Fox denounces “stunning” gifts to Supreme Court justice. No, not this one

Finally! Fox News is calling out a Supreme Court justice who accepted “staggering” gifts from a wealthy benefactor, and it’s high time conservative media brought this to light. In addition to making a mockery of best practices of good government and casting a veil of suspicion over the Supreme Court and its decisions, lavish gifts and benefits – especially when undisclosed – represent a blatant conflict of interest that erodes Americans’ trust in our justice system. .

So move on, Clarence Thomas, and take your medicine – – – oh, damn. They’re talking about Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Yes, it appears Jackson accepted four concert tickets, worth $3,700, from pop star Beyoncé, then disclosed the gift as soon as she was asked to do so. (Which, given the recent behavior of certain conservatives on the ground, East It’s kind of “mind-blowing” when you think about it.)

Say, if Fox ever gets tired of “Ticketgate,” maybe they could do an exhaustive 12-part series on Justice Elena Kagan’s gifts, one for each. bagel she refused to her old high school friends. Because it is completely fair to treat the extracurricular activities of liberals and slightly less liberals equally, without fear or favor.

In a June 8 article about gift disclosures by Supreme Court justices, Fox News somehow managed to ignore Clarence Thomas’ Belated Revelation About Luxury Travel accepted from billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow – and the $2.4 million in gifts he has received since 2004, which were nearly 10 times more valuable than those of all other judges over this period combined…until the penultimate paragraph.

Here is the lede of The Fox News story:

Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson received four concert tickets from pop superstar Beyoncé worth $3,700, according to a financial disclosure.

The Biden appointee also disclosed a $900,000 advance for his upcoming memoir “Lovely One,” which will be released in September, as well as two gifts of artwork at his quarters worth $12,500.

How dare she write a book?! It is better that it is her lavish trips to Thailand and an exclusive men-only retreat in Californiaor Fox surely will taunt her a second time.

Fox also called out Jackson’s previous financial disclosures, in which she “filed some eye-popping documents, including more than $6,500 in clothes from a photo shoot and a $1,200 flower display from Oprah Winfrey.”

And here’s how the network handled the long-delayed disclosure that Thomas had accepted gifts from an individual. having a direct interest in the decisions of the Supreme Court. (This “revelation” didn’t appear until the seventh paragraph.)

Judge Clarence Thomas also amended his 2019 filing to reveal two trips to Indonesia and Sonoma County, California, which he said were paid for by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow after initially being “inadvertently omitted” .

Of course, we’re talking about Fox News, which removed “news” from its programs faster than Coca-Cola removed cocaine from its sodas. But what about the rest of the media?

Why are Democrats forced to pass every test, lest the public think they are civilization-destroying agents of chaos, while Republicans can be literal criminals– who face dozens of additional criminal charges – and who are still treated like “normal” candidates?

Why President Joe Biden, who has fought all his life to stutterleans a little when he walks, and sometimes slurs his speech or says something moderately stupid, continually concerned about his age and mental health by both Murdoch-belonging and traditional media media, even though Donald Trump, almost 78 years old, spews utter nonsense on every imaginable and unimaginable subject? (Sharks and electric boatsanybody?)

How can the media bluntly report on the business activities of President Biden’s son, Hunter, who never held a position in the White House, without also mentioning the $2 billion Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took from Saudi Arabia after serving as full-time and part-time presidential advisor bone saw murder apologist?

Why is the media obsessed with every meaningless horse racing poll while neglecting to mention that one of the horses should have been summarily disqualified because it wasn’t a horse at all, but rather a wild Horse. Goofy horse killer with 34 felony convictions?

Perhaps worst of all, why does the media often give more weight to Americans’ misconceptions? perceptions on the temporary state of the economy (I’m very goodin case you were wondering) than to convicted criminals and Trump’s coup attempts very real threats to the rule of law and our 248-year-old democracy?

As Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, notes in the tweets above, the economy is currently booming, including compared to real wagesdespite still somewhat high inflation figures – and yet tens of millions of Americans have no idea how it is actually performing.

Take this April analysis from Greg Ip, chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal. (Its journalists are still capable of doing good work if Murdoch isn’t standing over their shoulders, dripping drops of sauna sweat onto their keyboards.)

Ip has found a disconnect between the public’s perception of the economy and actual economic conditions when it comes to measures ranging from inflation to stock market performance to job growth.

Citing a Wall Street Journal poll of voters in swing states – 74% of whom falsely claimed that inflation had gone in the wrong direction over the past year – Ip notes that “when it comes to economics, vibrations are at war with facts, and vibrations are winning.

(T)he gap between vibes and facts goes well beyond inflation, strongly suggesting that word choice is not the explanation.

More respondents in the Journal’s survey, 47% to 41%, believe their investments or retirement savings have taken a wrong turn over the past year – a period in which the stock market roared to reach record highs, home values ​​remained stable or increased, and interest on savings has climbed.

(…)

By a margin of more than 2 to 1 (56% to 25%), respondents said the economy had gotten worse rather than better over the past two years. It’s hard to reconcile robust job growthunemployment is near its lowest level in half a century, or growth of gross domestic productwhich actually accelerated last year.

Even more telling was respondents’ belief that their local economies were doing well while the national economy was a disaster. To the question: “Has the U.S. economy, or that of your state, improved or deteriorated over the past two years?” » Respondents as a whole were deeply pessimistic about the national economy: more than twice as many respondents answered “worse” than “better” to this question. But when asked about their states’ economies, they were much more optimistic, saying (correctly, it turns out) that their local economies are doing better today than they were two years ago.

So how to explain this? Well, for one thing, Republicans love to lie — and that probably includes lying to pollsters. But this cannot be the only explanation. People also tend to think that Trump would be better than Biden on the economy, even though Biden created more than 15 million jobs during his term and Trump created less than zero. Meanwhile, Democratic presidents have historically performed much better on the economy than Republican presidents — and by a jaw-dropping margin. (Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles likes to point out that 33.8 million jobs were created during the 16 years Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were presidents, while a total of only 1.9 million were created during the 16 years of George HW Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.)

In other words, far from being impartial and fair to both sides, most media outlets have put their thumb on the scale of fascism. Maybe more stories about the real state of the economy and fewer interviews with diner-dwelling MAGA minions about the price of eggs and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s fondness for music/witchcraft by Beyoncé would be welcome – if not for our sanity, then for the future of democracy itself.

As veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour said, it is up to the media to “Be honest, but not neutral.” This is of course great and timely advice, but at this point most of us would probably settle for “not intentionally dishonest”.

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Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “Teflon Don” no longer exists?