Jump to content
IGNORED

Greg Gianforte, Montana GOP candidate assaults reporter on the election eve


Othello

Recommended Posts

Damn it: "Republican wins Montana election one night after being charged with assault"

Spoiler

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Republican businessman Greg Gianforte has won Montana’s sole House district in a special election Thursday, keeping a seat in Republican hands despite facing assault charges for allegedly attacking a reporter who’d asked him about the GOP’s health-care bill.

In his victory speech, Gianforte admitted to the attack and apologized for it.

“I shouldn’t have treated that reporter that way,” he told supporters at his rally here.

The victory, called by the Associated Press, offered some relief for Republicans, who have struggled to sell their would-be Obamacare replacement, the American Health Care Act. But it was a closer call than the party had expected when it tapped the multimillionaire to run in a state President Trump carried by 20 points — and when Democrats nominated folk singer Rob Quist instead of an experienced politician. With 78 percent of the vote counted, Gianforte led Quist 51 percent to 43 percent, according to preliminary returns.

Some in the crowd laughed at the mention of the incident. “I made a mistake,” said Gianforte.

“Not in our minds!” yelled a supporter.

Democrats, who called on Gianforte to quit the race after the assault charge, believed that late votes broke Quist’s way, and that the first-time candidate put the race in play by attacking the AHCA. Forcing Republicans to spend seven figures defending a typically safe seat, they argued, was worth it.

“We said at the outset that this would be a very difficult election on very red turf,” said David Nir, the political director of Daily Kos, which endorsed Quist and crowdfunded donations for him. “The playing field next month in Georgia and next year in the midterms is much more favorable. Republicans might be breathing a sigh of relief that their morally reprehensible candidate won on Thursday night, but they should still be very worried about 2018.”

In-person voting began across the state just hours after Gianforte allegedly “body-slammed” Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, who was trying to ask him a question about the House Republican health-care plan. Gianforte has been charged with misdemeanor assault.

“I’m glad I waited to vote until today,” Wolf Redboy, 43, a software marketer and musician from Missoula, who backed Quist, said Thursday. It was the first election he’d voted in since 2012. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing in that tape. There are lots of words that come to mind for people who want to treat reporters that way.”

The scuffle was caught on tape by the reporter and witnessed by a Fox News reporting team. Gallatin County police announced the charges late Wednesday after the Guardian published the recording.

On Thursday, as three major newspapers pulled their endorsements of the technology entrepreneur and some early voters sought in vain to change their ballots, GOP leaders urged Gianforte to apologize in an attempt to control the damage.

“There is no time where a physical altercation should occur,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said at his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill. “It should not have happened. Should the gentleman apologize? Yeah, I think he should apologize.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), one of Gianforte’s closest allies in Montana politics and a former co-worker at his Bozeman company, called his actions “unacceptable” and agreed that he should apologize. Quist, meanwhile, told reporters Thursday that the scuffle was a “matter for law enforcement” and declined to comment further.

Wednesday’s incident took place after nearly four weeks of voting in a special election to replace Ryan Zinke (R), who became Trump’s interior secretary in March. By Thursday, more than 200,000 of 700,000 eligible voters had cast early absentee ballots.

In interviews at Quist’s final rally, at a Missoula microbrewery, voters were skeptical that the attack could change the race. Gianforte entered the contest with high negative ratings and an image as a hard-charging bully who had joked about outnumbering a reporter at a town hall meeting and sued to keep people from fishing on public land near his home.

“Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,” said Brent Morrow, 60. “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”

Gianforte and the allied super PACs had deflected attention from his low approval numbers with ads attacking Quist over unpaid taxes and gaffes about gun rights and military spending. To the extent the assault charge hurt — a GOP-aligned poll found 93 percent of voters aware of it — Republicans thought it denied them another day of attention on Quist.

