“The newsroom is not a safe space,” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn tells @semaforben.Read the interview in Semafor Media:https://t.co/2jVn4Mb7en— Semafor (@semafor) May 5, 2024 The "experiment" was a pretty blunt instrument. And the results were not at all surprising. It's almost like they asked about "evil" vs "not evil", and in that sense it seems pretty pointless. But that's not what disturbed me. pic.twitter.com/3khsb0FGSW— Thomas A. Fine 🇺🇸 (Trump is a Loser) (@thomasafine) May 6, 2024 Or, perhaps more accurately, they have chosen a tone that whitewashes every threat to our democracy into something that voters can find palatable.They are doing the exact thing that their experiment told them would enable the masses to vote for insurrectionists.— Thomas A. Fine 🇺🇸 (Trump is a Loser) (@thomasafine) May 6, 2024 Also, I love that Kahn so lacks the most basic self-consciousness that he says inflation and the economy (and even immigration, post Trump tanking the deal) favors Trump. The REASON NYT's economic coverage is so shitty is FROM THE TOP, they believe false things abt it.— emptywheel (oil check) (@emptywheel) May 6, 2024
PS: I was having breakfast and I read like 3 paragraphs before posting the interview and the other comments, but man, I'm glad I didn't read all of it back then. Damn, what a pair of morons living in an ivory tower. "I'ts our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it's not the top one - immigration happens to be the top and economy and inflation is the second." Kahn is a stupid man that things that he's overly smart and Ben is doing access journalism without really pushing hard on the important issues. Also, at some level, they think that because they're neutral, they will survive a second Trump presidency and they don't understand that telling people the dangers of Trump is not helping Biden.
It is never a bad time to bump this "media failure" thread. Evidence #2345, this article by the "respected" MSM journo Susan Glasser, arguing that Trump interview at the NABJ was not an accident where his revealed for the 200th time his racism, sexism and ignorance, but some elaborate chess move to change the subject....Really? She is definitely the one trolling us now. Susan Glasser: “How much clearer does it have to get? America, you are being trolled.” “The point here is simple: Trump’s efforts, over the past twenty-four hours, to shift the political debate to his own untrue and offensive assertions about the Vice-President’s race may well be a political disaster, but they are not an accident, a flub, or an undisciplined lapse. This, in 2024, is as absurd as subscribing to the credulous spin that Trump’s near-death encounter with a would-be assassin’s bullet had remade him into a unity candidate for the ages. Even Trump couldn’t help mocking this ridiculous line from his advisers…” “Trump is Trump is Trump. The Harris attacks represent a textbook example of his approach to politics, combining his belief in the strategic power of race-baiting to mobilize his base and his favorite tactic for disrupting a bad news cycle: changing the subject to something even more outrageous. Every minute spent debating Harris’s race—or his own folly in raising it—is a minute not spent on Trump’s own failings: on his advanced age and manifest unfitness for the Presidency; on his legal liabilities and criminal conviction; on his kooky Vice-Presidential nominee and his party’s extreme right-wing agenda.”
No, it just adds to the list of his own failings. Sure, the people who are going to vote for him probably loved it that he put those uppity black wimming in their place, but anyone who is not already in the Trump camp has to be shaking their head at this unforced error.
I agree with Glasser's take. Trump is the living embodiment that there is no bad press. We've known for years how awful Trump is and not one single of his "unforced errors" has ever harmed him. Not claiming that Mexico was going to pay for the wall, not denigrating John McCain, not claiming he could kill someone on 5th Avenue. And yet, here we are, with Trump's raggedy racist ass on full view, and we're all terrified that he's going to win in November. Pointing out his failings hasn't diminished him yet. Let Trump talk about black jobs and question Harris' choice to recently embrace her blackness. Kamala and her surrogates ought to take a page out of Keir Starmer's playbook. Let someone else worry about the culture wars and focus on what Harris/Dems can do for America. The only attacks I would levy against Trump are his age and that he's a convicted felon.
