Trump continues his vengeance tour on anyone he feels slighted him somehow after a lawsuit was filed against a pollster for the crime of being wrong.
For years, it was widely known that convicted felon, Donald Trump, was going to declare war on free speech and the media. he’s made this clear countless times over the years. Yet, for whatever reason, the mainstream media did what they could to sanewash him and make him look as absolutely presidential as humanly possible (including editing out his countless hours of rambling incoherence and completely editing it over with something that sounds like a normal politician talking – hence “sanewashing”). At the same time, the same media outlets relentlessly attacked those on the Democrat ticket, doing everything to make a mountain out of a mumbled molehill. In the process, they wound up successfully bringing down a respected president and, ultimately, handing the fascist an election win.
I never could make sense of the logic outside of right wing billionaires cracking down on their reporters to try and skew the coverage to the right. After all, as I pointed out back in October, these efforts to pull the convicted felon across the finish line by the media will ultimately backfire. After all, the mainstream media chose to offer full throated support for a candidate that wants to throw them in jail over a candidate that wanted to bolster the journalists’ legal protections. As I would later find out, it is likely that the billionaires that own the media has been influencing the coverage to protect their dear leader. Examples include Jeff Bezos silencing his journalists at the Washington Post and the LA Times owner cracking down on freedom of expression. In all likelihood, this sort of activity of ownership intervention on the coverage is likely happening elsewhere. It really is the only explanation for the activities we’ve seen in the media covering the election.
Regardless of why the mainstream media chose to betray their own interests, we are here now. Over top of the aforementioned push to jail journalists (which includes calls to revoke broadcast licenses), there has been other troubling developments including the fight to legalize Trump’s efforts to assassinate perceived political foes, an FCC nominee pushing to kill free speech on the internet, Trumps call to kill journalism shield legislation, FBI nominee, Kash Patel, threatening MSNBC, and the right wing intimidation campaign against 404 Media. No matter how you slice it, the long warned consequences have come home to roost.
The crackdown on free speech and journalism is continuing after Trump filed a lawsuit against a pollster for having the audacity to be wrong about a polling result. From TechDirt:
Trump, himself, never one to shy away from filing vexatious SLAPP suits, seems emboldened by Bob Iger’s decision to settle the case Trump had filed earlier this year against ABC and George Stephanopoulos. That case was very dumb, but because Stephanopoulos made the case more complicated than it needed to be, a judge refused to dismiss it earlier this year. At that point, it starts to get expensive, and Iger seemed to do the math that, with all the attacks the GOP has made on Disney, it was better to comply and kiss the ring — an unfortunately common occurrence for media moguls these days.
That said, this latest lawsuit is monumentally stupid. Ann Selzer, who had previously been called “the best pollster in politics,” clearly ran a single very bad poll in Iowa right before the election for the Des Moines Register. It caught a lot of attention as it showed Kamala Harris up by a few points on Donald Trump in a state that no one thought Harris would win. This really upset a lot of people at the time, but in the end, it was just a bad poll. It happens.
But, according to this new lawsuit, this one bad poll was… apparently election interference? That’s according to the complaint filed on Monday in an Iowa state court. While Trump had mentioned his intention to sue, Puck News broke the story of the actual lawsuit, but they get no link from me because they quoted from the complaint without including a link to it (my link above in this paragraph is directly to the complaint).
The complaint is laughable because Trump clearly can’t show any damages. He won the election, he won Iowa, so what harm occurred here? The lawsuit claims the poll was part of a Democratic plot to suppress Republican voting, but provides no evidence for this conspiracy theory. If anything, an inaccurate poll showing Democrats ahead would likely motivate more Republicans to turn out and vote.
The idea that you could sue pollsters for releasing poll results that differ from the final election outcome is absurd and dangerous. Polls are snapshots of voter sentiment at a given time, not ironclad predictions. Even the best pollsters are sometimes off the mark. It’s the nature of polling. They could have a bad sample or a bad polling system. Or their weighting system could be off. It happens. It shouldn’t be against the law to make a bad prediction.
Indeed. Even if you could say this was somehow the pollster’s fault, pollster’s, and journalists for that matter, are not infallible. Even mainstream media journalists would admit as such. Where many earn their credibility is admitting when they discover that they made mistakes because it shows the public that they care more about the truth rather than about their own personal ego’s. Unfortunately, this has increasingly become a rare quality where many journalists working in mainstream media outlets are more likely to double down and intentionally spread disinformation rather than admit they screwed something up when those errors are brought to their attention.
At the same time, in this case, there’s no real reason to bring a lawsuit outside of satisfying a personal vendetta. That fits the description of Trump’s motivations and known quantity of having unlimited grievances against anyone and everyone. The motives behind the lawsuit are quite clear. This is a campaign to try and chill dissenting voices wherever they may be for whatever made up reason of exacting revenge on people trying to do their jobs. It’s a travesty to say the least, but this will be far from the last we see something like this. If anything, this is very likely only the early stages of Trump’s campaign to silence others.
