Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The Mexican Firefighting Crew That Saves Lives Across the Border - The Diablos, who live south of the Rio Grande, have fought many of the biggest fires in the American West. Do they have a future? - link

• Ron Klain Looks Back on Biden’s First Two Years as President - “We have been declared dead, dead, dead many times,” the White House’s departing chief of staff says, of the Administration. “You just have to keep after it.” - link

• How Assad Blocked Aid to Syrian Earthquake Victims - In the country’s rebel-held northwest, none of the assistance delivered so far has included rescue equipment. - link

• Blanche the Unusually Friendly Swan - She reigned at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, but life wasn’t always easy. - link

• How Do Ukrainians Think About Russians Now? - After a year of war, the struggle for cultural sovereignty has triggered complex sentiments. - link

From Vox

• Joe Biden is mad about hidden fees and you should be, too -

  

  You are not the only person who thinks resort fees are ridiculous and it shouldn’t cost you $200 to cancel your cable.

  To exist in the economy in this day and age is to constantly be bombarded by fees. It’s often not clear what they’re for, or why they’re necessary, or when they’re even going to appear.

  One minute you’re trying to buy concert tickets on Ticketmaster for X dollars, and boom, the cost leaps by 30 percent to Y dollars, thanks to random fees you can’t even see unless you click a little drop-down arrow to figure out the provenance of the extra charge. Or you’re booking a flight, and somehow the original cost of your seat has skyrocketed when all is said and done. Or you just want to sit next to your elementary schooler on the plane, and there’s a charge for that, too.

  President Joe Biden knows America’s fees-riddled economy can feel frustrating, deceptive, and, of course, expensive. And so, to channel some Elizabeth Warren here, he’s got a plan for that: He’s calling for a Junk Fee Prevention Act in an effort to ax hidden fees and take aim at the ways consumers are nickeled and dimed by corporations.

  This is part of the White House’s broader efforts to try to increase competition across the economy and go after the proliferation of fees in industries ranging from banking to ticketing to travel. In October, the White House also rolled out a blog post outlining its plans to take on junk fees, and the FTC announced it would explore a rule to take a look at the issue. Other agencies, including the CFPB and the Department of Transportation, are taking a crack at fees in their respective areas as well.

  “Junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most folks in homes like the one I grew up in. They add up to hundreds of dollars a month. They make it harder for you to pay the bills or afford that family trip,” Biden said at his State of the Union address in February. “I know how unfair it feels when a company overcharges you and gets away with it. Not anymore.”

  Right now, the Junk Fee Prevention Act is basically a plan to have a plan — there’s no actual bill yet. The White House is trying to tackle the fees issue from multiple angles.

  The idea here isn’t necessarily that companies can’t charge for their services, but instead that they’ve got to be fair and honest about those charges and compete for consumers’ business in a way that isn’t, to put it plainly, tricky.

  “That’s bad for market efficiency, that’s bad for firms that price in an honest way, and if you’re an industry and you’re choosing how to innovate, if junk fees are permissible, then one way to make more profits is to come up with new and more sophisticated junk fees rather than actually making your product better or making your product lower cost,” one White House official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity.

  If the only way to get a Beyoncé ticket or book your Cancún vacation is to pay the extra charges, they’re not really extras anymore, they’re just kind of the price.

  “Basic economics teaches us that there’s supply and demand and prices are market signals. Common sense shows that people shop and compare goods on the basis of price, among other things,” said Aaron Klein, senior fellow in economics at the think tank Brookings Institution, in an interview. “The internet revolutionized how we bought and sold goods and services, so what we’re finding is that in the quest to have the lowest price, cost is being moved from price to fees, so that consumers think they’re buying something at a cheaper price when in point of fact the true cost to that might be higher.”

  What’s in the still-to-come Junk Fee Prevention Act

  The Junk Fee Prevention Act doesn’t exist as actual full legislative text on Capitol Hill. For now, it’s more talking points as the White House gets the ball rolling, and it’s still not clear with whom. One senior Democratic congressional aide who Vox granted anonymity in order to speak freely on the matter said they have “no fucking clue” on the bill and that as far as they know it is “made up.”

  A White House spokesperson who agreed to speak anonymously said they are having “productive conversations” with many members of Congress who have expressed interest in junk fees and noted there has been bipartisan interest in the issue in the past, including from Republican Reps. Ann Wagner of Missouri and Paul Gosar of Arizona. As mentioned, the Biden administration is also taking aim at fees at the agency level to try to tackle some of these problems from different avenues.

  In broad outlines, the junk fee legislation the White House is advocating for Congress to take up would take aim at four areas:

  Concerts, sporting events, and entertainment ticket fees. Anyone who’s tried to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert or any other event recently is well aware, the process can be a mess, including and often especially when it comes to extra charges. Consumers are met with nebulous service fees and venue fees when making a purchase, and those fees often appear at the end of the buying process and make up a significant chunk of the final price.

  The White House wants Congress to bar excessive fees, require those fees be disclosed in the ticket price from the start, and make sellers disclose holdbacks of tickets that diminish supply (and can therefore drive up prices).

