Not a peep about jobs on CNN, WAPO or NYT today either, or Politico, The Hill or even the McPaper, USA today. Plenty about Cuomo though. Lots about trump; even Melania gets ink for her opinion, but no jobs report. And Good Old Joe quietly pedals on, doing the hard work with nary a complaint. You gotta hope people won't forget the constant riot of the past five years and wake up. But that'll be next to impossible without the Free Press. Keep after 'em, podna.
Rather than touting the Biden/D’s impressive success bringing the bipartisan infrastructure bill (almost) home, an article I read in the NYT/WaPo? over the weekend was ALL about how TRUMP impacted these bipartisan results vis a vis diminished loyalty to him by the senate’s Rs. A whole article. About FG. NOT about Biden’s great work, perseverance. REALLY??? WHY? Immaterial imo. Another depressing confirmation of Eric’s right on target per usual ‘no good news for Biden’ piece today.
“Three days before the sterling jobs report, CNN’s Chris Cillizza announced Biden was suffering through “the worst week of his presidency.”
Chris Cillizza’s “reporting” is on a level with a gossipy teenaged girl, squealing over the cute boy in class. If I see that his name is on anything, I won’t click on it.
From Paste Magazine:
“We pick on Chris Cillizza quite a lot in these pages, and even though we will one day die and be forgotten, we’re proud of that fact. The former WaPo pundit and current CNN talking head is both a symptom and perhaps a secondary cause of everything that’s wrong with the mainstream media’s focus on “OPTICS!” over substance. He operates from the premise that the messaging, and the reaction to that messaging, should be paramount in political coverage, rather than the effects of the policies themselves. Cillizza is not alone, but he’s excessively visible, and is often producing egregious garbage seemingly designed to troll people who hate him, like the time he graded the GOP healthcare plan with emojis. As Roger Sollenberger pointed out, this was his actual mission statement at “The Fix”:
My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.
And of course, this Fake Fairness doctrine does nothing so much as serve politicians who are least committed to the truth. Only someone with a brain like Cillizza’s could compliment Trump when he honored Caryn Owens—wife of the Navy SEAL who died in a botched raid in Yemen that Trump ordered, and later blamed on his generals—because of how it looked, rather than how it was.
In short, he’s terrible. And today on Twitter, courtesy of Brendan James, I ran into a video that seems to get to the heart of exactly why Cillizza is so bad…and the explanation comes from Cillizza himself. The short conversation happened in late 2012 during the Obama-Romney race, and even though the interviewer seems to be a bizarre crypto-libertarian who hates taxes, the way Cillizza dodges anything even remotely substantive gets to the heart of his hyper-relativist worldview:
My favorite part is when Cillizza won’t even answer the question of whether taxes are a thing. His refusal to discuss something that goes beyond the realm of optics is almost fanatical.
Q: Chris, does the Constitution exist?
A: Maybe you misunderstand what I do. I’m not here to debate whether or not the Constitution is a factual object. I’m here to discuss how politicians are received when they debate whether it exists as a document or not.
And a few of the real quotes are too good not print on their own:
“You’re outside of my realm; I cover campaign politics.”
“I offer no judgment on the term itself.”
“We may have a little bit of a misunderstanding in terms of what I do. I cover what the two campaigns say, I’m not delving deeply into economic policy.”
“I can comment on the issue in the context of the way the two parties have positioned themselves….in terms of a judgment I would offer…it’s not what I’m in the business of doing.”
“I’m a reporter…I don’t think about what the government should or shouldn’t do.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by principles.”
I cannot imagine a more vapid, useless approach to journalism, but hey, at least Cillizza is hilariously open about it. Now if only we could extinguish this type of spineless punditry forever.”
Releasing the jobs report on a Friday is not a smart marketing move when the numbers are so good because it hands the media an excuse for less than prominent coverage. But you know front page (or top of the scroll) space would have been created had the numbers been poor or even just weak. This is what happens when the "news" becomes whatever the political press finds *entertaining* rather than informative or important.
What's ironic about all this is that Americans actually like and want to read about good economic news in these trying times. Biden's policies actually demonstrate that government can help people financially, even fascist Republicans.
Regarding the love affair the press has with Ron DeSantis, Digby had a scathing commentary on a NY Times article that treated his actions on covid as a political ploy. They passed off thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths as acceptable, assuming he could pull it off without a complete collapse of Florida's healthcare system. It would be a 'win' for the GOP strategy of denial.
"This NYT report on Ron DeSantis’s “approach” to the latest pandemic surge is chilling and not just because he’s a sociopath but because the press is actually treating his reprehensible cavalier attitude as political savvy:"
I think that there is a general problem in that punditry is now considered news, and straight news (actual numbers and facts) are now considered boring in our industrial-entertainment media.
