Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance.
August 15, 2024 8:00 AM Subscribe

Kamala Harris is taking power back from the press corps .
posted by signal (192 comments total) 46 users marked this as a favorite

Harris isn't asking.

Damn straight.
posted by grubi at 8:10 AM on August 15 [16 favorites]

Praise the lord hallelujah
posted by Melismata at 8:12 AM on August 15 [11 favorites]

I don't know, I see the piece's argument that the press brought this on themselves, but it doesn't feel right celebrating cutting the press out like this. Trump was often criticized for doing that and it's still wrong if it's Our Team doing it. The antidote to Trump shouldn't be just emulating him and a future where no politician feels the need to engage with the press is a grim one.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:18 AM on August 15 [25 favorites]

Acknowledging reality is good, and the reality is they suck and they brought this on themselves.
posted by Artw at 8:20 AM on August 15 [65 favorites]

She and her team have been doing an outstanding job.

I keep seeing articles (not this one) where pundits or journalists or whatnot try to give her advice about what she should do. She seems to be doing just fine and doesn't need your advice, thanks!
posted by Glinn at 8:21 AM on August 15 [19 favorites]

Trump excludes media because they don't fawn over him enough; Harris excludes media because they're not being fair.
posted by grubi at 8:21 AM on August 15 [47 favorites]

The press has been in the tank for Trump since the day he stepped off that gold elevator. They love covering him as a candidate and they love covering him as a president. He makes the job exciting and he sells newspapers.

They absolutely brought this on themselves and in a better world they'd be doing some self-examination about whether the quality of their work merits the access they expect.
posted by potrzebie at 8:22 AM on August 15 [102 favorites]

Trump was often criticized for doing that and it's still wrong if it's Our Team doing it.

Do you want her to do the "right" thing, or do you want her to win?
posted by Kibbutz at 8:24 AM on August 15 [44 favorites]

Trump excludes media because they don't fawn over him enough; Harris excludes media because they're not being fair.

She’s busy and carving out additional time for them doesn’t give any advantage.

It’s not like they haven’t gotten to ask questions - they have and they’ve all been stupid questions.
posted by Artw at 8:25 AM on August 15 [75 favorites]

Trump excludes media because they don't fawn over him enough; Harris excludes media because they're not being fair.
grubi

But that's exactly the reason Trump et al gave (and give) for demonizing the press: that they're not being fair.

Do you want her to do the "right" thing, or do you want her to win?
Kibbutz

I guess I want us to win and I'm not sure a world in which all those in power have deemed the media the enemy is a good one.

People keep saying they brought it on themselves and they deserve it, but it's awfully convenient for those in power that they get to decide when it's fair or legitimate for them to engage with the press.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:29 AM on August 15 [14 favorites]

It’s not like they haven’t gotten to ask questions - they have and they’ve all been stupid questions.

That clip that Lawrence O'Donnell played of the press corps yelling at Biden and Jean-Pierre is a perfect illustration of that. Fucking nonsense. Ask stupid questions, get fuckin iced out.
posted by ishmael at 8:30 AM on August 15 [38 favorites]

Wow. This is just great - well written, well considered, clear and persuasive.

I was just thinking about this, vaguely, this morning, but Stoehr says it all much more thoughtfully than my brain was managing.

Reporters like Cillizza have a bad habit of presenting themselves to voters as if they operated in their interest, and we know, after watching reporters make a fetish of Biden’s age, that nothing could be further from the truth.

I think this gets to the heart of it.

It's easy for me, personally, to tend toward being too conciliatory, giving a few too many chances to people who are operating in bad faith, because I believe in a world where people are operating in good faith, and that's the world I want to live in. But it seems like Harris sees through that and understands how much is wasted when you let bad-faith actors keep going.

The vast majority of the mainstream press has been working against the public interest for far too long. I don't know all the steps we can take, over time, to fix that; but prioritizing honest and direct communication over clickbait and outrage bait and a jaw-dropping abdication of reporting on reality is both smart and morally right, and I'm glad to see her do it.

Thank you so much for posting this, signal - I'm glad I read it, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Stoehr's writing.
posted by kristi at 8:31 AM on August 15 [38 favorites]

But that's exactly the reason Trump et al gave (and give) for demonizing the press: that they're not being fair.

They wouldn't know fair if it bit 'em on the nose.
posted by grubi at 8:31 AM on August 15 [6 favorites]

Um, I kind of think this guy is full of shit. It's clear to me that Vibes are the entire source of Harris' momentum. Perhaps present day, post-Trump political campaigning rises and falls entirely on Vibes, and if so, Harris has met the moment in a way Biden couldn't.

But let's be clear: Biden did fewer press conferences than any president in modern history. What killed Biden's candidacy had little or nothing to do with the press corps. It is obvious that Biden's candidacy only worked as well as it did because it coasted on the Vibes of four years ago. But the president can't be off-stage forever. Sooner or later the president has to step out from behind the curtain. When he did, it was over. But what in the world did the press corps have to do with that? Other than demand he speak in public, to the public that he intended to preside over for four years?

Harris has WAY better Vibes, for now. What does she have to lose if she meets the media on their terms? Kind of a lot, actually, but it's the exact opposite of a Vibes reframe; she could run up against hard questions -- against any questions at all! -- and come across flat footed. Good Vibes could be damaged by hard fact. Don't kid yourself: that is what happened to Biden. No one had to be told that he was incoherent at the debate, that he was not the equal of the softballs gently lobbed in the ABC interview. The press corps is not that powerful.

In a sense, I think he's right. I think Harris is very smart to protect her Vibes from anyone who might hurt them. Does that mean the role of the press corps is to protect her, or any candidate's, Vibes? That is literally the opposite of the role of the press corps. It goes without saying!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:31 AM on August 15 [38 favorites]

But that's exactly the reason Trump et al gave (and give) for demonizing the press: that they're not being fair.

It's beyond "they're not being fair". They're pushing an agenda and acting in bad faith. They're not being journalists.
posted by ishmael at 8:32 AM on August 15 [40 favorites]

The children and sociopaths who make up our political press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago. It was their criminal incompetence who gave us Reagan and the subsequent 40+ yrs of Reaganism, tanked Clinton's health care reform (resulting in the Heritage Foundation's RomneyCare plan rebranded nationally as "ObamaCare") and celebrated his selling out the Dem working class base, gave us 8 yrs of CheneyCo, and, of course, Trump. They are monsters and deserve to be treated as such.
posted by Pedantzilla at 8:33 AM on August 15 [34 favorites]

won't someone please think of the fourth estate 🥺🙏
posted by phunniemee at 8:34 AM on August 15 [13 favorites]

I’d say do an interview with Teen Vogue but they might ask some actual questions about Gaza which is kind of an opposite problem of questions that are too real.
posted by Artw at 8:36 AM on August 15 [32 favorites]

metafilter: "press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago"

Cool, definitely not fascist imagery! This is why people above are saying "maybe demonizing the press isn't going to have the outcome you want", unless the outcome you want is dead journalists.
posted by sagc at 8:39 AM on August 15 [88 favorites]

It's beyond "they're not being fair". They're pushing an agenda and acting in bad faith. They're not being journalists.

But that's literally exactly what Trump said and what those on the left, including on this very site, criticized him for!
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:40 AM on August 15 [13 favorites]

Political journalists stopped reporting on actual facts long ago, if they ever did. They never hold anyone to account, and they make an effort to make “Democratic scandals” like Whitewater, Her Emails, Hunter Biden, etc, A Big Deal even when they are the definition of nothingburger. They were so mad that Obama was so clean. Harris is playing it smart, knowing that their knives are out. The media only wants her momentum long enough so they can tear her down and keep up the horse race.

But this guy is waaaay off the mark about the debate. I don’t care how much policy progress the guy has made. If he can’t campaign he can’t win. And we need to win. I watched 5 minutes of that debate and his performance was so bad I couldn’t watch more. That was not manufactured by the media, that was the entire electorate gasping at Biden sealing his own loss.
posted by rikschell at 8:41 AM on August 15 [17 favorites]

It's very funny to look back at this guy's articles from the past 1.5 months:

June 29, 2024
Don’t let one very bad debate kill your confidence in Biden
He screwed up. He knows it. His party knows it. Move on.

July 5, 2024
Amid allegations of Biden’s decline, no one can point to anything he’s done wrong as a consequence of aging
Ageism doesn’t require proof.

July 8, 2024
‘Deepening divisions’ among Democrats highly exaggerated
Of 287 congressional Democrats and governors, five House members have publicly called on Biden to drop out. “The dam is breaking”? No.

July 19, 2024
Democrats who are calling on Biden to drop out must base their demand on more than vibes
The stakes are just too high.

