They keep saying “The story wasn’t about X; it was about Y” as if that’s not the problem.
Republicans are the protagonists in American life—I forget who said that, but it’s how they think.
Which, again, is illustrative. Because the 40-year descent of the Republican Party from being wrong about everything but still a basically normal political party, into an authoritarian ethnonationalist cult of personality working actively to spread a deadly virus—that IS a big story, with Republicans at the center. And the people with the access to tell it refuse to. People would click on it!
Hmmm...I don't see descent. Nixon/Kissinger's Peace with Honor is the same and worse than either DaddyBush or BabyBush, Reagan's handler's destructions and petty wars far worse than Trump's incompetence. The racism of them all is of one thread, as is the Us v. Them mentality. They got into the John Bircher gutter and never left, thanks to the long game by the believer sons and their SelfishBastard Faux Libertarian rich.
It was somewhat heartening to read the utter disdain expressed in the Twitter thread in response to Stolberg's lazy reporting. We're in the interregnum between a backsliding democracy and authoritarianism, and too many journalists are averting their eyes. Literally every story should be viewed through the lens of whether it bolsters or harms democracy. Journalists pandering to Republicans will not be spared by a SCOTUS systematically eradicating civil rights, especially one that is preparing to eviscerate the libel precedent that has protected the media for decades.
The lesson the media either can't or won't learn is that the objective of Republican influencers is to "catapult the propaganda" into the mainstream. No finer example than Dick Cheney feeding a line of crap about Iraqi WMD to Judy Miller, who dutifully wrote it up, and then Cheney went on Meet The Press and recited - and elevated - his own crap by sourcing it the NY Times. Over in Wingnuttia, an angel gets its wings every time the NYT prints GOP nonsense.
Actually Cheney was a little more subtle than that — not much, just a little. He made sure Miller could tell her editors that she had multiple sources by getting Scooter Libby and his pal, the corrupt Ahmed Chalabi to peddle his lies to her. I would bet he also got some of his political pals he had had installed at CIA to do the same. Miller knew these were Cheney’s mouthpieces but it gave her cover.
Miller was never a neutral observer, she had always been a neocon. After leaving the “liberal” NY Times MIller went on to become a Fox News contributor and worked for the right wing, neocon, libertarian “think tank”, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. That organization was founded by spymaster William Casey and Antony Fisher, a free marketeer who strongly opposed government regulation. It’s main funder was Richard Mellon Scaife. Cleary she was never an objective observer.
Another master at getting his propaganda into the mainstream media is Steve Bannon. He and his partner Peter Schweitzer founded the neutral-sounding Government Accountability Institute, then burnished its reputation for objectivity by doing some legitimate research into government mismanagement and corruption. Bannon and Schweitzer then used that faux credibility to sell the media on their Clinton Foundation corruption slanders and later the Biden Ukraine lies. Both smears originated in books (“Clinton Cash”and “Secret Empires”, both written by Schweitzer and published by the GAI) and were then peddled to mainstream outlets like the Times and WaPo which both fell for the claims hook, line and sinker.
The NYT knew or should have known that Schweitzer had a rightwing agenda, and still paid him for exclusive rights to print excerpts of Clinton Cash. Talk about being duped! Then again, when, as an institution, you hate Bill and Hillary Clinton...
I put the blame on the rest of the media. Most people had no way of realizing just how biased and misleading the mainstream media was. For example the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza’s reporting about Hillary’s emails was not only obsessive it was often factually wrong. For example Cillizza insisted that Powell had had a State.gov account despite the fact that his spokesperson flatly said he hadn’t and that Powell said he hadn’t. Cillizza kept insisting Powell did because Cillizza wrongly believed that the repeatedly hacked State.gov server is how classified messages are sent. Apparently Cillizza didn’t even know there is a completely separate system for sending classified info and that it is always sent using SCI-FI— a sensitive compartmented information facility.
Stolberg only called yr criticism "lame" because she heard yr criticism, and who likes criticism? But she heard it, and her editors probably heard it too. Can't hurt. Keep after 'em Hoss.
I agree but they dismissed the Public editor's concerns as well. Reporters, and especially those at the Times, are very thin skinned when it comes to criticism of their work. The standard circle the wagons line is "People don't understand how journalism works."
There's something wrong with journalism in American mainstream media when reporters can't take constructive criticism and somehow believe it's an attack on press freedom.
Similar to the idiots in the "muh freedumb" crowd, some media practitioners have forgotten that their freedoms also means that they will also be held responsible & accountable if & when there is a problem with their reporting.
These thin-skinned assholes should be aware that press freedom in other countries is either being constantly threatened by the government (Philippines, Turkey, Myanmar, Hungary) or is completely nonexistent (Russia, China, North Korea).