For 24 hours, the assault charge was the biggest political story in Montana. The Billings Gazette, which serves Montana’s largest city, told readers that it had made a “poor choice” by ignoring “questionable interactions” the candidate has had with reporters in the past. Two other major newspapers also pulled their Gianforte endorsements, with the Missoulian suggesting that the Republican should bow out of public life.

As word spread of the alleged assault in Bozeman, some supporters who had been knocking on doors for Quist began playing voters the audio clip. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has invested more than $500,000 in the race, called for Gianforte to quit the race and released a last-minute radio ad featuring Jacobs’s audio of the incident.

In the recording, Jacobs could be heard asking Gianforte to respond to the newly released Congressional Budget Office score of House Republicans’ AHCA, a bill Gianforte had said he was glad to see the House approve.

After Gianforte told Jacobs to direct the question to his spokesman, there was the sound of an altercation, and a screaming candidate.

“I’m sick and tired of you guys!” Gianforte said. “The last guy that came in here did the same thing. Get the hell out of here! Get the hell out of here! The last guy did the same thing. Are you with the Guardian?”

Quist surprised both parties by running — and by securing the Democratic nomination. A supporter of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid, he told activists he backed Canadian-style single-payer health care, and he waxed to local reporters about whether taxes should be raised on the rich, whether military spending should be slashed and whether assault weapon owners should register their guns.

In the first months of the race, Quist raised just $900,000 and appeared to be written off by Washington Democrats. Republicans attempted to define the candidate before he could go on the air, with the opposition research group America Rising paying a tracker to follow Quist, and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC hiring a researcher to dig up damaging stories about the musician-turned-politician’s tax problems. More than $5 million was spent by outside groups against Quist; Democrats responded with less than $1 million in positive spots.

“We knew that because Rob Quist was an unknown quantity with voters, we had the ability to define him negatively out of the gates,” said America Rising chief executive Colin Reed.

But after the March failure of the first version of the AHCA, Quist’s fundraising surged, adding up to more than $5 million by the final pre-election report — outmatching Gianforte, whom Republicans had hoped would self-fund his campaign.

The AHCA, the Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act, had become the dominant issue in the campaign. In the closing days of the race, Quist focused his events and TV ads on his opposition to the Republican bill and brought in Sanders (I-Vt.) to help promote his position on U.S. health care: universal coverage.

The Republican struggled to talk about the AHCA. In public, he said that he would wait to weigh in on the legislation until the CBO score was released and assured him that protections for people with preexisting medical conditions wouldn’t be scrapped. On a call with donors that was leaked to newspapers including The Washington Post, the Republican said he was “thankful” for the House’s vote that moved the bill forward.

At campaign stops and on TV, the soft-spoken Quist either rebutted Republican attack ads or attacked the GOP’s health-care bill, hitting Gianforte especially hard on the donor call remarks.

“Greg Gianforte says he’s thankful for the new health-care bill, the one that eliminates protections for preexisting conditions and raises premiums on every Montanan who has one, because he gets a big tax break at our expense,” Quist said in his closing spot.

Until Wednesday, Democrats worried that a loss would bolster Republican confidence to move ahead with the health care bill. But Gianforte’s triumph over the assault charges gave the winners another reason to cheer — a victory over what the president calls “fake news.”

At Gianforte’s party in Bozeman, Rehberg — among other revelers — spread a shaky rumor that the Fox News journalists who spoke to police were “changing their story.”

In Missoula, where Quist rallied with his voters, Democrats looked for the bright side. Matt McKenna, an adviser to the campaign and a longtime Montana politics insider, noted the ugly tenor of the race, starting with anti-Quist ads the first day of the campaign.