July 22, 2024
Dropping out was a mistake, hopefully not a fatal one
Can Democrats who abandoned Biden be trusted to back Harris?

posted by Atom Eyes at 8:42 AM on August 15 [33 favorites]

But that's literally exactly what Trump said and what those on the left, including on this very site, criticized him for!

You're making a false equivalency here. As Artw pointed out above, there have been publications like Teen Vogue and Pro-Publica that have been doing actual journalism, and I definitely appreciate when Democratic candidates are asked substantive, hard questions. But so much of the discourse pushed by the press has been about nonsense vibe questions, and so there is a natural reaction to that.
posted by ishmael at 8:48 AM on August 15 [20 favorites]

Oof. Yeah, Atom Eyes, I'll admit that it's not a good look.
posted by ishmael at 8:49 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

The good news is that even a hardcore Biden stan like this (so hardcore as to defend that debate performance over and over), can get behind Harris.
posted by rikschell at 8:49 AM on August 15 [12 favorites]

You're making a false equivalency here.

No, you and others are blinded by partisanship. Harris isn't sitting down with the "Good Press" you identify either. How can you not see that deeming the press the enemy isn't a repudiation of the Bad Press, it's a way to shut down all press?
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:51 AM on August 15 [12 favorites]

Reminder that the press didn’t want a smooth transition to Harris, they wanted some chaotic bullshit and groped when they didn’t get it.
posted by Artw at 8:52 AM on August 15 [45 favorites]

But that's literally exactly what Trump said and what those on the left, including on this very site, criticized him for!

Okay but both sides are not, in fact, correct and reality exists outside of rhetoric and all accusations are not equally valid.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:53 AM on August 15 [29 favorites]

There was an article in the LA Times today that had a very similar thrust.

"If this election is indeed like a broken sewer pipe, spewing a stream of info-poop in every direction, do you call a professor to fix it? A doctor?

Nope. You need an info-plumber — which is what a good journalist is. We know what's in those pipes, we know how to get it out, and we know how to clean it up so it doesn't make democracy sick.

And that's where the media has gone wrong. We're pretending to be at a fancy-schmancy belle epoque salon, when in reality we're slogging through Crap Creek, searching for nuggets of truth to bring to you, the people.”

Her overall argument is that the political press has forgotten their duty to the people. They aren't being plumbers, they're being interior decorators.
posted by rednikki at 8:53 AM on August 15 [42 favorites]

unless the outcome you want is dead journalists.

I guess it's heartening that people of all political stripes can apparently come together in this divided time to demand the destruction of the Lügenpresse.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:53 AM on August 15 [7 favorites]

No, you and others are blinded by partisanship.

I think you might be projecting a bit. I definitely have my reservations with Harris. But not everything is a "both-sides" situation. The horse-race nonsense is not actual journalism, and it's not out-of-bounds to point that out.
posted by ishmael at 8:55 AM on August 15 [38 favorites]

It seems disingenuous to accuse to press of being overly concerned about Biden's age. It has become pretty clear that, even though he has done some pretty great stuff during his presidency, his capacity has diminished, and that is a pretty damn critical question when thinking about whether he's the right guy for the next 4 years.

Should the press be more substantive? Absolutely! But Biden's age and capability for another term was absolutely a substantive issue, and citing that coverage as a reason for Harris to avoid press questions seems disingenuous to me.
posted by Pemdas at 8:56 AM on August 15 [13 favorites]

reality exists outside of rhetoric and all accusations are not equally valid.

Fortunately for the powerful that "reality" apparently means they have a good excuse for avoiding media scrutiny.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:58 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

and groped when

and griped when, pardon my edit window.
posted by Artw at 8:59 AM on August 15 [5 favorites]

there have been publications like Teen Vogue and Pro-Publica that have been doing actual journalism

The Harris campaign could review this list of ProPublica news partners and pick five of the non-profit groups to sit down for an interview. That might help to highlight some of the perceived deficiencies with some press outlets.

Harris could share her views on the media in America and its role in shaping the political narrative.

Try to use this developing conflict to start a much-needed conversation about American journalism.
posted by JDC8 at 9:00 AM on August 15 [17 favorites]

The vast majority of the mainstream press has been working against the public interest for far too long.

I see stuff like this and I feel … baffled. Like, what does it even mean to say, “the mainstream press has been working against the public interest”? That literally most journalists are deliberately trying to do harm to American society?

The reality is that “the vast majority” of media outlets and journalists are reporting on facts, i.e., reality, and those facts need to be ones that their audience will be interested in or they’ll go out of business. The reason Trump gets coverage – again, often critical coverage -- is because everyone cares and reads those stories, including folks here. You want to stop coverage of things you don’t like? Don’t click on them.

(Side note: O’Donnell’s criticism of the media at the Trump event last week, referenced above, is more than a little disingenuous. The Trump campaign deliberately only gave friendly media outlets an advance warning, so there were few, if any, legitimate reporters there [source: I work for a major media outlet that found out at the last minute and then was repeatedly ignored when we asked for access].)

On preview, JFC, so much for reasoned discourse. Sweet merciful crap:

The children and sociopaths who make up our political press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago. ... They are monsters and deserve to be treated as such.

posted by pwe at 9:02 AM on August 15 [23 favorites]

But not everything is a "both-sides" situation.

Yet this one entirely is, which is my point. This is the drum Republicans have beat for years: the press is lying, the press has an agenda, the press can't be trusted, the press is the enemy, the press isn't fair, the press has abandoned real journalism, all used as an excuse for minimizing and shutting down scrutiny. And the left rightly decried that, including I'd wager many of the very people in this thread now championing Their Side doing exactly that with the exact same language.

"But it's different when we do it because it's true!"

Uh huh. Where have I heard that before.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:03 AM on August 15 [11 favorites]

But not everything is a "both-sides" situation.

Yet this one entirely is, which is my point. This is the drum Republicans have beat for years: the press is lying, the press has an agenda, the press can't be trusted, the press is the enemy, the press isn't fair, the press has abandoned real journalism, all used as an excuse for minimizing and shutting down scrutiny.

Hm, seem to be going in circles here. Can I ask, do you think there is any problem with current press coverage? What's a good way to point that out?
posted by ishmael at 9:10 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

as a journalist myself, i can appreciate what Harris is doing. if i were her and seeing major news outlets softballing trump and letting him get away with non-answers, downplaying his racists ramblings as "an interesting dance", refusing to publish the contents of the latest hack regarding him, while at the same time churning out concern trolly articles that are all "this is why Harris' momentum spells trouble for dems", then yes, i too would be reluctant to reach voters through those platforms. least of all when her direct messaging is working just fine, especially in swing states. no one person is entitled to coverage, and no one media outlet is entitled to an interview. sucks to suck i guess!
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:11 AM on August 15 [97 favorites]

I have no doubt that Harris will eventually engage more with the press; and I would bet she wants to do so, because the press will cover and characterize her positions regardless of whether she engages with the press or not. But I applaud her for choosing to do so on her own schedule. It may seem like an eternity (in news cycles) since Biden stepped aside, but really it's barely been a few weeks. She's not simply going to take the Biden policy plan, scratch out his name, and write in her own name; she has to flesh out her own positions. And she and her team are probably also still working out how best to respond to the most common "gotcha" styled lines of questioning. Why invite a corps who want to pin you down on a platform that is not fully formed yet? The media are bad at patience, and so there's a lot of wailing. But it'll happen. When she's good and ready.
posted by fikri at 9:14 AM on August 15 [21 favorites]

Can I ask, do you think there is any problem with current press coverage? What's a good way to point that out?

ishmael

Of course there are problems, but there's pointing out problems and there is political candidates/sitting politicians using real or imagined problems as an excuse to not engage with press scrutiny at all which is very, very dangerous. It's incredibly disheartening to see people cheering this when it's being done by someone they support.

no one person is entitled to coverage, and no one media outlet is entitled to an interview.
Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane

This is insane. The public is entitled to know about who is leading them. It's not about reaching voters, it's about being able to engage with a campaign or a candidate in ways other then their own PR.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:16 AM on August 15 [9 favorites]

that they have been utterly failing to point out the extent to which Trump's utterances are word salad and lies. I mean, I don't know how long it was before they started actually calling his lies "lies" but it was a long time. And more recently, there has been an exaggerated willingness to pounce on every one of Biden's verbal gaffes

I'm going to assume good faith here, but a simple web search for "Trump lies" will turn up plenty of coverage. And no one was really talking significantly about Biden's gaffes before the debate, at which his performance showed a serious mental decline and immediately prompted vast global interest.