  Elsewhere in the government, the Department of Justice has reportedly undertaken an antitrust investigation against Live Nation Entertainment, the company born after Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged in 2010 that is the one charging a lot of these fees.

  Extra charges for sitting next to your kid on a plane. If you have flown lately, you’ve probably noticed airlines often now charge you extra for choosing a seat. It’s annoying for any traveler who remembers the days when sitting somewhere not terrible on a flight did not run you $50. For parents, the stakes can be higher — they are often faced with the choice of paying to sit next to their child or hoping a kind stranger will switch seats. (The kindness of strangers is not guaranteed.)

  In July 2022, the Department of Transportation put out a notice urging airlines to “do everything in their power to ensure that children who are age 13 or younger are seated next to an accompanying adult with no additional charge,” but no airlines actually guarantee this one yet. The DOT is still working on the matter with a fees dashboard and a potential rule to ban sit-by-your-child charges. Still, it’s hoping Congress can fast-track the matter by including a ban on these fees in legislation.

  Fees for quitting your cable company, your phone plan, or your internet service. When you sign up to get cable or internet in your home or open up a new phone plan, it often comes with a set time frame — and a financial punishment if you want to back out before that time frame ends. Quitting early can cost tens and hundreds of dollars.

  The White House makes the case that these early termination fees hurt market dynamism “by making it harder for innovative companies to win a toe-hold in the market by encouraging customers to switch.” Essentially, if a company wants to keep your business, it should have to do so by having a competitive offer, not by threatening to charge you a bunch of money if you go elsewhere. Biden wants Congress to ax “excessive” early termination fees so companies can’t lock in customers with the threat of a giant bill if they switch phone companies.

  Surprise charges that make what’s supposed to be your fun vacation a little less fun. The story with resort fees and destination fees is similar to what happens with concert tickets: The consumer sees one price for a hotel room when they start their vacation planning, and by the time they hit checkout, that total amount has jumped. The charade makes it hard to comparison shop because the low price shown at the outset can get pretty meaningless. As the advocacy group Kill Resort Fees notes, there’s not much stopping a hotel from advertising a $1 room rate and $99 in fees.

  It’s often not clear what these fees are for, beyond making hotels and resorts more money. The hotel industry makes billions of dollars in fees and surcharges each year. “The hotel likes to say that they provide amenities in exchange for that resort fee, but it’s a complete and total lie,” said Lauren Wolfe, the founder of the website Kill Resort Fees. “The resort fee exists so that the hotel can lie to consumers about the advertised price.”

  The White House wants Congress to bar surprise fees by making hotels include them in room prices up front.

  The idea here is there ought to be some limits on how companies charge you for random stuff

  Much of what the White House is pushing for isn’t that companies shouldn’t be allowed to impose various fees and charges for different services ever (though in some instances that is the case). What it’s saying is that there should be a cap on the amount those companies can collect so that arrangement is a little less predatory or, at the very least, companies should have to tell you how much something costs with the fees included from the get-go. It’s also looking to discourage the proliferation of fees across various industries and companies. In multiple sectors, there’s a culture of exploitative fees, and the hope is to reverse the tide and make companies think twice about adding on extra charges.

  There are areas where specific fees and charges make sense, and where differential pricing seems fair. At the very least, you can sometimes see the argument for them.

  In flying, for example, airlines say that much of what they’ve done is to disaggregate different options and services so travelers can sort of pick and choose what they want. The idea is that you see the stripped-down price initially and then decide whether you want to pay to check a bag, sit comfortably, print your ticket, whatever. (Vox has a whole explainer on the airline fee situation here.)

  Reasonable minds can disagree about whether this business practice is good. Some people really do want the lowest fare and are happy to take that middle seat in the back. At the same time, the checked bag fee distorts behavior because then everybody tries to bring their bags on the plane. And fees often add up so quickly that the original price you’re shown when booking on a website like Expedia or Google Flights, ultimately, ends up being a complete lie.

  “The airlines that competed on price in the same search engine started moving cost to things like bag fees and other things so you would think, ‘Oh, this is the cheapest flight,’ and buy it, and you get to the airport and boom. Same thing with the hotels,” Klein said. “Free market competition assumes transparent information about prices, and what we’ve seen are companies, and broadly speaking industries, moving toward taking something out of one price tag and moving it to another.”

  Again, this Junk Fee Prevention Act is not an actual thing that exists at the moment. If and when it does (which, you know, we have a Congress that often doesn’t do much), it’s not entirely clear how implementation would work. Which resort fees are unfair and which are for a legitimate thing? Is there a way to opt out of whatever amenities they correspond to? What would travel website designs need to look like? What counts as a fair rate for quitting your phone plan early, and how much exactly does that cost the company dealing with it?

  “There’s been too little policing of fees in the market, but I think implementation is challenging because sometimes the fees are correlated to different services,” Klein said.

  As the saying goes, the devil is in the details, but a lot of this stuff probably isn’t that hard to figure out — or at least it’s not as hard as many companies will likely say it is.

