Well, we've seen that line of reasoning basically being endorsed by one of their employees right here.
It was a big story then because people were reporting on it, therefore they had to report on it like it was a big story.
And I suppose we would be told now: it's not a big story now, and if they were to treat it as a big story now, that would be just becoming Democratic propaganda/inserting opinion into the news.
Since I know a lot of people don’t click links, here’s a few tweets summarising some of the most important points:
On Friday, the NYT did a piece about a podcast Secretary Clinton did with David Plouffe. They incorrectly quoted her saying that the “Russians” were “grooming” a candidate running in the Democratic primary. They rightfully fixed it to reflect that she was taking about the GOP. pic.twitter.com/iFCphQhZcU
I too am tired of talking about this, but let’s again set the record straight. HRC speculated that the only way the GOP is going to win in states where Trump can’t hit a 50% majority is to 1) Suppress the vote, as they do widely and routinely, & 2) Bank on the 3rd party spoiler.
Because it’s all indicative of bad habits that if we don’t start to get right, we’re going to find that 2020 looks more like 2016 than anyone would like.
At the same time, the Fuck the Fucking New York Times has fired its Director of Information Security because, apparently, you don’t need information security in today’s modern age. Can’t make this shit up.
Today the @nytimes chose to eliminate my role, stating that there is no need for a dedicated focus on newsroom and journalistic security. I strongly believe in what I do (and what we did), and to say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. (1/3)
Silverman has commentary on this general issue, too, though it preceded Sandvik’s firing.
In conclusion, just in case I didn’t think to mention it, Fuck the Fucking New York Times.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
No, The New York Times, neither Toni Morrison nor Harold Bloom won the culture wars. English is dead. German is dead. Reading is dead. And soon, your newspaper will be a hedge fund.
CIA got tip on al-Baghdadi’s location from arrest of a wife and a courier
This is a Seattle Times reprint of a New York Times piece. About the CIA. This is propaganda for domestic and foreign consumption as well as another means of throwing the Kurds under the bus and weakening Trump's attempt to control foreign policy directly; brilliantly written. Bravo!
Quote:
Officials praised the Kurds, who continued to provide information to the CIA on al-Baghdadi even after Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone. The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.
Quote:
The initial planning for the raid began this past summer. The Army’s elite Delta Force commando unit began drawing up and rehearsing plans to conduct a secret mission to kill or capture the ISIS leader and faced huge hurdles. The location was deep inside territory controlled by al-Qaida. The skies over that part of the country were controlled by Syria and Russia. The military called off missions at the last minute at least twice.
Elevator pitch screenplay about our noble and brave State-sanctioned murder squads planning their murder; location determined by the kidnap and interrogation (read: torture) of a spouse of the target and a courier. Watch breathlessly as they plan and execute; will the murder squad be safe? A noble attack dog for the death squad, injured in its noble attack. Our elected leader watches it on the jumbo-tron in the basement of his castle. America taking charge in the world and doing God's work.
I get it. Terrorist evil. We still give ourselves carte blanche to murder people wherever in the world, including this person and much of their family. But fuck man, how hard and deep can one cheer the same structure that only very fucking recently spies domestically, that kills civilians, takes photos pissing on corpses, kills US citizens extrajudicially, kidnaps and runs black-site prisons and torture facilities; the structure that trains death squads for the central and southern Americas; that's the hero of this narrative bootlick extravaganza.
Just one minor addition: We still give ourselves carte blanche to murder people wherever in the world, including this person and much of their family, even though we created the situation leading to the terrorism (which is bad, mkay) in the first goddamned place.
__________________
"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
You know, on the one hand, the US's involvement in the region has often been very bad. The conditions for ISIS's rise were significantly the result of the invasion of Iraq, etc.
On the other hand, maybe "it's bad that the US feels like it can just kill a guy responsible for, among other things, leading a campaign of rape and massacre against religious minorities" isn't the best argument to convince people that US foreign policy/military intervention has been bad?
Like I get where it's coming from, but I highly doubt it did nobody who wants a better, more progressive foreign policy any favors that there were people on the left who whined about how it's wrong to celebrate the death of anyone, even Osama bin Laden.
Personally, I was not rah-rah-rah about OBL dying and I'm certainly not about al-Baghdadi. But I really can't get worked up about mass murdering shitheads dying.