To be fair, I'm not arguing that Harris has an obligation to sit down with any specific media outlet (Chris Cillizza -- ugh!), but a refusal at some point to engage with the press at all, or even with unfavorable outlets, would be a truly bad thing for the public interest. Thankfully, I don't see her as having been unwilling to do so at all.
posted by pwe at 9:19 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

For some reason I just don’t see how not talking directly to the press for a couple of weeks is an existential threat to democracy.
posted by Captaintripps at 9:21 AM on August 15 [48 favorites]

This is insane. The public is entitled to know about who is leading them. It's not about reaching voters, it's about being able to engage with a campaign or a candidate in ways other then their own PR.

This makes no sense to me. How can this be true, if we don't reconcile the political interests of news media business?

won't someone please think of the fourth estate 🥺🙏

This is another American institution that is rotten almost to the core. I'm not saying #alljournalists, I'm just saying that the design of this tool is not fit-for-purpose to 'being able to engage with a campaign'. What's the answer? I have no idea. Federal subsidy of non-profit journalism? I'm sure there's a bunch of white papers somewhere, but I really don't know.

And I'm not saying this choice by Harris is right, but it's clear that the fourth estate is a tool of oppression more than a tool of information. Anyone who feels differently can go buy a bridge.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:23 AM on August 15 [6 favorites]

I admit I may have bias here/no real dog in this fight since instead of the "news media" I watch a lot of boring unedited CSPAN and use my own critical thinking skills to form opinions about our political leaders.

But I'll just say that in a world where the so called paper of record still seems to feel sus on the whole "should trans people have human rights" thing, I am quite happy to agree that the press can fuck its own face until they get their shit together. I wouldn't want to engage with them, either.
posted by phunniemee at 9:24 AM on August 15 [32 favorites]

It “bypasses the argument that the media is a critical part of our political system and any candidate who wants to be president — whether they are winning or losing — should be regularly subjected to scrutiny from the press.”

Should have thought of that before the media became an uncritical part of our political system.
posted by jimfl at 9:29 AM on August 15 [7 favorites]

This is insane. The public is entitled to know about who is leading them. It's not about reaching voters, it's about being able to engage with a campaign or a candidate in ways other then their own PR.

star gentle uterus, while this is true, surely it is the place of the public, not of the media, to articulate this demand? That is, the public can see how candidates engage with the media and make their decisions accordingly, and they can reward candidates who engage more with the media if they find that engagement valuable, but I don't think that places any obligation on a candidate to engage with the media on any but their own terms.

I'm going to assume good faith here, but a simple web search for "Trump lies" will turn up plenty of coverage.

pwe, kristi didn't say that no-one calls Trump's lies lies; they said:

I mean, I don't know how long it was before they started actually calling his lies "lies" but it was a long time.

Which is true! The NYT, for example, had an explicitly enunciated stance of not calling his lies lies while he was president. That they call them lies now doesn't excuse their shameful conniving at his lies out of misguided deference to the office he held.
posted by It is regrettable that at 9:31 AM on August 15 [26 favorites]

I have worked in the news business for the past 8 years. For most of my life, since editing my junior high school paper, I've believed in the central importance of the free press in a democracy.

And I have to say: I agree with this piece 100%.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:31 AM on August 15 [17 favorites]

The NYT, for example, had an explicitly enunciated stance of not calling his lies lies while he was president.

Yeah, I'm not paying for journalism until I actually see journalists doing their fucking jobs again. If the press has a problem with that, well, look in the goddamn mirror and maybe pillory a couple Editors-in-Chief and get back to me.
posted by aramaic at 9:33 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

It’s not just for-profit media, either. I stopped listening to NPR when they started platforming literal fascists with no pushback. I grew up with a journalism professor parent, so I understand that news reporting being about facts more than partisan propaganda is actually a rare historical blip. It’s not something we can expect, but it’s also not something we have to accept and consume as is.
posted by rikschell at 9:33 AM on August 15 [24 favorites]

No one had to be told that he was incoherent at the debate,

So, that's all true, but... when people talk about 'fair', one of the things they mean is, giving something approximating equal weight to issues of something approximating equal importance. And I haven't seen the fact that Trump is among other things a relentless liar, a dyed-in-the-wool racist, a drug addict, a convicted felon, and visibly physically and psychologically in steep decline being given any sort of consistent or comparable attention.

An awful lot - and there is an awful lot of it - gets excused or overlooked or somehow lost in transcription or just ignored. And after this happens for a while - and it's been going on for a long while - it's reasonable for people to assume that it's not accidental, that it's complicity. And given the track record of the media we saw during the 2016 election, where actual, unbuyable billions of dollars worth of free coverage were explicitly granted to Trump because of the boosts in ad revenue that generated, that's an assumption backed by data.

Declining to engage with that machine, on that machine's terms, seems very reasonable.
posted by mhoye at 9:35 AM on August 15 [44 favorites]

I don’t think I’m overstating things.

I think he's clearly overstating things.

Her current lead, the millions of dollars she’s bringing in, the thousands of volunteers who are signing up to help, the big big mo’ – I think all of it comes directly from her campaign’s decision not to give the press corps too much access too fast.

Yeah, pretty sure the above is the picture in the dictionary next to "overstating things."
posted by mediareport at 9:35 AM on August 15 [7 favorites]

The frog is ignoring calls from the scorpion to help it get across the river, and that's a problem.
posted by Reyturner at 9:36 AM on August 15 [52 favorites]

most journalists are deliberately trying to do harm to American society?

Journalists are not the press.

The vast majority of media owners are trying to do harm to American society. Journalists just work for them and their views on the matter only slightly impact that goal.
posted by Artw at 9:38 AM on August 15 [30 favorites]

Josh Marshall has been writing a lot about this lately.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:39 AM on August 15 [19 favorites]

Tell you what, I’ll believe in the good intentions of any newspaper of record that puts the word “racist” in a headline next time Trump does a racist thing.
posted by Artw at 9:40 AM on August 15 [34 favorites]

That clip that Lawrence O'Donnell played of the press corps yelling at Biden and Jean-Pierre is a perfect illustration of that. Fucking nonsense.

Yep, that Lawrence O'Donnell thread is directly relevant here.
posted by mediareport at 9:40 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

This is insane. The public is entitled to know about who is leading them. It's not about reaching voters, it's about being able to engage with a campaign or a candidate in ways other then their own PR.

Harris is speaking directly to the public through multiple platforms, in person and online, every day. no one is disserviced by Harris declining an interview with an outlet. the public is, though, not just disserviced but deceived by these trump stenographer outlets, for all the reasons i listed. she's talking to america. the press would do well to listen and learn. but they would rather have their spoiled tantrums than raise editorial standards, and that's on them; not Harris
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:41 AM on August 15 [27 favorites]

What I meant when I said "the mainstream press has been working against the public interest" is that they have been utterly failing to point out the extent to which Trump's utterances are word salad and lies. I mean, I don't know how long it was before they started actually calling his lies "lies" but it was a long time. And more recently, there has been an exaggerated willingness to pounce on every one of Biden's verbal gaffes - the sort of thing that every single person I know does, and that is particularly unsurprising in someone who's struggled with stuttering, and that was a known thing with Biden since before he became Vice President - while failing to thoroughly highlight Trump's significantly worse ability to connect thoughts together, or to acknowledge reality.

What I meant is that they are choosing not to present the facts to readers, which in these times is an act of working against the public interest.

Yes indeed, kristi.

They have also conspicuously failed to systematically cover Biden's accomplishments in a way that connected the dots for readers. His historic moves on climate change and renewable energy, for instance -- which I've covered in my professional capacity as an editor at a specialty news publication -- have been reported in a piecemeal, disconnected, low-key fashion, often with a single story on a single day that would drop like a stone into a pond with barely a ripple.

This coverage has been so poor that most people I know, including very intelligent folks who pride themselves on being well-informed, have no idea of all the huge things his administration has accomplished, and is continuing to accomplish.

The same is true of the enormous shift in economic policy that has happened under Biden's leadership -- a marked pivot away from neoliberalism toward a much more muscular interventionism, including an industrial policy that's unlike anything this country has seen in at least half a century. Again, the coverage has been so poor that even many pretty smart people don't know a thing about it.

Meanwhile, our top news outlets, like the NY Times, have had weeks upon weeks in which their top story every. Single. Fucking. Day has been "BIDEN IS OLD!!!".

This author is right. The political press chose to live by the vibes, so it will die by the vibes.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:42 AM on August 15 [63 favorites]

The vast majority of media owners are trying to do harm to American society. Journalists just work for them and their views on the matter only slightly impact that goal.

