Zeynep Tufekci, sociologist and academic who studies the effect technology has on society and one of the first writers to warn about the dangers of big data and social media-driven political campaigning, is also a thoughtful media critic. She laid out our current Beltway media problem in a Twitter thread yesterday with uncommon clarity:
Remarkable that a media person can write “Do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot…” without realizing it means that so many of in media failed so staggeringly in their job that they’re perceived as little more than cynical gossips. Institutional failure. https://t.co/rCmzIkqMtT
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 26, 2020
Here’s the rest of the thread, de-twittified:
“Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?” That’s the job! We can roll our eyes without their help; media’s only remaining job is to inform and highlight what’s important, not roll their own eyes preemptively. Amazing that so many in media are [s]till blind to this in 2020.
Also Politico published play-by-play gossip from the Wikileaks hacks daily in 2016—didn’t roll their eyes then. I tried to shout this before 2016 and I’ll say it again. The condition we face is widespread and profound *elite failure* in our institutions during a tough transition.
In the run-up to 2016, it was staggering how many individual reporters were consumed looking up their and colleagues names in the Wikileaks hack and snickering on Twitter and then writing pieces about it, instead of actual reporting on important stuff on either Trump or Clinton.
How many of them learned anything since 2016? Not very hopeful here. In an age where digital technology has eaten up the easy advertising dollars, the only hope traditional media has is to make a case that it’s relevant and important or be reduced to virality chasers.
Also, “Persuadable voter” is not some fixed category. If there is no informative reporting; if there is no contextualization; if there is no explanation of what happened, and then people are less likely to be persuaded by that particular issue.
From my book (written before Trump’s win). One key goal of authoritarianism is to produce “resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment”—not by censoring info (not that easy anymore) but making information irrelevant to action. Some media are handmaidens of exactly this.
Maybe institutions are like dominoes — when one falls, it knocks over the next, and so on. Open thread.
Roger Moore
The best response to this attitude is that nobody cared about Hillary’s emails until the media decided to publish thousands of articles about them. One of the poisonous aspects of the “view from nowhere” approach to journalism is that it has internalized the attitude that journalism is purely a spectator and has no real effect on the real world. It lets journalists pretend there are no consequences to whatever approach to journalism they adopt and bypass the question of whether they should be reporting the way they do.
schrodingers_cat
Beltway newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and male especially at the decision making levels, unless that changes they will keep making excuses for the party of pale males like themselves.
Xavier
There are two things the institution of Congress could do about an executive branch that clearly cares nothing about Congress’s laws. First is impeachment. Second is cutting funds. Neither are effective in this case. DeJoy would definitely not care if Congress cuts Post Office funding. He’d welcome it. Neither would any agency appointee outside of DoD.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
The press in America–the national press, anyway–is almost unfathomably lazy. There are exceptions, and I would name the evening lineup on MSNBC, and a number of op-ed writers. But mostly it’s just this mindless who’s-going-to-be-the-homecoming-queen shit.
Raoul Paste
I bet that few people in America know that the Stormy Daniels affair was happening at the same time Melania was at home with her new infant son
Now THAT is media failure
MattF
More about Tufekci (NYT).
MisterForkbeard
Media failure is a HUGE issue. Just to name a single problem with this particular issue, the media has chosen to make the Hatch Act violations a non-issue.
They COULD run it as “In a pattern of lawbreaking and normbreaking, RNC openly breaks campaign law and dares anyone to do anything about it. The law is currently unenforceable because it would require the Trump executive branch to police itself, which it has historically been unwilling to do”
There! You’ve got a story backed up by easily available and public facts. Blatant lawbreaking and thumbing their noses at it. Inability to hold Republicans to account because Republican officeholders simply refuse to do it. That’s a major campaign issue that Americans should know about! Blatant corruption and lawbreaking at the highest levels.
Instead we get republican framing of “yeah they broke a law who cares”
Baud
@Roger Moore:
I think the answer is that, if Republicans care about something, then they can use their own media funnel to get their voters to care about it, and then the mainstream media feels free to write about it — ignoring the fact that Republicans and their voters do not sincerely care about the issue but care about the damage to Dems from the “scandal.”
NotMax
The blurring (all right, all right, the erasing) of the line between news and opinion has been deleterious in the extreme.
Not saying there was a golden age of consistently aloof reporting, more that the Venn diagram of news and opinion was much less close to being a single circle.
AnonPhenom
The DC media don’t think anything is important unless the hacks at Fox are droning on about it ceaselessly.
robmassing
To me, the utter media failure always comes back to the “view from nowhere.” They do not see themselves as having any agency. They are merely “objective” observers telling you what they think is “out there.” (Why do they exist then? [shruggie].) It is a colossal lack of self-awareness with catastrophic results, and it is infuriating.