The Times did dismiss them but at least readers got a chance to read the criticisms instead of just the Times slant on things (and I do mean “slant”) which is what I think is the most important thing.
What’s missing from our commentary is the harm being done to Dr. Fauci and his family. How far we have sunk in this country when people like Fauci, who have served us all so amazingly well for decades, are verbally pummeled and threatened by badly informed Rs in a diner. I kind of see Stolberg’s rebuttal about her focus on these Rs as a way to reveal opinions, motives, BUT how about the wider view of the harm being done to Fauci, et al in the process. For me, that’s the story. We already know maga folks hate Fauci. So what else is new?
And why is everyone ‘just fine’ with officials having to deal with threats and added security… SINCE WHEN is this normal in the US? As Rachel has said: “Where is the National outrage? Where?!
1) Another case of what happens when the dems hold off from the tried and true rethuglican tactic of "playing the refs..." It works. If there is no organized push back from a national press advocate for the dems (does one even exist?), then this is yet another example of the press getting away with it... If the republicans were mad about a story like this, they would have a single, scripted, and widely distributed counter narrative and write-in campaign directed against the Times... And it would work.
2) Republicans are FAR more entertaining than democrats. This ginned up nonsense on the right about Fauci, while completely psychotic, is also interesting... So it gets printed... That's modern infortainment for you.
Remember, Stolberg's job is not to edify, educate or tell the truth. It is to sensationalize and sell papers. Well done, I say... I will read the story when I'm bored. But to learn about the truth of what the republicans are doing, I will read 1984, not the NYT.
1. The Times would NEVER admit this, because it would suggest they are capable of putting money ahead of journalism, but this stuff gets clicks, including from our side. If we really wanted to make a point, we'd organize a campaign not to read any story online by The Times that relates to politics.
2. Protecting your sources. I bet there's a sieve or two in the offices of #MassMurderingMoscowMitch and maybe even #KremlinKevin, the Bakersfield Benedict Arnold and Official Pleasurer of Lev Parnas, or maybe some other republicans. It isn't just that the likes of Gym Jordan are quotable.
3. Likability. I always recur to a story a DC-based friend told me. There's a rope line outside the Senate and reporters would stand behind it and ask questions. Bob Corker would come talk with them and knew their names and their kids' names. Elizabeth Warren would run by en route to her next policy meeting. So when Corker feebly questioned whether Orange Hitler might be wrong about something, the DC political media hailed him as the modern Margaret Chase Smith (hi, Susan Collins--you're a disgrace to her memory). When Warren became "Pocahontas," they had no problem repeating it and repeating it and repeating it.
The third reason is the one that most people just can’t believe is true because it is so high school. They believe it has to be greedy corporate overlords responsible for all the bias, not reporters’ own adolescent minds. There is plenty evidence that top political journalists will happily destroy a candidate they don’t like or one who doesn’t pander to them enough. Gore and Hillary both got destroyed by that kind of sophomoric mentality. This article about Frank Bruni’s lovefest with Dubya still boggles my mind. It was bad enough that supposedly serious journalists thought it was perfectly reasonable to praise Bush for being more fun to have a beer with but for a NY Times campaign reporter to favor a candidate because that candidate gave Bruni a childish nickname is disgraceful.
Agreed. Completely. I'll add something but repeat myself. New York Magazine once did a great profile of Joseph Lelyveld, who came back out of retirement to save The New York Times--I don't think that overstates it--after the Jayson Blair business led to Howell Raines imploding. Raines always invoked football coach Bear Bryant as his example of leadership and Robert Lipsyte, who was writing his sports column there at the time, had a great line. He said Raines would have been fine if journalists were football players because they are all wusses who fall all over themselves for alpha males. But journalists, he said, are the high school kids who take the bullying and take it and take it and take it, then show up one day at the cafeteria with an AK-47, and that's what happened to Raines's reign.
What Lipsyte did not say, but could have, was that a lot of journalists never really leave high school.
Too bad more journalists don’t get fed up with the bullying and fight back but I think most of them don’t mind— they are impressed by bullies because they perceive them as alpha males. That is the only explanation I can think of for why they clearly had more respect for Bush and Cheney than either Gore or Kerry. Bush and Cheney are both blatant chickenhawks who did everything they could to avoid fighting in a war they claimed to believe in. Gore and Kerry volunteered and were sent to Vietnam.