This just demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of how journalism, even corporate journalism, actually works.
posted by pwe at 9:43 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

The only headline I see at the McNews sites about either of them is "Republicans claim" something about Walz's military record. I can see how Walz might want to avoid walking into a swift-boat trap, and Harris probably expects them to ask for her birth certificate or to check her basement for email servers. I don't know if she can hold out forever, but I can understand why she doesn't want to roll loaded dice.
posted by credulous at 9:44 AM on August 15 [6 favorites]

From the excellent Josh Marshall piece gottabefunky linked above:

[M]odern political campaign journalism is almost totally indifferent to public policy. Normally, Democrats cannot get reporters to pay attention to it. So these demands for a “vision” for this and a vision for that and detailed policy papers on all the rest are just a bit weird. Where does this newfound interest come from?

...The deeper story is that most campaign reporters simply don’t know what to make of Harris’ campaign and can’t figure out how it has managed, at least for the moment, to be so successful. That’s not a criticism: I think many of Harris’ supporters are equally mystified. But they’re just happy with the results. They don’t need an explanation. But for reporters the inexplicableness requires a storyline. And this is that storyline: the substanceless campaign, the lack of interviews, yada yada yada...

The final part of the story is rooted in official Washington’s view of Harris. To put it baldly, most elite DC journalists treated Harris with a kind of breezy disdain that could scarcely rise to the level of contempt...

It is not only that there is this great appetite to find out just what it is Harris must be doing wrong. That backstory must have left Harris just utterly uninterested in what these folks have to say. They treated her as something between a punchline and a nonentity and now she’s the odds-on favorite, if only by a small margin, to be the next President. Why should she care?

Amen. The whole thing is worth a read.
posted by mediareport at 9:50 AM on August 15 [29 favorites]

This just demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of how journalism, even corporate journalism, actually works.

How so?

The fish is very much rotting from the top here, regardless of how stinky or not stinky the rest of the fish is.

Are you arguing that the NYT is doing a good job or that them doing a shitty job is a bottom up phenomena?
posted by Artw at 9:51 AM on August 15 [9 favorites]

I was beginning to wonder whether I was crazy or if I really hadn't seen an interview Harris did recently with Rolling Stone. The interview wasn't as recent as I remember (it was in June) but it did happen.

The other thing I keep remembering in the context of this article is something I read about how the NYT's publisher was mad that Biden wouldn't sit down for an interview with the NYT. Like "we are the paper of record, he owes us!" kind of talk. Presidential candidates should talk to journalists, sure, but no single press outlet is owed deference. I feel like what a lot of people in this discussion are arguing about is the difference between talking to the voters through the press and giving deference to the DC political press. I'm for the former and not so keen on the latter.

(Also I thought the TPM piece was good.)
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:53 AM on August 15 [10 favorites]

This coverage has been so poor that most people I know, including very intelligent folks who pride themselves on being well-informed, have no idea of all the huge things his administration has accomplished, and is continuing to accomplish.

I don't want to make this about Biden. But all of this is the administration's responsibility to report. The press is not meant to be a cheerleader for the president. That's not a road we want to go down. The press should have an adversarial relationship with the president, because the president should, reasonably, be talking up all the good things he has done; the press should be the one saying, "That's nice, but." I do not know why the Biden administration has been so bad at communication, but it's not the duty of the press to be their PR agency.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:54 AM on August 15 [7 favorites]

I feel like anyone who's been paying attention has been able to see the bad faith goalpost-moving of the corporate press in their approach to Dems, versus the way they treat Trump and Republicans. Trump can go up there and ramble for an hour about absolute fucking nonsense, just stuff that barely makes any sense when you read an actual transcript or watch it, and yet major outlets like the NYT and Washington Post launder that into about 10 times more coherency than it deserves rather than sounding the alarm about his mental incompetency. Meanwhile Biden makes some verbal gaffes and it's an emergency about his senility. The double standards are very, very obvious.

Like, all this handwringing about "what are her policies???" Well, when Hillary and Warren had absolute reams of white papers available for anyone to look at, the press didn't ask shit about those. It was all "but her emaaaaaaaiiiilllllsssss" and "wow, try hard much? voters don't care about your reams of policy! elitism blah blah blah." Meanwhile, the press is ignoring the clear statements of Harris's general policy directions in her stump speeches, and when they do get a chance to ask her questions, it's shit on the level of "Trump calls you dumb, what's your response???" Like, come on. Why the hell should she play this game when it's rigged against her?

Also, the DNC is next week. That's traditionally when the policy platform is finalized and publicized, isn't it? Let's see this hunger for policy from the press then. Surely they'll actually take a look at those policies and listen to the way they're articulated during the DNC and report on them right? Or, more likely still, will they decide that's all not enough or focus on some bullshit culture war angle like "the DNC has too many celebrities" or "the DNC doesn't have enough celebrities" or "Dems in disarray, look at how big the tent is and how they don't agree on everything ever!!!" or "let's talk to 'undecided' voters in a diner in Ohio (aka Republicans who like to pretend they're undecided) and see what they think! surprise, they think deporting millions of people (a "policy", btw, which I haven't seen any major news outlets question at all in terms of its costs, its plausibility, its logistics, etc) is more important policy than action against corporate price gouging!"

I know I'm not the only person sick to the death of seeing every single thing Trump does, no matter how ridiculous and craven and nonsensical, reported on as if it's serious without any real scrutiny, while anything a Democrat does gets analyzed and criticized to death. The double standard is very, very, very obvious. I don't blame anyone for deciding to opt out of enabling it as much as possible.
posted by yasaman at 9:55 AM on August 15 [93 favorites]

being able to engage with a campaign or a candidate in ways other then their own PR.

In theory, sure. But in practice you have to ask what value is the media adding? And are they treating both campaigns with equivalence? Are they fact checking everyone and calling them out on it? Or are they putting a thumb on the scale to make both sides seem more the same than they are?

In my lifetime, the media has added negative value to their coverage of Democratic politicians. So why play ball, knowing the coverage is going to be in bad faith? As consumers, I'd rather engage with the Harris campaign based on their own PR, knowing how it's skewed, than engage with media that's just as skewed but is really pretending super hard that it's not skewed, not at all, and no, I don't have my fingers crossed behind my back, and no I won't show you my hands to prove it.
posted by rikschell at 9:59 AM on August 15 [15 favorites]

Biden, Harris hold first joint event since Biden dropped out
Happening soon if you want to catch it live. (YouTube, WaPo)
posted by Glinn at 9:59 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

The article is interesting and the point worth considering, but the argument is lazy: his only examples are stupid things Chris Cillizza says. Too easy.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 10:02 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

I’ll believe in the good intentions of any newspaper of record that puts the word “racist” in a headline next time Trump does a racist thing

“Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks” NYT, 1/20/24
posted by neroli at 10:03 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

Wow. Never thought I’d see that.
posted by Artw at 10:07 AM on August 15 [5 favorites]

Also from TPM:

There’s an added component to your piece today on the media’s call for Harris to do interviews and put forward policies — the demand was a Republican demand first, and the media picked it up. Reporters didn’t come to this in some collective epiphany that they wanted more from the Harris campaign, but instead heard Trump and Vance and their surrogates claiming Harris was too weak or unprepared or stupid to handle a presser. It is, once again, the media being led around by the right wing on what’s important and not important.
posted by bgrebs at 10:07 AM on August 15 [35 favorites]

So hang on, they will do that for Nikki Haley but not now?
posted by Artw at 10:08 AM on August 15 [11 favorites]

I don't suppose many of us here would disagree that a vibrant, independent media interested in policy and substantive issues not the horse race and following one side's mostly manufactured talking points, is essential to a fully functioning democracy.

You'd be insane to think that is what we have at present. The greater part of the problem lies with ownership and the editorial policy it engenders. Though there may be a majority of good political journalists, their assignments and what makes it to the screen or the page and how it is framed is not up to them.

Whatever the ideal situation may be, I don't see where the big outlets are really in a position to complain when a candidate reacts to reality and doesn't pretend that the most important thing they can do when standing up an entire presidential campaign over a few weeks is sit down for an interview with the New York Times or Washington Post. Not that that would satisfy them anyway, and sitting down with, say, Teeen Vogue may or may not be good optics, but it would only enrage the big outlets further.

Harris will doubtless hold press conferences and do interviews, but there is no imperitive that she does so in a way and on a timetable designed to please the editorial board of the NYT.

It's not a double standard to refuse to play a rigged game!
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 10:09 AM on August 15 [24 favorites]

And here's NBC trying to rehabilitate Vance by invoking his Mamaw.
posted by credulous at 10:09 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

(I have a horrible admission to make. I understand the 'right-wing' complaint about the 'left-wing' media. And it is something like what the media are currently complaining about, and which has been noted upthread: the media wants to shape 'the' story. They 'shaped the story' for years in a way that was inherently 'anti-right' if not overtly so - because the 'right' are... not serious people, not really (no but really the crazy racism, almost every second sentence out of Vance's mouth, the rampant hypocrisy, the greed - it's not reasonable, it's not responsible government of the majority... but we all know that). Then at some point the 'right' twigged to it and were like -"Fuck you! Meany! We have Uncle Rupert and he's gonna make us a network just for us!" and the 'left' media were like, 'fuck, we missed a trick here, let's shift our focus... try and make it seem like we 'understand' the right...)