MazeDancer
First footage of the set-up for Trump’s speech in front of the White House released.
It is as disgusting and as much of a sacrilege as you could imagine.
Please make your Voting Plan. Help others make theirs.
ballerat
She calls them cynical gossips. I think of them as courtiers. The cynical gossiping is just stock in trade for a courtier, along with sycophancy and superficiality.
I suspect this is why our political media is wired for republicans: the gop treats them more like courtiers not professionals, and they find this place in a monarchical hierarchy more to their liking.
Not only do republicans not believe in or like democracy, neither does the political press, very likely for similar reasons.
jonas
As soon as a story gets picked up by a few key outlets, then everyone has to report on it because it’s being reported on and reporting on the reporting becomes a story — and on and on like a Mandelbrot fractal.
When it’s a Democrat, of course. The NYT ran a massive story last year (sourced, as it turns out, to Mary Trump) about how the family has been major tax scofflaws for decades. The response? Yawn. It’s Trump. Whaddya gonna do?….hey, is Hillary still sick?
Another Scott
@Baud: And the obvious corollary: The GOP only cares about things that help them maintain power.
“I’ve got a genius idea, let’s sell off Puerto Rico!!11”
:-/
tl;dr – The only stuff that comes out of their pie holes is mouth noises and attempted distractions.
Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
cmorenc
We have to campaign with the media we’ve got, not the media we wish we had.
Kinda reminds me of what someone else said in another context….
PaulWartenberg
As a journalist graduate from UF, it continually bothers me that our modern media outlets are incapable of stepping outside their comfort zones to recognize actual damage that is happening to the rest of the nation. Oh, they’ll report it, they tweet or opine about it, but I get a sense from the mainstream punditry that they do NOT “get it.”
They keep falling back on interviewing the same people even when such people are not experts. They keep buying into the “Both Sides” excuse of blaming the political arena in general rather than take the alienating-access step of pointing out when one side – cough Republicans cough – is straight-up insane. They keep falling back on a promoted Narrative that’s been carved into stone since 1980 (or worse, 1968). They never step outside of their concept of “America” or “The Way Things Ought To Be.”
A lot of the reporters and pundits, for example, show little understanding nor desire to understand just how corrupting and damaging financial fraud can be. It’s one big reason why the outrage towards banks and investment firms were not any greater after the 2008 collapse, and why the media was so eager to buy into the fake “Tea Party” outrage because that narrative – Dems are taxing everybody too much! FREEDOM! – was easier to cover.
And they keep doing all this because there’s no ethical way to slap sense into them. There’s no editor or factchecker in place who can drop 100 tons of facts on an erroneous story to wake the pundit/reporter up to reality (how many media outlets fire editors and archivists first every time there’s a staff purge?). There is, as Ezra Klein once documented, no accountability for being wrong.
So one of the biggest problems we’ve got in 2020 isn’t just trump and the Republicans cheating their way to possible victory this November. There’s also the problem of a mainstream media that’s too obsessed with covering this as a comic-book-fight / horse-race thrill ride instead of covering the ongoing disasters of TrumpWorld ™, and the ongoing real-time criminal activities of trump and his cronies that voters need to be aware of that the media refuses to cover with effective research and confirmation.
We’re at the point we shouldn’t listen or read or watch any news at all. Just focus on the goal. VOTE THAT MUTHAFUCKA trump OUT.
MattF
@MazeDancer: Considering that once a flag has been ‘used’ at the White House, it has to be burned and buried…
Hoodie
@schrodingers_cat: That’s certainly part of the problem, but it doesn’t explain why they treat male Democrats different from male Republicans. I think a lot of this occurs because national media commonly engages in what conservatives often accuse them of doing, i.e., looking at the world as divided between sophisticates and rubes. However, this does not result in the disadvantages conservatives that conservatives think it does. The Beltway media view themselves as sophisticates and assume Dems are in the same tribe (yes, even though a large part of the base of the party is working class black women). Because of this, they view Dem pols as social rivals within their own tribe and pick apart every stupid little thing they do so they can feel superior to people they view as their peers. They don’t have to do that with Republicans because they are not within their tribe. Instead, they end up viewing Republicans as being from some exotic tribe and give them a kind of “noble savage” treatment that ends up letting fucking millionaires like Trump who grew up in NY and went to Wharton get away with murder (they did the same with Bush) because they appeal to “real Americans” who, of course, are rubes. It’s like “of course they’re face-eating leopards, but, God, aren’t they magnificent!”