That the Jobs numbers were reported at all is amazing (did the business channels report on it, I wonder) but that to some degree that they were “interpreted” by the pundits to fit their world view is now what the media requires.
Bill Moyer's rule of reporting the facts and lead the reader to a conclusion is long gone and dead, I hate to say.
Eric, this is a symptom of a much broader problem, whether it's access, clicks, ratings or cowardice in the face of right wing tantrums about "the librul media!" I have given up on Politico (i.e. "Republico"), The Hill and others because of their obvious bias and tunnel vision, so I consider them journalistic backwaters akin to the New York Post. However, do the reporters and editorial directors at major outlets like NYT, Wapo, CNN and others not realize that we are living an historic, existential inflection point between democracy and fascism? Do they believe that doing their jobs under fascism will be as productive, or as safe, as doing their jobs under liberal democracy?
In a series marked by moments of dark, often gut-wrenching drama, one of the most powerful and haunting sequences in The Handmaid's Tale was as the protagonist, June, took temporary shelter in the offices of the Boston Globe, now silent, empty and littered with the aftermath of the bloody Boston Globe Massacre. Hyperbole? Almost certainly, but repression exists on a continuum. Hopefully, we may not get to bloodied walls in the loading dock of a once great newspaper. However, if U.S. journalism doesn't get its collective head out of its ass, we may learn where on that continuum we ultimately end up. Fascism doesn't like a free press. Not at all.
Well we see the Screw York Times whining about the reconciliation bill's big price tag and they're whining about the deficit...Gee I wonder why they never whined about the 7+trillion Trump and the GOP added to the debt...
If the mainstream media was deliberately trying to make themselves irrelevant, they couldn’t be doing a better job. They’re addicted to liars like most of the house republicans and the seriously deranged like Mike Lindell. I’ve stopped watching all but the early morning news. I watch Brianna Keillor on CNN and then I’m done.
How long is it going to take the thinking world to realize that the L word for the media is not liberal. It is lazy. And there is no such thing, sadly, as political journalism.
The mainstream media has defined GOP deviancy so far down, they can't even see it. They accept GOP actions that kill people as normal and not even newsworthy.
I went so far as to draw up a cartoon about how the GOP operates.
Not a peep about jobs on CNN, WAPO or NYT today either, or Politico, The Hill or even the McPaper, USA today. Plenty about Cuomo though. Lots about trump; even Melania gets ink for her opinion, but no jobs report. And Good Old Joe quietly pedals on, doing the hard work with nary a complaint. You gotta hope people won't forget the constant riot of the past five years and wake up. But that'll be next to impossible without the Free Press. Keep after 'em, podna.
Rather than touting the Biden/D’s impressive success bringing the bipartisan infrastructure bill (almost) home, an article I read in the NYT/WaPo? over the weekend was ALL about how TRUMP impacted these bipartisan results vis a vis diminished loyalty to him by the senate’s Rs. A whole article. About FG. NOT about Biden’s great work, perseverance. REALLY??? WHY? Immaterial imo. Another depressing confirmation of Eric’s right on target per usual ‘no good news for Biden’ piece today.
“Three days before the sterling jobs report, CNN’s Chris Cillizza announced Biden was suffering through “the worst week of his presidency.”
Chris Cillizza’s “reporting” is on a level with a gossipy teenaged girl, squealing over the cute boy in class. If I see that his name is on anything, I won’t click on it.
From Paste Magazine:
“We pick on Chris Cillizza quite a lot in these pages, and even though we will one day die and be forgotten, we’re proud of that fact. The former WaPo pundit and current CNN talking head is both a symptom and perhaps a secondary cause of everything that’s wrong with the mainstream media’s focus on “OPTICS!” over substance. He operates from the premise that the messaging, and the reaction to that messaging, should be paramount in political coverage, rather than the effects of the policies themselves. Cillizza is not alone, but he’s excessively visible, and is often producing egregious garbage seemingly designed to troll people who hate him, like the time he graded the GOP healthcare plan with emojis. As Roger Sollenberger pointed out, this was his actual mission statement at “The Fix”:
My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.
And of course, this Fake Fairness doctrine does nothing so much as serve politicians who are least committed to the truth. Only someone with a brain like Cillizza’s could compliment Trump when he honored Caryn Owens—wife of the Navy SEAL who died in a botched raid in Yemen that Trump ordered, and later blamed on his generals—because of how it looked, rather than how it was.
In short, he’s terrible. And today on Twitter, courtesy of Brendan James, I ran into a video that seems to get to the heart of exactly why Cillizza is so bad…and the explanation comes from Cillizza himself. The short conversation happened in late 2012 during the Obama-Romney race, and even though the interviewer seems to be a bizarre crypto-libertarian who hates taxes, the way Cillizza dodges anything even remotely substantive gets to the heart of his hyper-relativist worldview:
My favorite part is when Cillizza won’t even answer the question of whether taxes are a thing. His refusal to discuss something that goes beyond the realm of optics is almost fanatical.
Q: Chris, does the Constitution exist?
A: Maybe you misunderstand what I do. I’m not here to debate whether or not the Constitution is a factual object. I’m here to discuss how politicians are received when they debate whether it exists as a document or not.
And a few of the real quotes are too good not print on their own:
“You’re outside of my realm; I cover campaign politics.”
“I offer no judgment on the term itself.”
“We may have a little bit of a misunderstanding in terms of what I do. I cover what the two campaigns say, I’m not delving deeply into economic policy.”
“I can comment on the issue in the context of the way the two parties have positioned themselves….in terms of a judgment I would offer…it’s not what I’m in the business of doing.”
“I’m a reporter…I don’t think about what the government should or shouldn’t do.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by principles.”
I cannot imagine a more vapid, useless approach to journalism, but hey, at least Cillizza is hilariously open about it. Now if only we could extinguish this type of spineless punditry forever.”
Releasing the jobs report on a Friday is not a smart marketing move when the numbers are so good because it hands the media an excuse for less than prominent coverage. But you know front page (or top of the scroll) space would have been created had the numbers been poor or even just weak. This is what happens when the "news" becomes whatever the political press finds *entertaining* rather than informative or important.
What's ironic about all this is that Americans actually like and want to read about good economic news in these trying times. Biden's policies actually demonstrate that government can help people financially, even fascist Republicans.
Regarding the love affair the press has with Ron DeSantis, Digby had a scathing commentary on a NY Times article that treated his actions on covid as a political ploy. They passed off thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths as acceptable, assuming he could pull it off without a complete collapse of Florida's healthcare system. It would be a 'win' for the GOP strategy of denial.
"This NYT report on Ron DeSantis’s “approach” to the latest pandemic surge is chilling and not just because he’s a sociopath but because the press is actually treating his reprehensible cavalier attitude as political savvy:"
https://digbysblog.net/2021/08/07/well-just-have-to-live-with-it/
I think that there is a general problem in that punditry is now considered news, and straight news (actual numbers and facts) are now considered boring in our industrial-entertainment media.
That the Jobs numbers were reported at all is amazing (did the business channels report on it, I wonder) but that to some degree that they were “interpreted” by the pundits to fit their world view is now what the media requires.
Bill Moyer's rule of reporting the facts and lead the reader to a conclusion is long gone and dead, I hate to say.
Eric, this is a symptom of a much broader problem, whether it's access, clicks, ratings or cowardice in the face of right wing tantrums about "the librul media!" I have given up on Politico (i.e. "Republico"), The Hill and others because of their obvious bias and tunnel vision, so I consider them journalistic backwaters akin to the New York Post. However, do the reporters and editorial directors at major outlets like NYT, Wapo, CNN and others not realize that we are living an historic, existential inflection point between democracy and fascism? Do they believe that doing their jobs under fascism will be as productive, or as safe, as doing their jobs under liberal democracy?
In a series marked by moments of dark, often gut-wrenching drama, one of the most powerful and haunting sequences in The Handmaid's Tale was as the protagonist, June, took temporary shelter in the offices of the Boston Globe, now silent, empty and littered with the aftermath of the bloody Boston Globe Massacre. Hyperbole? Almost certainly, but repression exists on a continuum. Hopefully, we may not get to bloodied walls in the loading dock of a once great newspaper. However, if U.S. journalism doesn't get its collective head out of its ass, we may learn where on that continuum we ultimately end up. Fascism doesn't like a free press. Not at all.
Well we see the Screw York Times whining about the reconciliation bill's big price tag and they're whining about the deficit...Gee I wonder why they never whined about the 7+trillion Trump and the GOP added to the debt...
If the mainstream media was deliberately trying to make themselves irrelevant, they couldn’t be doing a better job. They’re addicted to liars like most of the house republicans and the seriously deranged like Mike Lindell. I’ve stopped watching all but the early morning news. I watch Brianna Keillor on CNN and then I’m done.
How long is it going to take the thinking world to realize that the L word for the media is not liberal. It is lazy. And there is no such thing, sadly, as political journalism.
The mainstream media has defined GOP deviancy so far down, they can't even see it. They accept GOP actions that kill people as normal and not even newsworthy.
I went so far as to draw up a cartoon about how the GOP operates.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/8/2044521/-Owning-The-Libs-the-GOP-Right-Wing-Media-business-model