I was so outraged when Newsweek ran their “Wimp Factor” cover about GHW Bush that I cancelled my subscription. I was never a fan and thought his Iran Contra lies should have destroyed his political career, but Bush had been a genuine war hero who had volunteered to be a fighter pilot and was shot down by the Japanese. His father had opposed him volunteering and was powerful enough to have gotten him out of combat but George showed real courage by volunteering for such a dangerous role.That same mainstream media would never implied that his cowardly son was a wimp because Bush Jr. was good at pretending to be an alpha male. As Chris Cillizza once said, perception trumps reality for journalists like him.
You did make the mistake of referring to Cillizza as a journalist. :)
They do run with the pack. It may be their perception of alpha males or it may be that they all think everyone is out to get them and they need to stick together, and that makes it worse.
I cancelled my NYT subscription last summer, and they're trying to lure me back with a $1 week subscription, but even if it were one penny a week, I wouldn't re-subscribe.
A journalist who writes political pieces should know when they're gaslighting their readers. There's a difference between bothsidesism and presenting both sides of a political argument during an election year, which is responsible journalism. Going back to the midwestern diner as the default interview site (and yes, the ubiquitous Ohio, or Indiana) is a good way to find plenty of ignorant Republican voices to fill up one's writing with, no?
Oops, Eric - Noem is the governor of South Dakota, not Montana, but no harm done.
Speaking as someone who is on the ground in Ohio, the political spots from the GOP candidates for the Senate (Portman is retiring) and governor are horrifying. One Senate candidate literally SHOUTS that the 2020 election was stolen, all of them express their fealty to Trump, and bemoan the socialist/commie direction of the Biden administration. The candidates are playing to the diner crowd, and they all know they have no shot at the nomination if they fail to drink the Kool Aid in public.
The people who think Trump is stupid aren't paying attention. I'm reminded of his first year in office when people struggled with the new reality they found themselves living in - with a president who knew nothing about governing but was an adept and prolific liar (but the press reported his lies as mere inaccurate statements), and someone who was completely lacking in ethics. What he has done re: gaslighting an entire political party is pretty damn brilliant, and simple. All he did was play on the diner crowd's grievances and resentments, reinforce their beliefs of being ignored and belittled, and make whiteness into a form of identity politics. Trump harnessed the worst in people, and it works well as a strategy. On the downside, he has not been able to grow the party or even keep people from leaving it.
That amoral cunning, the instinctive knack for using his worst traits, and those of others, to get what he wants is not exactly a form of intelligence, although it's a talent.
Trump has always been obsessed with measuring how many people like him. In 2020 there obviously weren't enough. In 2017 there weren't enough at his inauguration to suit him. He's still obsessed with poll numbers and Nielsen ratings. He's a sorry ass baby who never got enough love when he was growing up. Governing? He wouldn't know how. He couldn't run a casino, let alone a country. His cult of personality is probably the only thing he's ever accomplished, and he did it with lies.
Here in PA, we have one GOP candidate who says he's running "to represent you" and protect our country "from them." And then we have the moron Oz who is running as a "conservative outsider" and claims he was attacked because he dared to take on the darling Fauci. The GOP senate race goes beyond a raging dumpster fire; it's more like flaming latrine barrels. Even the state GOP has said it won't support any one candidate among those running to win the primary. (Of course they'll support the winner.) Even so it's going to be a fight but we WILL flip useless Toomey's seat.
I lived in your region (between Cleveland and Akron) for 10 years from the mid-80s to mid-90s. Back then Ohio was a true swing state so there were frequent visits from presidential candidates during campaigns. (We once got to see Bill Clinton in the Goodyear blimp airdock building! ) During the last five years or so I could see the creeping takeover of normal politics by the far right. What really set them off was Bush and then Clinton pushing for national education goals (not even standards just fairly vague goals). I was on a committee for the League of Women Voters that went to local meetings about the proposals. That was the first time I had ever met well-educated far right Republican crackpots. One woman from my town, a highly educated lawyer, told me her group believed that this was all a plan to institute one world government and that Bill Clinton was the anti-Christ. Not sure what you can say to that.
The following year two right wing guys won seats on our school board. They were stealth candidates who ran on a platform of educational excellence. As soon as they took their seats they proceeded to disrupt meetings with their complaints about teaching evolution and other right wing curriculum concerns. They did everything they could to disrupt normal processes, even making it almost impossible to pass a budget. Fortunately they were thrown out in the next election but not until they had done a lot of damage.
The media is treating the right wing push to take over local school boards and other political positions as a new development when it started decades ago. It was the brainchild of the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed who trained people how to run as stealth candidates:
“ Such a strategy has been embraced by the Christian Coalition and the Citizens for Excellence in Education, particularly in school board elections…….School board candidates would run on vague platforms, such as teaching "the basics" and restoring student discipline, while failing to mention any organizational or ideological alliances…... As former executive director for the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed explained in 1991, stealth has been a key tactic for Christian Right activists:
“I want to be invisible. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night. “
These people were also part of the Tea Party movement. The mistake Democrats keep making is by thinking these people are too crazy to ever become a force to be reckoned with, even though they morphed into the MAGA movement and put Trump in office. They're also proof of the centuries-old ruse of religion being used for nefarious political ends. The Christians have been political cutthroats since the beginning of the religion.