That summarizes my feelings. Some of what we do in our long arm policies is hypocritical, counterproductive, chaotic. Sometimes it seems justified, even if we're doing it because it's just the most expedient option.
I'm most upset that we left the Kurds in the lurch. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that they are a potential modernizing element in the region. They are for women's rights, for religious tolerance, many are atheists. A primary leader of the independence effort, Ocalan, if I understand his intent, is to form a direct democracy communalist state structure. I hope they eventually get a geographical state.
I don't think the press has done a good job of describing the Kurds, as if their struggle and values are unimportant.
__________________
Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
"Analysis: On Impeachment Fight, Neither Side Seems Willing To Give an Inch," read the Friday morning front-page headline at the New York Times, which, as usual, was the most egregious offender when it comes to "both sides" pablum.
The article underneath, by Carl Hulse, focused exclusively on the failure to compromise, noting that "the two parties [are] pulling ever further apart as they dig in deeper on the righteousness of their respective causes" and that "[l]ittle evidence has emerged that either side is willing to give an inch."
How the parties are supposed to compromise on the issue of whether the president should be allowed to commit serious crimes is not even addressed. After all, to acknowledge that one side is for crimes and the other side is against them might expose how ridiculous this "compromise vs. polarization" framework really is.
[...]
These stories are tough, because, in one sense, it's technically true that the vote and the polling shows that Americans are deeply divided, by party identity, on the issue of impeachment. But that framework misses the larger story: The reason for this deep division is that Republicans, both voters and their representatives, have completely abandoned any respect for democracy and rule of law, choosing instead the cult of personality around a flagrant criminal. It ignores that Democrats value the truth and Republicans are awash in lies. It equates the two sides in a way that is not justified by looking at the bigger picture.
(OK, I may have embellished the title a little bit.)
Quote:
The author, Peter Schweizer, began promisingly by noting an asymmetry in American law. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a product of the reformist ’70s—the children of foreign officials are prohibited from holding positions in American-run companies. But no equivalent law bars foreign companies and governments from hiring family members of American officials.
There followed five paragraphs about father Joe and son Hunter Biden, centering on Hunter’s business arrangements in Ukraine and China. No evidence has surfaced of any intervention from Joe in those arrangements. But because of the family connection between the then-vice president and his feckless, business-unqualified son, the author, along with Fox News and virtually every Republican official, considered financial payments to Hunter corrupt.
[…I]t was not altogether surprising that in Schweizer’s 1,186 words about corrupt family arrangements with foreign nations, the name “Trump” appeared exactly once: strictly to introduce the family of Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation in Trump’s cabinet. Chao’s father founded a Chinese shipping business that “has thrived in large part because of its close ties with the Chinese government.” Meanwhile, Ms. Chao and her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are said to have boosted their net worth between 2004 and 2008 by a factor somewhere between 2.5 and ten, after “Ms. Chao’s father, James Chao, gave the couple a ‘gift’ of $5 million to $25 million.”
Schweizer was identified by the Times as “an investigative journalist” and “the author, most recently, of ‘Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.’” To those who follow the ins and outs of right-wing funding networks, he has other credentials. He is a senior contributor to Breitbart. He wrote speeches for George W. Bush and advised Sarah Palin. He presides over the Florida-based Governmental Accountability Institute (GAI), which is funded by the family foundation of hedge-fund tycoon and major Trump 2016 funder Robert Mercer. (As of 2017, the chairman of the GAI board was Mercer’s daughter Rebekah.) Schweizer’s earlier books include Do As I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy (2005); Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less…and Even Hug Their Children More than Liberals (2008); and, most consequentially, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich (2015).
The Times had previously aired Schweizer’s worldview in its news pages. In 2015, his Clinton Cash was offered for previews to The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Fox News. Times editor Matt Purdy later said that the Times declined an offer of exclusive rights to Schweizer’s material, but later asked his permission to use one of his story lines, which in turn built on Times reporting dating back to 2008. The Times investigated further, and took to Page 1 in a state of alarm: “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.”