Omnes Omnibus
Historically, in the US and world-wide, news media has been partisan. There was a brief era in the Post-WWII era through the end of the Cold War (dates are approximate) where there was enough of a consensus on issues that news media could seem largely non-partisan. This started to fray in the late ’60’s and fell apart entirely by the ’90s. Nevertheless, the myth of the non-partisan truth-telling media persisted and nowhere more so than in the minds of journalists.
NotMax
@MisterForkbeard
Part and parcel with the institutional policy of entities like Fox (of course they’re not alone in this) to deliberately ignore or suppress reporting of events.
If the teletype bells clang in the forest and no one is there do they make a sound?
different-church-lady
Perhaps part of the problem is that we’re viewing news media as an institution, when it’s really just a consumer product.
My theory is that the golden age of news in the mid-20th century was the aberration, and now it’s returned to its true mean of tabloid crap.
Elizabelle
@Hoodie: That’s a really good comment.
What could we call that behavior?
WaterGirl
@MazeDancer:
He is Trash.Trump is Trash.
His followers are Trump Trash.
zhena gogolia
They do what their bosses ask them to do. It’s as simple as that.
James E Powell
@Roger Moore:
You’re right. What made it worse was that the press/media published Republican propaganda and rumors from “sources” of other serious wrongdoing that would be revealed . . . soon. It was all made up bullshit.
And I cannot believe there is a movie about Comey. Our culture is so effed up.
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: Another way of phrasing what I said above.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: That’s what it is.
Orders from the top. Plus access.
Wouldn’t want to offend the sociopaths and the people in government by pointing out who they are and what they are – because access is everything to them. That’s what’s important.
Journalism and reporting are not.
Cermet
@Baud: Ding! You win the thread! Having the fake news media – aka fox – as its legal propaganda arm , which then leads the media in all ways – this enables thugs and thugs alone to not just break the law but make even the most trivial issue for a dem a major scandal – i.e the email bullshit
Ruckus
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
But mostly it’s just this mindless who’s-going-to-be-the-homecoming-queen shit.
QFT
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Slight amendment.
They do what their bosses pay them to do.
;)
Another Scott
There were a few comments on this yesterday. https://www.routefifty.com/finance/2020/08/new-unemployment-benefits-could-take-weeks-distribute/168016/
(Emphasis added.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Princess
The first institution that fell in America was the media. Everything we are seeing flows from that.
There used to be a news industry, an entertainment industry and a publishing industry in this country. Now there is only an entertainment industry. The big difference between Canada and New Zealand on the one hand and the US, UK, and Australia on the other is that Canada and NZ would not allow Murdoch a foothold.
Kay
I think he just learned how to manipulate them over 50 years in NYC and he’s really good at it. It’s the only thing he’s good at as far as I can tell, but it’s been enough.
piratedan
@MisterForkbeard: I feel the same, we were treated to months of navel lint analysis regarding the proper protocol for the classification of information sent across electronic means, but shakedown of foreign governments and treason is just kind of sloughed off into the “well, what can you do about it” or the fact that an entire political party has essentially given carte blanche to those same activities and shrugs their collective shoulders.
Should Biden get elected and prosecution for those crimes take place, will the media just shrug and suggest that it’s all “no biggie?” and as far as they care (and THEY don’t) why should this be such a big deal when there are so many other problems to be addressed?
cmorenc
@Xavier:
Consider also the inverse problem: if Congressional Dems successfully pressured the Rs into passing $25 billion in supplemental funding for the post office for the purpose of making sure the post office has resources to timely handle mail-in-voting – what is to force DeJoy into actually using it in a timely fashion and for the intended purpose, instead of e.g. diverting it into improving the efficiency of package delivery (a purported priority of DeJoy)? And if Trump is able to siphon off congrssional funding allocated to FEMA for executive-ordered unemployment benefits, what is to prevent Trump from diverting the Post Office special funding into unemployment benefits? Even if courts would rule such illegal, is a sufficiently timely enforcement option available to un-stall, un-divert the funds in time to be useful toward post office handling of mail-in voting?
Omnes Omnibus
@Princess: Conrad Black says hi.
lowtechcyclist
The failure of the media to meaningfully address policy differences, and instead drown what little discussion they have of policy under a torrent of gossip, horse race coverage, and discussion of ‘gaffes’ and the like, is a fundamental problem for our democracy.
Here’s something they could do if they cared to do it: we have 10 Sundays between now and the election. Each network, each newspaper, could choose 10 major issues – Covid-19, climate change, racism, voting rights, economic inequality, etc. – and cover one each Sunday, summarizing the record of each party and each candidate on that issue on the Sunday news talk shows and opinion sections.
