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UPDATE: Definitely want to use at least the Michael Wolff stuff-maybe edit Avenatti considerably and not in the title?

FN: Change title to “Why  Michael Wolff is Persona non grata With the Mainstream Media?

Maybe some direct quotes from Wolff’s very important interview?

Both Avenatti and Wollf have been dismissed to varying degrees by the mainstream media as not entirely credible. On the other hand, when Bob Woodward’s book on the Trump Russia House came out it was rightly lauded to the Heavens.

UPDATE: Place at bottom the latest on Wolff’s fascinating and incisive criqute of the MSM method in interveiw with Baquet’s NYT

Wollf’s book garnered a good bit of interest when it was published but many in the media came to sniff about it as not being totally credible. What’s notable though is that no very sold specific examples of this were put forward which suggests this is more about the MSM protecting its turf than genuine concerns about honesty and good journalistic practice.

To an extent the media seems to have internalized some of the gripes of Trump and his apologists that somehow Wolff was misleading in his methods for extracting information from sources. Here’s the big picture though. Wether or not Wolff failed to dot all his i’s and cross all his t’s, he clearly did write a book of great consequence-just look at what it did to Steve Bannon-as I chronicle in chapter x

Bannon was clearly Wolff’s MVP among sources-Bannon more or less co-wrote much of it. Bannon’s cooperating with Wolff and his description of the Trump Tower meeting Don Jr and Jared Kushner had with the Russians in June, 2016 as near treasonous his suggestion that Kushner and even Trump’s daughter Ivanka could be going to prison was effectively Bannon’s own self inflicted burn notice in Trumpworld.

Even more astonishingly, Bannon became a person of interest for team Mueller who then interviewed him for 20 hours because of Wolff’s book-I noted in the chapter linked to above, the Mueller investigation didn’t even have Bannon on its radar until Fire and Fury. 

UPDATE: We have to update this to at least 50 hours… One of the many outrageous Mueller didn’t respond to was when Bannon and Eric Prince deleted all the Seychelles related emails-while Jerome Corsi deleted all emails prior to the start of the Podesta leaks.

So while MSM pundits jealous of their turf may pan the book, it nevertheless had great, indeed, almost startling, consequence-thanks to Bannon’s big mouth-he talked himself into becoming a subject of the probe.

So even if many Beltway journo types didn’t put credence  in Wolff’s book the Mueller investigators clearly did.

And this is also true of Michael Avenatti. By standing against Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction Avenatti now has a target on his back-it’s beyond shameful that even some elected Dems were willing to give credence to the phony GOP talking point that the GOP chose not to have a real investigation into the allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh because Avenatti was the lawyer for a third accuser,  Julie Swetnick.

 

This is absurd-the GOP was going to use its partisan power to ‘plow Kavanaugh through’ no matter what evidence emerged-the GOP did everything to ignore it. Remember when Trump boasted he could kill someone on 5th Avenue? Kavanaugh certainly could and the GOP would still have rammed him through-fitting rapist metaphor-him through.

But Avenatti is similar to Wolff in that when the story of his client Stormy Daniels first hit, the media reaction was-no big deal. This will be a one day story as Americans already knew about Trump’s sexual antics prior to the election. This was absurd-buying into the Trump’s illusion that because he ‘won’-as opposed to won-therefore everything he did was justified and the voters weren’t moved by any criticism of him.

This was quite different than the media attitude regarding Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky 20 years ago. Indeed, even now you have pundits still not over their Clinton Derangement Syndrome demanding that Hillary Clinton somehow retroactively demand that Bill resign over his extramarital affair 20 years later.

So Vox demands that Hillary retroactively make Bill resign meanwhile the media demands that Dems ‘just get over it’ regarding Kavanaugh’s being plowed through without a real vetting of his records, much less  a real investigation of the allegations against him. Last I looked Bill Clinton isn’t in the White House today nor is he at the Supreme Court. But this is the logic of the both sides do it media circa 2018. None of them would dream of demanding Trump or Kavanaugh step down.

