Illiberalism
Fig. 1. Photograph by Joachim F. Thurn, August 1991, Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F089030-0003, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Eva Hartog, “Putin may be the biggest dupe of his fake election landslide,” Politico, March 17, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-election-vladimir-putin-fake-legitimacy-moscow-ukraine/
Ishaan Tharoor, “Russia’s farce election sums up a grim moment in global democracy,” Washington Post, March 18, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2024/03/18/global-democracy-russia-election-backslide-autocracy/
Gilead
Donald Trump
Fig. 2. Donald Trump, depicted in an orange jumpsuit, reportedly by the Drudge, date unknown, via Mediaite,[1] fair use. Apparently, no mugshot was taken when he was actually arrested over hush money paid to Stormy Daniels.[2]
The to-do over [Donald] Trump’s remark [threatening a “bloodbath” (possibly economic) if he is not elected] can be seen as the latest installment in the debate (which we’ve covered often here at [Columbia Journalism Review]) as to how the media ought to handle his rhetoric, given its frequent violence and dishonesty. Nearly a decade after Trump rode down the escalator, it is a debate that media outlets have still yet to resolve. Even before the Ohio rally, it reared its head again last week. Various media critics took CNBC to task for hosting a rambling phone-in interview with Trump without sufficiently pushing back on his talking points. (Watching the interview, CNN’s Oliver Darcy felt transported “to 2015, back when news outlets allowed Trump to phone in to news shows and deliver a drive-by of lies to their audiences.”) The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser, meanwhile, took the media as a whole to task for failing to devote sufficient coverage to a prior, equally unhinged Trump rally in Georgia, arguing that his “flood of lies and BS” is now “seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality.” . . .
In 2019, Lenore Taylor, the editor of The Guardian’s Australian edition, turned heads among US media observers when she argued in a widely shared op-ed that watching a full, unfiltered Trump press conference had changed her perception of a man she thought she knew well. Taylor realized “how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect,” she wrote. “In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.” Those who feared normalizing Trump’s lies, in other words, might have been normalizing his incoherence instead.[3]
Jon Allsop, “Context collapse,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 18, 2024, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_ohio_speech_bloodbath_media_broadcast_live.php
Peter Stone, “Putin bromance has US intelligence officials fearing second Trump term,” Guardian, March 18, 2024, Putin bromance has US intelligence officials fearing second Trump term
Finances
Fig. 1. Trump International Hotel, Las Vegas, undated image credited to https://www.flickr.com/photos/glynlowe/ [bad link], via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
[Donald] Trump and his company need to post a bond for the full amount [of a fraud judgment against him] by next week in order to stop New York Attorney General Letitia James from being able to collect while he appeals. They’ve asked an appeals court to step in in the meantime and said Monday that they have not had any success getting a bond.
“Defendants’ ongoing diligent efforts have proven that a bond in the judgment’s full amount is ‘a practical impossibility,'” the filing said. “These diligent efforts have included approaching about 30 surety companies through 4 separate brokers.”[4]
Adam Reiss and Dareh Gregorian, “Trump has been unable to get bond for $464 million judgment, his lawyers say,” NBC News, March 18, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-unable-get-bond-464-million-judgment-lawyers-say-rcna143860
Coup attempt
Fig. 3. Cartoon by Ben Jennings, January 24, 2024, via the Guardian,[5] fair use.
Jon Allsop, “Context collapse,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 18, 2024, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_ohio_speech_bloodbath_media_broadcast_live.php
- [1]Alex Griffing, “Drudge Puts Trump in an Orange Jumpsuit as Site Monitors His Potential Indictment,” Mediaite, August 29, 2022, https://www.mediaite.com/news/drudge-puts-trump-in-an-orange-jumpsuit-as-site-monitors-his-potential-indictment/↩
- [2]Sarah D. Wire and Alexandra E. Petri, “Trump charged with 34 felony counts in alleged hush money cover-up case,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-04-04/donald-trump-alleged-hush-money-investigation-indictment-arraignment↩
- [3]Jon Allsop, “Context collapse,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 18, 2024, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_ohio_speech_bloodbath_media_broadcast_live.php↩
- [4]Adam Reiss and Dareh Gregorian, “Trump has been unable to get bond for $464 million judgment, his lawyers say,” NBC News, March 18, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-unable-get-bond-464-million-judgment-lawyers-say-rcna143860↩
- [5]Ben Jennings, “Ben Jennings on Donald Trump’s progress along the Republican nomination trail – cartoon,” Guardian, January 24, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2024/jan/24/ben-jennings-on-donald-trumps-progress-along-the-republican-nomination-trail-cartoon↩