They could do this. I doubt I’ll ever see them actually do anything like this.
artem1s
Media Ofdonalds
thank you for that!
namekarB
This applies to the local press as well. I finally ditched my local newspaper (Sacramento Bee) because most of the content was blurbs from wire services like Associated Press with a smattering of articles from WaPo and NYT. Very little original content. The straw that broke the camel’s back was an article in the Home & Garden section on how to care for tomatoes . . . in New Jersey! Which is a totes different climate than the Sacramento Valley (summer desert). Instructions included things like not to over water, just let the rain do the irrigation. It rarely rains in the Sacramento Bee’s coverage area between March and October and if you do not irrigate your toms regularly, they die.
NotMax
@Ruckus et al.
Cable news channels are not in the news business, they’re in the ratings business.
All else flows from that tap.
Kay
@piratedan:
They can (and will!) deny it forever but the record they themselves created proves it.
They would have done it again with Hunter Biden. They had already started the engine. The one and only thing that saved us was the whistleblower. It was like throwing a wrench into the gears.
trnc
@MisterForkbeard: An NPR story mentioned about an hour ago that the RNC skirted norms and MAY have presented ethical issues. No implication whatsoever that any law may have been broken repeatedly. Also no mention that Mr “Who Cares,” currently COS, was veeeerrrry concerned about Hatch Act violations during the Obama Administration.
A fully functioning media would ask “Have you ever voiced concern about _____” every time this type of situation comes up.
Hoodie
@Elizabelle: I’d say it’s form of romantic (Roussean) elitism. Not holding Republicans to the same standards as Democrats is actually looking down on Republicans. Cletus Safaris are an obvious example. Joe in the diner in bumfuck is often just an ignoramus, like Gene Wilder reminded us, and the press needs to quit acting like something he says has any merit beyond the fact that it evidences how many ignorant people are out there. Stop imbuing them them with some sort of primitive magic. I think that’s part of what Tufecki is saying, expect more out of people.
Chetan Murthy
Sigh. The media will start caring about corruption, and the appearance of corruption, and the hint of a shadow of the appearance of corruption, as soon as a Democrat is in the White House. Don’t you worry ……
@schrodingers_cat: has it 100% right: get these *men* (sure, and white men too, but as a nonwhite male, I’ve seen enough of my mind be assholes to not be willing to grant us a bye) and get in more women and women of color.
cintibud
I would love to see the next Dem press secretary be like a Don Rickles character – but not an act and not funny. Someone who calls out reporters for their hack stories and blasts their professionalism.
For example, start out by saying “Today Joe Biden rescued a small child from drowning in the Potomac. There was no boat available so Joe walked out on the water, picked up the child and walked back without getting his clothes wet. The child was returned to him mother unharmed”
NOW I BETTER SEE YOU RUN THAT STORY EXACTLY AS I SAID JUST LIKE YOU PRINTED EVERY LIE TRUMPS PRESS SECRETARY DID! Of course you may say that the story was presented without any evidence.
trnc
And if something out there reflects poorly on the GOP, all the media should do is ask “Is it really so bad” before drawing a ridiculous comparison to some democrat and how bad THAT was.
stinger
Aside from Trump’s DOJ, is there anyone with standing to prosecute Pompeo for breaking the law?
MattF
Putin says he’ll send forces into Belarus ‘if necessary’.
Ruckus
News sells, like everything else, it’s about the money.
Now having been a business owner I understand, that without money, your business will die. But you make a profit from running your business right, not from fucking your customers. A lot of business today, in the US at least, is all about the money, not the product/service of the business. I suggest that this is not just infecting the US. But we are a prime example. And it explains why so much of what we purchase is oversold, underperforming crap. Want to buy a toaster? They run from $12 to $250. They all heat and toast the bread. But the $12 will not take a standard size piece of bread, you have to spend $25 to find one that does. The $250 one just makes your wallet too hot to hang on to and is for people who have too much money and have to brag about it, mostly to themselves. And this is emblematic of our entire culture. Money is the object and having way too much is the goal. Look at the media from that standpoint, because it is a money concept far more than an information system. Look at the main supporters of shitforbrains, racists and those for whom money is their religion. There may be overlap. And I won’t even get into the religion business. The republican party is not about governing, it is about the grift and racism, end of story.
Calouste
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): Lazy scions of wealth and power realized that the best people to defend them in the media are lazy scions of slightly less wealth and power. That’s why the shitgibbon, who inherited his money and position from his dad, gets defended by Maggie HawHawHaberman, who inherited her position from her dad. The media personalities buy into the system because it benefits them directly. Heaven forbids that someone should get a position based on their abilities rather than their family connections.
