All the Equivalence That's Unfit for Print
December 22, 2019 11:56 AM   Subscribe

Jay Rosen, Dec 14 tweet: "This is it, people. This is all they got. ... Asymmetrical polarization is just too much for the institution as currently led. So they changed it to 50/50 polarization and put it on page one.", in reaction to "The Breach Widens as Congress Nears a Partisan Impeachment" (New York Times, Dec 13), the latest chapter in 'the Times's Long-Running Identity Crisis' (Vanity Fair), a misguided infatuation with "Both Sides" reporting (Columbia Journalism Review) that keeps repeating itself (previously, August 19).

See also:
posted by ZeusHumms (79 comments total) 66 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's not "both sides" it's the status quo.
They fear change and loss of their power.
posted by fullerine at 12:46 PM on December 22, 2019 [25 favorites]


Or supported the winner, tho. They're striving to be seen as neutral. But since one side is desperate to have their lived experience ratified by someone in the media, and the other side will foam at the mouth with death threats at anything that doesn't support their fiction, they just can't thread that needle and they're making everything worse by trying. Call it the James Comey effect.
posted by Horkus at 12:47 PM on December 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


When given the choice, capital will always side with fascism over even the faintest whiff of socialism

Now and forever, amen
posted by Rust Moranis at 12:48 PM on December 22, 2019 [83 favorites]


This is a great collection of write-ups, thank you.
posted by PMdixon at 12:50 PM on December 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


People talk all the time about the corrupting influence of money in politics, but seldom pause to ask where all that money is spent. Well, a lot of it goes for media buys. It seems to me that this is very near the root of the problem.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:51 PM on December 22, 2019 [20 favorites]


they don't want to seem to have supported the loser
I know! Meanwhile I keep reading where Zelinskiy, of all people, seems cowardly to all punditry because he's not sure who will lose and is thus hedging his bets and not outright defying Trump. I'm like, "hah?" Zelinskiy doesn't have any moral responsibility to uphold US national interests! Zelinskiy's responsibility is to do whatever he can to keep Ukrainians from getting killed. Where's the cowardice on his part because I am not seeing it? Could maybe somebody from some US institution with skin in the game try to be a tiny bit brave or make any small sacrifice whatsoever? The republican party? The New York Times? Anybody? Nope, nobody stateside can think of anything they could do: the survival of the nation is up to the president of Ukraine.
posted by Don Pepino at 12:53 PM on December 22, 2019 [38 favorites]


“The headline was inelegant, it missed the point, it was poorly written, but it was not a federal hate crime, as you would think based on reactions from some people in the newsroom. The bigger issue is the culture of outrage.”

This person should be fired.
posted by avalonian at 1:06 PM on December 22, 2019 [33 favorites]


Anybody? Nope, nobody stateside can think of anything they could do: the survival of the nation is up to the president of Ukraine.

hey wapo would like you to know that they are putting a lot of effort into cosplaying #TheResistance - they have a motto on a black header and everything!

they also still have Megan McArdle and Hugh Hewitt explaining why it's all Clinton's fault and that Barr is absolutely right to make sure the doj backs Trump but cmon you can't expect them to actually change their behavior
posted by PMdixon at 1:11 PM on December 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


Journalistic moderation should not pretend their ethical duty is to attain a centrism of arbitrary objectivity, which is the default state without ethics. They should instead report actual news in depth, which is any event made notable by courage, honorable acts, or done with a sense of modesty. All else is either normal, predictable, arranged, manipulated, boring, or going with the flow of corruption.
posted by Brian B. at 1:18 PM on December 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


Michael Kruse @michaelkruse
A.G. Sulzberger [Publisher, NYT]: "We won't be baited into becoming 'the opposition.' And we won’t be applauded into becoming 'the opposition.'" https://bit.ly/2ONWz0Q
5:34 AM · Oct 10, 2018
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:24 PM on December 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


For all Trump's talk of enemy of the people, the current press is actually an enemy of democracy.
posted by chris24 at 1:30 PM on December 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


Capital doesn't need a single whiff of anything as a reason to embrace fascism. It's structural and unconscious like an amoeba's engulf reflex.

The thing that it is trying to get both sides of when the NYT is both-sidesing an issue is revenue. The view from nowhere should get them clicks and buys from both sides. The individuals there are not working towards the Fuhrer, they're working towards the bottom line.

And that's what morality is under capitalism. That's the banality of evil, and why the problem is structural, because we're all drowning in the intentional precarity of it all.
posted by Horkus at 1:34 PM on December 22, 2019 [26 favorites]


Capital doesn't need a single whiff of anything as a reason to embrace fascism. It's structural and unconscious like an amoeba's engulf reflex.

