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The Campaign Legal Center is complaining in a letter to the White House that a top adviser to President Donald Trump may be illegally accepting outside professional services. Steve Bannon has worked with publicist Alexandra Preate since he was head of Breitbart News. Preate has continued to work with reporters on Bannon’s behalf even though she is not a government employee. A recent article by the Center for Public Integrity quotes an associate of Preate’s saying she doesn’t receive pay from Bannon. The Campaign Legal Center says that appears to be a violation of what’s called the Antideficiency Act. The law says government employees “may not accept voluntary services for (the) government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law.”...
The Russian attempt to influence the 2016 American presidential election, using what intelligence agencies call “active measures,” has dominated U.S. headlines.There is, however, a second front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of American citizens, and it’s received almost no attention in mainstream U.S. media outlets since the election. As someone who studies the growth of global public relations, I’ve researched the roles PR firms play in shaping public perceptions of international affairs. For years, Russia has been involved in public relations campaigns that have been developed and deployed by prominent, U.S.-based, global PR firms – campaigns intended to influence American public opinion and policy in ways that advance Russia’s strategic interests....
As the press secretary for a president who's obsessed with how things play on cable TV, Sean Spicer’s real audience during his daily televised press briefings has always been an audience of one.
And the devastating “Saturday Night Live” caricature of Spicer that aired over the weekend — in which a belligerent Spicer was spoofed by a gum-chomping, super soaker-wielding Melissa McCarthy in drag — did not go over well internally at a White House in which looks matter.
More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job in which he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the "opposition party," and developing a functional relationship with the press....
All modern American presidents have seen their disapproval rating surpass the 50 percent mark at some stage after taking office. Some reached that milestone faster than others but generally, it took all of them hundreds of days to do so. George Bush senior lasted an impressive 1,336 days before he hit 50 percent disapproval in Gallup's polls while Bill Clinton lasted 573 days before reaching majority disapproval. As a result of the federal debt crisis, Barack Obama passed the 50 percent mark 936 days into his presidency.
Donald Trump has reached majority disapproval in record time, just 8 days. When he entered office, an initial poll from Gallup showed that 45 percent of Americans approved of him, 45 disapproved and 10 percent were undecided. In his first week, he announced construction of the border wall, halted immigration from seven countries, gutted the Affordable Care Act and reversed U.S abortion policy, pushing his disapproval rating to 51 percent, according to a Gallup poll released on January 28....
A lot of former congressional staffers agree that the best way to make your voice heard is to call your representatives rather than emailing them. And a new website makes that easier than ever. 5 Calls streamlines the calling process to make it user friendly and convenient. Simply enter your zipcode at the top left and you’ll be given a personalized list of numbers to call about the most pressing issues of the day. Click through topics on the left hand column to access a brief overview of each issue, a script to use when placing the call, and an explanation of why you’re calling a particular office (i.e. it’s one of your Senators or the Army Corps of Engineers is conducting an environmental impact report on the Dakota Access Pipeline)....
Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.
Seizing on Trump's favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts - borrowing names and logos of their agencies - to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.... Employees at the EPA and the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services have since confirmed seeing notices from the new administration either instructing them to remove web pages or limit how they communicate to the public, including through social media.... Within hours, unofficial "resistance" or "rogue" Twitter accounts began sprouting up, emblazoned with the government logos of the agencies where they worked, the list growing to at least 14 such sites by Wednesday afternoon....
This drives journalists nuts. They feel a duty to rebut lies, and in the age of “John Oliver Destroys Something” headlines, there’s an appetite among liberal viewers for plucky correspondents eviscerating right-wing ideologues on-air. We’ve now seen one host after another—Todd, Cuomo, Anderson Cooper—lose his cool or waste a long interview trying to make Conway acknowledge elementary facts.
Of course, presidential flacks have always tried to stretch or shade the truth during on-air interviews. In his first briefings as press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer juggled contrary rationales for tax cuts, that the government could afford them or that a weak economy needed them, using whichever argument seemed to fit the evidence presented. In his first briefings as press secretary to President Obama,
Robert Gibbs used the term “financial stability package” to mask the stench of corporate bailouts. Reporters understood that no matter what they asked, Fleischer would defend tax cuts and Gibbs would defend bailouts. But the president’s spokesman would generally try to reconcile the president’s agenda with the facts. And if he couldn’t, he would at least clarify the agenda. Conway brings none of that. She alters unwelcome questions, disregards the facts presented to her, and clarifies nothing. In part, that’s because Trump has no organized agenda. All he has is ego. So that’s what she fights for. She’s not there to persuade a skittish Republican senator to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She’s there to defend and avenge one man’s wounded pride....
Much of the world was united yesterday in solidarity as Women’s Marches took place all over the globe. The protest signs – and there were so many – spoke volumes.
