Media

• Trump Nation is an ongoing reader discussion led by James Fallows regarding Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. (For a related series, see “Trump Time Capsule,” as well as “Will Trump Voters and Clinton Voters Ever Relate?”) To sound off in a substantive way, especially if you disagree with us, please send a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
• Seventh in a series
• Related: Trump’s lies are not the problem. It’s the millions who swallow them who really matter.

James Fallows, the Atlantic

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U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference in a packed White House press briefing room on November 14, 2016. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters) 

December 6, 2016 | In the four weeks since the election, which seem like four centuries, Donald Trump has dominated the news and done real strategic and economic damage with his stream of intemperate tweets. For a reckoning of the chaos that his tweets about Taiwan and China have already induced, please see these Atlantic items: by Uri Friedman with Shen Dengli, by David Graham, by Chris Bodenner, and by Isaac Stone Fish, with links to many other analyses. The harm he petulantly inflicted today on Boeing, a company that is perennially the United States’s leading exporter and one of its most important high-tech manufacturing employers and standard-setters, is only the latest and most flagrant illustration.

This is not responsible behavior. This is not normal. This is not something the United States, or for that matter the world, can really withstand from a commander in chief. But this ungoverned, thin-skinned impetuosity is something the “responsible” GOP has decided, to its enduring shame, that it dare not criticize.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic> and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

Full story … 

Previously in this Series:

• Part 6: Landslide Donald
• Part 5: Which Department Should Rick Perry Head? The Answer Will Come to You.
• Part 4: This Is What the Resistance Sounds Like
• Part 3: A Video for the New Age
• Part 2: How the Vote Broke, in Historical Perspective
• Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media

Related:

Trump’s lies are not the problem. It’s the millions who swallow them who really matter, Nick Cohen, the Guardian 

• As the alt-right continues to set the agenda in global politics at a frightening pace, has the world reverted to a 20th-century era of totalitarianism?
• Related: The Issue is Not Trump. It is Us.

Journalist Seymour Hersh in Perugia, Italy, on April 1, 2009.

• Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
• Related: Series | Trump Nation, Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media

Jeremy Scahill, the Intercept

January 25 2017 | Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.

Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.

“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He is writing an alternative history of the war on terror.

Jeremy Scahill is an investigative reporter and war correspondent. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the National Security Correspondent for The Nation Magazine and Democracy Now!. 

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Series | Trump Nation, Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media, James Fallows, the Atlantic

• Trump Nation is an ongoing reader discussion led by James Fallows regarding Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. (For a related series, see “Trump Time Capsule,” as well as “Will Trump Voters and Clinton Voters Ever Relate?”) To sound off in a substantive way, especially if you disagree with us, please send a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
• First in a series

Nat Hentoff in 2004. Photograph: K.G. Schneider/Flickr

• “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.” --Nat Hentoff
• Son says longtime Village Voice columnist died of natural causes, after long career in which he wrote more than 25 books and collaborated with Bob Dylan.

Associated Press in New York / Guardian

• Sunday 8 January 2017 |  Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died on Saturday at age 91.
• His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.

Full story ... 

• Trump Nation is an ongoing reader discussion led by James Fallows regarding Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. (For a related series, see “Trump Time Capsule,” as well as “Will Trump Voters and Clinton Voters Ever Relate?”) To sound off in a substantive way, especially if you disagree with us, please send a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
• Fourth in a series

James Fallows, the Atlantic

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December 16, 2016 | Governor Jerry Brown of California got Twitter-verse attention for saying two days ago that if Donald Trump shuts down satellite collection of climate data, “California will launch its own damn satellites.”

I’ve now seen the short speech from which that line was taken, thanks to a tip from reader CS. It’s remarkable enough to be worth your time. It’s a genuine fighting speech, with a tone that is resolute but positive, rather than resentful or doomed. It’s a rousing call-to-battle against the environmental backwardness and larger disdain for fact of the coming era, from a person who as he nears age 80 has struck a distinctive Happy Warrior tone of resistance. Happy, in its confidence. Warrior, in its resoluteness.

The 13-minute clip of an obviously extemporized speech is below, followed by a viewer’s-guide annotation.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

Full story … 

Previously in this Series:

• Part 3: A Video for the New Age
• Part 2: How the Vote Broke, in Historical Perspective
• Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media