Marc McKenzie
The crazy thing is that the media’s attempt to build a “narrative” about the 2020 election that involved nasty stuff about Biden is…being shattered. No matter what the media has tried to throw on Biden to firm up the “both sides!” narrative, it isn’t working. Not even the attempt by some in left-leaning media to push the Tara Reade rape story worked. Clearly the MSM wants a horserace but it’s a stark truth that there are vast differences between Trump and Biden–and Trump really is the most corrupt President in our lifetime who has gotten a lot of passes from the MSM.
Yes, it’s okay to be concerned about the outcome of the elections this year, but remember that this is not 2016, even if the media is behaving like it is. Also, the past few elections have shown Democrats blowing away Republicans at the ballot box and the Democrats took the House in 2018. With COVID and the collapse of jobs and the economy and the civil unrest egged on by Trump and the GOP, we can clearly see who has the country’s interests in mind–and it ain’t the GOP.
trnc
@Kay:
Wyatt Salamanca
Politico Playbook writers Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer are lazy asshole stenographers pretending to be journalists.
namekarB
If one realizes that whether news media is either corporate or privately held, they are exclusively controlled by the wealthy. Once you understand that then what we have for news media today makes logical sense.
stinger
@lowtechcyclist: That’s a great idea! Maybe the Biden campaign would do it, if not the media. Focus on one subject each week.
Calouste
@Ruckus:
When I lived in the U.K., the phrase “rip-off Britain” was used a fair bit by people I knew
namekarB
NPR courts mega donors and sponsors. Do not expect them to take a hard stance on anything that would disturb the flow of money to run the operation.
James E Powell
@Kay:
It’s not just his skills with manipulating them, it’s their decision to treat him like their product, like a show that gets good ratings. They have promoted and protected him since he came down the escalator. It’s the Trump Show, he is the star, and they will not do anything that causes that show to lose popularity.
chopper
few people give a shit about the president ‘politicking from the white house’ as the president is exempt from the hatch act. but hey, other officers of the executive branch are not, and here’s the SoS speaking at the RNC.
i mean, i know it’s politico and all, but it’d be nice if they could get the most basic distinction right.
Ksmiami
@cmorenc: Villago delenda est
MattF
So,… what’s going to happen when Giuliani & Co. try their ‘October Surprise’? Bear in mind that the ‘Surprise’ here is absolutely no surprise. Everyone, every journalist, every commentator knows exactly what is going on here. Will they propagate the lies? FOX, the RW echo chamber, and the Trump campaign certainly will. Will anyone recall or bring up that little impeachment thing, where Trump tried to get a little ‘help’ from Ukraine? We shall see.
trnc
Nancy Smash has suggested that Biden should not debate DT because it legitimizes a conversation that will obviously be full of crap from DT. I understand her point, and I don’t personally know what the best way is to fight off non-stop bullshit, but hopefully Biden’s debate team has some ideas about that. I think it would be a bad idea to completely blow off the debates. There are too many lazy ass voters who need to see that Biden can speak coherently off the cuff during a live event.
I also hope he is being coached on how to make fun of DT without coming across as smarmy. I liked his debate with Paul Ryan overall, but I wasn’t crazy about the chortling.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
You made the point more succinctly but that is exactly the point.
Real news takes effort, HS prom queen/king coverage doesn’t require near the same effort. Or cost.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cmorenc: Trump might have problems siphoning money from the Postal Service, it’s not an executive branch agency like FEMA or DOD. It’s a quasi public corporation.
NotMax
@Marc McKenzie
One thing we can count on is that at some time after Dolt 45 has left the scene there will be any number of stories trickling out about egregious/despicable/destructive/criminal happenings beginning with “We didn’t know it at the time, but.”
Yes, yes, you did know; you just either stayed mum or made a deliberate decision not to investigate.
James E Powell
@piratedan:
They will not shrug, the will attack any Democrat who wants to investigate and expose Trump’s corruption. They are all complicit in it.
MattF
@trnc: I think that would be somewhat misguided. It’s not about issues– Trump will try to dominate and humiliate Biden. If Biden can get that point across, good. But if not, Trumpists will have a field day.
Fair Economist
@MisterForkbeard:
I can think of three instances political actors have attempted to get outrageous violations of Trump’s moral constitutional violations past the media’s wall of silence:
Schumer tweets daily that Trump still doesn’t have a national testing strategy.
Duckworth tweets daily that Trump still has taken no action to protect our soldiers from Russian bounty hunting.
CREW tweets daily that Trump is still hiding any payments he’s received by refusing to disclose his tax returns.
