The Biden-Gaffe narrative was set in stone as a press paradigm from the moment Biden took office. Now, just grab any new information and shape it into the preexisting narrative to have a winning bark at the DC carnival. This was a good piece, Eric. And thank you for using the word, 'dopey.'
Along the same lines, Politico unveiled a story this week about how unhappy Kamala Harris' staffers are because they feel ignored and believe Harris' chief of staff is too mean. The writer got the word "chaos" in there, and reverted to how Harris "blew it" when she injected a bit of sarcasm when Lester Holt, sounding more like a Republican operative than an anchor, kept hammering away at the "why haven't you gone to the border" GOP theme. So the beltway media isn't going to stop sniping at Biden....it will work hard to make Harris un-electable, too.
It’s all lazy journalism. Our Failed Political Press ™ probably has a macro on MS Word to make anything as “Democrats in Disarray.” My campaign to create a competing macro of “Rudderless Republicans” has oddly not been adapted.
Ever since Eric pointed it out, I’ve been keeping an eye out for uses of Congress (or Senate) whenever Republicans have obstructed. It is as close to a law of physics as you can get.
I think there's an additional dimension to this that should be discussed.
After decades of conservatism on the march (Ni shagu nazad!), the mainstream media is in a panic that those dangerous hippies on the left might actually start to turn things around. Certainly, conservatives are warning in apocalyptic terms what will happen if they get their way - and the media is channeling that panic.
If you look at Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, and David Brooks at the New York Times (painful I know, but somebody has to do it), they all seem to be working a common theme lately - the demonization of progressives. An infrastructure plan in which government actually delivers for the people is an existential threat to them.
The latest from Brooks is really over the top. I'll give you one sentence worth of false equivalence: "Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism." (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opinion/patriotism-misinformation.html)
The whole Brooks piece is basically arguing that progressives are bad because using facts and reason makes people feel bad about themselves and America. To quote Charles P. Pierce:
“The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
The tiresome skinny about Dems in DC is that they don’t play hardball and then Joe and the Ds play hardball and everyone in the press and R party clutch their pearls when Joe indeed plays hardball. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if the press reported the substance in the bill per Eric’s great piece today, rather than the ‘rinse, repeat’ of the outrage machine stuck in high gear. And, yes, that piece on Kamala in Politico was an embarrassment and an insult both to her position and accomplishments. It’s as tho the press is on the FG roller coaster and have no clue how to get off. Also, ala Eric, the NYT video is harrowing, amazing, gripping; I hope it’s played at the January 6 hearings. A must see.
That article by Jennifer Rubin you quote made my day. After years of watching the kinds of games our mainstream media keeps playing I see that some in major mainstream media outlets are speaking out against gotcha “journalism”. Rubin hit the nail on the head when she said “….. the cynical stance — we’re too in-the-know to believe Biden might be onto something — often leads to perverse coverage that plays up “crises” and acknowledges only quietly when they’re resolved”. She was also on target with this: “The gap between what the mainstream, D.C.-based media covers and what concerns ordinary Americans is never greater than when the media decides to hyperventilate over a process story”.
I was also shocked that the Post allowed this headline for a column by Paul Waldman: “The Supreme Court’s new ruling confirms it’s the enemy of democracy”. I would have thought it was too rude to the snowflake Republicans to publish. I just hope it isn’t an aberration.
It's always important to reporter that the number of actual journalists covering politics nationally can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the hand could belong to the great Cubs pitcher, Mordecai Three-Finger Brown. They are truly, as someone described them from a very different perspective, the enemies of the people.
PS. Seems to me that ‘Punchbowl News’ is created for one purpose only the reporting of inane tales of inside baseball. Sherman and Palmer are hard working and thorough, but not a great way to promote substance in reporting.
I think that the DC media forget that that the only people who care about process stories are them. I'm a politics junkie and I don't care about process at all, especially when the stories are bullshit because they pretend that the Republicans are, as you said, "honest brokers," which they haven't been in a really long time. People want to know what's in the bills that are being considered, they don't give a crap about the fake controversies that the DC media like to dish out, because apparently it's too hard to write about what's in the actual bills.
I absolutely don't think that the media are "the enemy of the people," as TFG said (with the exception of Fox news and their odious offshoots OAN and Newsmax), but they're really falling down on the job of informing the American people about what the government is doing.
The Biden-Gaffe narrative was set in stone as a press paradigm from the moment Biden took office. Now, just grab any new information and shape it into the preexisting narrative to have a winning bark at the DC carnival. This was a good piece, Eric. And thank you for using the word, 'dopey.'