A fella whose name I can't recall once described fascism as capitalism in decay.
posted by Rust Moranis at 1:46 PM on December 22, 2019 [12 favorites]


I saw a tweet I can't find now that pointed out the effect of the media abandoning truth and turning everything into both sides partisanship, is that they have made people who do care about truth into angry partisans... they feed the partisanship they claim to decry.
posted by fleacircus at 1:59 PM on December 22, 2019 [18 favorites]


Press Watch: The New York Times’s political coverage has completely imploded at the worst possible time

Or...the best? I still have to plow through these links, but nowhere do I see any possibilities raised that this is an NYC thing, Trump and Giuliani (etc.) exercising power over the NYT, pushing them toward corrupt motivations and editorial decisions via mysterious forces. I think it's reasonable to think it's a big matzo hanging out there, that it's not purely journalistic failure. Both Trump and Rudy would absolutely twist every available screw.
posted by rhizome at 2:01 PM on December 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


A.G. Sulzberger [Publisher, NYT]: "We won't be baited into becoming 'the opposition.' And we won’t be applauded into becoming 'the opposition.'" https://bit.ly/2ONWz0Q

Unless Hillary wins in which case, BUCKLE UP!
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:16 PM on December 22, 2019 [20 favorites]


nowhere do I see any possibilities raised that this is an NYC thing, Trump and Giuliani (etc.) exercising power over the NYT, pushing them toward corrupt motivations and editorial decisions via mysterious forces

My operating theory wrt NYT is that it's an even more depressing NYC thing: they've spent decades giving Trump press as a colorful local gadfly and can't change modes.
posted by PMdixon at 2:17 PM on December 22, 2019 [13 favorites]


The political press in particular has a big problem in their weakness for meta-narratives. This comes up again and again when straightforward stories about corruption and abuse of power inevitably become meta-stories about the messaging fight, or partisanship, or how it all plays to white swing state voters.

This might be related to the tendency that a lot of political reporters seem to have of writing for their peers in the political press (and social class cohort) rather than for the general population. I’m overgeneralizing a bit, but there really is a status-seeking aspect to writing for those who like to think of themselves as already being au fait with the grubby facts of a story and want to advance to the n-dimensional chess angle.

There’s also, of course the underlying issue that journalists in general seem to want to forget, which is that all journalism is political. Choices about which stories to cover and how to cover them will always have a political basis, whether that stems from the socioeconomic and racial makeup of a newsroom or the financial incentives of its owners.
posted by theory at 2:20 PM on December 22, 2019 [41 favorites]


This comes up again and again when straightforward stories about corruption and abuse of power inevitably become meta-stories about the messaging fight, or partisanship, or how it all plays to white swing state voters.

Yes. THANK YOU. This so much. "Democrats won today" or "Republicans won today" shit about how well they fought. Like the corruption is a fucking given and all this is just a game on whether Trump can worm out of it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:34 PM on December 22, 2019 [29 favorites]


The New York Times votes "present" every single day.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:39 PM on December 22, 2019 [45 favorites]


There's another insidious form, too, like this WaPo article on Warren. It calls her out for calling the photo lines she does with supporters selfies, when mostly they're not.

Inside, the reporter admits it's a fairly stupid point and that people's phones are handed to a staffer mostly for crowd management reasons, but you wouldn't know that from the headline, which boldly proclaims Warren's "central falsehood."

Making mountains out of semantic molehills when you say the president "misspoke" when he is out and out lying is really too much.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:43 PM on December 22, 2019 [53 favorites]


Don't think it's been linked, but Jay Rosen was on The Professional Left's podcast (yay Driftglass and Bluegal!) and the three of them had an excellent talk on all of this.
posted by zardoz at 3:07 PM on December 22, 2019 [9 favorites]


I feel this accelerated during the Bush years, remember that famous Karl Rove quote (in the NYTimes, no less):
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
The media swallowed that bait, hook, line and sinker. And to some extent I think it was because the journalists and editors felt they were participants in creating a new reality. They felt powerful. They felt they were part of a movement of sorts. And while the politicians creating new realities with lies had agendas and purposes, the journalists didn't, they just got caught up in the wave. Back then I knew a lot of journalists where I'd tell them that the facts were easy to find, and the facts were that the Bush and Blair administrations were lying, and these people would just move the goal posts. From weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein is evil. When I said Pakistan and Saudi Arabia harbored terrorists and specially Saudi Arabia was at least as totalitarian as Iraq, they would change the subject entirely.
The ideal of journalism as a guardian of democracy and the truth was wiped out almost entirely, and it wasn't exactly resurrected during the Obama years. Just as there was no political reckoning after 2008, there was also no professional reckoning among the media.
Only now, when disinformation has become a serious threat to our democracies, there is a discussion. But after nearly 20 years of watered down values, there is a whole generation, or two, who never learnt critical thinking.
Young journalists are often great, inventing the whole thing from scratch again. This is not a critique of them, it's an acknowledgment that they are fighting a very uphill battle with media owners and editors.
posted by mumimor at 3:07 PM on December 22, 2019 [37 favorites]


There's another insidious form, too, like this WaPo article on Warren. It calls her out for calling the photo lines she does with supporters selfies, when mostly they're not.

Inside, the reporter admits it's a fairly stupid point and that people's phones are handed to a staffer mostly for crowd management reasons, but you wouldn't know that from the headline, which boldly proclaims Warren's "central falsehood."

Making mountains out of semantic molehills when you say the president "misspoke" when he is out and out lying is really too much.


It's almost like nitpicking enough dumb details about a candidate in this age of "fakes news" is actually just a way of building mountains of bullshit.
posted by ipsative at 3:08 PM on December 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


As in, you know, mountains of lice.
posted by ipsative at 3:11 PM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Daniel Okrent is widely created as one of the creators of rotisserie baseball and he served as the first public editor of the NYT. While there, he articulated something he called Okrent's Law: "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true."