The media continues to ignore these and many more issues, in shocking contrast to the thousands of articles about Hillary following the same email policies as all her predecessors.
Calouste
@namekarB: There are a number of European media that are not. The Guardian is one example, it is held in a trust.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@stinger: The House could impeach him, but the Senate would acquit him.
waspuppet
It’s not just that. It means so many people in the media ARE FLAT OUT TELLING PEOPLE they SHOULD be perceived as little more than cynical gossips.
Bob Somerby said it best long ago: Sports writers love sports. Science writers love science. Arts writers love the arts. Even business writers love the inner workings of business, and local politics writers love finding out, and keeping up with, the latest. Only the people who get paid six and seven figures to cover national politics go out there every day thinking they cover a bunch of BS no one cares about, and don’t even try to do anything to change that.
catclub
until your learn that two towns with one newspaper ( and one local government reporter) schedule their council meetings for the same times, so at least one of them will not get reported on and they can act in darkness.
Fair Economist
@NotMax:
That’s not true or we wouldn’t have had and endless series of vapid “clouds and shadows” reports on Hillary. The public doesn’t care about the minutiae of email management. Virtually no reporting on the 2 million+ erased emails at the end of the Bush administration, many under subpoena. Much less reporting on the many security violations under the Trump administration. There’s an active campaign to weaponize media attention, not just a clickhunt.
Ruckus
@trnc:
Does he actually need to make fun of djshitforbrains? I don’t think so. The reality is that trump makes fun of himself so much that he doesn’t really need selling as a moron. And the people who think he’s not will not be swayed by facts or anything else. They chose to not believe their own eyes and ears in any event so there is nothing to gain in making fun of trump, that he is his own worst enemy. And all of ours. I often wonder why people have a difficult time of understanding that most people can be moronic at times and that a fair number of people are moronic all the time. Didn’t we have a concept floating around about the me generation? That’s not new, and it’s not gone, nor will it ever be gone. There will always be a me generation, they elected their leader as president. And he’s as good at it as anyone should have known the leader of the me generation would be.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Fair Economist: There was a story in the WaPo about the Trump Organization making about $1m off the government(Secret Service lodging, etc.).
Kathleen
@Princess: I call it the Propatainment Complex
artem1s
@robmassing:
the problem is they are lying about the ‘objective’ part. it’s not objective when they are the final arbiter of deciding what is and isn’t objective. they are there to preserve the male white supremacy norm. no more, no less.
Brachiator
@MisterForkbeard:
The GOP Congressional leadership don’t care that Trump has broken the law. Trump supporters don’t care that he breaks norms. This is exactly why they voted for him. They fundamentally do not care about rules and norms, especially rules that they think prevent them from getting what they want.
The more that Trump plays to this, the more they love him. And the more they disdain the media.
BTW, this doesn’t always work to the GOP’s advantage. During the Clinton era, I remember increasingly strident op-ed pieces from conservative pundits explaining why impeaching Bill Clinton was necessary. The majority of citizens shrugged it off.
This also underscores the reality that the public often forms it’s own judgements. It’s hard to predict how they will react to attempts by media and politicians to manipulate them.
On the other hand, supposedly cynical and “objective” reporters and editors are often easy to subvert, especially when you play to their egos and sense of self-importance.
NotMax
@Fair Economist
On the contrary, “an endless series of vapid “clouds and shadows” reports on Hillary” was not news, it was (as you put it) clickhunt. Also rote obeisance to entrenched anti-Hillary memes; upsetting that apple cart would nullify decades of investment in creating dogma.
Not biting the hand that feeds you and all that.
James E Powell
@artem1s:
Agreed. And it isn’t objective when they decide what is and what isn’t a story. The great bias in the press/media is the stories they decide not to tell.
Splitting Image
@Princess:
I respectfully disagree. The first to fall were the churches.
Kay
@Marc McKenzie:
Sometimes it doesn’t work but I no longer think that’s rational or tied to anything, which just adds to the frustration because it seems arbitrary.
Steeplejack (phone)
@MattF:
Thanks for the link. Good article.
HumboldtBlue
Sharp documentary ‘#Unfit’ makes a case that Donald Trump suffers multiple mental disorders
Baud
@Kay: Right. Our side likes its grand theories of everything, and we don’t do a good job dealing with the randomness of it all.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
The Guardian’s trust was established by its wealthy owner John Scott. In the US, The Nation and the New Republic have wealthy owners or benefactors.
geg6
@zhena gogolia:
I don’t agree with this at all. Because they do it no matter where they are writing or broadcasting. When he was at HuffPo, Howard Fineman wasn’t any better there than when he was at any of the other outlets he’s written for. Hugh Hewitt wasn’t any different at MSNBC than he has been at WaPo.