“This is the first day of the end of Greg Gianforte’s political career,” said McKenna. “It may seem like he got away with this because so many people already voted, but they will deny him the prize he really wants which is the governor’s office. He could go to jail. He still has to be arraigned.”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Let's face it- in many of these bright red areas, you could run a skunk for public office, and if it had an R after its name, it would be elected. Wait- they have put skunks in Congress!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Damn it: "Republican wins Montana election one night after being charged with assault"

  Reveal hidden contents

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Republican businessman Greg Gianforte has won Montana’s sole House district in a special election Thursday, keeping a seat in Republican hands despite facing assault charges for allegedly attacking a reporter who’d asked him about the GOP’s health-care bill.

In his victory speech, Gianforte admitted to the attack and apologized for it.

“I shouldn’t have treated that reporter that way,” he told supporters at his rally here.

The victory, called by the Associated Press, offered some relief for Republicans, who have struggled to sell their would-be Obamacare replacement, the American Health Care Act. But it was a closer call than the party had expected when it tapped the multimillionaire to run in a state President Trump carried by 20 points — and when Democrats nominated folk singer Rob Quist instead of an experienced politician. With 78 percent of the vote counted, Gianforte led Quist 51 percent to 43 percent, according to preliminary returns.

Some in the crowd laughed at the mention of the incident. “I made a mistake,” said Gianforte.

“Not in our minds!” yelled a supporter.

Democrats, who called on Gianforte to quit the race after the assault charge, believed that late votes broke Quist’s way, and that the first-time candidate put the race in play by attacking the AHCA. Forcing Republicans to spend seven figures defending a typically safe seat, they argued, was worth it.

“We said at the outset that this would be a very difficult election on very red turf,” said David Nir, the political director of Daily Kos, which endorsed Quist and crowdfunded donations for him. “The playing field next month in Georgia and next year in the midterms is much more favorable. Republicans might be breathing a sigh of relief that their morally reprehensible candidate won on Thursday night, but they should still be very worried about 2018.”

In-person voting began across the state just hours after Gianforte allegedly “body-slammed” Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, who was trying to ask him a question about the House Republican health-care plan. Gianforte has been charged with misdemeanor assault.

“I’m glad I waited to vote until today,” Wolf Redboy, 43, a software marketer and musician from Missoula, who backed Quist, said Thursday. It was the first election he’d voted in since 2012. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing in that tape. There are lots of words that come to mind for people who want to treat reporters that way.”

The scuffle was caught on tape by the reporter and witnessed by a Fox News reporting team. Gallatin County police announced the charges late Wednesday after the Guardian published the recording.

On Thursday, as three major newspapers pulled their endorsements of the technology entrepreneur and some early voters sought in vain to change their ballots, GOP leaders urged Gianforte to apologize in an attempt to control the damage.

“There is no time where a physical altercation should occur,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said at his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill. “It should not have happened. Should the gentleman apologize? Yeah, I think he should apologize.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), one of Gianforte’s closest allies in Montana politics and a former co-worker at his Bozeman company, called his actions “unacceptable” and agreed that he should apologize. Quist, meanwhile, told reporters Thursday that the scuffle was a “matter for law enforcement” and declined to comment further.

Wednesday’s incident took place after nearly four weeks of voting in a special election to replace Ryan Zinke (R), who became Trump’s interior secretary in March. By Thursday, more than 200,000 of 700,000 eligible voters had cast early absentee ballots.

In interviews at Quist’s final rally, at a Missoula microbrewery, voters were skeptical that the attack could change the race. Gianforte entered the contest with high negative ratings and an image as a hard-charging bully who had joked about outnumbering a reporter at a town hall meeting and sued to keep people from fishing on public land near his home.

“Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,” said Brent Morrow, 60. “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”

Gianforte and the allied super PACs had deflected attention from his low approval numbers with ads attacking Quist over unpaid taxes and gaffes about gun rights and military spending. To the extent the assault charge hurt — a GOP-aligned poll found 93 percent of voters aware of it — Republicans thought it denied them another day of attention on Quist.