  It’s impossible not to note how much the economy has become overridden by fees. Banks charge a web of fees for accessing your own money or for making a mistake there’s no way it costs them that much to address. They often make money off of fees levied on those who can least afford it. The costs added onto food delivery services for consumers and restaurants are disorienting, and it’s never clear whether the fees companies say go to workers actually do. It’s impossible to know what so many goods and services are going to cost you because of charges and fees that consistently pop up. This isn’t good for anyone, ultimately, even businesses.

  Another White House official who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said he’s heard in conversations with some companies that they’d be amenable to tighter rules around fees — assuming everyone else has to go along. If you’re a ticketing platform and you’re the only one showing full prices up front while all your competitors are going to add them on later, you’re at a disadvantage. Consumers won’t choose you if there’s no way for them to know you’re actually the right choice.

  “That’s bad for consumers and it’s bad for industry in the long run,” Klein said. “We should be competing on the best service and the best price, not on who can shock you with the most fees at the end.”

• How the Harry Potter video game became an ethical minefield -

  

  Hogwarts Legacy is one of the most anticipated video games of all time. Whether or not you play it is a question of morality.

  On February 10, Warner Bros. released the video game Hogwarts Legacy, an open-world role-playing game (RPG) set 100 years before the events of Harry Potter. So far, reviews have been solid: The game is by no means groundbreaking, relying heavily on the conventions long perfected by other RPG fantasy franchises like The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, and The Legend of Zelda, where players control one main person who explores a world full of other characters who can either present them with quests or act as obstacles to defeat.

  But whether it is a good, a bad, or even a solidly fine video game is not really what people are talking about when they talk about Hogwarts Legacy. Since the first rumblings of its existence, all the way back in 2017, to its official announcement in 2020, the game has sparked intense fury and speculation over how it would distance itself — or not — from the hateful rhetoric of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

  Rowling has, over the past several years, proudly aligned herself with trans-exclusionary radical feminism, or TERFism, which maintains that trans women are actually men who seek to invade women-only spaces and oppress them further. This logic has no basis in reality, and as Katelyn Burns previously noted for Vox, TERFism effectively functions as a hate group targeting one of society’s most vulnerable communities.

  Much of Harry Potter’s enormous fan base has spent the intervening years reeling from the realization that its beloved author could harbor such abhorrent views, particularly one whose books explicitly championed progressive values (so much so that terms from the series became synonymous with the anti-Trump “resistance”). But the attention on Rowling’s beliefs about trans people has also reignited conversations around her portrayal of other marginalized groups within the book series. Namely, her tendency to call nonwhite characters stereotypical and offensive names, the most egregious being Cho Chang, whose name is actually two last names of completely separate ethnic origins, and the Black character Kingsley Shacklebolt. She also frequently uses antisemetic dog whistles in her depictions of the greedy, “hook-nosed” goblins who work at the wizard bank.

  All of this has made Hogwarts Legacy, one of the most anticipated video games of all time, into a deeply fraught topic. For many fans, the fact that Rowling will profit from the purchases of Hogwarts Legacy is reason enough to boycott it. “If anyone makes a new Harry Potter anything, it will clearly broadcast the message that Rowling’s views aren’t abhorrent. That you can demonize trans people as mentally ill sexual predators and still continue to have a voice, a career, tremendous social influence,” wrote my colleague Aja Romano, after rumors that Warner Bros. was working on a Harry Potter TV show.

  Now that there is in fact a new Harry Potter property, professional video game streamers, games websites, and fans have publicly clashed over their approaches to playing and reviewing it. Some argue that whether or not fans purchase the game, Rowling will continue to be a billionaire, so it shouldn’t matter. Potterheads have waited decades for the ability to explore Hogwarts castle themselves, their logic goes, so what difference will a portion of their $59.99 make to someone with a virtually limitless bank account, even if it ends up funding anti-trans hate groups?

  You’re afraid about people being mad about you playing Hogwarts Legacy and supporting the transphobic JK Rowling. I’m afraid of being murdered for being trans.
  
  We are not the same.

  — Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) February 13, 2023

On the other side, many trans people and allies argue that the desire to play a video game and the desire to exist freely as a trans person are hardly comparable. “You’re afraid about people being mad about you playing Hogwarts Legacy and supporting the transphobic JK Rowling. I’m afraid of being murdered for being trans. We are not the same,” tweeted writer Alejandra Caraballo.

What seems to be the underlying question, however, is this: Does my choice to play or not to play Hogwarts Legacy make me a bad person or a good person?

Hogwarts Legacy has tried to sidestep the Rowling issue but hasn’t necessarily succeeded

Since 2020, Warner Bros. has attempted to distance itself from Rowling, stating repeatedly that the author was not “directly involved” with the development of the game. Her creative agency, however, “did work with the developers on creative decisions throughout the project,” according to Bloomberg.

It should also be mentioned that Rowling is not the only controversial part of Hogwarts Legacy. In 2021, its lead developer, Troy Leavitt, resigned after videos surfaced of him defending men who had been accused of sexual harassment and Gamergate, the 2014 harassment campaign against women in the games industry. One of its voice actors is Greg Ellis, who publicly supports Rowling and made many anti-Amber Heard videos on his YouTube, where he regularly rails against feminism, cancel culture, and wokeness. Others have criticized Hogwarts Legacy’s decision to focus the main plot on the goblin wars, further impressing upon the veiled antisemitism of the tropes they represent.