Three weeks after Donald Trump won a historic victory to become the 45th president of the United States, the media postmortems continue. In particular, the role played by the media and technology industries is coming under heavy scrutiny in the press, with Facebook’s role in the rise of fake news currently enjoying considerable coverage. This represents a shift from earlier in the campaign, when the volume of media airtime given to Trump was often held culpable for “The Apprentice” star’s political ascendancy. In truth, a Trump presidency is – in part – a reflection of the status and evolution of the media and tech industries in 2016. Here are 10 ways that they combined to help Trump capture the White House in a manner not previously possible. Without them, Trump might not have stood a chance....
This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.
The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.
Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore....
The TV media no longer conceal their disdain for Donald Trump’s ludicrous spinners. Jake Tapper raps Rudy Giuliani for defending Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and chides Paul Manafort: “These things, just because you say them, they’re not true!” CNN’s Brianna Keilar takes Kellyanne Conway to task for insisting Trump did not mean to say he’d lock up Hillary Clinton. (“I’m talking about what your candidate is saying, which is more important than what you are saying about this. He is saying she has to go to jail. He is not talking about she has to stand and be judged. He is saying she has to go to jail.”) And practically everyone treats the hapless Jason Miller as a liar, a fool or both.
Bias? No, these TV journalists can no longer bear to pretend Trump’s people are saying anything resembling the truth and are annoyed they have to put them on air essentially to lie to the American people....
For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one.
Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change.
Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States....
Excitement is building for the final of the three US Presidential debates.
We’re excited to have a scoop about Donald Trump’s final debate strategy courtesy of a leaked email shared with Sean Hannity and me (The PR Coach) from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Polling reveals Trump opportunity
Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway’s secret polls have turned up some potentially explosive insight that could help the Trump campaign mount a PR and political comeback according to the email from Conway to Trump.
The secret national poll of registered voters found BBQ was more popular than Hillary Clinton by a whopping margin of 76% to 24% nationally....
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Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters. This revelation comes from documents obtained via an open records request from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department in Wyoming. Emails show that the firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies, apparently on contract with the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), worked in secret on talking points, media outreach, and communications training for law enforcement dealing with Dakota Access opponents mobilized at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. As previously reported by DeSmog Blog, the GOP-connected firm DCI Group led the forward-facing public relations efforts for Dakota Access via a front group called Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN). Today MAIN has morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN). Delve is an opposition research firm run by Jeff Berkowitz, former Republican National Committee research director and official in the George W. Bush White House. His company led research efforts on behalf of the sheriffs’ association. Off the Record Strategies, meanwhile, guided the sheriffs’ behind-the-scenes communications strategy. Mark Pfeifle runs the secretive firm, and also served as communications advisor in the Bush administration, leading PR efforts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....
Several people have figured out that the best way to get a message to President Trump is to do so via a TV program he is likely to watch, but no one has gone to the lengths that John Oliver has to get a television-based message to the president.
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the first new episode since Trump’s inauguration, Oliver revealed that his show has arranged to run a Trump-targeted ad locally in the Washington D.C. market on all three cable news shows Monday morning, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Oliver made the announcement during a segment on the show called “Trump vs. Truth,” about Trump’s reliance on information gleaned from dubious and often false outlets like Brietbart and Infowars, and his alarming tendency to lie about easily-debunked topics such as his inauguration crowd size, much as he did for a decade about the ratings for his NBC series, Celebrity Apprentice....
If you repeat a lie enough, it becomes the truth.”That quote has been attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. I say attributed because even though there are many reports of him saying it, there is no public record that he actually did. In other words, it could be a lie that has become the truth simply because it was repeated enough times....
But there is a third kind of humor that could ultimately do the most to deflate Trump. Last weekend, in an attempt to explain the new Administration’s insistence on lying about the size of the crowds at Trump’s Inauguration, Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet the Press” to explain that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had been offering “alternative facts.” Trump’s team knows the political power of a concise, catchy, and easily repeated phrase—and they must recognize, in “alternative facts,” a potential crack in the veneer of Trumpism. The phrase is not simply plainly ridiculous, it’s pathetically so. It’s the kind of thing that an aspiring strongman like Trump himself would never say—he just blusters, pretending, or maybe even believing, that the things he says are the real facts, the only facts. Instead, it’s what the semi-reasonable people who work for him have to come up with in order to serve two masters—Trump on the one hand and reality on the other. “He believes what he believes,” Spicer later said about his boss.
What we’ve got here is [NOT] a failure to communicate” to slightly alter the famous line from the movie Cool Hand Luke. That line best describes public response to the Trump inauguration, the massive DC and national Women’s March, and the public and social media response to the first six days of the new administration. The Trump campaign and transition teams, and the new White House advisors all pride themselves on their social media savvy. Led by the newly sworn-in POTUS and Twitter-in-Chief, social media is now alive with the sound of truth, lies, statistics and “alternate facts.” And the new administration is scrambling to respond....