Divide and conquer, they divided the media and now no-one listens - or rather people only listen to those that reflect their views - instead of an over-arching, public-facing informative view (we all agree racism is bad, genocide is genocide etc.) Bring back the 'Fairness doctrine.'

And hats off to Josh Marshall for calling it what it is.
posted by From Bklyn at 10:10 AM on August 15 [6 favorites]

Accurately reporting the right always makes the right look horrible. The media has tried as hard as possible not to do this for decades.
posted by Artw at 10:17 AM on August 15 [32 favorites]

How so?

Yes that is how management structures work.
posted by Artw at 10:20 AM on August 15 [5 favorites]

Also, the DNC is next week. That's traditionally when the policy platform is finalized and publicized, isn't it? Let's see this hunger for policy from the press then.

That's my take on this as well. The GOP is looking for any handle, anything, that will label her as a flip-flopper on some policy angle or other and then that's the conversation for the next week. She's denying them any and all red meat until it has to get out there.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:22 AM on August 15 [9 favorites]

I am reminded of how voters tend to recoil at the stated policy positions of the Republican party, but assume that they're Democratic attack lines or made-up positions instead of the actual positions that they actually run on. It's one of the reasons the Project 2025 attack is so successful; the document isn't that controversial inside the Republican party (there's several paragraphs that are clearly compromise positions, the tell-tale signs of a big blow-out argument at some point) but it's absolutely abhorrent to anyone not desensitised to it.

One must wonder how the American people have been so uninformed about the stated policy positions of the Republican party, if the press have been doing the best job they can under difficult circumstances.
posted by Merus at 10:23 AM on August 15 [29 favorites]

Yes, "how management structures work," or more precisely "how journalism works," does not allow the kind of conspiracy theory you're implying, in which a Mr. Burns type is dictating spittle-flecked ledes to stenographers.
posted by pwe at 10:24 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

Yeah, there never was a left-wing media. During the days of the Fairness Doctrine and loss-leader TV news that competed on the basis of people not changing the channel leading into prime time, there was a more fact-based news than what we have today, less partisan. But post-Watergate, the Right assumed or pretended they weren't getting a fair shake, when it was really sour grapes over getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Didn't stop Reagan from getting plenty of good press, though (and the Fairness Doctrine ended in 1987).

CNN's 24-hour news cycle damaged the seriousness of media, and FOX destroyed its fairness. Reporters, like most educated-but-underpaid folks, have generally been left wing, but that never actually produced left-wing media.
posted by rikschell at 10:24 AM on August 15 [20 favorites]

You guys have never heard of editors???
posted by Artw at 10:29 AM on August 15 [3 favorites]

It's not a matter of directing ledes. The issue, as Jon Stewart started calling out 20 years ago, is that we're operating in a world with media organizations churning out 24 hours of coverage and there isn't 24 hours worth of news. Now, if CNN decided to dedicate itself to deep worldwide journalism maybe that would be different, but they've decided that their main product is US political coverage, stretched out over 24 hours a day. So necessarily, you get a both-sides editorial product that has to normalize the crazy to some degree.

And because print media pivoted to online, the 24 hour cycle infected there, too.
posted by AndrewInDC at 10:29 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

"Make Politics Boring Again"
posted by hairless ape at 10:30 AM on August 15 [3 favorites]

Edditors? What are edittors?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:31 AM on August 15 [5 favorites]

Amazing that people can live in a dreamworld where journalists get to live a carefree life filing whatever story they like under whatever healing they like without consideration of who will pay them and who will publish them, and then pop off at other people being “conspiracy theorists”. Like, wow.
posted by Artw at 10:34 AM on August 15 [23 favorites]

"The politics, goals, and desires of the owners of media companies don't have anything to do with their companies output" is, um, not especially credible.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:34 AM on August 15 [23 favorites]

in which a Mr. Burns type is dictating spittle-flecked ledes to stenographers.

So you’re suggesting that a right wing ghoul like Rupert Murdoch (or now his progeny) has no effect on the editorial stance of the outlet he owns?
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 10:35 AM on August 15 [13 favorites]

...But that's exactly the reason Trump et al gave (and give) for demonizing the press: that they're not being fair...

... This is the drum Republicans have beat for years: the press is lying, the press has an agenda, the press can't be trusted, the press is the enemy, the press isn't fair, the press has abandoned real journalism, all used as an excuse for minimizing and shutting down scrutiny...

I'm old enough to remember the before times of 2015, when Trump started rolling out his approach to media coverage.

A big part of the issue with him yelling 'fake news' all of the time was that the ridiculousness of it would make any similar claims from the other side look untrue. Looks like he can hang a mission accomplished banner.
posted by Jarcat at 10:37 AM on August 15 [5 favorites]

is that we're operating in a world with media organizations churning out 24 hours of coverage and there isn't 24 hours worth of news

the complaint is, typically, that the media appear to largely ignore press releases from a Democratic White House if there's a reason they can talk about what Trump wants instead. The White House announced a policy! They've signed a deal for cheap pharmaceuticals for Medicare! This is a key step towards cheap universal healthcare! The press are covering Trump calling Kamala Harris' crowds AI-generated instead! They've been doing the same thing for 8 years! Why!

If they're having difficulty filling up the news cycle, they could try asking Trump if he's voting in the Florida abortion referendum, or why he lied about that helicopter ride, or whether he accepted that $10 million bribe he claimed he accepted a few days ago, and they could try and force him to actually answer a question! Like journalists overseas do! Where, if they don't get a real answer, they say, that's not a real answer, then repeat the question! Or ask a single follow-up question!
posted by Merus at 10:39 AM on August 15 [24 favorites]

I don't want to make this about Biden. But all of this is the administration's responsibility to report. The press is not meant to be a cheerleader for the president. That's not a road we want to go down. The press should have an adversarial relationship with the president, because the president should, reasonably, be talking up all the good things he has done; the press should be the one saying, "That's nice, but." I do not know why the Biden administration has been so bad at communication, but it's not the duty of the press to be their PR agency.

I'm not saying the press should have been Biden's PR agency. But it should have offered deeper, more systematic coverage of his policies and actions. I'm not saying such coverage should have necessarily celebrated what he's done -- it should have simply explained it to the public, such that the public could see the broader contours of said policies and actions. But that hasn't happened.

Isn't it newsworthy when the U.S. makes a dramatic shift toward embracing renewable energy and adopting new measures to fight climate change -- whether you approve or not? Isn't it newsworthy when the U.S. starts turning away from decades of neoliberal economic policy -- whether you approve or not?

The press didn't need to cheerlead these things. They just needed to cover them in ways that made them visible and comprehensible to the public. Instead, they largely failed to so... and chose to focus on vibes instead. They made "Biden is old" the overriding narrative of this administration. That's 100% a press failure.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:43 AM on August 15 [30 favorites]

"And she has answered less than five total questions from the press.”
Has Trump answered any?
posted by MtDewd at 10:43 AM on August 15 [17 favorites]

MeFi has never been good at having discussions about journalism; it too quickly devolves into the left/right canard about some beast called The Media behaving in coordinated lock-step, as though there were such a thing. I’d just say this:

-- If you want to critique the press, critique specific stories. That allows for a discussion on the merits, rather than “WaPo=no-good, bad!” vs. “Nuh-uh!” (And I promise you’ll find lots of fuck-ups to critique!)

-- Distinguish between actual coverage, pundits, the editorial page and the opinion page. They’re not the same, and MeFi too often treats an opinion piece as “The NYT.” Again, plenty to criticize in each.

-- Be the change you want to see. If you don’t want coverage of X topic, don’t click on it, don’t watch it, don’t link to it. If there’s one thing that dictates legit journalism’s coverage more than anything else (and certainly more than some sinister, eeeeeevil CEO), it’s what gets readers. So yes ... it's your (and everyone else's) fault.

And I promise you, from my decades of experience working in media, the vast majority of journalists are trying to do good work writing stories and uncovering news that people want to read.

With that said, think I’m going to bow out of a thread where a literal call for my colleagues to be curb-stomped has been left to stand for two hours (and has gotten more than a dozen favorites).
posted by pwe at 10:50 AM on August 15 [27 favorites]

The White House announced a policy! They've signed a deal for cheap pharmaceuticals for Medicare! This is a key step towards cheap universal healthcare! The press are covering Trump calling Kamala Harris' crowds AI-generated instead! They've been doing the same thing for 8 years! Why!

If they're having difficulty filling up the news cycle, they could try asking Trump if he's voting in the Florida abortion referendum, or why he lied about that helicopter ride, or whether he accepted that $10 million bribe he claimed he accepted a few days ago, and they could try and force him to actually answer a question!