I don't completely agree with her assessment, but overall I do (after reading the entire article). This, to me, is the most relevant part of the article: Before Wednesday, Trump’s attacks on Harris just didn’t land. He called her “mean,” “nasty,” “crooked,” and “crazy,” a “radical-left lunatic,” a “Marxist,” a liar. None of it stuck. The nicknames he floated for Harris seemed generic, mere retreads of his greatest hits. The “nasty” woman trope was a pure ripoff of his own 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton; if Trump is America’s ultimate insult comedian, then the lack of new material was telling. But memories, when it comes to Trump, are perplexingly short. Race-baiting is Trump’s original sin in politics, going back to his embrace of the birther lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; perhaps the surprise is simply that it took more than a week into Trump’s head-to-head match with Harris for him to play it so overtly. There’s another way, however, to look at this depressing twist in the election contest—as a sign of Trump’s incipient fears that a race he thought he had won may now be slipping away. I was saying this to somebody the other day, but it is amazing that he doesn't yet have a nickname for Harris. To me, that says he is slipping. But he is not lost. During the NABJ Q&A, he started out by attacking the journalists, but slowly backed down and tried to do some praising, yet slipped a "nasty" in there immediately realizing that it was a mistake. He knows he needs the media and feeds off the media's attention, and tries to get it to be positive. Particularly in a hostile environment. Yet, he knows that he is racist, and that he needs to attack Harris along the lines of racism (and will do so also along the lines of sexism in the future). And he doesn't have an attack on Harris other than through racism (and sexism). Trump is not very dynamic, and we are seeing his inability to pivot away from his preparation to challenge Biden and refocus on Harris. He is lost. So he is resorting to what he knows: racism (and sexism). And over the past couple of weeks it has been all positive for Harris and all negative for Trump. Not negative in the way that Trump likes, but negative in a way he can't control. So he is bringing out the tools he has tried and tested as a way to control the attention. And he does so because he doesn't see it as bad. After all, this is how he won in 2016. But I don't think it will work this time around.
But this appears to be specific to Trump. JD Vance allegedly writes about having sex with a sofa and is the butt of jokes for weeks. Trump has done way worse - including actual crimes - but nothing sticks to him. I feel like it's another aspect of the cult thing, and it's why I'm not too worried about organized Trumpism / MAGA continuing to be a major threat in American politics after Trump dies - anyone else who tries to pick up where Trump left off will just get laughed at.
Wow. The questions in the wake of this Editor's note are.... many. https://t.co/1iamrxRT23— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 4, 2024
The only question the Boston Globe is gonna care about is, "did the number of angry people forwarding this article to their MAGA-loving friends make enough money that we can continue to lease this building in the bombed-out-shell of an industry for another few months?"
“We don’t put fingers on the scales” - The NYT. People, what on earth is going on at the Times pic.twitter.com/7hZw9aUb55— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 9, 2024
It’s also damning that the media is so resistant to using the word “lie.” “Stated falsehoods,” “exaggerated,” and other softer edged terms to describe what Trump does are the norm. Trump might “repeat the lie” about the 2020 election, but “Trump lied” is not something the NYT and other outlets have the balls to say, despite its obvious accuracy. More to the point, doing so would get them one step away from having to state the equally obvious, that “Trump is a chronic liar.” It is a foundational part of his character. His nonstop stream of lies is simply remarkable, unprecedented, yet they’re unwilling to state what is so undeniably the case. I recall a BBC headline after the debate with Biden that used pretty harsh adjectives to describe his performance. For Trump, the headline said he’d “blustered” during the debate. Blustered. That’s a new one.
It’s a Trump feast for the media: This video is a stunning indictment on the political press. It’s honestly embarrassing. After complaining about press access to Harris, she does a press gaggle and every single question is about Trump. Zero policy. Zero substance. https://t.co/M8D7Ku5ICC— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 9, 2024
Former President Trump is holding a general news conference at Mar-a-Lago Thursday afternoon with members of the press... "President Trump wanted to address them while they were already in Palm Beach because he’s the most transparent candidate in history," the Trump campaign source told Fox News Digital. I would agree with that as I also agree with Maya Angelou!
I guess having multiple FBI leaders fired for progressing the Russia interference probe and appointing a toilet salesman as AG is "overhauling the justice system"
Man, this thread should be a hundred pages long by now. The utter failure of our political media is the subtext to so much of what's gone wrong in American politics.
If Biden had spewed out the meandering, barely coherent, gibberish and non-sequiturs Mango did yesterday, the NYT and WaPo would have written fifty articles about it already.
There hasn’t been one day in the past nine years in which Trump hasn’t said something so immensely, colossally stupid that any Democrat wouldn’t have had to resign for saying it. If Kamala said she would take over the Fed because she was smarter than anyone else on the Fed board, people would have been demanding her head. Nobody even noticed that Trump said that very thing. Yesterday.
Charles Pierce is one of the few calling out the political reporters. If anything, they don't want to be political reporters, they want to be entertainment and sports reporters. And I know they wouldn't last long covering those either with their behavior. And again, that older reporter in the Reagan documentary openly admitted that they enjoyed covering Reagan.
That's what my wife said a couple of weeks ago when we listened to an insufferable edition of the New York Times program, "The Daily." I mean, they called them reporters, but it was all horse race and reality TV-like bullshit. They were closer to pundits than journalists.
The Daily is horrible when anyone but Sabrina Tavernise is hosting. Michael Barbaro is such a f********ing tool that I can’t manage to get through an episode with him.
Right now on PBS Newshour they're having an earnest, in-depth discussion on whether or not the attacks on Walz's service in the military will hurt the ticket. The fact that these attacks are baseless once you realize time only moves in one direction isn't really factoring into the "analysis." These ********ing people.