For 24 hours, the assault charge was the biggest political story in Montana. The Billings Gazette, which serves Montana’s largest city, told readers that it had made a “poor choice” by ignoring “questionable interactions” the candidate has had with reporters in the past. Two other major newspapers also pulled their Gianforte endorsements, with the Missoulian suggesting that the Republican should bow out of public life.

As word spread of the alleged assault in Bozeman, some supporters who had been knocking on doors for Quist began playing voters the audio clip. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has invested more than $500,000 in the race, called for Gianforte to quit the race and released a last-minute radio ad featuring Jacobs’s audio of the incident.

In the recording, Jacobs could be heard asking Gianforte to respond to the newly released Congressional Budget Office score of House Republicans’ AHCA, a bill Gianforte had said he was glad to see the House approve.

After Gianforte told Jacobs to direct the question to his spokesman, there was the sound of an altercation, and a screaming candidate.

“I’m sick and tired of you guys!” Gianforte said. “The last guy that came in here did the same thing. Get the hell out of here! Get the hell out of here! The last guy did the same thing. Are you with the Guardian?”

Quist surprised both parties by running — and by securing the Democratic nomination. A supporter of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid, he told activists he backed Canadian-style single-payer health care, and he waxed to local reporters about whether taxes should be raised on the rich, whether military spending should be slashed and whether assault weapon owners should register their guns.

In the first months of the race, Quist raised just $900,000 and appeared to be written off by Washington Democrats. Republicans attempted to define the candidate before he could go on the air, with the opposition research group America Rising paying a tracker to follow Quist, and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC hiring a researcher to dig up damaging stories about the musician-turned-politician’s tax problems. More than $5 million was spent by outside groups against Quist; Democrats responded with less than $1 million in positive spots.

“We knew that because Rob Quist was an unknown quantity with voters, we had the ability to define him negatively out of the gates,” said America Rising chief executive Colin Reed.

But after the March failure of the first version of the AHCA, Quist’s fundraising surged, adding up to more than $5 million by the final pre-election report — outmatching Gianforte, whom Republicans had hoped would self-fund his campaign.

The AHCA, the Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act, had become the dominant issue in the campaign. In the closing days of the race, Quist focused his events and TV ads on his opposition to the Republican bill and brought in Sanders (I-Vt.) to help promote his position on U.S. health care: universal coverage.

The Republican struggled to talk about the AHCA. In public, he said that he would wait to weigh in on the legislation until the CBO score was released and assured him that protections for people with preexisting medical conditions wouldn’t be scrapped. On a call with donors that was leaked to newspapers including The Washington Post, the Republican said he was “thankful” for the House’s vote that moved the bill forward.

At campaign stops and on TV, the soft-spoken Quist either rebutted Republican attack ads or attacked the GOP’s health-care bill, hitting Gianforte especially hard on the donor call remarks.

“Greg Gianforte says he’s thankful for the new health-care bill, the one that eliminates protections for preexisting conditions and raises premiums on every Montanan who has one, because he gets a big tax break at our expense,” Quist said in his closing spot.

Until Wednesday, Democrats worried that a loss would bolster Republican confidence to move ahead with the health care bill. But Gianforte’s triumph over the assault charges gave the winners another reason to cheer — a victory over what the president calls “fake news.”

At Gianforte’s party in Bozeman, Rehberg — among other revelers — spread a shaky rumor that the Fox News journalists who spoke to police were “changing their story.”

In Missoula, where Quist rallied with his voters, Democrats looked for the bright side. Matt McKenna, an adviser to the campaign and a longtime Montana politics insider, noted the ugly tenor of the race, starting with anti-Quist ads the first day of the campaign.

“This is the first day of the end of Greg Gianforte’s political career,” said McKenna. “It may seem like he got away with this because so many people already voted, but they will deny him the prize he really wants which is the governor’s office. He could go to jail. He still has to be arraigned.”

 

Disappointing but not surprising. 

 

He apologized in his victory speech. *insert eye roll here*

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Let's face it- in many of these bright red areas, you could run a skunk for public office, and if it had an R after its name, it would be elected. Wait- they have put skunks in Congress!