You can count the Department of Agriculture as the latest federal agency under attack from Donald Trump who is now actively rebelling against him. After Trump punished the National Park Service for tweeting about his inauguration crowd size, and the Badlands was forced to delete its tweets about climate change, these agencies have begun sticking it to Trump by rolling out secondary non-government Twitter accounts that he can’t control. Lo and behold, the unofficial USDA Twitter account.
The @AltUSDA account on Twitter has been in existence for less than a day but already has tens of thousands of followers, and it’s been posting helpful tweets along the lines of “Read the USDA Climate Change Solutions page while you still can” along with a link to an article on the usda.gov website which, for the moment at least, is still visible. It’s expected that the Trump administration will forcibly remove such information in order to pretend that climate change isn’t real. But @AltUSDA is going further....
Today the New York Times rolled out the big guns in the battle for truth. There, in Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column, were two digits the likes of which I have never seen in the Grey Lady. Footnotes, people. Honest-to-God footnotes. The footnotes were there to annotate a story about the Trump administration’s disregard for the truth: ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality. By necessity, that story referenced two of the administration’s newly minuted “alternative facts”, a.k.a. lies. The first of these was the claim by Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, that more people had used DC’s Metro system the morning of Trump’s inauguration than had used it the morning of Obama’s 2013 inauguration. The second was the President’s accusation that tensions between Trump and the intelligence community were caused by the meddling media....
We’re only three weeks into the new year, but “fake news” could already be the phrase of the year. After reports suggested that fake news on Twitter and Facebook contributed to Donald Trump’s win in last year’s US Presidential election, the latter is finally clamping down on the issue. The company has announced new tools to curb fake news in Germany, presumably as a measure ahead of the country’s August 2017 elections. “Last month we announced some tests to address the issue of fake news on Facebook,” Aine Kerr, the company’s manager of journalism partnerships, wrote in a press release....
Some MIT faculty, led by Roger Levy and Nancy Kanwisher, posted a short message regarding what they believe in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. More than 400 faculty have now signed it. As an MIT alumnus, I read this statement and wondered about the platitudes it contains: why make this statement, and why ask faculty to sign it? The answers may make you uneasy.
The platitudes in this statement are problematic
The 233-word statement is well-written and direct — it’s free of jargon, passive voice, and weasel words. If you think only about the words, it seems clear and effective. But its filled with platitudes nobody disagrees with. The fact that these faculty need to make statements of this kind says a lot about them, and the times we live in. I’ve appended my comments in italic....
These days you tend to hear about Russia in terms of its government hacking the US election. But some canny Russian developers have put their skills to something more productive: monitoring the TV appearances of world leaders.
A team of Russian developers have released an AI powered algorithm that tracks all world leaders activities in all media. Based on the information the Verso service analyzes the impact of each President/Prime Minister and shows a rating for them in real-time.
Verso is an experiment to utilise algorithms designed to rapidly recognise faces (even blurry ones) which were developed at Moscow State University,
Once a second the Verso platform takes a screenshot of a set of monitored TC channels. All the faces it detects are run through the computer vision processing, to see if there is one which matches the person the researchers are searching for.
The algorithms it uses are able to tell in milliseconds if a person is at least a 99% match, even with blurred or turned heads. The data it delivers to its site is in real-time....
In September, Hillary Clinton released a devastating attack ad on Donald Trump, in which young girls are seen looking at themselves in the mirror while Trump's offensive remarks about women—in particular, their looks—are heard in the background.
The ad, titled "Mirrors," has gotten more than 5 million views on YouTube, and has been hailed by many as one of Clinton's strongest ads of the year.
Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, told Slate last month: "I do think that Clinton will look back, particularly in suburban areas where they will be able to really drive good margins with women, that the ads helped. That ad where they show Trump's words and children listening? That stuff works!"
Now, Kathy Griffin has springboarded off the famous spot with a great parody of it. It's not subtle, but it is hilarious. Check it out below. Note: It features lots of NSFW language....
You might argue that I’m no better than Mike by filtering the stories I don’t like from sites I don’t agree with. The big difference, though, is that the only news I consume on Facebook is related to the babies, pets, and baby pets of my friends and family. If you want to discuss politics then you’ll have to buy me a drink first so we can talk face to face. See, Facebook doesn’t care about the veracity of the political news being shared just so long as people spend lots of time viewing ads while sharing it. That’s fine for cat videos, gadgets, and recipes, but surely political news requires a different set of personalization algorithms. Baseless conspiracy theories and outright lies should be downranked just as quickly as the clickbait articles Facebook demoted in August. If Google News can introduce a nonpartisan fact checking feature then surely Facebook could do the same. It would go a long way in helping Mike and I, and the nation, to become friends again....
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Not fake news.