Warner Bros. has stressed that it attempted to make the game as diverse as possible. Speaking to IGN, director Alan Tew said, “We know our fans fell in love with the Wizarding World, and we believe they fell in love with it for the right reasons. We know that’s a diverse audience. For us, it’s making sure that the audience, who always dreamed of having this game, had the opportunity to feel welcomed back. That they have a home here and that it’s a good place to tell their story.” Within hours of beginning the main storyline, players will meet characters from Korea, Uganda, and India, as well as a female archeologist who refers to her wife. Players can also ostensibly play as trans characters; the game offers the ability to choose one’s voice, body shape, and whether they want to be referred to as a “witch” or a “wizard” in separate sliders.

Harry Potter Fandom Wiki

There is also a character who is (almost) explicitly transgender: Sirona Ryan is the owner of the Hogsmeade pub the Three Broomsticks, and in one scene says the line, “He recognized me instantly. Which is more than I can say for some of my own classmates. Took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.” While it could be assumed that her inclusion was a direct rejection of Rowling’s beliefs, sources familiar with the game’s development have said that the move was “performative bullshit,” and that the character was only added after the initial backlash to the game.

The online reaction to the character, however, has focused mostly on her name — specifically that it seemed to mirror Rowling’s stereotypical naming conventions by beginning with “sir.” “I think the trans community can accept the first trans character in harry potter being named Sirona Ryan if they introduce the first TERF character and name her Dee Vorced,” tweeted @JUNlPER, a podcaster and prominent trans Twitter user named June (she avoids using her last name to prevent doxxing and harassment). “It feels like a lot of this [discourse] is manufactured, because there’s a lot of right-wing TERFs who are like, ‘Wow, look how good this [game] is selling, sticking it to trans people!’ Which is, of course, provoking trans people. It’s just so obviously targeted culture war discourse,” June told me.

Another aspect of the game that contradicts Rowling’s moral logic is that in Hogwarts Legacy, players are free to use one of the three “Unforgivable Curses” — the killing curse, the torture curse, and the spell that allows you to control other people’s actions — without punishment. In the books, casting any one of them results in a lifetime sentence in Azkaban, which is a prison where very often your soul gets sucked out, but as lead designer Kelly Rowland told Games Radar, the decision “comes from a place of non-judgment by the game creators. If you want to be evil, be evil.”

In any other video game, this would seem like a pretty reasonable choice; many of the most popular games, after all, encourage players to murder one another. But in Harry Potter, a book series whose moral code is so central to the story, and where the “evil” people are essentially eugenicists (they believe that wizards should only be of “pure blood” and that wizardkind should be free to subjugate and enslave non-magic people), it feels not only extra icky but like a major break from the franchise’s ethos.

The rest of the game, though, is pretty much what you’d expect: You walk around the castle and the grounds, you learn spells from professors, you befriend your classmates, you find out that you possess a rare bit of magic that becomes the key to defeating the evil goblin rebellion. It’s exactly the Harry Potter video game fans have been hoping for for decades — just in a far more fraught context.

How “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” became part of Hogwarts Legacy’s legacy

There’s a phrase that has become commonly used in situations where a lot of people want to buy something they know they shouldn’t: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” The phrase’s origins are murky; its earliest internet appearance was a 2013 meme of Clippy, the sentient paperclip on Microsoft Word, but author Malcolm Harris attributes the idea to a 2010 YouTube video of Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek. The idea is that under a capitalist system in which laborers do not own the means of production, there is no such thing as buying or consuming something that is inherently fair trade, so we should endeavor to reduce harm when possible. But, Harris notes, the line is more often used today to mean its inverse: that there is no unethical consumption under capitalism, therefore nobody should feel bad about the things they buy because it’s all bad anyway.

You can imagine how this sort of copypasta can be used to justify the purchase of Hogwarts Legacy. “Sorry guys but I am forced to buy this game twice and also any DLC released, as well as the new movie and scarves and of course the boxed set in Ravenpuff colors and for recurring entrance to the themed parks and,” tweeted one person, sarcastically.

The “no ethical consumption under capitalism” defense is also almost always a pretense for the real reason someone might willingly give money to a proud transphobe: They just really, really want to play the game, and the consequences of this choice will always be invisible to them.

“On some level, all of us buys something that supports an evil person, right?” says June. “By me using Twitter, I’m supporting Elon Musk in some way, and he’s transphobic.” There is a difference, though, when people who buy the game then need to be told that what they are doing is still virtuous because they personally disagree with Rowling’s beliefs. “Here’s my take on it: Feel free to buy it, but don’t try to get ‘good ally’ points for saying, ‘I really dislike J.K. Rowling, so can you still pat me on the back?’”

Consider the many viral tweets that attempt to work out this logic: “If you buy #HogwartsLegacy because you’re excited to play it, you aren’t transphobic. If you boycott the game, you’re not a bad person. If you call someone transphobic for buying the game, you’re an asshole. If you say you’re buying to ’piss off the libs’ you’re an asshole too.” One person compared the decision to play to the Trolley Problem. The popular games website IGN inserted a lengthy parenthetical regarding Rowling in their otherwise glowing review of the game, seemingly as a way to separate the game from its context — a tempting exercise, but ultimately an illusion.