You are so correct. It puts me in mind of this wonderful piece of Bill Maher's ("the magic R")

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Silly us for overreacting!  He was just recycling a recent nugget of wisdom.  Sound familiar?

 

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people and I wouldn't lose voters, okay"

 

Yes, he got elected.  But will he be allowed to stay in Congress?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not surprised he won, especially considering the early votes from the mail-in ballots. Montana does run very red, despite having a Democrat governor and one Democrat senator.

I will be interested to hear how many people turned out to vote and how close the final margin is.

All politeness aside, I am so sick of Gianforte's smug, ugly, disingenuous, lying face. I've had to suffer through two elections full of his vitriol and disgusting twisting of the truth, all bought and paid for, not only by his own wealth, but that of the PACs that endorsed him. I have a drawer full of campaign ads I've received that I cannot wait to destroy. But first, I hang my head in shame for my home state.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In fairness, one thing I've read in multiple articles is that a sizable percentage of the ballots were cast in advance as absentee/mail-in, and a lot of citizens who had already voted were upset and wanted to change their votes when this news came out, but there was no way for them to do so. As the final counts shake out we'll see how accurate that is, but there's at least a possibility that this just happened too late for it to affect the outcome.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

41 minutes ago, GoddessOfVictory said:

I'm not surprised he won, especially considering the early votes from the mail-in ballots. Montana does run very red, despite having a Democrat governor and one Democrat senator.

I will be interested to hear how many people turned out to vote and how close the final margin is.

All politeness aside, I am so sick of Gianforte's smug, ugly, disingenuous, lying face. I've had to suffer through two elections full of his vitriol and disgusting twisting of the truth, all bought and paid for, not only by his own wealth, but that of the PACs that endorsed him. I have a drawer full of campaign ads I've received that I cannot wait to destroy. But first, I hang my head in shame for my home state.

For what it is worth... I love your state. Especially the Bozeman area (I have really only been there and Billings/ a few small towns). I would totally live there in my FIL didn't. We may retire there someday.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Keith Olbermann's tweet made me laugh:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"The Daily 202: Gianforte’s victory after assaulting reporter reflects rising tribalism in American politics"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Greg Gianforte admitted to attacking a reporter and apologized during his victory speech last night, as he kept Montana’s sole House seat in Republican hands. Now he and his party’s leaders are trying to move on.

On the eve of the special election, the wealthy technology entrepreneur flipped out when the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs asked him about the CBO’s score of the health care bill. He now faces misdemeanor assault charges for reportedly throwing Jacobs to the ground and breaking his glasses.

“I made a mistake,” the congressman-elect said at his party in Bozeman. “Not in our minds!” yelled a supporter. David Weigel, who was there, reports that some in the crowd laughed.

-- After his comfortable six-point victory, Republican congressional leaders are making clear there will be no meaningful consequences for his behavior. “Elections are about choices and Montanans made their choice,” Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement this morning. "Rep.-elect Gianforte is an outsider with real-world experience creating jobs in Montana. He will bring that experience to Congress, where he will be a valuable voice in the House Republican Conference."

Without being asked, Donald Trump turned to a group of photographers following him in Europe this morning and declared: "Great win in Montana.” Then he walked away without saying anything else. In a robo-call recorded shortly before the election, he called Gianforte “my friend” and “a wonderful guy.” “You'll be very proud of him for years to come,” Trump told voters.

A spokesman for Mike Pence, who traveled to Montana two weeks ago to stump with Gianforte, declined to comment yesterday, and the vice president skipped his only public event of the day so he did not need to weigh in.