They are shallow, thoughtless people, mostly. And they love their view from nowhere because they think it makes them look savvy and above the fray. And they are ignorant of the actual heroes in journalism. They may throw their names around (such as Edward Murrow, Nelly Bly and Walter Cronkite), but they are ignorant as to why they were great and are venerated today.
I used just despise Yamiche Alcindor because she, to me, was the epitome of the view from nowhere. Always finding a way to make some idiot GOPer sound reasonable. But she seems to have found some journalistic backbone in the last few months and has been absolutely on point. Cheetolini seems to have radicalized her and that is a very good thing.
Kay
@Baud:
Al Gore just wasn’t notably or unusually corrupt yet the NYTimes political team absolutely succeeded in portraying him as corrupt. I have no earthly idea why some of it sticks. It’s almost random.
A lot of Democrats at the time thought Gore was a goody two shoes- too religious and preachy. They took that person and turned him into a sleazy political operative. It had no relation to reality.
schrodingers_cat
@Hoodie: Dems advocate for everyone. Beltway minions even ignore the exalted WWC if they vote for Ds which many do in the northeast.
Brachiator
@MattF:
Can you remind me what the October Surprise will be?
Miss Bianca
@catclub: But in the age of COVID-19 all these meetings are being recorded, or held remotely. So local government meetings reporters can review them later, if they can’t make the meeting in real time. Ask me how I know!
ETA: I don’t think I’ve attended any of the meetings I’m reporting on “live”, except for a couple School Board meetings, since March. And I don’t intend to, either, till sometime next year, if then.
Jeffro
Truth. We are “amusing ourselves to death“, now.
catclub
a)a super effective vaccine that Donald trump vouches for, even if Dr Fauci
does not.
B) indictment of Joe Biden and Hunter for ‘you know what you did’ in Ukraine
MattF
@Brachiator: Some variation on the Ukrainian thing. Details to be revealed later.
catclub
@MattF: Ha! beatcha by one
SiubhanDuinne
@MazeDancer:
Horrible. Tacky. I am aghast.
The only thing that could make it worse would be to have giant gilt letters spelling out TRUMP, and dry ice sending up clouds of mist during his entrance, the way he did at the 2016 Convention. But otherwise, it’s about as bad as anything I could envision.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
This is very true, but the newsrooms also recruit women and people of color who share the same narrow world view. Maggie Haberman’s parents and brother are part of that world.
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
I never knew that. But I expect the Trump campaign will sell them to the MAGAt hordes.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Dry ice fog stays close to the ground. Was in a production once which required fog for some scenes. Machines in the wings spewed out clouds of some oily chemical mixture. Which to those of us on stage smelled absolutely vile. Never could quite completely launder the odor from the costumes, it bonded with the fabrics.
Maybe for tonight they’ll install flashpots, as in the throne room of the Wizard of Os.
;)
MattF
@SiubhanDuinne: Meant as a joke, considering how Trump ‘uses’ flags.
NotMax
@MattF
“What happened? They weren’t wrinkled like that this morning.”
//
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: Not sure about the buried part, but the proper way to dispose of a US flag is to burn it. You dispose of a flag once it has faded or torn.
sdhays
@trnc: I think it’s at least 50/50 that Dump himself runs and hides from the debate.
Brachiator
@MattF:
Okay. Nothing new. I expect some “Biden is beholden to China” crap also.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: I’ll take the combo plate — some of the horrible Beltway coverage conforms with the views of the media outlets’ owners. That’s for sure the case with Fox News and probably influences other outfits to a less obvious extent. But in other cases, I attribute the journalistic malpractice to people who either don’t know or care what their actual jobs are and focus instead on creating their own brands to position themselves for book deals.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: I’ve known a few journalists— they’ve generally viewed journalism as a job, period. If playing political footsie with their sources gets them stories that make their bosses happy, then that’s what they do. There are exceptions, I suppose, but there aren’t a lot of high-paying jobs for writers, and a paycheck is viewed in a positive way.
sherparick
@Roger Moore: And they kept publishing articles about Hillary’s Emails because their Republican sources and PR people kept demanding they do so if they wanted “access” to their “guys.” and in part it fitted their “meta-narrative” about Hillary being “secretive” & “creating a false front” & “somehow ambiguously corrupt” that started in the 1992 election campaign.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Or has been superseded by an updated version.
geg6
Apparently, this will be running on all the networks tonight. I especially like the running up the ramp clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3UsWMbUpF4&feature=youtu.be
James E Powell
@Kay:
The NYT also constantly characterized Al Gore as a phony while promoting the transparent fraud George W Bush as authentic.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Reporters are not free agents. They write what their publishers and editors tell them to write. If everyone is not on the same page with respect to integrity, all is lost.