This story, by Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, made waves and sold books. The article credited Schweizer and called him “right-leaning,” but failed to mention that Schweizer’s work was funded by a man who would become one of Donald Trump’s chief donors. As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker,
Quote:
The story insinuated that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had risked national security by facilitating the sale of American uranium mines to Russia in exchange for more than two million dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the businessmen behind the deal, who worked for a company called Uranium One. The story enabled Clinton’s opponents to frame her as greedy and corrupt. Even a year after she had lost the race, the Fox News host Sean Hannity was still invoking it on air, calling it “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.
But there was neither a here nor a there there. Hannity, Schweizer’s conduit, alleged that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty percent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons”— purportedly in return for huge payments to the Clinton Foundation. But in fact, the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had signed off on the uranium deal, which involved nothing like Hannity’s “twenty percent.” There was no evidence that Hillary Clinton had ever spoken about or otherwise intervened in approving the deal, or even attended the meeting at which it was approved. A noncontroversial deal had been spun into a national security threat. A story about donations to the Clinton Foundation had morphed into an insinuation that Hillary Clinton was party to quid-pro-quo corruption.
In their tenth paragraph, Becker and McIntire entered a caveat: “Whether the donations [to the Clinton Foundation] played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation.” Thus did a high-drama claim beginning with “Vladimir Putin’s goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain” devolve into a story of “special ethical challenges.” The Times bent over so far backwards to show that it was not “liberal,” it fell over.
And there’s more.
Fuck the fucking New York Times.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
So you're telling me that when some right-wing shitmonger propagandist writes a book like Clinton Cash, the New York Times shouldn't sign deals to provide special coverage of its contents?
So you're saying they're just supposed to not cover at all books by dishonest Republican Party hacks? I guess you basically want them to be a Democratic Party propaganda outlet.
You're just like Trump, who you are secretly a fan of, as evidenced by you praising Trump's foreign policy instincts, for example!
I guesss this makes more sense here, although maybe Rolling Stone isn't mainstream enough?
But the fact that davidm works at the NYT makes it close enough.
Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidm
Yes, of course, Matt Taibbi, who has a distinguished career in journalism and is the author of several books, is trash.
Ah, yes, here's some quality journalism:
Conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and dismissing all the evidence about Russia (even though the Mueller Report explicitly says it's not an exoneration, Trump and close associates never testified, tax returns never examined, dozens of prosecutions, and there are several on-going spinoff investigations... there never was nothing to it). And whining about leaks from someone who thought reporting on the content of DNC hacks (which he referred to as "leaks") was more important than reporting on the motivations and actors behind the hacking. No double standard there. Anyway, that's all good journalism.
But beyond that, he's using it to cast doubt on the Ukraine stuff, which is a whole nother matter. Like, he's acting like all we have to go on is hearsay from CIA agents. Trump himself released a partial "transcript" (readout) that is direct evidence that Trump did exactly what Taibbi is dismissing! And you can imagine that the reason it's a partial readout is because the full one is even more damning. Because it's fucking Trump, and he lies about everything and is the actual embodiment of corruption (like, ridiculous for people to call Clinton that when Trump is there. She is at best the moon to his sun), but yet he is also dumb enough to think that this partial readout was exonerating.
Not to mention all the other witnesses we have, as well as circumstantial evidence like the fact that within a day or two of this whistleblower story breaking, Trump mysteriously decided not to withhold the money anymore!
Yes, this is distinguished journalism right here, definitely not trash that makes Taibbi indistinguishable from a Trump supporter.
Also, still at "author of several books" being somehow evidence that someone is not trash. You know Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza are also the authors of several books, right?
the only thing that can stop a bad guy billionaire with an unaccountable propaganda network is a good guy billionaire with an unaccountable propaganda network pic.twitter.com/IdpxYkxQwG
Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump's scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention. https://t.co/1UfkaeZ3I4
From Daily Kos, a nice little composition on one way the msm sucks and why. There is no flarping equivalency here, none. I think it's fundamentally correct in its observations. Preaching to the choir. It's not confirmation bias if it's fundamentally correct, right?
The truth is, this is a decadeslong game of dare that Republicans have been playing with the press, as members of the party uniformly become more radical and more antidemocratic, and basically challenge the press to call them out, knowing full well it won't happen. That's because the Beltway press basically revolves around the central idea that there are two major competing parties in this country and that they are mirror opposites of each other. Republicans are just as conservative as Democrats are liberal. Republicans are just as serious as Democrats are. Republicans are just as fact-based and honorable as Democrats are. That false equivalency drives political coverage in this country, and has for decades.
