I guess we’re all supposed to buy subscriptions to the New York Times to support great journalism. Well, I subscribe to the Washington Post and the Guardian (as well as TPM Prime), and I’ll consider subscribing to the Times when I see how they handle the news that Paul Ryan wants to end Medicare and the appointment of the racist alt-right sociopath Steve Bannon to a top spot in Trump’s White House.
If the Ryan articles are a bunch of punch-pulling about “reform” and “privatization”, explaining why it won’t be so bad after all, and if they just accept the bald-faced lie that Obamacare killed the Medicare star, is that the “great journalism” that I’m supposed to be supporting? I couldn’t find a good Medicare story, but here’s how the Times describes Bannon:
Perhaps the deepest schism is between Stephen K. Bannon, the conservative provocateur and media entrepreneur who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, and Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman who came to terms with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Both are on a short list for chief of staff, according to people close to the campaign, and whoever is chosen, the other is likely to get another senior White House post.
[…]Mr. Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News and onetime Goldman Sachs executive, is an avowed enemy of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. An anti-establishment verbal bomb thrower with ties to the alt-right movement, Mr. Bannon may have little interest in compromising with the Republican-controlled Congress under its current leadership. He is an unabashed critic of the current immigration system and repeatedly encouraged Mr. Trump to appeal to the party’s base in the closing days of the campaign with arguments against globalization.
Contrast that with Yahoo News story on Bannon, which includes Hillary Clinton’s tweet with some racist, sexist and xenophobic Breitbart headlines. I think that story is far more informative about what Breitbart really is, and what it means to have Bannon in the White House.
If you want to really inform readers, the genteel euphemisms that the Times loves to use just don’t cut it. It is not the zenith of journalistic cleverness to use a tweet from Clinton to show what Breitbart really is – but it is better journalism than the Times’ story.