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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Court Says Bill Barr Lied. Why Didn't the Media?
Also, who quotes Elliott Abrams as an authority on human rights?

I had initially planned to write a feature about the fact that, as this
Times report

noted (as did this report in the Post
),
"Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in
Washington said in a ruling

late Monday that the Justice Department's obfuscation appeared to be
part of a pattern

in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the
public about the [Mueller] investigation." The Times further noted that
Jackson "also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the
investigation's findings in a letter

summarizing the 448-page report

before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been
exonerated
,"
and further decried the manner in which Barr's "characterization of
what he'd hardly had time to skim, much less study" defined the
reaction to the much-anticipated report. I wrote about this episode
extensively in Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is
Worse
,
but was struggling with how to boil down my point to a manageable length
for this post. The point was that the very same media companies that are
reporting on this now were more than happy to play along with Barr's
strategy at the time, failing more often than not to point out the
obvious dishonesty involved in Barr's spinning of the strategy. The
media's validation of Barr's lies was ultimately what made those
lies largely successful. (Here

is a typical example of the Times' tendency to bury the truth beneath
a mountain of both-sidesism bullshit.)

Thankfully, I suppose, my friend Eric Boehlert beat me to the job. Read
him here
. The
larger point, however, is that so many in the media treat politics as if
the media play no role in creating the perceptions they report on in
voter surveys and elections. But they clearly do, and countless academic
studies have repeatedly demonstrated this. Here
's one.

According to this item
,
three Democratic representatives are hoping to talk Joe Biden and Tony
Blinken into picking their former colleague Robert Wexler to be U.S.
ambassador to Israel over the recently floated favorite, Tom Nides
. I
hope they succeed. Wexler inches toward the left side of Democratic
debates on Israel, while all I need to know about Nides is that he used
to work for Joe Lieberman

(who is perhaps only the second-most hawkish person named "Lieberman
"
when it comes to Israel, but it's close).

What I really want to talk about, however, is this related Jewish
Telegraphic Agency item

by Ron Kampeas about the fight over the potential pick for the top human
rights role at State. I have no opinion about the likely nominee, Sarah
Margon. What interests (or should I say "infuriates") me is Kampeas's
decision to rely on Elliott Abrams as validator for her bona fides. In
picking Abrams, Kampeas is continuing the decades-long whitewashing of
not only a man convicted of lying to Congress (and recommended for
disbarment in the District of Columbia), but more importantly one of the
few ex-U.S. officials who can be said, without qualification or
ideological impetus, to have worked (in Ronald Reagan's State
Department) purposely to enable and defend "acts of genocide" (in the
words of Guatemala's United Nations-backed Commission for Historical
Clarification) in Central America. Now, Abrams has somehow become a
validator of people's human rights credentials? I have written about
this issue, one might say obsessively, here
, here
, here
,
here , here
,
and elsewhere. (I have been covering Abrams's career for literally 34
years, beginning here
.) I am
not exactly Seymour Hersh; all of this information is widely available.
Yet Abrams is still treated as a totally respectable fellow, with a
fancy appointment at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a go-to
source by the mainstream media. This says many things about our media,
about what remains of the foreign-policy establishment, and about the
pre-Trump Republican Party, all of them deeply depressing from the
standpoint of America actually caring about human rights, let alone the
prevention of mass murder by the nations we armed during the Cold War.

Speaking of Human Rights Watch (and depression), here is the depressing
piece I wrote about the HRW report on Israel and apartheid
.

And speaking (yet again) of Jews, if your concerns in life include
"decolonizing racism ... cisheteronormativity, ableism, and classism"
(and neoliberalism) in relation to "uninterrogated categories beyond
overdetermined, conventional paths of thinking, positioning us to
provincialize (be attuned to the contingency of) rather than naturalize
(unquestioningly reiterate) contemporary assumptions and ideas" in the
field of Jewish studies, then this

is what you will want to read next (though perhaps also this

is what you will want, as suggested, "for starters").