Why this obsession? Because to concede that one party operates under a radically different set of guidelines (or no guidelines at all, in the case of the GOP), journalists have to do two things. They have to defend themselves against allegations of "liberal media bias," and they have to throw out the old, dependable rule book that allowed the press to lazily suggest that Republicans and Democrats function on the same plane, and therefore had to be treated similarly.
__________________
Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
The insinuation here, I think, is that imposing taxes and fees on domestic companies is as outlandish an idea as extracting payments from foreign governments over which we have no jurisdiction. https://t.co/Z9pt4V65qEpic.twitter.com/y2UxCHa1nn
Front page news about the impeachment hearings... well, we could keep the focus on the substance of the hearings. But instead, let's have a front page headline about how the viewership of the Democrats' counterprogramming to this reality TV presidency is disappointing. Maybe it won't get renewed for a second season!
Coincidentally, this plays into one of the narratives the GOP has been pushing: these hearings are boring. Now I'm sure the NYT doesn't connect this to the GOP's further conclusion - that these hearings are about irrelevant minutiae, but it stills fits with it.
Now, the story itself is more about people tuning out of the news in general and the reasons for this... but the headline instead implies that it's about the impeachment hearings per se. And it's unclear what makes it front page news; it doesn't seem to be an especially detailed story nor does it seem to offer new insights into the problem.
you can’t make this up: NYT published front-page story abt how “many” people aren’t watching hearings.
in three years of GOP charade Benghazi hearings, did you ever see NYT coverage like that?
(The answer is no, there was never a front page headline about the Benghazi hearings' audience size, afaict by Googling... unless they changed the headline of a story since publication, which is possible, since they did for this one.)
Right... the whole point of this was that Trump wanted an announcement of an investigation into Biden by Zelensky. He didn't care about an actual investigation, he didn't expect it to actually turn up anything worse than the somewhat sketchy fact that Hunter Biden got a cushy job off his family name (which is the most ludicrous thing for anyone named Trump, including Donald Sr, to attack anyone for).
And why did he care about that so much? Because he knows that the US media, including certain prestigious newspapers, would make that into a huge story. They would plaster it over their front pages before actually looking into it and determining whether it really was a big deal. They would tweet out headlines that mention the allegations or quote Trump's statements without putting the fact that they're unsubstantiated and appear to be baseless in a place of equal prominence. If it (predictably!) turns out there was nothing there, they would probably still say that it nonetheless puts Biden under a cloud, it casts shadows on his campaign.
And we know certain people would defend to the death the media outlets who fell for it. What are they supposed to do? Not cover the President of Ukraine announcing an investigation into Biden? So you want the media to turn into Democratic propaganda!
They only didn't succeed because of the whistleblower. The fact that the GOP successfully pressured the FBI/Comey into doing the same sort of thing in 2015-2016 (and Comey being a Republican and naturally more sympathetic to their complaints helped a lot there) doesn't give the media any pause. We must treat the FBI investigation as being prima facie serious and legitimate and quite plausible to turn up criminal behavior despite it stemming from the years-long blatant Benghazi witch hunt. So why wouldn't they publicly assume the Ukrainian investigation was also prima facie legitimate? To treat such things as bullshit until proven otherwise would be unacceptably partisan given that it requires the (accurate, but unacceptably "partisan") premise that the GOP have proven themselves lying, cheating ratfuckers whose statements can't be trusted without verification.
(Likewise, they have tended to be credulous of Trump's statements, even though experience shows that Trump saying something has little relationship to whether it's true/whether it will actually happen.)
Although who knows, maybe they'll succeed anyway? Who's to say that despite all this blatant evidence that it's ginned up bullshit that they won't say there are just too many questions about whether Biden is corrupt for this cloud to dissipate? #Bothsides have been plagued by scandal.
This is it, people. This is all they got. All phrasing from a single story in the New York Times today. https://t.co/HDXwSGcwge 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. pic.twitter.com/JIYPDYoCzD
The NYT could report on the facts of impeachment. But because the Republicans screamed and yelled about how unfair it was, you can't simply report the facts, because the facts would agree with Democrats. So instead this goes on the front page.