And I guess the ongoing death of newspapers contributes to a small number of reporters focusing on their personal brands and the inherent contradiction of pursuing a book deal while also working for a media company.
sherparick
@sherparick: One of their problems with Biden is they never built a narrative around him except that he his “gaffe” prone & little “goofy.” I think that is why Trump tries constantly to go with the “Joe is senile” BS. The problem Trump & Repubs get is even with the supine press like the NYT, they then have to bring up all of Trump’s “senior moments” and “bleach and sunlight cures” for COVID.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: I’m still gobsmacked that the editor of the FTFNYT op-ed page made the excuse that he “didn’t read” Tom Cotton’s Ode to Fascism op-ed before he published. I don’t believe that, but either it’s true, in which case why do they bother having an editor at all if he’s not expected to read it, or it’s a more acceptable excuse for the real reason it was published.
It’s pretty disturbing what might be “less acceptable” than “failing to do the absolute most basic functions of the job”.
Captain C
@trnc:
Given that it’s Nancy Smash, I wonder if she’s trying to goad Deadbeat Donnie into committing to debates at which he will crash and burn.
namekarB
Reporters do not attend local meetings anymore. Every city and county council in my area record the meeting so it is way easier to watch the recording and even rewind to make sure you heard something correctly. A single local government reporter can cover a much greater area in today’s world
J R in WV
@NotMax:
You do know that there are not teletype bells any more, don’t you? All computer to computer now.
Back during Nixon’s Watergate crime crisis, wife was city editor at the local newspaper, working nights with Friday and Saturdays off. So the night of the Saturday Night Massacre, we were at a pizza and beer party when we hear on the radio that mass firings were underway at the DoJ.
We more or less left as soon as we could, and went straight to the news room, where there was a long skinny room full of teletypes, 3 AP, 2 UPI, the national Race Wire (yes mostly for bookies, but the AP was willing to sell news to everyone!) the NYT wire, the WaPo wire, the WSJ wire… pretty sure this was before Bloomburg’s wire.
For the first time in our lives, all the teletypes were running full speed in the middle of the night, and the bells were ringing. For those who don’t know, teletypes would ring a bell when a new news story started. The more important the story, the more times the bell would ring, up to 5 bells for war, murder of a world leader, the firing of the AG, his deputy, etc. With over a dozen teletypes ringing 5 bell new leads, write-throughs, etc, it was a jolly sounding havoc. Will never forget it, it will never be repeated as technology has walked away, now your screen just shows a big icon.
1
trnc
@MattF: No, it definitely won’t be about issues, and of course DT will try to dominate and humiliate by saying “Hunter” a billion times. Of course, DT supporters will have a field day no matter what. Do you think if Biden says no to the debates, they’ll say, “Wow, I really respect Biden now.” If DT has a heart attack and Biden resuscitated him, they’d probably call him a homo.
I don’t care about the deplorables. If Biden says no debates, the story from now til Nov will be the Biden didn’t think he could hack it because scared/senile/you name it.
I think Captain C’s comment further down was right – Pelosi is probably trying to goad DT into something.
J R in WV
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artem1s
@trnc:
I liked his debate with Paul Ryan overall, but I wasn’t crazy about the chortling.
that debate sealed the deal for many voters who were tired of watching Dems try to be nice to obvious Granny Starvers. It shouldn’t have take that long to reveal that smarmy, ignorant pill for exactly what he was. Thank God for MALARKY. Otherwise we might have had that MF still working in the house and conniving with Moscow Mitch. I’m personally all for embarrassing these assholes and showing the country exactly what kind of ignorant idiots they are.
J R in WV
@Splitting Image:
I disagree with that — SOME of the churches. Many work hard for truth, God and the American way… others, of course, are evangelical theocratic horse crap peddlers using religion to make money and maintain power over women and the tithers.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
So does the Wall Street Journal~!!~ Rupert and his kids!
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
The Guardian’s trust was established by its wealthy owner John Scott. In the US, The Nation and the New Republic have wealthy owners or benefactors.
True. The Guardian, the Nation and the New Republic were founded by lefty, progressive individuals. The Nation has only run at a profit for about 3 years of its existence. Kinda sad in a way, but it has always been subsidized by its progressive benefactors.
Rupert and crew are in it for the money and the power.
jayjaybear
“Nobody cares about Hatch Act violations.”
*ringring*
*ringring*
It’s Al Gore. He’s calling about some fundraising calls to China…