A Republican congressman from San Diego, who is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, said this to an AP reporter:

... <tweet about a statement from another Repug that illustrates how morally bankrupt the party has become>

-- Michelle Fields, the former Breitbart News reporter who Corey Lewandowski grabbed when she tried to ask Trump a question last year, believes some Republicans “have put party over civility.” “From the age of the Gipper to our era of the Groper, the state of our politics has declined drastically,” she writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. “It’s hard to imagine the late, great William F. Buckley cheering on a politician who assaulted a reporter. But Buckley’s nephew, Brent Bozell, did just that on Twitter in the aftermath of the Jacobs’s incident.” Bozell runs the Media Research Center:

...

“Had Ben been attacked by a Democrat, many on the right who are refusing to believe the assault occurred — or outright praising it — would be hailing him as a victim of liberal rage,” Fields adds. “Had Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, rather than Mr. Trump’s, grabbed my arm, I would not have been abandoned by many of my friends and mentors at Fox News, or my employer, Breitbart News. But I was inconvenient to their political narrative.”

-- The Montana donnybrook quickly became a Rorschach Test that highlighted the divide within the conservative media between the serious and unserious outlets. It also showcased how many prominent figures on the right reflexively rally behind Republican politicians, whether the president or a House candidate, even when they are very clearly in the wrong. This is part of a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.

FoxNews.com published a first-person account yesterday by veteran correspondent Alicia Acuna, who witnessed the incident: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.”

Very tellingly, upstart conservative outlets that are trying to steal Fox’s market share by getting to the network’s right spent yesterday trying to poke holes in the story.

Laura Ingraham aggressively questioned the Fox reporter on her radio show: “You can’t body-slam someone by holding both hands on the neck. That’s impossible…Didn’t he grab him near the neck and throw him down? Just asking.” Acuna held firm: “I saw both his hands go up not around his neck in a strangling type of way, but more just on each side of his neck, just grabbed him. I guess it could have been on his clothes, I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. But he grabbed him and slammed him down. … He had one hand on each side of his neck.”

“Acuna’s account in her interview with Ingraham was consistent with what she published on FoxNews.com, not to mention Jacobs’s own version of events,” Erik Wemple writes. “Now have a look at the headline on LifeZette, where Ingraham serves as editor in chief: ‘Montana Assault Witness Changes Story, Says No Neck Grab; Reporter says firsthand account misstated key aspect of Gianforte incident.’ BuzzFeed has deemed this story ‘FAKE.’”

But fake stuff gets around, Erik notes: On his radio show yesterday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh falsely told his listeners that the Fox reporter had basically recanted her story. He also called Jacobs “a pajama boy journalist” who was “insolent … disrespectful … whiny and moany.” RealClearPolitics reported wrongly that Acuna was “walking back” her claims. The headline on the Drudge Report was: “Witness Changes Story.”

And while the news division at Fox covered the story seriously and showed integrity, at least one commentator said on the air that the reporter had it coming:

... <more crap from Faux commentators>

… to which Republican focus group guru Frank Luntz replied:

...<tweets from Luntz, with whom I usually disagree, but he makes valid points>

The fever swamps of the internet went even further, though: Mike Cernovich, who has a wide following on the fringes and friends in the White House, raised the bar for required evidence. “Although there is an audio recording of the incident, he said video was needed for the story to be reliable,” Abby Ohlheiser reports. “Gateway Pundit wrote that it was ‘strange’ there was no video.”

It should go without saying that this really does a disservice to the well-intentioned people who look to these sites for honest information. Remember, Gianforte himself has now admitted wrongdoing and apologized.

-- Many rank-and-file Republican voters, who follow the cues and signals of their leaders, defended their nominee’s behavior. “I understand the frustration of someone being right in your face,” Luanne Biggs, who voted for Gianforte, told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “I feel like it’s a little set up.”

