1/10/2018 by Lee Camp
The Washington Post put out an in-depth analysis of President Trump’s 1,950 lies and misleading claims over his first year in office – an impressive feat seeing as the Post had to not only fact-check everything but also allow Trump’s 3rd-grade-level speeches to enter their ear holes, a punishment I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.
The writers at the Washington Post are correct that lies spray out of Trump’s face at the force of an untethered fire hose. They’re also correct that almost every statement by Trump is either false or misleading. However, the irony is that almost every statement the Washington Post prints in correcting Trump’s lies is in ITSELF a lie or misleading statement. So to be clear – I’m not saying Trump isn’t lying. I’m saying that the way in which our mainstream media correct him is ALSO meant to deceive us. The Washington Post starts with December and counts backwards through the year. Here are MY corrections to THEIR corrections to Trump’s lies. (This is only a few weeks worth, but at that point you’ll probably get my gist and need to purge yourself in a bathroom immediately.) The quote on the left is from Trump, the writing to the right is WaPo’s correction.
What the Post won’t tell you is that the stock market does GREAT when workers are effectively exploited. When the average American worker doesn’t have the power or leverage to demand better pay or safer working conditions, corporations are thrilled, the stock market grows, and the fabled coke-fueled Wall Street parties go off without a hitch. The market has also continued to grow with increasing inequality. Furthermore, over 90% of the income gains since the 2008 collapse have gone to the top 1%, and 80% of stock value overall is held by the top 10% of the population. Plus, the market does not take into account externalities such as impacts on the environment – even as the environment collapses down around us, the stock market thrives. So while Trump is lying to you about what the stock market would’ve done under President Hillary, the Washington Post is lying to you about the NATURE of the stock market (as is Trump). The Post acts like Wall Street’s growth is somehow good for average Americans – it’s not. Trump, Hillary, and the Post are all part of an elite class enjoying the spoils of a fully exploited working class. Judging the health of our society by looking at stock prices is like judging the health of a dying man by looking at the leeches on his skin. “Wow, those leeches are VERY happy. This man is in peak condition!”
This almost needs no response because most people know how ridiculous it is. Of course Trump lies endlessly – he hardly knows how to speak an honest sentence. (After all, he’s a barely literate man who called himself “a genius” just a couple days ago.) But the idea that the Washington Post, long known to put out propaganda for the CIA and other government agencies, is somehow free of intentionally misleading the American public is laughable on a level that would put the new Dave Chappelle special to shame. One need look no further than their hilarious “Prop or Not” article (which was quickly debunked) to see how far down bullshit lane they’re willing to travel. But more importantly what the Post won’t tell you here is what they won’t tell you all the REST of the time. (And that last sentence is not a typo.) The corporate media – even when they’re getting the story correct – is endlessly avoiding certain topics or points. Just last week former NY Times reporter James Risen revealed how he was stopped by his editors from reporting on the Bush era illegal surveillance of American citizens. That occurred a decade before the Snowden revelations and could’ve changed the outcome of presidential elections as well as the course of our government’s continued assault on our civil liberties. (No biggie.)
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Our media avoids everything from climate change (which they’ve known about for decades but hardly covered even as they cover extreme weather events) to the current US-backed destruction of Yemen to the fact that only 1% of terror plots stopped by the FBI are real and most of those 99% were helped along by the FBI. (To add anecdotal evidence to my point, my friend Abby Martin and I have both forced the New York Times to issue corrections in the past year on statements about us that a simple Google search could have proven wrong.)
Shouldn’t it matter in the “correction” that most of the jobs created are part-time and low-paid? About 25% of those with part-time jobs currently live in poverty in our country. This is not Trump’s fault but an ongoing trend in America’s late-stage capitalist economy that is exploiting nearly everyone more and more. Trump’s economic team is filled with Goldman Sachs and Citibank just as Obama’s was. (Many people don’t even know that Citigroup chose almost all of Obama’s cabinet.) Wall Street has captured our government and therefore does whatever is good for the top 1% who rule Wall Street. On top of that, technology will soon replace most jobs, and we need to adjust to a nearly jobless society. Studies show roughly 50% of jobs in the US could be replaced by artificial intelligence in the next 20 years. And in fact it might be much higher than that seeing as technology advances exponentially – whereas we humans seem to be devolving tenaciously. So acting like poorly paid part-time job creation is the only way to judge success as a President is either ignorant or manipulative on a level usually reserved for the cast of Survivor. Even our “most successful” corporations hardly pay their employees – Amazon was just added to the list of major corporations with a significant number of employees on food stamps. The Washington Post wants the struggling American worker to remain unaware of what’s coming and of the power we could all have if we knew what to demand from a government that is HYPOTHETICALLY supposed to work for us!