The NYTimes does make me wonder if (god forbid, when) the fascists take over, will they send their crack social anthropology teams out to blue city restaurants to find out what those quaint natives think about losing their country, too?
It’s all optics madness. I do not know what they are thinking, but I have to assume this comes from the top down.
As for the Sunday shows, they stopped being Public Affairs programming long ago, and now they are beltway insiders talking to other beltway insiders about how clever they are. The Sunday shows are not news, they are punditry, and they are not even good at that.
As I have been saying for quite a while, The NY Times is no longer the "Paper of Record", it is now the "Paper for Wrapping Three Day Old Fish". Started when they decided the Clintons were 'hicks from Arkansas' and thus couldn't possibly be President/First Lady. 30 years of their hatred of everyone but rich white republican men!
Most people can’t believe Times reporters and other top political journalists could be that juvenile but they clearly were/are. A classic example is Sally Quinn’s infamous WaPo article quoting the Post’s David Broder, the man lionized as the august “Dean of Washington Journalists” saying this about Clinton:
“He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place."
How arrogant is it for Broder to think that Washington belongs to journalists like him, not to a president elected by the American people. Washington is our city, not Broder’s.
Other big offenders were Tim Russert who derisively called Clinton “Bubba” and the odious Chris Matthews who clearly couldn’t stand that a guy from nowheresville Arkansas had risen above him. ( I once asked a woman who had worked as a producer for Matthews’sCNBC show if that was why he was so biased against Clinton. She said he had openly told her he that.)
I suspect The NY Times has internalized the GOP talking point that Democrats are now all radical Socialists (except for ‘moderates’ like Manchin and Sinema.) As the paper of record for the status quo, the Times is not going to give dangerous lefties and their ideas any exposure. America is a center-right country after all - or so they keep hearing from their trusted inside sources on the right.
Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is lately getting swamped with ads from GOP groups like the GOP senate campaign committee warning the out of control Socialist spending of the liberal Democrats will destroy the country, that Critical Race Theory is in all the schools, and so on.
It’s enough to make me consider putting sardines in my oatmeal. That’s how crazy things are getting.
Not only Facebook. I go to Raw Story and Alter Net and every ad Google places is for Republicans. Really getting sick of seeing video clips of a whining Marco Rubio who says Biden is forcing critical race theory on those poor white kids...
They are wasting a lot of money targeting people like you. I have been surprised at blatantly right wing ads on MSNBC. They used to be better at targeting their base and people who can be swayed, not the left.
I remember when the right was much better at tailoring their messages to those not in their base. The ads I have seen are far too extreme to work with the MSNBC audience. The one exception was a ad about how BBB would raise drug prices. That kind of lying by Big Pharma (and the mainstream media) worked to destroy support for Bill Clinton’s health care reform bill.
Regarding the lead story on the NY Times, it's not about "the truth", which is just an advertising slogan for them. It's about the subscribers, and The Times has now reached its goal of 10 million digital subscribers three years earlier than expected. Their goal now: 15 digital subscribers by 2027. Excelsior!
I just cancelled my NY Times subscription and explain, in detail, how fed up I was with their apparently pro-GOP, pro-insurrectionist, pro-crackpot stance. Sticking with Reuters, the Guardian, and the BBC.
They keep saying “The story wasn’t about X; it was about Y” as if that’s not the problem.
Republicans are the protagonists in American life—I forget who said that, but it’s how they think.
Which, again, is illustrative. Because the 40-year descent of the Republican Party from being wrong about everything but still a basically normal political party, into an authoritarian ethnonationalist cult of personality working actively to spread a deadly virus—that IS a big story, with Republicans at the center. And the people with the access to tell it refuse to. People would click on it!
I would say it is a 50-year descent but who's counting?
Hmmm...I don't see descent. Nixon/Kissinger's Peace with Honor is the same and worse than either DaddyBush or BabyBush, Reagan's handler's destructions and petty wars far worse than Trump's incompetence. The racism of them all is of one thread, as is the Us v. Them mentality. They got into the John Bircher gutter and never left, thanks to the long game by the believer sons and their SelfishBastard Faux Libertarian rich.