CNN correspondent Kyung Lah went to a polling place to interview voters and reported that nearly everyone she talked with said they weren’t changing their vote:

...<quotes from Repug voters in MT>

Recall that many of these sorts of voters began identifying with the term “deplorable” after Clinton described some of Trump’s supporters that way during the 2016 campaign. That is why, even before the polls closed yesterday, many Democratic voters in Montana expressed skepticism that the attack on Jacobs would change the outcome of the race. “Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,” Brent Morrow, 60, told Weigel. “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”

-- But at least those people were talking about what happened. The Montana NBC Affiliate reportedly refused to cover the Gianforte story at all on Wednesday night, a shocking blackout. Irate sources inside 30 Rock appear to have called up New York Magazine’s Yashar Ali to complain: “KECI news director Julie Weindel was called by NBC News to see if KECI would cover the story or had any footage of the Gianforte incident that NBC News and its affiliates could use. … She was unyielding in her refusal to share any footage she may have had access to, or run a report on the story. … Weindel said that they weren’t covering the story, though it was running in outlets across the country at the time, explaining, ‘The person that tweeted [Jacobs] and was allegedly body slammed is a reporter for a politically biased publication.’ Weindel then added, ‘You are on your own for this.’ … The station was acquired, last month, by the conservative media conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting.”

-- Here’s why that’s a big deal: Sinclair Broadcasting just struck a deal with Tribune Media to buy dozens of local TV stations. “Already, Sinclair is the largest owner of local TV stations in the nation. If the $3.9 billion deal gets regulatory approval, Sinclair would have 7 of every 10 Americans in its potential audience,” Margaret Sullivan explained in a column last weekend. “Sinclair would have 215 stations, including ones in big markets such as Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago, instead of the 173 it has now. There’s no reason to think that the FCC’s new chairman, Ajit Pai, will stand in the way. Already, his commission has reinstated a regulatory loophole — closed under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler — that allows a single corporation to own more stations than the current 39 percent nationwide cap…

“When Sinclair bought Washington’s WJLA-TV in 2014, the new owners quickly moved the station to the right … It added conservative commentary pieces from a Sinclair executive, Mark Hyman, and public affairs programming with conservative hosts. (The deal would give Sinclair a second Washington station, WDCW.) And Sinclair regularly sends ‘must-run’ segments to its stations across the country. One example: an opinion piece by a Sinclair executive that echoed President Trump’s slam at the national news media and what he calls the ‘fake news’ they produce…

“During the presidential campaign, Trump’s message came through loud and clear on Sinclair’s stations, many of which are in small or medium-sized markets in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, even bragged, according to Politico, that the campaign cut a deal with the media conglomerate for uninterrupted coverage of some Trump appearances. Is there a link between such content — and the expectation of more — and the loosening of federal rules?”

THE BIGGER PICTURE:

-- “The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party,” Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa explain. “When Gianforte assaulted a reporter … many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are ‘the enemy of the people.’ … Trump — and specifically, his character and his conduct — now thoroughly dominate the national political conversation. Traditional policy arguments over whether entitlement programs should be overhauled, or taxes cut, are regularly upstaged by a new burst of pyrotechnics. … Trump’s barrage of news-making and controversy drives the GOP even at its lowest levels, with his raucous populism and blustering behavior reshaping its identity. Candidates often are either adopting aspects of his persona or finding themselves having to fitfully explain why they back him despite them.”

-- Many right-wing intellectuals blame Trump for corrupting the conservative movement so much that Gianforte can get away with hitting a reporter:

Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host in Wisconsin, told Karen and Bob: “Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”

Michael Gerson, a top speechwriter for George W. Bush, recalls a few of the conspiracy theories that the president has floated in his column for today’s Post: “Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? ‘How amazing,’ Trump tweeted in 2013, ‘the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.’ We have a president charged with maintaining public health who asserts that the vaccination schedule is a dangerous scam of greedy doctors. We have a president charged with representing all Americans who has falsely accused thousands of Muslims of celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks. … This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness.”

“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) told Mike DeBonis at the Capitol. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license. … There is a total weirdness out there. People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.”

Sobering, but true, article.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.



×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.