goofy
August 28, 2024, 5:26am
1571
Good opinion piece choice in the Philly Inquirer about poor media outlet choices
I’ll start with the weekend’s lowlight: a news story that worked up the media food chain from the muck of smaller right-wing outlets , then got boosted on X/Twitter by Alex Thompson , a widely read national political correspondent for Axios, before the New York Post hyped it in your local Wawa and eventually the New York Times felt compelled to address it. You see, an idea that has animated the right for the last couple of weeks is the fantasy that Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz is a phony. Sunday’s purported news slammed Walz for a 2006 episode when his then-congressional campaign claimed he’d won a youth award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce when really it was — get this! — the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce!
Never mind that the 2006 Walz campaign had corrected this tiny mistake (picture Barack Obama doing the hand thing , but even smaller), probably the work of a junior staffer, the second they learned about it. The nattering nabobs of negativism had accomplished their mission in a year when the elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind — going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions , issuing ludicrous “fact checks ,” and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud, who was dinged by NPR for 162 lies or distortions in just one news conference.
Indeed, the outrageous overinflation of the Walz story was nearly forgotten by Monday morning when the Times, which has bent over backwards to belittle the joy of Kamala Harris’ wildly successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, published an op-ed from the editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, headlined simply: “Trump Can Win on Character .” Perhaps that’s true, as critics noted, if voters do what Lowry did in his piece and pretend that inconvenient facts like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection or the fraud verdict had never happened. But while the column was ridiculed on social media, few people said they were giving up on the Times — because in this annus horribilis for the American media, many had already tuned out the NYT weeks or months ago.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen urged journalists to cover “the stakes, not the odds” of the 2024 election while Margaret Sullivan — who writes for the Guardian and her Substack after stints at the Times and the Washington Post — was more blunt in beseeching the press to ignore the pull of both-sides journalism and take seriously the threat to democracy posed by Trump, who tried to override his 2020 election loss and has made no comforting assurances that he won’t try to do the same after Nov. 5, 2024.
So Democratic convention week brought absurdities like PolitiFact tackling a DNC video that showed an actual Trump 2016 quote that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions and labeled it “mostly false” (!!) because his panicked aides later told him to walk back such a politically damaging statement. Also typical was USA Today calling it “false” when the DNC talks about “Trump’s Project 2025″ because the blueprint for his presidency was produced by the Heritage Foundation, even though most of its authors are former and would-be future Trump staffers and it offers the only program for filling jobs in a Trump administration.
C’mon, man.
It would require another column — maybe a book — to explain why this is happening. I see it as less the public’s main complaint (corporate control of the media) and more about our profession’s weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule, on top of maybe a new and not always healthy brand of careerism from younger journalists.
The Chicago-based media critic Mark Jacob, a retired veteran editor of that city’s Tribune and Sun Times, nailed it Monday with a piece headlined “Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance.” Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.”
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The timing on this indictment is bad, but only because it wasn’t 3 years ago. If you’re going to try this crime so late he gets to run again at least it’ll be very clear to anyone who wants to help him steal this election that doing so is likely going to result in federal felony charges.
New challenges for who??? Lol
Just print the remarks he shared, stop dancing around it. Media wants him to win soooooo bad.
https://x.com/JonathanCohn/status/1829489844101562614
When I see something this outrageous without a link provided, I try to find the source. The closest I got is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/business/economy/housing-plan-harris-trump.html
which does not have those exact words but does manage to write 9000 words about whether mass deportations will lower rents.
The screenshot is probably from a post on their website linking to that article and briefly summarizing it.
goofy
August 30, 2024, 6:21pm
1579
The original source of that quote is here and the link does indeed go to the link you identified.
goofy
August 30, 2024, 7:16pm
1580
Very nice of them to put Trump’s false framing front and center:
You have to go deep in the article to see sections like
Harris Was Not Responsible for the Law
Shoplifting Is Still a Crime in California
or this quote that should shut down the entire debate
While California’s $950 felony threshold for shoplifting has been held up as an example of leniency in a famously liberal state, it is actually the 10th strictest in the nation. States such as Republican-led Texas, Alabama and Mississippi allow even higher levels of theft before a felony is triggered.
goofy
August 30, 2024, 8:11pm
1581
Very good thread on the NYT’s corrosive effect on media coverage, and how it determines what does and doesn’t get treated as “news”:
Its comprehensiveness is its defense. If one asks why a certain story wasn’t covered, it can always find an article or op-ed where is was covered–once and only once, and henceforth buried. Implicitly, the Times acts as if every article it’s ever published was read by everyone.
The Times’ constant repetition of certain stories or lack of such coverage on others constitutes bias. But it’s hard to find bias in any individual story. It’s the sheer repetition of stories that should have been dropped that constitutes the bias.
Hillary’s emails are the clearest example of this but in the last year there’s also
Harassing Claudine Gay into resigning
Breathless coverage of Gaza protests at Columbia that forced the university to escalate and bring in police (leading protesters to occupy buildings in response)
Front page stories on Biden’s fitness every day between the debate and him stepping down
Meanwhile they wrote one article on Trump maybe getting a $10M bribe from Egypt and his own DOJ eventually squashing the investigation, never to be thought about again
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https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1829508355267727870?t=-Qn-4zImV6GvnrVECdQgeg&s=19
Every fucking time.
Listen, if you didn’t know you were being scammed you’re too fuckin’ dumb to keep this job, if you did know, you were in on it. Either way, YOU’RE OUT!
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MSNBC is in on this shit now?
My edem econbro friend just keeps defending the NYT. “They’re the paper of record!” “They have to report both sides!” “You’re missing the sarcasm!”
Fuckkkk.