It was somewhat heartening to read the utter disdain expressed in the Twitter thread in response to Stolberg's lazy reporting. We're in the interregnum between a backsliding democracy and authoritarianism, and too many journalists are averting their eyes. Literally every story should be viewed through the lens of whether it bolsters or harms democracy. Journalists pandering to Republicans will not be spared by a SCOTUS systematically eradicating civil rights, especially one that is preparing to eviscerate the libel precedent that has protected the media for decades.
Nice usage of " interregnum."
The lesson the media either can't or won't learn is that the objective of Republican influencers is to "catapult the propaganda" into the mainstream. No finer example than Dick Cheney feeding a line of crap about Iraqi WMD to Judy Miller, who dutifully wrote it up, and then Cheney went on Meet The Press and recited - and elevated - his own crap by sourcing it the NY Times. Over in Wingnuttia, an angel gets its wings every time the NYT prints GOP nonsense.
Actually Cheney was a little more subtle than that — not much, just a little. He made sure Miller could tell her editors that she had multiple sources by getting Scooter Libby and his pal, the corrupt Ahmed Chalabi to peddle his lies to her. I would bet he also got some of his political pals he had had installed at CIA to do the same. Miller knew these were Cheney’s mouthpieces but it gave her cover.
Miller was never a neutral observer, she had always been a neocon. After leaving the “liberal” NY Times MIller went on to become a Fox News contributor and worked for the right wing, neocon, libertarian “think tank”, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. That organization was founded by spymaster William Casey and Antony Fisher, a free marketeer who strongly opposed government regulation. It’s main funder was Richard Mellon Scaife. Cleary she was never an objective observer.
Another master at getting his propaganda into the mainstream media is Steve Bannon. He and his partner Peter Schweitzer founded the neutral-sounding Government Accountability Institute, then burnished its reputation for objectivity by doing some legitimate research into government mismanagement and corruption. Bannon and Schweitzer then used that faux credibility to sell the media on their Clinton Foundation corruption slanders and later the Biden Ukraine lies. Both smears originated in books (“Clinton Cash”and “Secret Empires”, both written by Schweitzer and published by the GAI) and were then peddled to mainstream outlets like the Times and WaPo which both fell for the claims hook, line and sinker.
The NYT knew or should have known that Schweitzer had a rightwing agenda, and still paid him for exclusive rights to print excerpts of Clinton Cash. Talk about being duped! Then again, when, as an institution, you hate Bill and Hillary Clinton...
All the New York Times cared about was torpedoing Hillary and they didn't give a damn about anything else.
And the public couldn’t be bothered to connect those two dots… sickening :/
The end result of Howell Raines pathological hatred of the Clintons which seeped into every facet of the New York Times.
Sad.
I put the blame on the rest of the media. Most people had no way of realizing just how biased and misleading the mainstream media was. For example the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza’s reporting about Hillary’s emails was not only obsessive it was often factually wrong. For example Cillizza insisted that Powell had had a State.gov account despite the fact that his spokesperson flatly said he hadn’t and that Powell said he hadn’t. Cillizza kept insisting Powell did because Cillizza wrongly believed that the repeatedly hacked State.gov server is how classified messages are sent. Apparently Cillizza didn’t even know there is a completely separate system for sending classified info and that it is always sent using SCI-FI— a sensitive compartmented information facility.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/10/17/clinton-lawyer-pounds-cnns-chris-cillizza-on-email-analysis-piece/
There is no GOP ass Cillizza won't kiss.
Stolberg only called yr criticism "lame" because she heard yr criticism, and who likes criticism? But she heard it, and her editors probably heard it too. Can't hurt. Keep after 'em Hoss.
I think readers should start demanding the Times and WaPo reinstate the position of ombudsman/public editor. TV news ought to have them too.
I agree but they dismissed the Public editor's concerns as well. Reporters, and especially those at the Times, are very thin skinned when it comes to criticism of their work. The standard circle the wagons line is "People don't understand how journalism works."
There's something wrong with journalism in American mainstream media when reporters can't take constructive criticism and somehow believe it's an attack on press freedom.
Similar to the idiots in the "muh freedumb" crowd, some media practitioners have forgotten that their freedoms also means that they will also be held responsible & accountable if & when there is a problem with their reporting.
These thin-skinned assholes should be aware that press freedom in other countries is either being constantly threatened by the government (Philippines, Turkey, Myanmar, Hungary) or is completely nonexistent (Russia, China, North Korea).
The Times did dismiss them but at least readers got a chance to read the criticisms instead of just the Times slant on things (and I do mean “slant”) which is what I think is the most important thing.
Yes. They won’t do it though even though they should. They will most likely have to put something in place even if it’s internal if Palin wins. Ugh.