He said that way back in 2004. It sometimes seems like the paper he once worked for and various other media institutions have been doing their damnedest to ignore that law ever since.

As well, they very much seem to be looking to be entertained by the people and the issues they cover. I recall thinking while reading/watching coverage of Mueller's testimony "My God...these fucking idiots in the American media. They wanted a scene out of A Few Good Men or ...And Justice For All: they wanted Mueller to jump up and shout out unequivocal condemnation upon Trump amid frantic calls for 'Order! Order!' as the room erupted. And having not gotten that, they're going to make this into a nothingburger even though there are bombshells aplenty in what he said" and lo! that's what they did.

Most days, I feel my loathing for and distrust of the Republican party is outpaced by my loathing for and distrust of the American media.
posted by lord_wolf at 3:19 PM on December 22, 2019 [40 favorites]


I feel my loathing for and distrust of the Republican party is outpaced by my loathing for and distrust of the American media.

Republican politicians don't bother lying to themselves the way journalists/commentators do. There is something pseudo respectable in that.
posted by PMdixon at 3:32 PM on December 22, 2019 [6 favorites]


The Republican party and the handful of big media orgs that remain in the US have settled into a mutually agreeable exploitative relationship.

Soooo much this. It was really on display after the most recent Democratic primary debate, with millionaire TV news talking heads being so very personally offended at Sanders’ and Warren’s “attacks” on the wealthy and poor ol’ Pete Buttigieg. The social and political changes that are afoot threaten their ongoing wealth and cultural hegemony, and they don’t like that one bit.
posted by LooseFilter at 4:19 PM on December 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


A lot of powerful people and institutions that leftists thought had their backs are going to be nowhere to be found if Trump faces Sanders or Warren in November. I don't think that you'll see the New York Times endorsing Trump's re-election, but it could back a Bloomberg independent campaign in a big way that might just amount to the same thing.

If the UK establishment was able to look beyond Brexit -- which they absolutely loathed -- to drive the Tories to a majority in the UK general election earlier this month, the US establishment won't find it all hard to countenance Trump's re-election.
posted by MattD at 4:27 PM on December 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


If the establishment needed to through someone to the wolves. They would with a President Pence to calm the nation for free and secure elections, continuity of government and market stability. If the Republicans partisan a vote to dismiss, goodbye election(s) for them as i believe outrage would drown out what's left of the political system.
posted by clavdivs at 4:33 PM on December 22, 2019


“The headline was inelegant, it missed the point, it was poorly written, but it was not a federal hate crime, as you would think based on reactions from some people in the newsroom. The bigger issue is the culture of outrage.”

I hear you man. When you get away with being incredibly complicit in the manufacture of the Iraq War and the death of hundreds of thousands all your other crimes feel so puny. Glory days and whatnot.
posted by srboisvert at 4:44 PM on December 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


There's been a very strange story in Chicago lately where the new Mayor has fired a long term press spokesperson and the media on twitter were by and large lamenting the dismissal of this spokesperson who they all thought was a great guy. The 'great guy' was the spokesman for Rahm Emanuel's administration where they continually obstructed press access to documents to the extent that the city lost not a few lawsuits over it. He was also the spokesperson during the city's cover up of Laquan McDonald's murder by a police officer in full view of something like a dozen other police.

But they liked him...personally. A lot reporters whose work I respect were publically out there saying that. Now I find myself thinking about everything they wrote and everything they will write and asking myself "How are they being played and how am I being played".

Which sucks because it's an exhausting way to live and makes me feel like I am just few short steps away from being a conspiracy minded nutjob..
posted by srboisvert at 4:57 PM on December 22, 2019 [40 favorites]


I think any American politician who's meaningfully "conservative" in the context of a liberal democracy is already a Democrat. The remnant of the Republican party is basically a pack of mercenary moral nihilists (a phrase I will continue to overuse because I enjoy the music of it).

It seems like people and institutions who try to relate to this situation in the terms that they've been taught or compelled to understand, that there is a "spectrum" with policy positions distributed along it. That doesn't really exist right now (as if it wasn't mostly nonsense to begin with anyway), but they're still acting as if it does. I can't tell if that's a good-faith error or evil or some of both.

It's like watching ED-209 fall down the stairs. They're just not equipped to deal with on-the-ground realities and they squeal so piteously when they fail, you almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
posted by klanawa at 5:05 PM on December 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


A lot reporters whose work I respect were publically out there saying that.

Which did you respect, out of curiosity? I hope to spend several more decades in Chicago than the one I just completed, but I've never been under the impression the local media is in the least adversarial to the political machine and especially the cops, so I'd be very interested in knowing what I should have been disabusing my cynicism with: it would be great to have hope, even if in retrospect.
posted by PMdixon at 5:21 PM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


makes me feel like I am just few short steps away from being a conspiracy minded nutjob

The thing to keep in mind about conspiracies is that they're hidden. This shit goes on in plain sight.