Warner Bros.

This is the unspoken undercurrent of nearly all Hogwarts Legacy discourse: the misguided need to be considered a good person even if you buy the game. In some ways, this makes sense; in American culture, where spending money is essentially our greatest form of power, of course we equate consumer choices with morality. And in an economic environment where the value of a dollar is declining alongside the power of working families, it’s easier to unleash our frustrations on each other than it is to try and dismantle the system. Hence, endless infighting among fans who might have extremely similar views at their core.

“Especially in the trans community, there’s a lot of lashing out because there’s a helplessness. When you don’t have any real power at all, people tend to lash out at each other and at people who are, on some level, allies,” June explains. She recently raised $60,000 for the Trevor Project by streaming a video game created by a trans person, writing, “The world has gotten bad and scary for trans people recently and I hope that people become better to each other. Try not to become as vicious to each other and ostensible allies as transphobes are to us. We need everyone we can get to keep fighting back.”

It’s fitting that Hogwarts Legacy has incited so many heightened, emotionally fraught reactions. The Harry Potter universe is one in which there are Death Eaters and the resistance and very little in between, one where 11-year-old students are sorted into houses based on their characters before they’ve really developed them. It is nearly synonymous with an entire generation, the millennials whose worldviews were formed based on the choices Rowling made.

The problem is, the regular world isn’t Harry Potter. By playing or not playing the game, no one is going to brand you with the Dark Mark or induct you into the Order of the Phoenix. As the game’s lead designer said, “If you want to be evil, be evil.” Just don’t expect anyone to congratulate you for it.

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

• The rise of the Trump-Russia revisionists -

  

  The attempt to rewrite the Trump-Russia scandal is underway. But the critics leading the charge are showing their own blind spots.

  Nearly four years after the Mueller investigation concluded, the Trump-Russia scandal has largely faded from the nation’s political consciousness. The people who now dwell on it most are those who believe it was an appalling wrong committed against Donald Trump — or at the very least, a big embarrassment for the media and an overreach by investigators.

  Trump and his staunchest defenders on the right have long made the case that “Russiagate” was a sham, joined by some commentators like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who aren’t professed Trump fans but who do disdain what they view as the groupthink, dishonesty, and partisanship of the media and liberal establishment.

  Late last month, this argument got its most prestigious endorsement yet, with the Columbia Journalism Review’s lengthy series by Jeff Gerth, titled “The press versus the president.” Gerth argued that major news outlets’ Trump-Russia coverage “includes serious flaws” and proceeded to lay out what he claimed those flaws were.

  Trump-Russia revisionism is on the rise and the old conventional wisdom is in retreat. Now that the scandal has faded from headlines and all those names and purportedly suspicious contacts have receded into the haze of memory, even liberals inclined to suspect the worst of Trump may be left wondering: What was that all about again, anyway? Did it really matter?

  I covered the investigation contemporaneously for Vox, and I do think a reassessment is worthwhile. But the revisionists tend to fall into their own patterns of oversimplification and overhype.

  Does the media’s Trump-Russia coverage hold up? It depends on what coverage you’re talking about. The “Trump as Manchurian candidate” theories, the frenzied hunt to unearth any suspicious-sounding “contacts” with any Russians, and anything based on the Steele dossier — the explosive document that purported to have the goods on Trump but very much didn’t — have not aged well.

  But the coverage and scandal were about more than that. Though it’s inconvenient for the revisionists’ narrative, the Russian government really did intervene in the 2016 election by hacking leading Democrats’ emails and having them leaked. Much of the coverage of the scandal now derided as “Russiagate” was about the investigation into whether anyone associated with Trump was involved in that Russian effort, treating this as an open question to which we simply didn’t yet know the answer.

  Much of what the critics are arguing here is less about the facts of the scandal and more about the larger narrative around it. Should the media have treated Trump-Russia as the biggest political story in the country? Did the overall amount and tone of the coverage leave a false impression of his guilt? How does it compare to scandal coverage of other politicians, like Hillary Clinton?

  And was the media and liberal establishment too suspicious of Trump in treating him like an unprecedented threat to the nation or have his subsequent actions proven they were right all along? The revisionists, in arguing that Trump got a raw deal, want to focus more attention on the overreaching of his liberal and establishment critics, but their one-sided account distorts the full picture of what happened, and reveals their own blind spots about the former president as he runs for office again.

  How the Trump-Russia story began

  Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

  The revisionist account of how this all started is that it was mainly because of falsehoods spread by allies of Hillary Clinton.

  The narrative goes something like this: The Clinton campaign paid an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to research Trump’s Russia ties, and Fusion paid former British spy Christopher Steele to assemble what became known as his “dossier” of research claiming a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy — claims that, in their specifics, were largely later debunked as false. Various Clinton allies, and Steele himself, tried to get reporters to write about these claims, and law enforcement officials to investigate them.

  Later, Clinton allies also learned of a group of computer scientists’ research into whether a Trump server was communicating with Alfa Bank, a Russian bank, and tried to get that to investigators and the press too, but no wrongdoing was ever proven there. Gerth recounts this all in great detail.