I think some of what you're talking about is news, some of it is investigative journalism, and some of it is commentary. What I was getting at is that "news," in the sense of "here is what happened in the world today," seems like a diminishing slice of media consumption. If the product is increasingly investigative journalism or commentary, there are going to be strong profit-seeking and other corporate incentives to normalize false equivalence.
posted by AndrewInDC at 10:52 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

pwe - Nah. We are not pretending we have to figure everything out from first principles every time WaPo or NYT or CNN or whatever adds to their clear pattern of shitty behaviour. The management structure and editorial biases that perpetuate that behaviour absolutely exist and it is fair to treat them in aggregate. You can think like this if you want to, but honestly it’s just going to leave you permenantly stranded on an island of false assumptions wondering what the fuck is going on.
posted by Artw at 10:55 AM on August 15 [20 favorites]

I propose a new phrase: billionaire owned media or BOM. As in the BOM is really bombing at reporting the plain truth of Tr*mp's cognitive decline.
posted by overglow at 11:00 AM on August 15 [3 favorites]

Because no “media owner” outside of Fox News is getting within, like, four org chart rungs of actual copy

Please allow me to introduce you to Sinclair Broadcasting and its "must-run" Rapid Response Team news segments, which have been going on for years and shove very specific copy written by editors at HQ into hundreds of anchors' mouths.
posted by mediareport at 11:01 AM on August 15 [54 favorites]

It's pretty obvious why the media would rather focus on Trump's latest verbal diarrhea than a meager policy gain on the Biden side: viewer interest. It all comes down to this exchange from that high water mark of American cinema, the Howard Stern biopic Private Parts:

Researcher: The average radio listener listens for eighteen minutes a day. The average Howard Stern fan listens for - are you ready for this? - an hour and twenty minutes.
Kenny: How could this be?
Researcher: Answer most commonly given: "I want to see what he'll say next."
Kenny: : All right, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?
Researcher: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.
Kenny: : But... if they hate him, why do they listen?
Researcher: Most common answer: "I want to see what he'll say next."

Keep in mind, Trump was literally a casual acquaintance of Stern's for many years. (Trump is also a close friend of wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, like Trump a megalomaniacal asshole with a gift for self-promotion and very little besides.) He has simply been playing football while every other politician in America has continued to play checkers for the last entire DECADE, and it is only now at this insanely late date that mainstream democratic politicians have begun to figure that out.

I don't think Harris (or any other democratic politician -- or indeed any other politician) even could duplicate the Trump playbook if they wanted to; he's a combination of generational traits that are unlikely to recur, monstrous entitlement and freedom from all consequences that can only befall those born into extreme unearned wealth, massive uncorrectable emotional damage, several pathologies, and -- most importantly -- an ability to soldier on and even thrive in the face of immense personal flaws that would hobble nearly any human with a small modicum of self-awareness. But Harris can choose not to play at all, and again, I think this is a wise move on her part.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:03 AM on August 15 [13 favorites]

I do also think the problem is self-correcting, to an extent - news outlets die all the time, and there is no natural law that says the New York Times needs to exist, any more than the New York Sun. A lot of these outlets are propped up by the idea that "liberals" should be reading the news, specifically these outlets; if people are encouraged to start reading different news outlets with an editorial approach that's able to meet the moment, then those outlets will attract readers instead.

I do not think the "Left bubble" is a credible threat in the same way as the Right disliked its courage and then made its own cheerleader media - the Left are far too willing to start in-fights for that to sustain itself. It does seem like there's a "liberal elite bubble", but that appears to be a handful of people who all have columns and care way too much about what goes on at Martha's Vineyard.

Distinguish between actual coverage, pundits, the editorial page and the opinion page. They’re not the same, and MeFi too often treats an opinion piece as “The NYT.” Again, plenty to criticize in each.

I appreciate you bowed out, but: I think the New York Times has convinced itself, and many of its peers, that them publishing an opinion piece is not an editorial endorsement of its content. This is obviously nonsense. Every opinion published in the New York Times is a reflection on what the paper thinks it is worthy of consideration by its readers; it's a fine goal to include opinion pieces that the editors disagree with, but the New York Times goes so far as to publish under its banner, and thus give its implicit editorial endorsement, opinions that range from wastes of space, to stupid, to inflammatory, to fascist. There is a word for this in leftist circles: "platforming".
posted by Merus at 11:05 AM on August 15 [23 favorites]

Also notable: what the NYT does NOT consider worthy of consideration by its readers.
posted by Artw at 11:08 AM on August 15 [14 favorites]

"At some point soon the US political media, already on the precipice of crisis due to shocks to the media’s business model, is going to have to realize that alienating half the country with a right-wing bias against Dems is a doomed strategy."

-- Robert Cruickshank
posted by overglow at 11:21 AM on August 15 [4 favorites]

It's pretty obvious why the media would rather focus on Trump's latest verbal diarrhea than a meager policy gain on the Biden side: viewer interest.

Also notable: what the NYT does NOT consider worthy of consideration by its readers.

One case of right-wing bias: Trump's attempted assassin.

If the "bleeds it leads" rule of thumb were the only thing driving the media narrative, why has that story disappeared? Why is there no more investigation into the culture surrounding an ostensibly conservative partisan? Who benefits from removing focus from violent, right-wing aspects of what should be Trump's base?
posted by ishmael at 11:26 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

When I watched snippets of the Trump "news conference", I assumed that he had handpicked the reporters from all the right-wing sites and excluded the major news organizations. The questions were so reserved and timid compared to what Biden regularly went through.

When I found out that "main stream" news was there, I knew that Dems are never gonna get a fair break from them. Vibes not reality isn't a good policy. And now they are suddenly questioning the ethics of reporting on the hacked material from the Trump campaign after attacking Hillary on it in 2016.

I'm fine with Kamala completely avoiding these folks.
posted by jabo at 11:26 AM on August 15 [19 favorites]

The press is not meant to be a cheerleader for the president. That's not a road we want to go down. The press should have an adversarial relationship with the president, because the president should, reasonably, be talking up all the good things he has done; the press should be the one saying, "That's nice, but."

I think it would be good if the press were aware of the popular conceptions of various issues, and supplied information (including but not limited to news) that updated- and filled the gaps in- those popular conceptions. This process should be informed by how powerful parties can shape narratives, but "being adversarial to the president" is, to me, merely a potential strategy for being useful to the public rather than a foundational principle.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 11:27 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

When I found out that "main stream" news was there, I knew that Dems are never gonna get a fair break from them. Vibes not reality isn't a good policy. And now they are suddenly questioning the ethics of reporting on the hacked material from the Trump campaign after attacking Hillary on it in 2016.

Trump just said whatever came into his head and ignored the questions but you’d never know it.
posted by Artw at 11:27 AM on August 15 [8 favorites]

The NYT, for example, had an explicitly enunciated stance of not calling his lies lies while he was president. That they call them lies now doesn't excuse their shameful conniving at his lies out of misguided deference to the office he held.

Here is the NYT calling Trump on a lie 4 days after his inaguration.

(NPR had such a policy however.)
posted by joeyh at 11:28 AM on August 15 [2 favorites]

And they continue to do things their way-

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on tacos, music, and the future of America (Kamala Harris, YT Aug 15)
Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, sit down for a conversation about their historic campaign. They talk taco recipes, hot peppers, their childhoods, careers, and the rights and freedoms they want to protect.

TW: "...black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota."
posted by Glinn at 11:36 AM on August 15 [12 favorites]

The media on a whole is sexist, racist, and loves Trump. Why SHOULD she let them have access?
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:01 PM on August 15 [5 favorites]

The press is merely a symptom, blaming them is missing the forest for the trees.

Let's say it is totally true that, simply, the press is stuck in a vicious loop. But that is not of its own creation. So one must ask, how did journalism get this way?

The straightforward answer is that neoliberalism destroys the commons, including the commons of public discourse. And so the press (as a whole) degenerating from its actual traditional role as an elitists' manufacturer of consent to having outright dysfunctional properties is a natural result of that.

To say that the press is merely an echo chamber, etc., is an essentialistic reduction of their role, and does not fully account for how these institutions got to become this contradictory in its behaviour and intended purpose as we still normally understand it. The progressive collapse of each of our critical public institutions is one of the key signs of how fascism is at work in society, and once seen that way, the real enemies at fault become clearer.
posted by polymodus at 12:04 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

I wrote about this in the other thread but I'm sad to see the continued fiction of "the media" as a unified entity promulgated here. It's simply not true. Even if there are serious issues with the White House press pool and DC operators, this is an incredibly small, strange, and specialized corner of a large, complex, and diverse industry. That "the media" is a thing that acts in an organized fashion and "wants" Trump to win is a highly selective strawman narrative that does not hold up to the slightest honest scrutiny. I am disappointed to see what is fundamentally fascist rhetoric - the leader must humble and muzzle the out-of-control press - celebrated on the blue.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:09 PM on August 15 [11 favorites]

I am disappointed to see what is fundamentally fascist rhetoric - the leader must humble and muzzle the out-of-control press - celebrated on the blue.