What makes it feel like a conspiracy is also the reason the rich keep getting away with it: the inbuilt resistance that any decent human being feels toward believing that behaviour so transparently craven, mendacious and self-serving could possibly be deliberate.
posted by flabdablet at 5:39 PM on December 22, 2019 [7 favorites]


I thought their political coverage imploded some time around the beginnings of the second Iraq war? I mean, Judith Miller basically helped wag the dog on that whole mess and they’ve (to my knowledge) never even considered the idea that the institution might owe at least an apology for their part in that clusterfuck.
posted by drivingmenuts at 5:47 PM on December 22, 2019 [11 favorites]


imploded some time around the beginnings of the second Iraq war?

I recall the mainstream press being pretty fucking keen to boost the official line on the first Gulf War, and I recall being horrified by the glee with which they pushed the spectacle of the initial attacks, as if they were all playing some not at all obscene to them video game. At the time I had trouble comprehending how anbody who called themselves a journalist could possibly bring themselves to do this, given all that had come out in the aftermath of Vietnam. But that was before I'd encountered Manufacturing Consent.
posted by flabdablet at 6:38 PM on December 22, 2019 [10 favorites]


If all but one American thought the president should be impeached, many news outlets would still put one from each "side" at a news desk to debate the issue.
posted by thorny at 6:46 PM on December 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


Judith Miller

yep. Can’t be lived down.
posted by mwhybark at 11:36 PM on December 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


BTW, while facts should be reported as facts, and pundits should stop with the false equivalencies they make in bad faith, I like to be able to read genuine conservative opinion pieces once or twice a week. I don't want to watch Fox News or listen to talk radio, or read conservative newspapers. So the best way for me to know were they are at is by letting them have a small voice in my paper. Even better, it could be a critical interview with a right wing person every now and then. My Danish Sunday paper had an interview with a fire-spouting vicar yesterday, and it was very interesting.
posted by mumimor at 12:46 AM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


In the US mainstream media, the military-industrial complex is unquestioned, the rights of certain groups of people to exist and be treated equally is questioned, and ideas that have popular support ike sane health care are dismissed.... it's all conservative here.
posted by kokaku at 1:19 AM on December 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


In the US mainstream media, the military-industrial complex is unquestioned, the rights of certain groups of people to exist and be treated equally is questioned, and ideas that have popular support ike sane health care are dismissed.... it's all conservative here.

Yes I know, I thought of someone I know who is a Conservative MEP, and she is slightly to the left of Elizabeth Warren. It's crazy.
posted by mumimor at 1:36 AM on December 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


But they liked him...personally. A lot reporters whose work I respect were publically out there saying that. Now I find myself thinking about everything they wrote and everything they will write and asking myself "How are they being played and how am I being played".

I am reminded of Michelle Wolf's remarks at the White House correspondent's Dinner (an event that should have died an undignified death after Stephen Colbert's famous scolding, by the way). The press went on an on about how Wolf had criticized Sanders' appearance (she didn't) in order to avoid confronting the fact that wolf told the press that Sanders lies all the time, and they just write down and print those lies.

Much political reporting has degenerated to theater criticism. The other day on NPR's show 1A, the panel was so busy talking about the perceptions of impeachment both parties were trying to create that they never bothered to mention which side was grounded in objective reality. And this failure to do so, out of fear of bad faith accusations of "liberal bias," gives undue influence to conservative positions (such as imagining that "climate skepticism" is anything other than a willful denial of reality).

And that's the problem. As I've noted often in the politics megathreads, the standard of journalism used to be objectivity. Now, this standard itself is subject to much criticism -- as noted upthread, the agenda of what to report is itself political (*cough* Hillary Clinton's email *cough) -- but at least it's an ethos. But by objective standards, Trump is massively guilty of the crimes set out in the articles of impeachment, according to the call memo they themselves released (and the obvious fact that he demanded his people ignore subpoenas). Thus they take up the comforting and lazy trope of balance, in which all they have to do is write up both sides' claims -- whether they're objectively true or even consistent -- and call it a day.

And as Jon Stewart pointed out in his famous Crossfire segment (in which it's notable that he apparently shamed Paul Begala but not Tucker Carlson), the very fact that journalists seek out "spin" means that they're willing to be spun -- that is, they are willing to let political operatives influence their coverage. And that fact is neither objective nor balanced.
posted by Gelatin at 3:47 AM on December 23, 2019 [22 favorites]


Both sides: Holocaust, for and against.
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 4:21 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Both sides: Holocaust, for and against.

Recall that the media quickly turned the news of Trump running concentration camps for immigrant children into a debate over whether the term "concentration camp" was appropriate.
posted by Gelatin at 4:29 AM on December 23, 2019 [19 favorites]


My biggest disappointment was when the Times sided with the Bush administration to call torture enhanced interrogation techniques. I still get angry about that.
posted by xammerboy at 6:35 AM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


My first insight into both side-ism for journalism in general is that that's how they define their jobs. Journalism was never about giving people the truth, it was about presenting various expert opinion as part of the process for manufacturing public opinion. This definition has been gamed but journalists don't know what to do about it. A good example are the NyTimes "Picks" in their comments section. Half of these selected comments are garbage and flat out contradict well known facts, but they highlight them anyway.
posted by xammerboy at 6:46 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


In the US mainstream media, the military-industrial complex is unquestioned

Sidebar: … and the 'Congressional' part is always unstated.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:31 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


the standard of journalism used to be objectivity

If, by "objectivity", you mean a view of reality constructed within narrow parameters agreed by wealthy white men, I guess you're right. The standard was certainly what passed for objectivity, at least.
posted by howfar at 9:27 AM on December 23, 2019


the standard of journalism used to be objectivity

If by objectivity you mean that all views are of equal value, then you aren't talking about objectivity. You are talking about stenography, that is, dutifully typing up and printing anything that anyone says, no matter how objectively outrageous.

