Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 5:57 AM and sunset 7:47 PM, for 13h 49m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred ninety-seventh day.
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1977, the Morris Pratt Institute of Spiritualism Moves from Whitewater to Waukesha.
Recommended for reading in full:
Margaret Sullivan writes Mueller’s report proves why Trump loves Fox News — and why he needs it now more than ever:
It’s no secret that Fox News and the Trump administration are deeply entwined: They are the conjoined twins of misinformation.
So it hardly raised an eyebrow when the president took to Twitter on Thursday to urge everyone to tune in to Fox for Attorney General William P. Barr’s (misleading) prelude to the release of the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The results were predictable: Fox’s early news coverage was somewhat straight — kept so largely by the presence of Fox’s designated truth-teller, Chris Wallace.
The follow-up coverage and commentary, though, was outlandishly one-sided, led by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was allowed to spin frenetically for what seemed like endless minutes, offering such gems as “there’s not a single surprise” in the report.
….
Trump will need Fox News more than ever to fend off the undeniable truths of the report, which Dahlia Lithwick in Slate called a “highlights reel of things even the most casual observer already knew.”
To wit: “The Russians tried to steal the election. Some members of his campaign were happy to help. The president wanted to protect Michael Flynn. The president wanted to kill the special counsel investigation. The president materially and significantly tampered with witnesses to that investigation. The president lied and told others to lie.”
We knew this. As my colleague Paul Farhi documented, the Mueller report “largely validated news accounts that Trump dismissed or disparaged,” often with his favorite insult — that those accounts were nothing but fake news.
Jay Rosen describes the kind of ecosystem Trump wants – needs:
“It’s as if one-third of the public has been broken off from the rest of the electorate and isolated in an information system of its own.”
@JayRosen_NYU calls this an “authoritarian news system” and says “we don’t always have the language we need to talk about it.”
How an Abandoned Whaling Station Turned Into a Penguin Paradise: