Whereupon We Pontificate About Poor Media Outlet Choices

This is really funny in the context of the history of the Trump family. Literally more mobbed up in real life than the Sopranos. The guy was the biggest homebuilder on the east coast from the start of the syndicates golden age to the end of it.

Then ask yourself what shenanigans must have been involved for that guys kid to get a casino license.

LouisCyphre · February 25, 2024, 2:15pm

Biden’s great-great-grandfather was literally Moses.

grue · February 25, 2024, 2:58pm

Parting the red sea has to break all kinds of zoning laws.

Hired_Goons · February 25, 2024, 6:10pm

Oh, I thought you meant his grandfather who was a deserter and a brothel owner.

goofy · February 25, 2024, 7:15pm

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1761595089195778211

This guy is a GWU law professor who’s testified in all three modern impeachment trials lol

hammypotter · February 25, 2024, 8:43pm

We need to build a wall around law schools until we figure out what the hell is going on

TheDuker · March 1, 2024, 4:35pm

Math, how does it work?

mathfail

eyebooger · March 1, 2024, 4:44pm

XOjxQAR

boredsocial · March 1, 2024, 7:38pm

The media keeps asking why I don’t take their shit at face value anymore and trying gaslight me for it. Then they do shit like this constantly.

I’ll give another example: A pretty aggressively funded startup (had big VC’s behind it) called Convoy recently went busto in my industry leaving one of their bigger customers Ikea stuck with a bunch of unpaid trucking companies. The reporting on that situation has basically claimed that Convoy was making 73% profit margins on the freight they never paid the carriers for. What happened in real life is that 73% was the biggest profit margin they found in the entire audit on any load that got run. Convoy went busto because my role is an already heavily automated skill role that isn’t going to be easily cut out and replaced with expert software they were trying to pretend was AI.

Literally took a news story and framed it in a blatantly misleading way to try to push outrage.

goofy · March 2, 2024, 7:00am

I haven’t read all this yet, but here’s Jeremy Scahill and others reporting on the clusterfuck around the Times’s reporting on Hamas’s supposed use of sexual violence that maybe wasn’t actually true

…and the Times union publicly asking their employer why they appear to be targeting Arab journalists in trying to find who talked to Scahill:

https://twitter.com/charlottetklein/status/1763717510292021586

pvn · March 2, 2024, 10:05pm

good podcast episode looking into this

goofy · March 3, 2024, 5:36am

Chait uses this opportunity to relitigate old beefs with Michael Hobbes (???) by bringing up instances where Chait was clearly, incredibly wrong

Honestly baffled at why Chait has a job when so much of his work is just complaining that so many people think he’s an idiot; who is the audience for this?

This is all in the context of a former Times opinion editor who I think was primarily responsible for Tom Cotton’s “send in the troops” piece writing a tell-all in The Atlantic doubling as “I was treated unfairly” and “the NYT has gone full woke” arguments, in which he (accidentally?) makes himself and the whole paper look really dumb by revealing that the Times solicited the fucking piece from Cotton and then edited it to soften his language to make it more palatable to the public and (barely) hide what a fucking psycho he is. Tom Scocca has a good recap:

For one thing, Rubenstein wrote that the Times had separate standards for handling conservative op-eds:

It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently. They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups. Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.

Here, not for the last time in the piece, Rubenstein was claiming one thing and describing its opposite. Right-wing submissions “faced…more layers of editing”—until, by his own recounting, leadership changed the editing process to skip over most staff review. What was presented as a story about “a higher bar” for conservatives turned into an account of how the Times lowered the bar for conservatives, protecting their submissions from the normal evaluation and editing process.

What Cotton was writing against, as was obvious at the time, was the protest movement itself.

Further underscoring this, Rubenstein narrated the editing history of one of the crucial passages in the piece:

I was given the job of fact-checking and line-editing. Among other edits, I inserted a line making clear the distinction between peaceful protesters and law-breaking looters.

That “distinction between peaceful protesters and law-breaking looters” was held up by the op-ed’s defenders, after the fact, as the heart of Cotton’s argument, proof that he never meant to call for military action against the protests themselves. Yet Rubenstein described this supposedly essential, definitive piece of the argument as not having come from Cotton at all.

And then, later on, he wrote "In fact, Cotton’s essay was explicit in distinguishing between protests and the undeniable violence and looting: ‘A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.’” Cotton’s essay may have said that—although it studiously dodged the categories of protesters who were peaceful but not law-abiding or of protesters defending themselves against police attack—but did Cotton write it? Or did the Times?

pvn · March 3, 2024, 1:09pm

oh my fucking god I thought this was going to be about the fake gaza rape gang story not the fake “someone frowned at me for mentioning chick-fil-a” story hahaha what a fucking beta shitbag