That kind of objectivity gives unlimited power to those willing to say anything, tell any lie.
posted by JackFlash at 9:50 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I have close friends who have worked at both the NYT and the WaPo, and they've told me a lot about the difference in culture at the two papers. (And as an ex-reporter, I've also read both for years with a critical eye.)

The NYT has the burden of this legacy of being "the paper of record." For a long time it was the largest and single most powerful news organization in the world, and probably still is. They internalize that whole "first draft of history" thing. As I write this, the parallel to the One Ring pops into my head -- it's world-breakingly powerful, the heaviest of burdens, and in the end irresistibly corrupting.

As such, the person carrying the ring -- aka, the executive editor -- has to have the humility to resist that temptation to be the Great Impartial Chronicler of History. Journalism isn't about being the all-powerful and wise wizard in the tower; it's about being on the ground, in the streets, getting dirty.

(Quick aside, can't resist: There's an unremarkable 1994 movie, The Paper, that only a reporter could love. Michael Keaton plays a guy who's the editor of a paper like the Daily News or Post, a scrappy tabloid. At one point he gets an interview to be an editor at the mock NYTimes. It goes badly, and the Times editor says, "You blew your chance to cover the world!" And Keaton says, "I don't live in the world. I live in fucking New York City!")

Point is, the editor can't think about The World. You think about your city, where you live. The person running the paper has to know that.

And (finally getting to the point) the NYT has the wrong guy for the job, in the opinion of this former grunt. Dean Baquet to me has always seemed a little too conscious of what the powerful will think of his work. Remember that when he ran the Los Angeles Times, he spiked a story -- at the government's request -- that would have disclosed warrantless spying on Americans by the NSA. This was years before Edward Snowden.

Meanwhile, over at the WaPo, you've got Marty Baron. If you've seen Spotlight, you know he headed the Boston Globe's takedown of the Catholic Church over the pedophilia coverup. You want pushback from a powerful organization with rabid supports? Go after the Church in Boston.

(Here's a story about him: Years ago, a friend of mine went up to this rumpled-looking guy standing by himself at a journalism conference and introduced himself, hi, "I'm Mike, I'm a reporter for the Podunk News." The other guy said, Hi, "I'm Marty, I'm the editor of the Boston Globe." And they had a couple of drinks and talked for a while.)

Finally wrapping up: Given what Baron has overseen at the WaPo (Dave Farenthold's long-running butt-kicking of Trump, and more recently, the Afghanistan Papers series, for starters), I often wonder what it would be like if he was the one running the NYT.
posted by martin q blank at 10:08 AM on December 23, 2019 [13 favorites]


I’m reminded of the esteemed Craig Mod:

“The New York Times is a partially dopaminergic publication. That is, the success of it as a business is still contingent on readers looking at a lot of ads. It’s also dependent on subscriptions, which is why the writing is usually high-caliber; quality is necessary to convert casual readers into subscribers (hyperbole is necessary to multiply ad views); becoming a subscriber is often a proxy vote for quality.

But the Times makes a significant portion of its profits from ads, so eating your attention is still good for the organism. Hence, click-bait headlines. And horrible, horrible election needles: real-time “content machinery” adjacent to ads from which you can’t avert your gaze. Of course, The Times is not the only publication that functions like this. Most legacy or incumbent news organizations do, too.”


Media Accounting 101: Books, Appholes & Publications

But like, what’s the alternative for readers today? Maybe The Guardian (but like, brexit)?
posted by curoi at 11:39 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I only ever actually read the Guardian for US news now. The tone seems right. and I usually play things by gut. Both NYT and WP give me tummy aches often.
posted by ipsative at 2:12 PM on December 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


The view from nowhere should get them clicks and buys from both sides.

Obligatory mention of Lewis Wallace’s very worthwhile podcast The View From Somwhere, on the history/invention of “objectivity” in journalism.
posted by progosk at 2:26 PM on December 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


Why would Baron be any better than Baquet?

Well, the Post isn't perfect, to be sure. But the Post has been a hell of a lot more aggressive than the NYT, and with less both-sidesism. I'm afraid the NYT might actually have sat on the Afghanistan Papers; you'd have a solid argument that the current leadership would have passed on the Pentagon Papers.

I'd also say this: Sometimes pieces (like that one you noted) fall flat. I'm solidly on Team Warren in the Dem primaries, and I should be pissed off about that piece. While I'm a little annoyed, I don't see it as a cheap shot. I think it's more that Philip Bump, the writer, was trying for a clever piece on language and campaign strategy, and it just didn't work. But Bump is maybe the smartest, wonkiest guy at the Post. I'd actually give the paper credit for giving as much ink (pixels?) as they do. For example:

New emails help peel back the layers of pressure surrounding Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky
How Trump’s conversations with Putin overlapped with his emerging Ukraine conspiracy theories
Trump notwithstanding, incomes in blue America continue to grow faster than in red areas
To avoid removal, Trump needs senators representing only 7 percent of the country to support him

Bump has a solid track record of doing the digging, and producing good analyses. But every good writer knocks out a clunker now and then.
posted by martin q blank at 4:37 PM on December 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


Meanwhile, for a picture of the mainstream media as a whole, there's this:

Media Matters, Dec 6th - Study: Major media outlets show improvement at debunking Trump misinformation on Twitter (Matt Gertz & Rob Savillo)

Media Matters, Dec 18th - Mainstream media headlines about Trump’s unhinged letter show just how bad things have gotten (Parker Malloy)
Mainstream media outlets did more than just treat the letter as typical; they treated it as normal.

These headlines don’t show us the real Trump, and that might be lost on people not particularly tuned into politics.

Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor at Lawfare, highlighted one of the major problems with these headlines, noting the clean-up work mainstream media outlets do to give the impression that Trump is a more “coherent person” than he actually is.

For people not constantly immersed in politics, a newspaper headline may very well be all that they see about any given event. Headlines matter in the age of social media, and right now, they’re serving as bumpers to protect the president.
Calling out individual lies is good, but calling out larger patterns of falsehoods is needed too.
posted by ZeusHumms at 3:18 PM on December 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


I wouldn't underestimate the threat of implied violence by joker wingnuts made to individual media companies and journalists. It is happening to politicians too, helping them decide to quit (~19 mins). They invite feedback everyday and a few people are deranged enough to warn them of impending murder if they don't reverse their position, indicating the sentiments of untold others. It might explain the fawning loyalty to Trump, on top of the threat of a primary election. It should be noted that these nutjobs are often sincere in their threats because they were violently brainwashed into their political beliefs as children by unhinged parents who beat them, and it takes very little to trigger them to criminal rage.
posted by Brian B. at 10:23 AM on December 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


How Disinformation Spreads, According to Chuck Todd (Rolling Stone)
"So I mean, look, if people want to read my answer to your question, 'Boy, that Chuck Todd was hopelessly naive.' Yeah, it looks pretty naive. I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them."
posted by rhizome at 3:35 PM on December 25, 2019 [1 favorite]


A 538 article that lays out the stark differences between both sides: What Unites Republicans May Be Changing. Same With Democrats. (Perry Bacon Jr., Dec. 17, 2019)
The Republican Party has traditionally favored few tariffs, limited government intervention in the economy and not giving government money directly to people in lieu of them earning it through work. Its recent actions seem out of character for a party organized around a particular ideology.

But if you think of the GOP as being organized around identity groups, these policies hang together quite well. The clear beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s actions have been businesses and corporations whose leaders back the president (such as those in the coal industry), conservative Christians, farmers, gun rights enthusiasts, people wary of increases in the number of foreign-born Americans and Islam, people wary of movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, pro-Israel activists and residents of rural areas.
...
I don’t think that the Republican Party has abandoned ideology in favor of identity completely. But it does seem like identity is playing a bigger and clearer role than it did a decade ago.

Let’s move to the Democrats. Polling shows that a rising number of Democrats view themselves as liberal — now half of the party, compared to less than a third in the early 2000s. Democratic voters are increasingly likely to support liberal positions such as allowing more immigrants into the country and the government playing a role in helping Americans pay for their health care.

But the shift among Democrats is even more evident among activists and elites. Groups like Black Lives Matter, Demand Justice, the Sunrise Movement, Planned Parenthood and the newly-revived Poor People’s Campaign are pushing the Democratic Party in a more ideological direction. That ideology is perhaps best defined by a push for equality across a lot of realms — and particularly around ethnicity and race, gender, income, sexual orientation and wealth.

I think this is why Kamala Harris struggled to win the support of young, liberal black Democratic activists in her presidential run. She often tried to connect with them on identity (as a woman of color), but many of them were more interested in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both made taking strong stands on racial and wealth inequality central to their candidacies.
(I'm being lazy and not copying the copious links over into this pullquote.)

To tie this back to the OP: I think it's disastrous to present both sides as equals, where the GOP is the party of White Fragility, and the Dems are for Improved Equality or Equity (they're not the same thing -- comic for example). GOP is clinging fearfully to The Way Things Were (for cis het White Christian Men) and fighting against the changing tides (of human diversity and climate disasters), while the Democrats want to provide a viable future for all.

I realize I'm painting with a pretty broad brush, but when the impeachment proceedings have made it clear that the GOP is the Party For Trump, while the Democrats are generally Against That Shit, the broad brush method seems pretty appropriate.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:06 PM on December 25, 2019 [8 favorites]


From the Chuck Todd piece linked to above by rhizome:
Yeah, it looks pretty naive. I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them. (Ed note: Maya Angelou is the author of this quote.)

1. My dude, not all of us made that mistake. Not even all of your colleagues.

2. As a former fact checker who has missed some errors in my time, that must’ve been a painful editor’s note for him to read. And also hella insulting to both those writers.

End of derail. Sorry.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:46 AM on December 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


End of derail. Sorry.

I struggled somewhat about posting it, but decided that while it's a shame about the NYT, at the same time we are surrounded by it.
posted by rhizome at 12:58 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


Did not mean to suggest that your link was a derail but rather that the chunk I highlighted and commented on was a derail. It was an interesting story, rhizome.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:27 PM on December 26, 2019


To tie this back to the OP: I think it's disastrous to present both sides as equals, where the GOP is the party of White Fragility, and the Dems are for Improved Equality or Equity (they're not the same thing -- comic for example). GOP is clinging fearfully to The Way Things Were (for cis het White Christian Men) and fighting against the changing tides (of human diversity and climate disasters), while the Democrats want to provide a viable future for all.
The problem is, trying to do that without scaring the normies. There's a reason why woke Twitter loves Sanders/Warren (I love the crap out of Warren) while the rest of the country is fine with Biden. Warren and Sanders talk about big change and it scares the crap out of people. A good swath of the country still has something to lose, either tangible or intangible and change is scary. Change as a concept when you're trying to build a broad coalition is poison.

How do Republicans get away with saying "we need change in Washington!"? Because they're a regional ethnocentric party now. They wink to their base of white cis heterosexual people or men in the midwest and the south and imply that they're going to change the system to benefit their base exclusively. They've got the advantage that it's easily visible to verify because they go to Washington, they try to fuck everyone else, and it makes national news back home.

I've written about portraying change as improvement rather than scary rip the whole system to bits and rebuild it so I won't repeat myself, but I swear, all Sanders and Warren do at face value when they use the phrase "Medicare for All" is scare the shit out of people in the suburbs. Those same people are fine once they figure out how all that change stands to benefit them personally but that takes time, energy, resources. Wouldn't it be better to actually say stuff in a way that succinctly communicates that plan X is going to improve these people's lives and everyone else will be the same if not better. Tailor messages for different groups. If Democrats ever figure out how to thread that needle they will be able to build coalitions better. If they keep trying to be leftist populists the straight white cis male demographic is going to outvote us every single time.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:13 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]


Wouldn't it be better to actually say stuff in a way that succinctly communicates that plan X is going to improve these people's lives and everyone else will be the same if not better.

I agree with you and that's a steep uphill battle when fighting against 40 years of GOP propaganda rooted in fear of the government saying we're here to help, which is also a failing of the Dems to stand-up for government and say look at all the great things it does for you (e.g. they could've been doing this since the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts that were passed under Nixon of all people and had demonstrable, tangible, visible benefits).
posted by kokaku at 4:33 AM on December 27, 2019 [3 favorites]


Heather Cox Richardson's December 26 letter talks about Chuck Todd:
In the interview, Todd laments that he has been “absurdly naïve.” Right up until he had Senator Cruz on his show recently and Cruz echoed Russian propaganda, Todd apparently believed that the Republicans were acting in good faith when they talked to the media. Todd says he was “stunned” by Cruz’s embrace of Russian disinformation, especially since he was the third senator to do exactly that on the show. Cruz had asked to come on, and Todd thought that since Cruz had always been a Russia hawk, he wanted to set the record straight. When, instead, he followed the party line, Todd finally got it: Trump Republicans are using the media to spread propaganda.
Well, duh...
She concludes with:
It is my sense that Todd’s revelation is a sign that media figures are starting to see how they are being used to advance disinformation. There has been discussion emerging of how to report the news without providing a platform for lies. If it takes hold, there will be an important shift in media coverage of the administration and congressional supporters in the new year.
That would be nice
posted by MtDewd at 7:44 AM on December 27, 2019 [7 favorites]


@ashleyfeinberg (via):
a jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opi…

surely the new york times would never
I'm not qualified to assess the scholarship of the 2006 study that Bret Stephens cites. I'll merely note that a.) its title, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," rings alarm bells & b.) one of its co-authors, the late Henry Harpending, was a White Nationalist.
bret stpehens tiptoeing around the times newsroom and quietly attempting to lower calipers over his colleagues' heads without them noticing

the guy allowing this to happen is currently in the running for dean baquet's job

anyway, a fun thing to think about is how, if a new york times reporter tweeted tonight about how people with national platforms shouldn't be promoting race science, they would almost certainly be reprimanded
posted by tonycpsu at 12:20 PM on December 28, 2019 [7 favorites]




I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

The Times "correction" says: "Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or the authors' views."

Bullshit.

Here are Stephens exact words: "When it comes to Askenasi Jews, it's true." And then he cites the authors' study to support the statement.

The New York Times can't even get a correction right.
posted by JackFlash at 9:14 AM on December 30, 2019 [8 favorites]


Profiles in bothsidesism:

Joe Biden, asked whether he'd commit to choosing a woman or POC as his vice president (12/6/19): "No, I can't commit to that."