Back to baseball: How heartbreaking it must have been for Orioles
pitcher John Means to have lost his perfect game

to a catcher's dropped third strike. I was already thinking about
dropped third strikes when the Phillies beat the Mets, 2-1, and scored
both runs on another one last week. Talk about So Many Ways to Lose

...

I'm taking this opportunity to plug that wonderful book a second time.
Way back in 1975-and here is the real justification for this item-I
read a New Yorker profile of Cary Grant by Pauline Kael, called "The Man
from Dream City
,"
and it made me want to become a writer. I reread it every few years and
it makes me sad to feel how short I've fallen. Now, I can't believe
I'm saying this, but that Mets book by Devin Gordon (whom I've never
encountered before in print or in person) reminds me of Kael's
magnificent profile in its sharp and knowing humor and the implicit
conspiracy it succeeds in creating between writer and reader. I don't
know if it would work for a non-Mets fan, but I'm willing to recommend
it as a stellar example, along with Kael, of a certain kind of wise
guy/wise gal prose that makes one feel less alone in the world and maybe
even makes one want to be a writer (though I am definitely not
recommending the latter).

On the Jacob deGrom watch, meanwhile, baseball's
best-pitcher-in-a-generation (and
worst-supported-by-his-team's-offense, possibly ever) era has risen to
0.51 because he gave up
one run in yet another game in which the Mets were shut out. He's now
2-2. DeGrom also tied Nolan Ryan's record for the most strikeouts in
his first five games. This is yet another "way to lose." Jake is also
batting .462, by the way. It's a wonder that the Mets have not traded
him for a lifetime .265 hitter

who does not even know how to play the position they traded to put him
at .

Finally, if you were wondering what kind of mood private
citizen/criminal Donald Trump is in at the moment, according to
"sources," The Washington Post

is only one of the many mainstream media institutions that is all over
that extremely important beat.

The below was written for Altercation by my friend Danny Goldberg
.

Bob Fass died at the age of 87 on April 24th, and given his lifelong
rebellious persona, I was pleasantly surprised that there were extended
obits in both The New York Times
and The
Washington Post
.

From 1965 to 1967, while I was in high school, Fass's show Radio
Unnamable was broadcast every weeknight from midnight to 4:00 a.m. on
New York's WBAI. He defined hipness for me and I wasn't alone. That
was the point. Fass was at the epicenter of both the anti-war and
psychedelic movements, and he embodied the most idealistic aspects of
the era. He called his listeners "the cabal," and thousands came to any
hip event he believed in. There was no such thing as "rock radio" in
those years. "There was just Bob's show," Wavy Gravy
told me
after Fass's passing. "Bob was the mother of the hippies in the
Concrete Apple."

Fass was also a patron of musicians. Bob Dylan was a frequent guest,
sometimes playing a new song but often as a prankster using pseudonyms
like "Elvis Bickel." Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant and Jerry
Jeff Walker's Mr. Bojangles got their first broadcast exposure as live
performances on Radio Unnamable before either artist had a record deal.

Abbie Hoffman called the show regularly during the Chicago Seven trial,
but my favorite Radio Unnamable moments were the sarcastic, cosmic
conversations Fass had with fellow broadcaster Marshall Efron, Wavy
(using his original name, Hugh Romney), and Realist Editor Paul
Krassner. I thought they were as cool as the Beatles.

Odds and Ends

Everybody who wants to, I imagine, has seen Prince's incredible Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame performance during "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," but
did you know there's a brand-new (and better) director's cut
?

Also, to put all of us in a better mood after all that depressing stuff
above, here's a video of George Harrison and Paul Simon singing
"Homeward Bound " on Season 2, Episode 8
of Saturday Night Live, on November 20, 1976. (And Paul, if you're out
there, I'm sure you know by now that it should have been "I wish I
were," not "I wish I was.") Here they are doing "Here Comes the Sun
."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Donate to The American Prospect

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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