FN: This remains a crucial point made by Eric Boeheler: over 100 newspapers demanded Clinton’s resignation, at this late stage exactly none have demanded Trump do so-they’re so worried about being ‘neutral’ or a la Jay Rosen viewless and savvy. Chapter A.

Of course, regarding Stormy Daniels, the media totally missed the fact that beyond ‘just an extramarital affair’, there was the hush money paid to quiet the women lest the news harm Trump’s election chances. Again, the media thought the story would be over in a couple days at most.

Yet Daniels’ allegations-along with those of other women Trump and Cohen paid off-became a large part of the charges Cohen recently pled guilty to.

UPDATE: Cohen is now serving a three year prison term for committing crimes at Trump’s direction and at Trump’s benefit while Trump has paid 0 consequences thus far though this morning there’s reason to hope that is finally changing.

So while the media thought the Avenatti-Daniels’ allegations were a nothingburger the SDNY didn’t agree and they thought Wolff’s book lacked credibility but Mueller-who questioned Bannon for 20 hours based on what he told Wollf didn’t-agree.

FN: Avenatti did some great work that is still resounding to this day-Cohen is going to prison in large part to the crimes he committed in trying to shut up Stormy Daniels. It’s true Avenatti turned out not to be the right guy for 2020.

There’s a lesson in here though it’s not clear the media is getting it. While Wolff’s credibility-even more Omarosa’s testimony-has been questioned the story they tell at least in the big picture is very similar to the one Woodward himself tells..

What is the lesson? The media needs to be less self righteous. They run their industry much like a closed union shop or monopoly but as Jay Rosen documents there’s more to journalism than the MSM’s stenography, it’s ‘view from nowhere.’

The short description of the view from nowhere amounts to the idea that the less opinion you have of something the more right you are about it, or at least the less opinion the more equipped you are to be a journalist and report on it.

But more on this in the next chapter.

UPDATE 2.0:

Ok so first a caveat on Avenatti. Yes he has turned out to be a very dubious and questionable character in his own right

One of the first signs of trouble were his repeated assertions that to be Trump in 2020 the party must nominate a white male-himself, presumably.

Then there were charges of financial malfeasance and then accusations of domestic violence–Stormy Daniels herself has now repudiated him.

Having said that the egg on the MSM’s face is just as messy in their ‘savvy’ dismissal of her story on day one-two day nothingburger story, everybody knows the ‘President’ fools around-180 degree opposite of what they said about Clinton naturally.

It’s also clear that Avenatti’s involvement is a thin pretext not an explanation for the Kavanaugh ram through.

And even if Avenatti emerged as a rather dubious character it is a fact that the MSM has no less egg on its face for dismissing Stormy Daniels as a one day story.

And even if Avenatti proved to be a highly problematic character in his own right that doesn’t change the larger critique of the MSM’s modus operandi in the least.

Indeed, Michael Wolff had a fascinating interview in the belly of the beast-Dean Baquet’s NYT-after his sequel Siege.

Wolff pointed out the way the MSM has to always negotiate with itself on what it knows. The Savvy can know something to be true yet refuse to report it if they way they know it goes against their best practices-for instance just recently Lawrence O’Donnell had to do penance for reporting a story that may well be true but just didn’t have enough sources. 

You can argue this is a good thing-to establish trust with the public they won’t report something without say three reliable sources. But it also means that many accurate stories never see the light of day based on a technicality.

You think of Beto O’Rourke’s brilliant viral moment: members of the media what the fuck?

He’s right-the MSM knows perfectly well Trump’s a racist but they have to play dumb as they don’t know it in the right way-also it’s usually against their genteel terms of engagement to call a racist a racist.

In any case Wolff makes a compelling case that even if you think the MSM rules on sourcing are a good thing for the most part it’s certainly important to also have different kinds of reporting available to the public-Jay Rosen’s advocacy journalism.

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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