Donald Trump’s tawdry relationship with the National Enquirer was arguably most valuable to him when he wasn’t using the tabloid as an accomplice in a criminal hush-money-and-election-fraud conspiracy. Testifying this week as the Manhattan district attorney’s star witness, the Enquirer’s then-top executive David Pecker described a standing plot he, Trump, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen hatched to plant false or misleading stories (positive ones about Trump, derogatory ones about his opponents) on the paper’s covers starting way back in 2015. It began with the Republican presidential primary ..read more

(Photo by Harrison /Topical Press Agency/Getty Images) Lots to cover, let’s jump right in. Read more ..read more

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) Ahead of Thursday’s Supreme Court argument over Donald Trump’s claim to immunity for everything he did while president, the New York Times published a stirring call for the Supreme Court to rule against Trump with haste and in no uncertain terms—so that Trump can’t tee up a new series of dilatory appeals, and the case can go to trial before the election.  The essay admonishes the justices to “recognize the profoundly negative impact they may have if the court does not resolve these issues quickly and decisively.” It notes that by dragging their feet, th ..read more

(Photo by DNA Films / YouTube) Breaking the News, the seminal critique of mainstream news, begins with Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace in the hot seat on a PBS series called Ethics in America.  The two TV news legends were asked, before a panel of military officers, to ponder a hypothetical scenario in which the United States were at war with the fictional nation of North Kosan, and they were embedded as journalists with the North Kosanese. At a critical juncture, the North Kosanese company intercepts American soldiers and sets up an ambush. Would the journalists a) protect their sourc ..read more

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) A weekend of important news has quickly overshadowed something striking that led up to it: In just the past few weeks, several House Republicans (none particularly “moderate”) have conceded that their conference is lousy with Russian influence.  On Thursday, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) admitted that Donald Trump’s enforcers in Congress “want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it.” Reps. Mike Turner (R-OH) and Michael McCaul (R-TX), who chair the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees respectively, have each acc ..read more

(Donald Trump and his advisers celebrate as ACA repeal legislation passes the House of Representatives in 2017. Photo by Dan Scavino/Twitter) Last week I had the honor of participating in the Travers Conference, U.C. Berkeley’s big annual public-facing political science symposium on ethics and accountability in government.  My presentation was about deficiencies in our presidential nominating system, but that’s not what this edition of Off Message is about. I’ve been thinking instead, consistently since last Friday, about the presentation UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck delivered on a separate pane ..read more

(Photo by Yifei Fong) With apologies in particular to west coast readers, this week’s live chat will begin around 12 p.m. ET. I’ll try to do a couple swings through the comment thread—once around then, once later in the afternoon—to make up for it. There’s a lot to discuss! Seems like over the past couple weeks we’ve entered a new, faster paced news environment, befitting the stakes of this election. And a lot of it’s good. Read more ..read more

(Photo by maylat) The tussle between Joe Biden and the mainstream media over the state of the economy is over, and Biden won. Not before he felt compelled to abandon his whistlestop tour touting the success of Bidenomics—he lost that battle. But one way or another reality took hold. The way economics desks cover their beats, and political reporters grapple with the economic component of politics, has changed dramatically since the year began. Outside of Trump propaganda organs, the strength of the American recovery is now frequently stipulated to, as is its robustness relative to other ..read more

(Photo by Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images) The debate over whether it’s wise or unwise to give Donald Trump more media exposure pits those who fear the proliferation of uncorrected lies against others who believe metering his visibility tends to sanitize him. If we establish a norm against broadcasting Trump’s rantings and ravings, in order to arrest the spread of disinformation, the bits and pieces people ultimately see will tend to make Trump seem much more ordered and honest than he really is.  I sympathize with both camps here, but in some ways I’m less worried about the spread of lies t ..read more

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Steve Bannon let on to something interesting this week. As Greg Sargent first noticed, Bannon acknowledged that oil production under President Biden has reached historic highs. But he implied that this empirical reality is less important than how and whether the factual information is deployed. It’s not that Republican elites don’t know Biden has overseen an oil-production bonanza—it’s that they don’t feel any moral obligation to acknowledge the truth unless it’s useful to them. To that end, Republicans will try to filter the truth about Biden’s broad-spe ..read more