  Now, all of this happened, and those particular claims about Trump and Russia indeed haven’t held up.

  But they are only one part of the story of how the Trump-Russia story began, and a relatively minor part.

  A fuller recap of what the scandal was all about would go something like this: What became the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia was opened in the summer of 2016 for reasons having nothing to do with Steele, Fusion, or Alfa Bank.

  That year, leading Democrats had seen their emails and documents stolen in hacks, later to surface on mysterious websites or to be published by WikiLeaks. Initial assessments blamed the Russian government for the hack (and Mueller’s team later confirmed those assessments, fleshing them out with much more detail).

  Trump viewed these leaks as highly beneficial to him, touting them constantly on the campaign trail, and even publicly calling on “Russia, if you’re listening” to find more Clinton emails. (He then claimed this was a joke, but in private, he urged his campaign advisers to try and get ahold of more Clinton emails.)

  While this was unfolding, the FBI received a tip that a little-known Trump foreign policy aide, George Papadopoulos, had been saying he knew Russia had damaging emails related to Clinton before any hack news was public. So the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation originally focused on a discrete question: Had the Russian government conveyed information about their plans to interfere in the 2016 election to someone on Trump’s team?

  This was, I would argue, an entirely reasonable question. And with hindsight, due to this investigation and reporting, we know that many shenanigans were indeed afoot.

  • Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone was trying to get hacked Democratic emails from WikiLeaks in advance, while apparently informing Trump about his efforts.
  • Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was sharing the campaign’s polling data and strategy with an associate the FBI claims is tied to Russian intelligence.
  • Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had reached out to the Russian government to try to get a Trump Tower Moscow project going, though it didn’t end up happening.
  • Donald Trump Jr. even welcomed an emailed offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton that was said to be “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” setting up a meeting with Manafort and Jared Kushner to discuss it. (They didn’t find the information useful.)

  Additionally, Trump later tried to get a different foreign government to help him win the 2020 election, in his effort to strong-arm Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelenskyy into investigating the Biden family — so it’s not like he’s ethically opposed to colluding with a foreign government to help him win the presidency.

  And here’s the other thing: Before the 2016 election, Trump-Russia was a minor subplot of the campaign coverage. The Clinton campaign tried to make the scandal catch on, but they didn’t yet succeed. There were occasional stories based on Fusion or Steele’s claims, but there was widespread skepticism of those claims (including here at Vox). When the New York Times did learn of the Trump-Russia investigation, they suggested there was not much to it, in an October 31 story headlined “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” that poured cold water on the Alfa Bank claims.

  Indeed, Clinton’s own scandals and other Trump controversies received far more attention before Election Day.

  

  After the 2016 election, though, quite a bit changed.

  Mistakes were made

  Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  Trump’s unexpected victory led mainstream media organizations and federal investigators to elevate the question of Russian interference to paramount importance — with suspicions running high.

  The public discussion around Trump and Russia then metamorphosed into something far more sprawling, strange, and conspiratorial, centering around the question of whether Trump was either “compromised” by Russia or was somehow a puppet of the Kremlin — a question even some top political players seriously entertained.

  This is the moment when Steele’s work had the greatest impact. Without him, “Manchurian candidate” theories may have been limited to self-appointed online gurus spinning elaborate fanfiction. But the dossier circulated in Washington, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on it, and then BuzzFeed News controversially decided to publish it in January 2017.

  Steele’s memos cited anonymous sources who laid out a maximalist version of Trump-Russia collusion, claiming he traded policy concessions on Ukraine in exchange for Russia’s email hacking; that his aides even helped pay the hackers; and that he had been exchanging information with Russian intelligence for “at least eight years.” Steele’s memos also fingered another little-known Trump foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, as orchestrating a wild collusion conspiracy with the Russian government.

  The memos also brought to life one of the most bizarre subplots of the whole affair: the pee tape. This was the claim that Trump hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him” at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2013, implying this could have been secretly taped so that Trump was vulnerable to Kremlin blackmail.

  Later investigations revealed, though, that most of Steele’s juicy claims came from one person who didn’t seem to have good intel or even believe in his own findings.

  Now, all along, most media coverage did make clear it wasn’t known whether Steele’s claims were true. However, once the dossier was published by BuzzFeed and those claims became public, they were frequently discussed as though they could well be true: On the one hand, Steele says this, on the other, Trump denies it, so who will you believe?

  In effect, this kind of framing did legitimize Steele’s claims far beyond what they deserved, letting unsubstantiated rumors and gossip drive coverage. And some media outlets and journalists were more Steele-friendly than others. There was regular discussion of his allegations on cable news, and a drumbeat of articles that kept asserting that more of his claims were being confirmed when they weren’t. (Paradoxically, Steele’s claims also effectively raised the bar for what “counted” as Trump-Russia collusion, making even the absurd seem within the realm of possibility, and setting up the less spectacular reality to later seem underwhelming in comparison.)

