Are you shocked by today’s “breaking” news, the Washington Post’s “scoop” that the Trump Organization was actively engaged in negotiating a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign? You shouldn’t be, and it’s not your fault. The amazing Talkingpointsmemo.com, a part of new media doing more serious investigative work and posting deep political commentary, broke this story LAST AUGUST in the middle of the general election. Why didn’t the Washington Post and other mainstream papers or cable news report this news to connect the Russia dots in the middle of Trump’s deeply suspicious pro-Putin behavior then? Why? Because they were too busy with both-sides-ism, Hillary’s emails, the “basket of deplorables” (newsflash, Hillary was dead right, no pun intended), Hillary fainting…
Talking heads and reporting the horse-race is easy and cheap. Investigative reporting is hard. But it’s also their job. It turn out that Trump is half right about “fake news.” Superficial news coverage gave us President Trump. Media, stop freaking out about Trump mocking you, and just do your job.
Author: Jed Shugerman
Jed Handelsman Shugerman is a Professor and Joseph Lipsitt Scholar at Boston University School of Law. He was at Fordham Law School 2013-2022. He received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 ASLH’s Cromwell Prize. He is co-author of amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases.
He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America. The first is tentatively titled “A Faithful President: The Founders v. the Unitary Executive,” questioning the textual and historical evidence for the theory of unchecked and unbalanced presidential power. This book draws on his articles “Vesting” (Stanford Law Review forthcoming 2022), “Removal of Context” (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2022), a co-authored “Faithful Execution and Article II” (Harvard Law Review 2019 with Andrew Kent and Ethan Leib), “The Indecisions of 1789” (forthcoming Penn. Law Review), and “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” (Stanford Law Review 2014). The second book project is “The Rise of the Prosecutor Politicians: Race, War, and Mass Incarceration,” focusing on California Governor Earl Warren, his presidential running mate Thomas Dewey, the Kennedys, World War II and the Cold War, the war on crime, the growth of prosecutorial power, and its emergence as a stepping stone to electoral power for ambitious politicians in the mid-twentieth century.
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