Along the same lines, Politico unveiled a story this week about how unhappy Kamala Harris' staffers are because they feel ignored and believe Harris' chief of staff is too mean. The writer got the word "chaos" in there, and reverted to how Harris "blew it" when she injected a bit of sarcasm when Lester Holt, sounding more like a Republican operative than an anchor, kept hammering away at the "why haven't you gone to the border" GOP theme. So the beltway media isn't going to stop sniping at Biden....it will work hard to make Harris un-electable, too.
It’s all lazy journalism. Our Failed Political Press ™ probably has a macro on MS Word to make anything as “Democrats in Disarray.” My campaign to create a competing macro of “Rudderless Republicans” has oddly not been adapted.
Ever since Eric pointed it out, I’ve been keeping an eye out for uses of Congress (or Senate) whenever Republicans have obstructed. It is as close to a law of physics as you can get.
I think there's an additional dimension to this that should be discussed.
After decades of conservatism on the march (Ni shagu nazad!), the mainstream media is in a panic that those dangerous hippies on the left might actually start to turn things around. Certainly, conservatives are warning in apocalyptic terms what will happen if they get their way - and the media is channeling that panic.
If you look at Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, and David Brooks at the New York Times (painful I know, but somebody has to do it), they all seem to be working a common theme lately - the demonization of progressives. An infrastructure plan in which government actually delivers for the people is an existential threat to them.
The latest from Brooks is really over the top. I'll give you one sentence worth of false equivalence: "Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism." (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opinion/patriotism-misinformation.html)
The whole Brooks piece is basically arguing that progressives are bad because using facts and reason makes people feel bad about themselves and America. To quote Charles P. Pierce:
“The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
More great quotes from the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6193147-idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-virtue-in-the-land-of-the-free
The tiresome skinny about Dems in DC is that they don’t play hardball and then Joe and the Ds play hardball and everyone in the press and R party clutch their pearls when Joe indeed plays hardball. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if the press reported the substance in the bill per Eric’s great piece today, rather than the ‘rinse, repeat’ of the outrage machine stuck in high gear. And, yes, that piece on Kamala in Politico was an embarrassment and an insult both to her position and accomplishments. It’s as tho the press is on the FG roller coaster and have no clue how to get off. Also, ala Eric, the NYT video is harrowing, amazing, gripping; I hope it’s played at the January 6 hearings. A must see.
And btw, I cannot bear Matt Viser and Seung Min Kim of the WaPo....always negative...always.
That article by Jennifer Rubin you quote made my day. After years of watching the kinds of games our mainstream media keeps playing I see that some in major mainstream media outlets are speaking out against gotcha “journalism”. Rubin hit the nail on the head when she said “….. the cynical stance — we’re too in-the-know to believe Biden might be onto something — often leads to perverse coverage that plays up “crises” and acknowledges only quietly when they’re resolved”. She was also on target with this: “The gap between what the mainstream, D.C.-based media covers and what concerns ordinary Americans is never greater than when the media decides to hyperventilate over a process story”.
I was also shocked that the Post allowed this headline for a column by Paul Waldman: “The Supreme Court’s new ruling confirms it’s the enemy of democracy”. I would have thought it was too rude to the snowflake Republicans to publish. I just hope it isn’t an aberration.
It's always important to reporter that the number of actual journalists covering politics nationally can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the hand could belong to the great Cubs pitcher, Mordecai Three-Finger Brown. They are truly, as someone described them from a very different perspective, the enemies of the people.
Here's a new nugget from the NYT this morning: "Is Biden Declaring ‘Independence From the Virus’ Too Soon?"
PS. Seems to me that ‘Punchbowl News’ is created for one purpose only the reporting of inane tales of inside baseball. Sherman and Palmer are hard working and thorough, but not a great way to promote substance in reporting.
Wake up and see The Washington Post is beating the crime drum...
I think that the DC media forget that that the only people who care about process stories are them. I'm a politics junkie and I don't care about process at all, especially when the stories are bullshit because they pretend that the Republicans are, as you said, "honest brokers," which they haven't been in a really long time. People want to know what's in the bills that are being considered, they don't give a crap about the fake controversies that the DC media like to dish out, because apparently it's too hard to write about what's in the actual bills.
I absolutely don't think that the media are "the enemy of the people," as TFG said (with the exception of Fox news and their odious offshoots OAN and Newsmax), but they're really falling down on the job of informing the American people about what the government is doing.