I also think we need a federal level fact checker :/
What’s missing from our commentary is the harm being done to Dr. Fauci and his family. How far we have sunk in this country when people like Fauci, who have served us all so amazingly well for decades, are verbally pummeled and threatened by badly informed Rs in a diner. I kind of see Stolberg’s rebuttal about her focus on these Rs as a way to reveal opinions, motives, BUT how about the wider view of the harm being done to Fauci, et al in the process. For me, that’s the story. We already know maga folks hate Fauci. So what else is new?
And why is everyone ‘just fine’ with officials having to deal with threats and added security… SINCE WHEN is this normal in the US? As Rachel has said: “Where is the National outrage? Where?!
Thank you for raising this issue. It seems like the gateway crime to 1/6 :/
Don’t know whether it’s too late to correct, but Kristi Noem is the governor of South Dakota, not Montana.
Yep fixed for online version. thanks
Either way, she is reprehensible.
I bet the governor of Montana is a "beauty," too.
Couple of things going on:
1) Another case of what happens when the dems hold off from the tried and true rethuglican tactic of "playing the refs..." It works. If there is no organized push back from a national press advocate for the dems (does one even exist?), then this is yet another example of the press getting away with it... If the republicans were mad about a story like this, they would have a single, scripted, and widely distributed counter narrative and write-in campaign directed against the Times... And it would work.
2) Republicans are FAR more entertaining than democrats. This ginned up nonsense on the right about Fauci, while completely psychotic, is also interesting... So it gets printed... That's modern infortainment for you.
Remember, Stolberg's job is not to edify, educate or tell the truth. It is to sensationalize and sell papers. Well done, I say... I will read the story when I'm bored. But to learn about the truth of what the republicans are doing, I will read 1984, not the NYT.
WOW. 1984 indeed.
WR Hearst would be…proud
A couple of theories:
1. The Times would NEVER admit this, because it would suggest they are capable of putting money ahead of journalism, but this stuff gets clicks, including from our side. If we really wanted to make a point, we'd organize a campaign not to read any story online by The Times that relates to politics.
2. Protecting your sources. I bet there's a sieve or two in the offices of #MassMurderingMoscowMitch and maybe even #KremlinKevin, the Bakersfield Benedict Arnold and Official Pleasurer of Lev Parnas, or maybe some other republicans. It isn't just that the likes of Gym Jordan are quotable.
3. Likability. I always recur to a story a DC-based friend told me. There's a rope line outside the Senate and reporters would stand behind it and ask questions. Bob Corker would come talk with them and knew their names and their kids' names. Elizabeth Warren would run by en route to her next policy meeting. So when Corker feebly questioned whether Orange Hitler might be wrong about something, the DC political media hailed him as the modern Margaret Chase Smith (hi, Susan Collins--you're a disgrace to her memory). When Warren became "Pocahontas," they had no problem repeating it and repeating it and repeating it.
The third reason is the one that most people just can’t believe is true because it is so high school. They believe it has to be greedy corporate overlords responsible for all the bias, not reporters’ own adolescent minds. There is plenty evidence that top political journalists will happily destroy a candidate they don’t like or one who doesn’t pander to them enough. Gore and Hillary both got destroyed by that kind of sophomoric mentality. This article about Frank Bruni’s lovefest with Dubya still boggles my mind. It was bad enough that supposedly serious journalists thought it was perfectly reasonable to praise Bush for being more fun to have a beer with but for a NY Times campaign reporter to favor a candidate because that candidate gave Bruni a childish nickname is disgraceful.
https://www.americanprogress.org/?oldid=9654
Agreed. Completely. I'll add something but repeat myself. New York Magazine once did a great profile of Joseph Lelyveld, who came back out of retirement to save The New York Times--I don't think that overstates it--after the Jayson Blair business led to Howell Raines imploding. Raines always invoked football coach Bear Bryant as his example of leadership and Robert Lipsyte, who was writing his sports column there at the time, had a great line. He said Raines would have been fine if journalists were football players because they are all wusses who fall all over themselves for alpha males. But journalists, he said, are the high school kids who take the bullying and take it and take it and take it, then show up one day at the cafeteria with an AK-47, and that's what happened to Raines's reign.
What Lipsyte did not say, but could have, was that a lot of journalists never really leave high school.
Too bad more journalists don’t get fed up with the bullying and fight back but I think most of them don’t mind— they are impressed by bullies because they perceive them as alpha males. That is the only explanation I can think of for why they clearly had more respect for Bush and Cheney than either Gore or Kerry. Bush and Cheney are both blatant chickenhawks who did everything they could to avoid fighting in a war they claimed to believe in. Gore and Kerry volunteered and were sent to Vietnam.
