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President Trump Changed His Story on Son's Meeting with Russian Lawyer

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 07 2018, @05:08PM   
from the "A-Tale-of-Flodden-Field" dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

5News reports:

President Donald Trump appears to have changed his story about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that is pivotal to the special counsel's investigation, tweeting that his son met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to collect information about his political opponent.

[...] That is a far different explanation than Trump gave 13 months ago, when a statement dictated by the president but released under the name of Donald Trump Jr., read: "We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago."

also at Vox, MSN and Mic

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Original Submission

• The Brainwashing of My Father (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:37AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:37AM (#718566)

  Last night I watched the documentary "The Brainwashing of My Father" [imdb.com] which added some info to the puzzle for me:

  * Roger Ailes was Nixon's tv image consultant

  * He was already working on the fox news project in the 70s, his handwritten notes & signature are all over
      an anonymous memo that delineated much of fox's tactics, including the phrase "fair and balanced."

  * The shift of news reporting from "objective truth" to "balanced" was one of Ailes's goals
      because it gives equal weight to bullshit as it does to fact, and he succeeded in reshaping
      the way nearly all television news and much print news is reported, its no longer about truth
      its only about false balance.

  * Endorphins are released in response to anger, raging can be addictive

  * Hate radio has a semi-captive audience in commuters (obvious)
      (counterpoint: I've heard that NPR is surprisingly popular among truckers,
        but NPR doesn't do jack to market to them, major blindspot)

  * Clarence Thomas (whose wife has made a career of being a right-wing nut job)
      admitted to regularly taping and listening to rush limbaugh's daily 3-hour radio show
      in lieu of "the mainstream media"
      Also officiated limbaugh's 3rd wedding at his own house in VA

  * Scalia admitted to getting most of his news from "talk radio guys" and explicitly not NPR
      (but he did not mention limbaugh by name, said he liked former drug czar bill bennett but usually did not catch his show)

  * Its possible to deprogram RWNJs, it works almost exactly like deprogramming "traditional" cultists -
      show them irrefutable proof that their cult's biggest lies are false and eventually their belief system
      will shatter.

      But the example in the movie (the "Father") was different - he was only deprogrammed when his wife took control
      of his media consumption and switched in other sources, she didn't fully block the RWNJ stuff,
      but she started putting unabashedly liberal news in front of the dad (alternet, truthout, mother jones)
      I don't see that easily scaling up for most consumers of the million little lies that fox tells.

  Parent

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