  Still, the revisionists too rarely acknowledge that many other media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, were more cautious about Steele’s claims, and about theories of Trump being Putin’s puppet. Much of their coverage of the Trump-Russia investigation and the topic generally was newsworthy and stuck to the facts, making clear that it wasn’t known whether Trump conspired with the Kremlin.

  Was the coverage perfect? No. There are some types of stories that have held up less well, including two in particular that are frequently criticized by the revisionists.

  The first is a genre that was briefly in vogue: the “Russian contacts” story. Fed by anonymous leaks, these stories were about how one Trump associate or another had talked with a Russian at some time, with the ominous implication that these contacts could be crucial to uncovering a conspiracy.

  But sometimes, these anonymous sources were incorrect. Gerth cites real-time internal commentary from the FBI’s Peter Strzok critiquing a series of these 2017 New York Times articles as “largely wrong.” And even when the contacts were real, further details revealed them to be not so sinister. For instance, it now seems clear Jeff Sessions was not hiding a secret conspiracy when he didn’t mention in Senate testimony that he met with the Russian ambassador once in his Senate office and also spoke to him briefly at a separate event.

  The second genre that proved hyperbolic is Russian trolls coverage. As I’ve written, the panic over online Russian trolls influencing Americans and swinging the 2016 election with propaganda or fake news was overhyped. Yes, this trolling operation existed, and its existence was newsworthy. But the overwhelming amount of coverage may have led to exaggerated perceptions of its impact which, as a recent study confirms, was pretty minimal.

  A question of suspicion

  Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

  But the revisionists’ issue with Trump-Russia coverage isn’t just about the stories that were factually wrong. It’s about something bigger, broader, and a bit tougher to pin down: the “narrative.” Media coverage that is accurate and even arguably justified can create an unfair or misleading narrative, due less to the facts than to proportion, hype, tone, and implication.

  For instance, leading media outlets did not merely cover Trump-Russia — they made an editorial choice to treat it as the biggest and most important political story of 2017 and 2018. New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet referred to the scandal internally as “Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers,” per a transcript of a 2019 Times town hall.

  This was, in many respects, a defensible decision. This was the investigation that seemed like it could bring down the president or at least lead to his impeachment. We now know that it didn’t, but hindsight is 20/20. The core question of whether Trump worked with Russia, if you believed it was unsettled, was important. And as Baquet suggests, in a sense they were following intense reader interest as well (as I know very well, being privy to the traffic statistics for many of Vox’s Trump-Russia stories from that period). It was always going to get coverage — a lot of coverage.

  Another question posed by the revisionists is whether the overall tone and tenor of the coverage was too suspicious of Trump, and whether media outlets were too quick to assume he had something to hide.

  But recall that Trump fired the FBI director and then quickly contradicted his own aides’ explanation for why he did so, saying it was because of “the Russia thing.” Should the assumption have been that Trump had nothing to hide? (Gerth puts great weight on Trump also saying that he thought the firing actually might prolong the Russia investigation, ignoring the false explanation Trump’s team initially offered for Comey’s firing and sounding rather too credulous about whether Trump truly would have let such an investigation proceed.)

  These tensions are inherent to modern political scandal coverage. For decades, the press’s model has been Watergate, in which reporting and investigation gradually, in drip-drip-drip fashion, revealed a dastardly cover-up and brought down the president. Scandal coverage is internally and externally prestigious; it wins prizes and makes reporters famous. It sells.

  For this reason, Gerth was an interesting choice to write the Columbia Journalism Review’s Trump-Russia retrospective. He is the reporter who, his critics charge, invented the Whitewater scandal: the claims of wrongdoing over an Arkansas land deal that dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton for years and spurred the appointment of an independent counsel, a long investigation, and (years later) Bill Clinton’s impeachment on an unrelated matter. Gerth’s Times-era reporting on other topics, too, including the series that won him his Pulitzer, faced criticism for making ominous implications that were not borne out. (Semafor’s Ben Smith even reports that Gerth sent what sounds like a rather wildly speculative memo about the Clintons to the Times in 2016.)

  In the CJR series — which in my view makes some persuasive points but is overall a selective and one-sided account — Gerth does not reflect on any lessons he may have learned from his own work in the Clinton years. But back in 2015, my then-colleague Jonathan Allen wrote about what he called “the Clinton rules” — the unspoken assumptions that pervaded the mainstream media’s longtime approach to coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Three of those rules, in his telling, were:

  1. Everything, no matter how ludicrous-sounding, is worthy of a full investigation by federal agencies, Congress, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and mainstream media outlets.
     2. Every allegation, no matter how ludicrous, is believable until it can be proven completely and utterly false. And even then, it keeps a life of its own in the conservative media world.
        3. The media assumes that Clinton is acting in bad faith until there’s hard evidence otherwise.

  Part of this, Allen acknowledged, was due to a general journalistic desire to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But, he added, there was another reason: “The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire.”

  Election night 2016 marked the shift from the Clinton rules to the Trump rules. But the reality is that when journalists come to the conclusion that a politician is fundamentally untrustworthy and trying to hide things, they tend to make a great effort to try to uncover those things — and sometimes they overreach in doing so.