I was so outraged when Newsweek ran their “Wimp Factor” cover about GHW Bush that I cancelled my subscription. I was never a fan and thought his Iran Contra lies should have destroyed his political career, but Bush had been a genuine war hero who had volunteered to be a fighter pilot and was shot down by the Japanese. His father had opposed him volunteering and was powerful enough to have gotten him out of combat but George showed real courage by volunteering for such a dangerous role.That same mainstream media would never implied that his cowardly son was a wimp because Bush Jr. was good at pretending to be an alpha male. As Chris Cillizza once said, perception trumps reality for journalists like him.
You did make the mistake of referring to Cillizza as a journalist. :)
They do run with the pack. It may be their perception of alpha males or it may be that they all think everyone is out to get them and they need to stick together, and that makes it worse.
I cancelled my NYT subscription last summer, and they're trying to lure me back with a $1 week subscription, but even if it were one penny a week, I wouldn't re-subscribe.
A journalist who writes political pieces should know when they're gaslighting their readers. There's a difference between bothsidesism and presenting both sides of a political argument during an election year, which is responsible journalism. Going back to the midwestern diner as the default interview site (and yes, the ubiquitous Ohio, or Indiana) is a good way to find plenty of ignorant Republican voices to fill up one's writing with, no?
Oops, Eric - Noem is the governor of South Dakota, not Montana, but no harm done.
Speaking as someone who is on the ground in Ohio, the political spots from the GOP candidates for the Senate (Portman is retiring) and governor are horrifying. One Senate candidate literally SHOUTS that the 2020 election was stolen, all of them express their fealty to Trump, and bemoan the socialist/commie direction of the Biden administration. The candidates are playing to the diner crowd, and they all know they have no shot at the nomination if they fail to drink the Kool Aid in public.
The people who think Trump is stupid aren't paying attention. I'm reminded of his first year in office when people struggled with the new reality they found themselves living in - with a president who knew nothing about governing but was an adept and prolific liar (but the press reported his lies as mere inaccurate statements), and someone who was completely lacking in ethics. What he has done re: gaslighting an entire political party is pretty damn brilliant, and simple. All he did was play on the diner crowd's grievances and resentments, reinforce their beliefs of being ignored and belittled, and make whiteness into a form of identity politics. Trump harnessed the worst in people, and it works well as a strategy. On the downside, he has not been able to grow the party or even keep people from leaving it.
He's ferally cunning. The problem is he has too many enablers, including the media and the GOP. Without them he would never have succeeded.
If Trump was smart he would still be president.
And not just be actually overturning the election but by using Covid to give him that "presidential" moment.
100% agree.
That amoral cunning, the instinctive knack for using his worst traits, and those of others, to get what he wants is not exactly a form of intelligence, although it's a talent.
If you aren’t wasting time actually governing - you’d have plenty of time to look at poll numbers, media takes, etc. Priorities
Trump has always been obsessed with measuring how many people like him. In 2020 there obviously weren't enough. In 2017 there weren't enough at his inauguration to suit him. He's still obsessed with poll numbers and Nielsen ratings. He's a sorry ass baby who never got enough love when he was growing up. Governing? He wouldn't know how. He couldn't run a casino, let alone a country. His cult of personality is probably the only thing he's ever accomplished, and he did it with lies.
(*checks notes) & it’s nearly impossible to lose money owning a casino.
Or three of them when they're all competing against each other LOL
Here in PA, we have one GOP candidate who says he's running "to represent you" and protect our country "from them." And then we have the moron Oz who is running as a "conservative outsider" and claims he was attacked because he dared to take on the darling Fauci. The GOP senate race goes beyond a raging dumpster fire; it's more like flaming latrine barrels. Even the state GOP has said it won't support any one candidate among those running to win the primary. (Of course they'll support the winner.) Even so it's going to be a fight but we WILL flip useless Toomey's seat.
I lived in your region (between Cleveland and Akron) for 10 years from the mid-80s to mid-90s. Back then Ohio was a true swing state so there were frequent visits from presidential candidates during campaigns. (We once got to see Bill Clinton in the Goodyear blimp airdock building! ) During the last five years or so I could see the creeping takeover of normal politics by the far right. What really set them off was Bush and then Clinton pushing for national education goals (not even standards just fairly vague goals). I was on a committee for the League of Women Voters that went to local meetings about the proposals. That was the first time I had ever met well-educated far right Republican crackpots. One woman from my town, a highly educated lawyer, told me her group believed that this was all a plan to institute one world government and that Bill Clinton was the anti-Christ. Not sure what you can say to that.
