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‘Ableist Propaganda’: Media Criticized for Negative Treatment of Fetterman’s Use of Closed Captioning Device After Stroke

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Pennsylvania Democratic U.S.. Senate nominee John Fetterman has been very open about the stroke he suffered just days before the primary, and appeared in an interview Tuesday night with NBC News after asking for a simple accommodation: a speech-to-text device so he could read the questions, which he was more than able to answer.

But NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns, who interviewed Fetterman, is now being accused of misrepresenting Fetterman’s abilities.

“‘Because of that auditory processing, he still has a hard time understanding what people are saying,’ Ms Burns said, while explaining the use of closed caption technology for her interview,” The Independent reports.

“She added that ‘some of the conversations’ she had with the Democrat before his first sit-down interview post-stroke – which were without closed caption help – were a ‘challenge for a canddidate’ and that ‘it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying’ without the use of captions.”

READ MORE: Dr. Oz Campaigned in Front of Hitler’s Car at a Fundraiser Hosted by Matt Gaetz’s In-Laws and Rick Scott’s NRSC: Report

Fetterman, a former mayor and current Lt. Governor, has never had a problem doing his job and there his no indication he does now.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put the entire situation in context.

“I have a confession to make. I used a teleprompter in this interview last night,” he tweeted, pointing to his interview with Fetterman which was after the NBC News interview with Burns.

“The truth is I am not able to do my show without a teleprompter. (That’s true of every TV news host who is discussing the way John Fetterman does interviews.)”

By many accounts the NBC News interview was good, but some, like now-former New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin took to social media to claim it did not go well for the Democrat, who is leading his GOP opponent, celebrity physician Dr. Oz, by a strong margin.

READ MORE: ‘What I Saw Was Abuse’: Allegations of Dr. Oz’s Experiments Killing Hundreds of Animals Fact-Checked by Whistleblower

“This is a rough clip for ⁦@JohnFetterman⁩, will only fuel questions about his health,” Martin tweeted, pointing to the NBC News interview.

Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar tweeted out the quote from Burns, writing, “NBC News’ Dasha Burns: ‘In small talk before my interview [with Fetterman], it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying.'”

He, and Burns, were excoriated.

Journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who contributes to The Daily Beast and Vogue, among other top publications, responded to Kraushaar by tweeting: “This is bs.”

“I interviewed @JohnFetterman on @FastPoliticsPod two weeks ago,: she said, pointing to her podcast.

Kara Swisher, a noted journalist, contributing editor at New York magazine, and formerly of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, also responded to the Burns quote.

“Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.”

“Listen to the interview in which we did not edit the ums or ahs out as we typically do for everyone else. There were few slips — I had more — and at no moment did he seem distracted,” she also tweeted.

Swisher, who is highly respected, did not stop there.

“Lastly the most irksome thing for me when I had a stroke in 2011 is all Dr. Google folks who kept trying to give me advice (‘Slow down,’ they’d say; ‘Fuck you,’ I’d reply) or study my speech for signs of trouble. It is a slow recovery but many younger people do just fine,” she added.

READ MORE: Dr. Oz Trounced in Newsmax Interview as Host Demands Explanation for ‘Wegner’s’ and ‘Crudité’ Ad

New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister also pushed back – hard – against the mainstream media’s attacks on Fetterman.

“I wrote in my lengthy profile of Fetterman this week about how open he has been about his ongoing stroke recovery, and how awful it is to watch not just Fox but mainstream media push for ‘transparency’ even as he offers just that,” she writes, pointing to her article.

“Watching tv news/online pundits leer over clips of an interview in which he’s completely engaged and communicative is stomach-turning and a super depressing example of what I was trying to describe,” she adds, pointing to these excerpts:

“Every week, Fetterman’s public engagement has increased, & nothing about his increasingly frequent rallies & media interactions is at odds with what doctors suggest would be normal for a 53-year-old four months out from a serious stroke and expected to make a recovery.”

“Yet legitimate newspapers are pushing for further documentation with some of the energy once applied to Hillary’s emails, while the right-wing carnival barkers treat complete medical records as they did Obama’s birth certificate.”

And she adds, “Fetterman speaks about what it’s like to have a doctor (Oz) mock his recovery—a gross irony, yes. Also ironic is news media clamoring for transparency then themselves offering distortion: implying challenges are cognitive when they’re not, failing to contextualize accommodations.”

CBS News Senior White House & Political Correspondent Ed O’Keefe is also among those being blasted for attacking Fetterman.

“An important interview with top Senate contender. Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?” he tweeted, suggesting that using a teleprompter-like device was too much of an accommodation.

Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief at Random House and the author of “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style,” responded to O’Keefe by asking, “What in God’s name is the matter with you?”

Another Twitter user responded, noting: “FDR was crippled by polio and helped lead USA through unfathomable catastrophe and media would now turn him into a circus freak.”

Others on social media, like this attorney, are also blasting NBC News.

“NBC News is pushing ableist propaganda to imply John Fetterman isn’t well enough to be a Senator for Pennsylvania because he requested closed captioning. Meanwhile, Republicans believe Herschel Walker has brain damage and they are pouring millions in his Georgia race.”

Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo says, “It’s absolutely disgusting what the media is doing to John Fetterman. He has a hearing impairment as a result of his stroke and they’re treating it as a scandal. It’s one of the worst examples of ableism in politics I’ve ever seen.”

Even the retired former MSNBC host Chris Matthews made an appearance on “Morning Joe” and mischaracterized Fetterman’s abilities.

In his interview with O’Donnell, Fetterman has responded to critics, saying, “The truth is, is that I’m going to be feeling better in January, but [Dr. Oz is] going to still be a fraud!”

 

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Trump White House Turns on ‘Moron’ MAGA Loyalist ‘Begging for an Additional Brain Cell’

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The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

 

 

 

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Veteran Journalist War-Games Trump’s ‘Rolling Coup’ — and How It Fails

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Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘Be Very Afraid’: Carville Warns Trump ‘Everybody Is Out for You’

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Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.

Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”

“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”

“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”

“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”

“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”

“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.

“Be scared. Be very afraid.”

It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”

Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”

Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”

Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”

Image via Reuters

 

 

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