Joe Biden, asked whether he'd consider picking a Republican (12/30/19): ""The answer is I would, but I can't think of one now."
posted by box at 1:54 PM on December 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


That second quote was quite the sick burn. More so because it's true that I can't think of a single Republican currently in politics. The Teanazi Party is wearing the corpse of the Republican Party, but there are no Republicans any more. It's Teanazis (and Russian stooges) all the way down.
posted by wierdo at 2:20 PM on December 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


I agree. I think it's a pretty masterful wedge against Republican unity. It's not so much the officeholders as the populace that I think are going to start going "hmm," and that that is going to trickle up via polling and bingo nights.
posted by rhizome at 3:02 PM on December 30, 2019


I keep thinking the underlying issue is that most of the people who go on to write for the NYT and WaPo have the sort of background to do the whole "unpaid internship to make your bones" -- there are a few exceptions, but are there very many any more? The days where you put time in at a local paper first are long gone. Who can afford to enter journalism these days other than the wealthy?
posted by rewil at 3:59 PM on December 30, 2019


People still put in time with local media quite often to build their careers, but almost always that local media is owned by a big media company, underfunded, understaffed and has a culture of fluff pieces, crime scare stories, and regurgitated press releases.
posted by jason_steakums at 4:40 PM on December 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


I wrote somewhere about the Danish fact-checking radio show, Detektor. Well today the US ambassador Carla Sands was in it, and she was thrashed. It was great fun to hear how she was completely unprepared for what happens in that show. At first she kept repeating that she is the personal representative of the President, clearly expecting some deference to come out of that. Didn't happen. Then she began saying "it's not fair", like a kindergartner. Nice. You guys should have a thing like that.
posted by mumimor at 5:42 AM on January 10, 2020 [6 favorites]


I tell you what I have had enough of: hand-wringing think pieces about how "reality" means nothing any more. The actual situation is that there is a government run bye liars; the metaphysical status of the external world remains the same as it was in 2015. All you have to do is stop pretending that they care about telling the truth concerning pretty much anything and report "they are lying , again" as needed.
posted by thelonius at 6:00 AM on January 10, 2020 [4 favorites]


It's No Secret Why Republicans Win (book review in the Boston Review)
For Nelson, who has held leadership positions at the Columbia School of Journalism and the Committee to Protect Journalism, the “colony collapse” of journalism in the past few decades is a key factor in that explanation. That is partly due to the economic and technological changes that have decimated local news and transformed national outlets, and partly due to changes that have happened to the practice of journalism with the rise of right-wing media in the second half of the twentieth century. Why did the collapse of journalism benefit the right far more than the left? In part because the right had been hard at work since the 1940s establishing alternative media institutions, from magazines to radio shows to television networks. They paired these new institutions with a novel and effective argument about existing news outlets: that these purportedly objective outlets were riddled with liberal bias and could not possibly be trusted.
posted by mumimor at 7:50 AM on January 12, 2020 [5 favorites]


Milwaukee rally referenced below: Trump counterprogrammed the Democratic debate with a rally featuring a rant about toilets (Aaron Rupar, Vox)
The contrast between Trump’s rally in Wisconsin and the Democratic debate in Iowa could not have been clearer.
NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media (Aaron Rupar, Vox)
"In trying to be above taking sides, the mainstream media does Trump a favor by making order out of his chaos."

By almost any standard, President Donald Trump’s rally on Tuesday evening in Milwaukee was a bizarre affair. The president went on a lengthy tirade about lightbulbs, toilets, and showers; touted war crimes; joked about a former president being in hell; and said he’d like to see one of his domestic political foes locked up.

[...] for media outlets that view themselves as above taking sides, attempts to provide a sober, “balanced” look at presidential speeches often end up normalizing things that are decidedly not normal.

A brief report about Trump’s Milwaukee speech that aired Wednesday morning on NPR illustrates this phenomenon. The anchor’s intro framed Trump’s at times disjointed ramblings as a normal political speech that “ranged widely,” and the ensuing report (which originated from member station WUWM Milwaukee Public Radio) characterized his delivery as one in which he “snapped back at Democrats for bringing impeachment proceedings.”

[...]

NPR is far from alone in struggling to cover Trump.

As I wrote following a previous Trump rally in Wisconsin last April, outlets including CBS, USA Today, the Associated Press, and the Hill failed to so much as mention in their reporting that Trump pushed dozens of lies and incendiary smears during his speech.

The irony is that the media is one of Trump’s foremost targets of abuse. He calls the press the “enemy of the people,” yet the very outlets he demeans regularly bend over backward to cover him in the most favorable possible light.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:21 PM on January 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


So much for the "liberal media": Chattering-class hypocrisy is supporting Trump's rule (Chauncey Devega, Salon)
"Hillary warned us — and the media crucified her. Now a smug culture of neutrality is enabling a would-be fascist"

In the Age of Trump, too many voices in the American mainstream news media have defaulted to a type of cowardly neutrality where they are unwilling to tell the truth — or where, as Trump would have it, the truth is always fungible and malleable. Such behavior is avoidance of moral responsibility.

Today's mainstream news media might report black Americans' struggles against slavery and then white racial terrorism and Jim Crow by telling us that "Black and white Southerners disagree about voting and civil rights." It might report on the Holocaust with a headline like "Jews and others in spirited dispute with the Nazi Party and Hitler." […]
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:28 AM on January 16, 2020 [5 favorites]


Five myths about bipartisanship
No, it wasn’t the norm throughout U.S. history.

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, WaPo

I'll jump right to the end:
Today, Republicans are one of the most extreme (even radical) conservative parties in the democratic world, with no members in the House and arguably barely one in the Senate who would qualify as moderates or traditional conservatives, while Democrats look like a traditional center-left party. Though the “Squad” of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib receives much attention, a breakdown of voting records shows that the Democratic caucus is populated by more moderates than leftists. The asymmetric nature of this polarization makes bipartisanship almost impossible.
posted by mumimor at 8:39 AM on January 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


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