The following year two right wing guys won seats on our school board. They were stealth candidates who ran on a platform of educational excellence. As soon as they took their seats they proceeded to disrupt meetings with their complaints about teaching evolution and other right wing curriculum concerns. They did everything they could to disrupt normal processes, even making it almost impossible to pass a budget. Fortunately they were thrown out in the next election but not until they had done a lot of damage.
The media is treating the right wing push to take over local school boards and other political positions as a new development when it started decades ago. It was the brainchild of the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed who trained people how to run as stealth candidates:
“ Such a strategy has been embraced by the Christian Coalition and the Citizens for Excellence in Education, particularly in school board elections…….School board candidates would run on vague platforms, such as teaching "the basics" and restoring student discipline, while failing to mention any organizational or ideological alliances…... As former executive director for the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed explained in 1991, stealth has been a key tactic for Christian Right activists:
“I want to be invisible. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night. “
https://sites.pitt.edu/~mmcclure/NEA/lugg.html
These people were also part of the Tea Party movement. The mistake Democrats keep making is by thinking these people are too crazy to ever become a force to be reckoned with, even though they morphed into the MAGA movement and put Trump in office. They're also proof of the centuries-old ruse of religion being used for nefarious political ends. The Christians have been political cutthroats since the beginning of the religion.
The NYTimes does make me wonder if (god forbid, when) the fascists take over, will they send their crack social anthropology teams out to blue city restaurants to find out what those quaint natives think about losing their country, too?
It’s all optics madness. I do not know what they are thinking, but I have to assume this comes from the top down.
As for the Sunday shows, they stopped being Public Affairs programming long ago, and now they are beltway insiders talking to other beltway insiders about how clever they are. The Sunday shows are not news, they are punditry, and they are not even good at that.
As I have been saying for quite a while, The NY Times is no longer the "Paper of Record", it is now the "Paper for Wrapping Three Day Old Fish". Started when they decided the Clintons were 'hicks from Arkansas' and thus couldn't possibly be President/First Lady. 30 years of their hatred of everyone but rich white republican men!
Most people can’t believe Times reporters and other top political journalists could be that juvenile but they clearly were/are. A classic example is Sally Quinn’s infamous WaPo article quoting the Post’s David Broder, the man lionized as the august “Dean of Washington Journalists” saying this about Clinton:
“He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place."
How arrogant is it for Broder to think that Washington belongs to journalists like him, not to a president elected by the American people. Washington is our city, not Broder’s.
Other big offenders were Tim Russert who derisively called Clinton “Bubba” and the odious Chris Matthews who clearly couldn’t stand that a guy from nowheresville Arkansas had risen above him. ( I once asked a woman who had worked as a producer for Matthews’sCNBC show if that was why he was so biased against Clinton. She said he had openly told her he that.)
I suspect The NY Times has internalized the GOP talking point that Democrats are now all radical Socialists (except for ‘moderates’ like Manchin and Sinema.) As the paper of record for the status quo, the Times is not going to give dangerous lefties and their ideas any exposure. America is a center-right country after all - or so they keep hearing from their trusted inside sources on the right.
Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is lately getting swamped with ads from GOP groups like the GOP senate campaign committee warning the out of control Socialist spending of the liberal Democrats will destroy the country, that Critical Race Theory is in all the schools, and so on.
It’s enough to make me consider putting sardines in my oatmeal. That’s how crazy things are getting.
Not only Facebook. I go to Raw Story and Alter Net and every ad Google places is for Republicans. Really getting sick of seeing video clips of a whining Marco Rubio who says Biden is forcing critical race theory on those poor white kids...
They are wasting a lot of money targeting people like you. I have been surprised at blatantly right wing ads on MSNBC. They used to be better at targeting their base and people who can be swayed, not the left.
They are taking a chance on recruiting rather than "preaching to the choir" on Fox, NewsMax, etc.
I remember when the right was much better at tailoring their messages to those not in their base. The ads I have seen are far too extreme to work with the MSNBC audience. The one exception was a ad about how BBB would raise drug prices. That kind of lying by Big Pharma (and the mainstream media) worked to destroy support for Bill Clinton’s health care reform bill.
Regarding the lead story on the NY Times, it's not about "the truth", which is just an advertising slogan for them. It's about the subscribers, and The Times has now reached its goal of 10 million digital subscribers three years earlier than expected. Their goal now: 15 digital subscribers by 2027. Excelsior!
Correction - Kristi Noem is not the governor of Montana, but the governor of South Dakota.
This was corrected for the blog post, just incorrect on the email newsletter.
I just cancelled my NY Times subscription and explain, in detail, how fed up I was with their apparently pro-GOP, pro-insurrectionist, pro-crackpot stance. Sticking with Reuters, the Guardian, and the BBC.
I suppose it’s hard for some folks to tell the ‘boxy states’ apart. 🤔