I just want them to treat the two campaigns and candidates in similar ways.

If you scream questions at one campaign, do so at the other. If you ask followup questions of one, do so to the other.

If you cover an empty podium waiting for a candidate to appear and then carry their whole schpiel live without questions afterwards, do the same for the other candidate's event.

If both candidates or campaigns are doing something at the same time, flip a coin to decide which one gets carried live or take turns.

If some issue is of concern, apply it to both candidates or campaigns in reasonable correlation how valid that concern is for them. If taking policy positions is a matter of grave concern, apply that issue to both campaigns and report on what you've found. If age and decrepitude are of concern, apply it to both Biden and Trump.

None of these are difficult to achieve. None of them seem like crushing the press under a bootheel of tyranny. They seem to me like obvious things that responsible media would be doing.

But yet it feels like such a reach, like it's so far above what we have now.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:27 PM on August 15 [56 favorites]

The media on a whole is sexist, racist, and loves Trump. Why SHOULD she let them have access?

More to the point. She doesn't need them. She's speaking directly to America. Every rally is up on youtube live as it happens, and for replay whenever the fancy strikes you.
posted by mikelieman at 12:27 PM on August 15 [6 favorites]

I am disappointed to see what is fundamentally fascist rhetoric - the leader must humble and muzzle the out-of-control press - celebrated on the blue.

I'm sorry BlackLeotardFront, but I feel that that is a pointedly uncharitable reading of this whole (admittedly stupidly messy) thread. I've read what you posted in the other thread... and I agree that it is a really bad time for the press and I fully agree that this is a bad thing for us all.

But I fundamentally disagree on some of the other stuff you say... I really really don't see the part where the first 20 times that "they" reported on Trumps lies were ignored and they just got worn out doing it. If I did I'd likely feel more charitable on their current lack of even trying.

The 24 hour news cycle has definitely destroyed things, and the "news" has to make massive profits or we kill it corporate mentality even more so. But Harris waiting out the first few weeks of her campaign doing sit downs with what has been a supremely hostile press is hardly a fascist attempt to destroy the news media.

If anyone here can look at the media landscape and disagree that the way the Democrats and Republicans are treated, represented, and reported on is vastly different and not ridiculously weighted in the Right's favour... well then I'd love some of what you are smoking.
posted by cirhosis at 12:28 PM on August 15 [12 favorites]

I thought the essay exposed pretty well an important truth about campaigning in the modern media (social, etc) environment.

Folks who are saying that hyperbolic criticism of “the media” is de facto fascist or insane are themselves engaging in hyperbole that isn’t, IMHO convincing or pushing an interesting conversation forward.

Wanting the press to bring reality to the fore rather than “reality tv” horse race junk is not fascist or insane. And treating some one’s hyperbole as literal is bad faith (apologies if I’ve done that here).

Further the campaign not sitting down with journalist is not comparable to the right actively bad mouthing and riling up their supports against journalists. Wake me when Kamala starts chiding journalists at her rallies with stochastic rhetoric.
posted by creiszhanson at 12:32 PM on August 15 [9 favorites]

The media on a whole is sexist, racist, and loves Trump. Why SHOULD she let them have access?

More to the point. She doesn't need them. She's speaking directly to America

Yes. I know. And I approve.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:32 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

Sorry should add that I don't want to put words into your mouth... I don't think you were trying to say that Harris is being a fascist... likely that you were surprised that people on the blue were echoing fascist rhetoric... But my feeling on this was expressed earlier in the thread...

A big part of the issue with him yelling 'fake news' all of the time was that the ridiculousness of it would make any similar claims from the other side look untrue. Looks like he can hang a mission accomplished banner.

sometimes the criticisms are true. And I'm aware that bias for your own side has to be taken into account... but sometimes... sometimes it is true.
posted by cirhosis at 12:33 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

I had all these things I wanted to say and then GCU Sweet and Full of Grace said all of them.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:33 PM on August 15 [9 favorites]

It's a simple tactic: play hard-to-get until the press agree to cover you on your terms. Make access a reward, not a right.

The media landscape has changed dramatically over the past 15 years, and it's not some failure of moral character to adapt to it.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:58 PM on August 15 [15 favorites]

Also I wanted to say that personally I absolutely love good journalism. Insightful and through reporters and reporting is totally the lifeblood of a healthy society.
Obviously there are some people who work in the news media in this thread that are very much feeling attacked and are pushing back on it, possibly reflexively, possibly cause they have a very different view point. And I don't want to appear to be piling on. It's a tough job and I don't want to undersell that. But it's an industry that I largely feel is failing at it's core missions for a variety of really crappy reasons.

I'd like to suggest that if you feel that the criticism is off the mark... rather than asking for specific examples of what's wrong... why not give us some examples of reporters or organizations that are doing it right?
posted by cirhosis at 1:02 PM on August 15 [9 favorites]

The press could.... do some research? I mean, isn't that their job? It's not reprinting press releases verbatim, and it's not waiting for someone else to answer their questions. They could look up everything the candidates have said, and everything the candidates have done, and maybe report on that?

Interviews have always struck me as very suspect, like campaign promises, or commercials because of course the person being interviewed is going to at best put a positive spin on everything they can, or be completely two faced depending on who is interviewing them, as a standard response. And of course many people will just flat out tell lies. The higher the stakes and the higher the possibility they won't get caught or called on it, the more likely they are to lie.

As far as I can tell the purpose of a media interview is for the media person to get air time to farther their career. Media interviews are like job interviews. You sit there in your finest corporate outfit, using buzzwords you have culled from the job posting, describing your previous job where they treated you like crap, you slacked off entirely, and it was so badly managed neither you nor your managers every knew what was going on or what you were doing, as "Formative training where you built a dynamic skill set of foundational abilities in organization and customer service skills." The person interviewing you knows darn well that statement translates to "I was paid to be there." Half the time you get a job interview only after they already know they are going to hire someone else, and they are only interviewing you because the personnel department has to justify their budget and be observed doing something. Your interview is so that they can report back to their department head that they conducted fifteen interviews. Meanwhile the department head has already informed everyone that they will be hiring the CFO's nephew.
posted by Jane the Brown at 1:04 PM on August 15 [13 favorites]

Embrace Those Good Vibrations

What’s always been [Trump's] obsession, and in a way, his talent? Branding. The overall image, the big impression, the general feeling—the vibe. Trump’s political talent—and it’s always the talent of the demagogue—is branding himself with favorable vibes, such as strength, showmanship, and making America great again, and branding his opponents with negative ones, such as being weak, dangerous, unpatriotic, and the like.

Which is why Trump is so rattled by Harris. He’s watching her and realizing that she’s winning the vibe wars. Her campaign offers morning in America. Her campaign is change vs. more of the same. She’s the under-75-year-old we’ve been waiting for.

Trump knows the power of all this. And he knows he’s losing because of it.
The Case for Publishing the Hacked Trump Documents
...both Politico and the Washington Post have issued statements indicating the information wasn’t “newsworthy” enough to print—as of yet. Each statement left open the possibility that the publication might still write more in depth about the substance of the hacked information they received. The New York Times is not commenting.

That’s baffling. What a campaign thought about its own vice presidential candidate is inherently newsworthy.
...
Stories like this used to be the bread and butter of politically obsessed outlets. In January 2012, Buzzfeed published the opposition research file that John McCain’s 2008 campaign had compiled on then-primary opponent Mitt Romney. Buzzfeed hadn’t received the material through a hack. But strictly as a matter of news, many commentators saw value in their decision. Buzzfeed also, more controversially, printed the subsequently discredited Steele dossier. It did so under the argument that, again, it was indisputably a matter of public interest to know what material was being shopped around on Trump prior to his election.

The Vance files, authenticated, certainly clear the bar set by these past stories. The idea that there’s nothing “newsworthy” in 271 pages of internal campaign documents at all defies credulity.

posted by kirkaracha at 1:18 PM on August 15 [20 favorites]

The press could.... do some research?

Very much agree.

We're taking it for granted that this particular style of "access," of face-to-face, head-to-head confrontational interviewing and question pressing -- which is, whatever else it is, always a spectacle that just so happens to enhance the prestige of the media outlet and the media personalities involved -- is effective at holding power to account, is an important step in keeping the public informed, and/or irreplaceable in some ineffable way. But maybe it's not.
posted by Western Infidels at 1:20 PM on August 15 [6 favorites]

Late to the party but let me tell you a story.