  How should the media cover these unfolding investigations when information about them is incomplete and imperfect and the full story really isn’t initially clear? How much coverage is too much and how much is not enough? Can the press really know in advance which investigation is a nothingburger and which isn’t? These are tough questions with no easy answers.

  Coverage of Trump was fraught for another reason. Much of the media, the government, and the Democratic Party really did view him as a uniquely dangerous figure, an aspiring dictator with no ethical guardrails who would do anything to get and hold on to power. Were they right to suspect the worst of him?

  The revisionists have argued for years that they were wrong — that, driven by hysteria and partisanship, the liberal establishment exaggerated the threat Trump posed and that the real story was their own abuses of power. And as the Trump presidency settled into something like a routine and he seemed generally contained and constrained by his own administration and the sky didn’t fall, this may have seemed at least arguable.

  But Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election torpedoed that defense, laying his character bare and revealing that, yes, he really was willing to go to shocking lengths to hold on to power. Knowing that, it hardly seems unreasonable for the press to have responded to his denials of Russian collusion with skepticism and to investigate whether it happened.

  To be clear, there was too much hysterical and flawed reporting in Trump-Russia coverage, and that shouldn’t be defended. But a great deal of thoughtful, rigorous, and newsworthy work took place on that beat too. Journalists did not in the end find that Trump cut a deal with the Kremlin in 2016, but they unearthed a great deal about Trump and his allies in the process.

  Dismissing the whole thing as a hoax or debacle — as the revisionists are doing — is too pat a dismissal. It was a complicated, messy endeavor in a complicated, messy time.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Jake, Fire Power, Trevalius, Crown Consort, Champions Way and True Faith catch the eye -

• Ahead Of My Time and Fighton impress -

• Something Royal and Eagle Bluff work well -

• I did my best, if someone’s doing better than that, it’s fine: Shikhar Dhawan - One of the finest openers India have produced in the 50-over format, Dhawan was dropped from the side following a lean run which included the three games in Bangladesh in December

• India becomes top team across all formats in latest ICC rankings - After defeating Australia comprehensively in the Nagpur Test, India reclaimed the top spot in ICC Test team rankings

From The Hindu: National News

• Arsikere CMC president removed from his post -

• Wild elephant takes out rice bag from cooperative society in Belur - This is the second incident at the cooperative society

• Cultural organisations demand govt to retain original name of Tummalapalli Kshetrayya Kalakshetram -

• Sivasankar’s arrest not to impact LIFE Mission project: Rajesh -

• KPCC leader takes exception to MP’s varsity meeting -

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine war: The Russian student under arrest for an Instagram story - Olesya posted online about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, she can only leave home to go to court.

• Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko jailed for highlighting Mariupol killings - Maria Ponomarenko faces six years for detailing Russia’s deadly attack on a theatre in Ukraine.

• Turkish earthquake: They came to be healed, but died in the rubble - The hospital building, which had 300 people inside, failed a 2012 earthquake resistance test.

• Pierre Palmade: French comic faces charges over drug-fuelled crash - Pierre Palmade faces charges after a head-on collision led to a woman losing her unborn baby.

• Land’s End: Fishing crew rescued from sinking vessel - Four crew members abandoned their vessel and boarded a life raft after it crashed into rocks.

From Ars Technica

• AI-powered Bing Chat loses its mind when fed Ars Technica article - “It is a hoax that has been created by someone who wants to harm me or my service.” - link

• Latest attack on PyPI users shows crooks are only getting better - The code found in the malicious packages closely resembled legit offerings. - link

• Seven states push to require ID for watching porn online - Opponents say laws preventing underage porn access are vague, pose privacy risks. - link

• Android launches yet another way to spy on users with “Privacy Sandbox” beta - Rather than match iOS’s tracking limits, Google built an additional tracking system. - link

• Tesla Autopilot workers try to unionize, are “tired of being treated like robots” - Buffalo-based workers say invasive monitoring leads some to skip bathroom breaks. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What’s the difference between elon musk and a lemur? -

  Elon Musk made an electric car

  Lemurs Madagascar

  submitted by /u/squanto420sqanching
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• Russia just warned it’s citizens that Canada is an unsafe place for them to visit. -

  I guess Vladimir heard Canadians eat Putin with gravy and cheese.

  submitted by /u/illGATESmusic
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• What does a stripper do to her asshole before going to work? -

  Drops him off at band practice.

  Edit: spelling

  submitted by /u/apero_lastronaut
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• A Jewish man buys a lottery ticket and wins. -

  After the news heard about this amazing stroke of luck, they went to go and interview him.

  The news reporter asked, “Mr. Goldberg, you have just won $1 million. What are you going to do with all this money?”

  The Jewish man responds with, “Well, I’m going to give half of it to my family, a quarter of it to charity and another quarter of it to the American Nazi Association”

  The reporter was shocked and asked, “But you were a survivor, Mr. Goldberg. Why would you want to give money to the American Nazi Association?”

  The Jewish man then rolled up his sleeve and said, “See this? How else would I be able to know the winning numbers?”

  submitted by /u/Doomguy2021
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• There’s love without sex and there’s sex without love….. -

  Then there’s You, without either.

  Happy Valentines

  submitted by /u/UIUIUIUIUIUIBN
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