica.

The second big piece of news this week concerns Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based company that ran the Trump campaign’s data operation beginning in June 2016. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Cambridge as part of his look into the Trump-Russia mess, with the company’s work with disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn raising a particularly big red flag. 

“We know that congressional and DOJ investigators believe that Trump’s campaign might have helped guide Russia’s voter targeting scheme and that Flynn, who worked for Trump’s campaign and with Cambridge Analytica, is suspected of having extensive ties with Russian operatives,” my colleague Sean Illing explains in a vital profile of the group. 

The scoop this week, first reported by the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff on Wednesday morning, is that Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks head Julian Assange to try to acquire 33,000 emails that had been deleted from Clinton’s private server. 

This matters for two reasons. First, it suggests a willingness on the part of Trump allies to reach out to foreign sources with anti-American agendas (Assange is no fan of the USA). Second, it could in theory point to a pathway through which information traveled from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign: We know that Assange published emails Russia passed to him after stealing them from Clinton allies. 

“If true, HOLY COW!” tweeted Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who tracks Russian involvement in US politics. “US political campaign seeking help of US adversary doing damage to US, to then damage another American.” 

This, like the Post’s Clinton scoop, is legitimately interesting — but is also being overinterpreted by people who believe it confirms their overarching view of the Russia scandal. 

First, there’s no evidence (yet) that the Trump campaign was behind Nix’s outreach. While he informed Trump allies of the idea of working with WikiLeaks afterward, there’s no reason to believe they told him to write the email — which suggests it wasn’t a “political campaign seeking help of US adversary,” as Watts wrote. 

“No one from the Trump campaign was copied on the email,” CNN reported in a follow-up to the Daily Beast’s piece. “It is not clear whether he sent it before or after Cambridge Analytica was brought onto the campaign.” 

Second, and more importantly, there’s no evidence that the Cambridge-WikiLeaks connection actually went anywhere. Assange tweeted that he refused to help Nix; while he’s not especially credible, that’s also what Woodruff’s sources said. 

“Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own,” she writes. 

So while the Cambridge Analytica report is certainly suggestive, it doesn’t on its own confirm very much.

For now, yes.  But I'm betting the other shoe drops soon, and this is where things get very nasty for the Trump regime when they do.  That this is happening at the same time you're seeing things like former Trump regime adviser Sebastian Gorka all but call for Hillary Clinton to be executed for treason is no coincidence.

The serious stuff is just starting.

And that brings us to the big reveal tonight from CNN.

A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter. 

The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.

This explains the sudden move this week  to discredit the Mueller investigation and deflect to "Clinton collusion".  They knew the charges were coming.  They know somebody's doing the perp walk next week.

Somebody with ties to Trump.

On Friday, top lawyers who are helping to lead the Mueller probe, including veteran prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, were seen entering the court room at the DC federal court where the grand jury meets to hear testimony in the Russia investigation. 

Reporters present saw a flurry of activity at the grand jury room, but officials made no announcements.

We're entering the next phase of the game.  The sides are on the field and awaiting the fight. Still don't believe me?

Here we go.

Last Call For The Two-Front War

Both Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka have been booted from the White House, but it doesn't mean they are gone from the Trump regime at all.  In fact they both are vowing to take on the two-thirds plus of Americans who disapprove of Trump and destroy them by any means necessary.  Bannon will take on Republicans and conservatives who don't swear allegiance to Dear Leader...

Steve Bannon taunted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday and vowed to challenge any Senate Republican who doesn’t publicly condemn attacks on President Donald Trump.

“Yeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. They’ve all left you. We’ve cut your oxygen off,” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said during a speech to religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

Referencing Shakespeare, Bannon compared McConnell to Julius Caesar, adding that lawmakers are wondering who will emerge as Brutus, the character who reluctantly joins in on the assassination of Caesar for the benefit of Rome.

Bannon, now the executive chairman of Breitbart News, bashed Senate Republicans by name for not publicly distancing themselves from Sen. Bob Corker’s criticism of Trump, reserving particular animus for Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Dean Heller (Nev.) and Deb Fischer (Neb.).

“Nobody can run and hide on this one,” he said. “These folks are coming for you. The days of taking a few nice conservative votes and hiding are over.”

 ...while Gorka is vowing to destroy anyone to the left of Trump.

During his speech to the Values Voter Summit today, Sebastian Gorkasaid liberals who were celebrating him leaving the White House should be more worried now.

Gorka spoke before Steve Bannon did and told the crowd not to be so troubled by the fact that the two of them left the White House.

“This is much larger than the White House,” he said. “This is a national movement to retake our country.”

He noted how liberals celebrated when both he and Bannon left, but after once again invoking Star Wars, he said this:

“The left has no idea how much more damage we can do to them as private citizens, as people unfettered by being part of the U.S. government.”

Those who oppose Trump must be exterminated, you see.

And that above sentence may not be figurative for much longer.