Here the Post is bragging about military spending while failing to mention that our military spending is out of control on all levels. We spend more on our military than the next 8 countries combined. At the same time we refuse to fund universal healthcare, infrastructure projects, paid maternity leave, education – such as last week in Baltimore when children sat in freezing classrooms because the schools didn’t have money for heating. While even the Post covered the Baltimore story, they won’t ever connect such an issue to our utterly psychotic military spending. Part of how our corporate media manufactures consent for our illogical and highly immoral system is by leaving everything out of context, intentionally avoiding connecting the dots. (The Post has never had much use for red yarn in their office.) The UN estimated it would take $30 billion a year to end world hunger and then in 2015 increased that number to $267 Billion. Even if it’s the higher number of 267, that’s still less than half of the over $600 Billion we spend on “defense”. …Well, if we actually wanted it to be defense, why don’t we pay to end world hunger, at which point we would be the safest country in the world because no one wants to bomb the country that ENDED WORLD HUNGER. …Or we can continue to listen to the Post haggle with Donald Trump as to whether he’s built up our “depleted” military.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The Post acts like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over even though about 40,000 people were killed in Iraq last year, and we still have AT LEAST 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. But how does one declare a war is “over” when it was never really a war to begin with–but rather an ongoing assault of a population, designed to maintain endless instability in the region and allow the U.S. to hold our global empire? …The Post misses tiny insignificant facts like that.
The Post corrects Trump’s assertion that coal jobs have returned to West Virginia. However, they don’t mention that coal is the most dirty of all fuels and therefore is helping to send our planet down a death spiral of greenhouse gases. Something tells me most of their readers might like to know there won’t be a world for their grand kids to grow up in. We should all be wildly celebrating the move away from coal in an orgy-astic manner. The Post’s correction is the equivalent of the president bragging that he brought hit-man jobs back to West Virginia and then the Post saying, “In fact, hit-man jobs have not returned as promised and very few people have been professionally murdered in West Virginia in the past year.” The Post SHOULD have said, “In fact, coal jobs have not returned and that is a good thing if we value the air in lungs and the life in our bodies.”
What the Washington Post won’t mention is that the US is the only developed country without universal healthcare. And Obamacare was written by the health insurance industry (initially introduced by the GOP in the 1990’s), which by definition profit most when people are least taken care of. This doesn’t mean it isn’t great that more people have coverage than before Obamacare, but rather it’s pathetic that one of the richest countries in the world doesn’t cover everyone to begin with. …That context might help in any correction on this issue.
Whoa whoa whoa. If the Post REALLY wants to correct Trump, they would mention that the catastrophic Drug War is a war on our own people and was designed from the beginning to arrest Black people and activists. Furthermore, in Portugal where drugs have been decriminalized and are treated as a health problem instead of a crime problem, illicit drug use has decreased and so have overdoses. No so-called “correction” of Trump’s ridiculous statement that a WALL will stop drug use is even remotely complete without talking about the context of the Drug War. And here’s the thing – the Washington Post knows this. They know everything I just stated. They’ve even covered some of it in the past. And yet, in general, most of the time, they leave this context out so that our nation continues arresting thousands upon thousands of people (of color) a year for small-time drug use. It seems the Post wants to have their coke and eat it too.
Overall, the Washington Post has filled their “corrections” with decontextualized manipulations of their own. (And I only covered about 2 out of 52 weeks!) The Post is lying to us as much as Trump is. Until we can see these issues for what they really are, we will never be able to change anything.
Keep Fighting,
Lee
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