>>I consider myself pretty good at distinguishing between serious conservative journalism and the stuff you see on the website of Rush Limbaugh or hear on Fox News. This article falls more under the second. So I kind of agree with Bill F

Method in my madness, dude!

I've been concerned about the US media-political diad for a while. I think JVP may have figured it out and maybe passed it onto you- but I must have as least as much financial reason to be educated about the USA as anybody else here.

With partisan media so bad these days, IMHO a strategy is needed to traverse the mess.

It's interesting that the Forbes piece didn't last long. Victor's "Bombshell is a dud" piece dripping with venom and false premise, is likely to survive forever. Which is a story in itself.

Here's my 2018 strategy:

1) Always validate the premise.
2) Invert the behavior.
3) Consider the source/discount the spite.

If the Forbes piece is down we can't do that one, so lets do Victor's one.

The premise is that the disreputable Fox et al misreported a txt message saying Obama wanted to know everything the FBI people were up to. Apart from the customary venom and obligatory swipe at POTUS, a series of "experts" opines on how ridiculous it is to suggest Obama was involving himself in the HRC email exoneration. So the whole thing is a nothing burger.

I have not read all of Fox- no thanks- but my understanding is that it was the Senate Committee, not Fox, that made a release linking this txt to the HRC email scandal. Fox is entitied to report that, surely. And unless the series of experts has reviewed material examined by the Senate over many months, they're not equipped to scoff at the Senate committee. More to the point- the Senate seems to ask how is it that a POTUS can demand to know everything the FBI is doing at all? In ignoring this question, Victor's piece exhibits at least 3 logical fallacies that mislead the readers that it's all a Fox beat up and the txts don't matter at all.

For clarity, move to step 2 and invert the behavior. Imagine if it was Trump wanting to know everything the FBI was doing. Imagine if Comey's leaks included Trump making this demand. Would that be OK?

While you're at it, invert the behavior regarding reaction to media pieces. Forbes produces a partisan piece using relatively calm language, but nobody has any trouble identifying what it is. Including Forbes itself it would seem. Compare to Victor's piece and literally thousands like it over the last year and the reaction is - crickets. No, not quite: approving citation on sites like UT.

Which brings me to 3) . Who can you trust? As noted, I'm not a connoisseur of right wing media- but the pieces closest to Victor's are the occasional piece on Breitbart using hilariously inventive language that I choose to interpret as satire caricature of the MSM.

What to do? IMHO point 1) is te most important, since it makes it easier to discount a lot of what passes for news these days. I also tend to discount anything involving venom , or casual swipes at POTUS. Not just me: Trump's approval rating is 49% while Obama's in the same poll in February 2010 was 45%. Obama enjoyed MSM adulation; Trump has faced non-stop enemy action, but still now achieves greater approval than in the election. The implied loss of MSM credibility is probably the biggest story of all.