From the NY Times...
There isn’t
any evidence to support President Trump’s assertion that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election.
Next sentence...
But there is one
study that has been interpreted to suggest it is at least possible. It found that between 32,000 and 2.8 million noncitizen voters might have fraudulently cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. The study, based on a survey of 38,000 people after that election, has been under fire since it was published in 2014.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Times stating that there isn't any evidence to support Trump's illegal vote assertion and then in the very next sentence gives the link to evidence that supports his assertion is, uhm, ironic?
The
article then goes on and takes great convoluted pains to show why the study (the Cooperative Congressional Election Study) is worthless and shouldn't be taken seriously at all. They use the ever-popular "imagine what if" method to construct a straw man that can easily be dismissed, forever planting the any future references to the study should be just as easily dismissed. For some reason, they do not engage in the thought exercise of using the same "imagine what if" to show how the study could be used to show that illegal voting is even far worse that it might appear. Yet both thought exercises are worthy of doing. Neither of the extreme results of either of the thought exercises are likely to be accurate (virtually no illegals voting versus millions of illegals voting), but both show that it's certainly possible for the number to be somewhere in between.
But rest assured, until every illegal who voted illegally stands there and swears under oath that they voted illegally, there will never be any evidence that the press will admit to as evidence of illegal voting.
The Media Should 'Keep Its Mouth Shut'
In other news, someone deleted their post where Jake Tapper of CNN Tweeted the NYT piece about Trump's co-Chief of Staff Steven Bannon saying that the media should 'Keep it's mouth shut.' I don't know, but I'm guessing the post was deleted because, on the surface, it might not look like fake news, since Bannon actually said that.
The term "fake news" started off meaning news that was totally fake, completely fabricated, not true at all. But it's quickly become a way to indicate news stories that are presented in a less-than honest manner, presented as propaganda to make someone believe something other than the full and accurate truth. It's like the story of Trump grabbing women by the kittens. The only thing Trump ever said that he actually did was kiss women. Everything else was hypothetical, and with consent, yet it all got presented as sexual assault. "Senator, do you believe that grabbing a woman by her kitty is sexual assault?" "Why, yes, yes, of course it is."
So now we have headlines that show Steve Bannon as saying the media should keep their mouths shut. Most people will only read the headlines, of course, so the takeaway is that Bannon is attempting to muzzle the media. In many of the stories that follow the headlines, muzzling the media is precisely the narrative that is crafted. Reporters Tweet their shock and awe asking,
"I'm sorry, what country do we live in? Trump strategist says media should "keep it's mouth shut." (Christiane Amanpour).
The reality is, Bannon spanked the press using a Truth Paddle, and they reacted by playing innocent victim and then climbing the moral high mountain of the importance of a free press.
"The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong, a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there. The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign. Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign. The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States. That’s why you have no power. You were humiliated.”
Saying "
The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while," is hardly an attempt to muzzle the press, and the press damn well knows it. The phrase "keep your mouth shut and just listen" is something that every journalist has heard in journalism school. It's a method that journalists use (or are supposed to use) to check their own bias in their reporting. It means listen and gather the facts, and report those facts, without you opening your mouth and inserting your own opinions into the story. The press is mad, and arrogant about it, because they got slapped up side the head with stuff they aren't doing despite being taught to do it in journalism school. And it's hilarious.
On a side note, Jake Tapper reTweeting the NYT is just another example of how CNN would be a test pattern if it weren't for the New York Times, something else that Steve Bannon has said.
In a very Trumpian move, Tapper goes out of his way to become part of the news by posting this (a story, again, that comes from the NYT and not Tapper himself or CNN, so it appears that Bannon really struck a nerve with Tapper).
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