Back in June 2018, for the first time in a few months, Trump dusted off one of his favorite lines: "the press is the enemy of the people." Four days later, a guy who had harbored a grudge against his local newspaper for 11 years decided it was finally time to march in with a pump-action shotgun and murder five people. Two of them were old friends of mine; I'd worked there about 20 years earlier, and they were still there, serving their community.

We can debate in circles all day, week, month, year about whether "the media" is in the tank for Trump. We can even be angry at "the media," whatever that is. And out in there in the big broad world, angry people will and do threaten "the media" -- back in the day, I got death threats for my coverage of gun trafficking.

But I'd like to think at least here at Metafilter, people wouldn't be calling for violence against my former colleagues. )I've been out for a decade.) It would be nice if here, at least, we could have these discussions in relative safety and moderate tones, without people advocating for reporters and editors being curb-stomped. I suppose it was hyperbole, written in haste, but for too many of us who work or worked in the field, it's more than that.
posted by martin q blank at 1:40 PM on August 15 [54 favorites]

Not sure if this has been mentioned above thread, but I wonder what the ledes would be if Kamala was a man.

I’m guessing that “Candidate’s bold strategy on avoiding the press” and “Candidate X has learned important lessons from the past” would be the norm… instead of what we are currently seeing. I don’t think it was just a desire to uncover the facts that compeled them to report on Hillary’s emails day after day after day after day after...

Hey… I don’t want to eradicate the free press. I’m just asking them to do a better job. Right now, many of those media outlets with the most reach… aren’t.
posted by jabo at 1:56 PM on August 15 [8 favorites]

But I'd like to think at least here at Metafilter, people wouldn't be calling for violence

Violence is abhorrent.

Those on Metafilter who hold a dim view of the current media landscape are not, as far as I’m aware, advocating violence or inciting it against anyone.

Harris not holding a press conference that satisfies certain media outlets or not sitting for an interview is neither inherantly violent not advocating violence.

Trump on the other hand…
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 2:01 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

I can't help but think, while reading this discussion, of my town's local newspaper, which has dwindled in page count to the point where it's measured in single digits most days. And that dwindling is reflected in the size of the staff that the paper employs full time, which is much smaller than it once was.

And then I think about our local television stations, and their news coverage. Which is mostly fine, I think, except for the matter of the Sinclair company that owns one of them, and that, as noted above, frequently dictates what their daily coverage will consist of, right down to exactly specifying the phrasing.

And then I think about our local "news" format radio stations, which are entirely dominated by right wing commentators.

And then I think about the 24 hour cable "news" networks, which broadcast editorial "commentary" almost to the exclusion of everything else, because the American audience has lost its appetite for just-the-facts reporting, and because it's easier to justify inaccuracies and bias in commentary than it is in actual reporting.

And in regards to Trump specifically, I think about how nobody at any level of what's left of journalism in this country has figured out how to cope with the Gish Gallop strategy that the man employs in every public appearance and in every interview. They couldn't deal with it adequately when he employed it as a tactic for bulldozing negative coverage, or for dazzling the rubes, and they still cannot deal with it adequately now that he appears to be doing it reflexively, as his mind dissolves under the effects of dementia.

I aspired to be a journalist as a young person. I can understand how people still working in the industry might feel slighted by criticisms that they're failing to uphold the responsibilities that were the basis for making them the ONLY industry to be explicitly granted the freedom to do their work in the Constitution. I would like to remind them that many of us who make that criticism, and say "us" because I'm one them, haven't called for anyone to get curb stomped, and that maybe some of us, observing the business from the outside, can see plainly how badly it's been hollowed out. The fact that you structurally no longer appear to be able to do what your profession used to call for isn't your fault. But it remains a fact nevertheless.
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:02 PM on August 15 [11 favorites]

Media: Calls for violence mar Metafilter thread on media
posted by Artw at 2:23 PM on August 15 [6 favorites]

Hmm…

"I don't know what I watched to be honest. It was just sort of meandering incoherent ball of lies.. that's when he remembered to talk about the economy.. Then he decided to go off on a tangent about tampons."

Okay maybe CNN has some slight capacity to learn, though as ever I would expect NYT will still find a way to translate this into reasonable sounding human English with centrist appeal.
posted by Artw at 2:39 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

Just as a brief meta note, if you ever find yourself saying "Nobody is saying X", you are probably wrong. There are a lot of people out there, and it is highly likely that somebody really is saying X. There may be a useful kernel Y that can be disentangled from the shittiness of X, and there may be plenty of reasonable Y supporters out there. Maybe I'm approaching things too literally, but it seems like Y supporters might be better off showing that Y does not entail or require X rather than making the false claim that nobody has said X.

Those on Metafilter who hold a dim view of the current media landscape are not, as far as I’m aware, advocating violence or inciting it against anyone.

On the contrary; from upthread

The children and sociopaths who make up our political press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago. It was their criminal incompetence who gave us Reagan and the subsequent 40+ yrs of Reaganism, tanked Clinton's health care reform (resulting in the Heritage Foundation's RomneyCare plan rebranded nationally as "ObamaCare") and celebrated his selling out the Dem working class base, gave us 8 yrs of CheneyCo, and, of course, Trump. They are monsters and deserve to be treated as such.

and while favorites could theoretically be bookmarks or steganographic messages it's likely that a good proportion of the 22 favorites that comment got were endorsing the message. So somebody said X and a lot of people agreed.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 2:47 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

Suspect some kind of metaphor a likely explanation here.
posted by Artw at 2:50 PM on August 15 [5 favorites]

I look forward to and/or anticipate being enraged by how many outlets launder Trump's latest hours-long "press conference" of rambling lies and nonsense, which has included such hard-hitting questions from our totally functional press as: why did god save your life in that shooting, Nikki Haley says you need to stop whining on the campaign trail, what do you think?, and why are you only leading by one in a Fox poll?

Perhaps they'll actually report on how his answers to questions on fracking and his relationship with China were full of nonsense and outright lies. Or perhaps they could mention how it was literal hours of just old man yells at cloud rambling, with varying levels of sense and little to no accuracy. Guessing they won't though! Let's just wait and see how many articles attempt to present literally anything about that "press conference" as a "campaign pivot" or evidence of serious policy proposals, versus the literal actual policy proposal from the Harris campaign about the literal, concrete, achievable and physically possible goals of building three million new housing units and expanded down payment assistance for first-time buyers.

Would really and genuinely love to be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong if those actionable policy proposals that could concretely help middle class Americans will get anything close to as much press coverage as this hours-long Trump "press conference". Really.
posted by yasaman at 3:10 PM on August 15 [14 favorites]

I really don't understand the criticism of this article. It seems to me that by not holding constant press conferences she's forcing the press to do it's damned job and report on what she is doing and saying and rather than try to guide her into the preferred lazy narrative of their respective employers. Seems pretty smart to me considering recent history.

I guess a certain kind of reporter is used to all caps ACCESS to the candidate and gets butt-hurt if they don't get it but that's not her problem.
posted by lordrunningclam at 3:17 PM on August 15 [11 favorites]

Suspect some kind of metaphor a likely explanation here.

Even at Teen Vogue, I don't think a significant number of people in the political press corps are children.

'Say precisely what you mean' and 'Overheated hyperbole wins the day' are like the Ask and Guess of MeFi politics talk.
posted by box at 3:17 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

Media: Metafilter endorses curb stomping of literal children
posted by Artw at 3:21 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

'we're operating in a world with media organizations churning out 24 hours of coverage and there isn't 24 hours worth of news'

There's like thousands of hours of news happening every day, but only not in North America and it's colonies and co-conspirators. If there were any interest in reporting the news, the things that have happened and been documented or reported on, then there would be teams of people aggregating news from all over the world and translating it into English for the US market, but that is not what the BOM (also known as the legacy media) are interested in. Presenting alternative viewpoints is just not on the agenda.
How much coverage have the US media made of the millions spent by AIPAC to subvert US democracy? You might think that would be a big story in a country that seems to believe they have a manifest destiny to 'spread democracy'. And this is something that is happening in the US, never mind what goes down globally.

In the UK the news stories are controlled and dictated by the establishment, and then further filtered by the BOM who control almost all print media. There are a few exceptions, but generally only when that information will not upset the kyriarchy. How many stories about non-dom billionaires avoiding tax while firehosing millions into media empires to maintain an atmosphere of fear and division do you see in the press?
Do people really think that the US press are 'free'? In a country that created Radio Free Asia? As Atom Eyes points out, this Joe Stoehr person is clearly churning out whatever pro Dem copy is going to earn him a buck this week. He may be right twice a day, but his journalistic contribution is a stopped clock.

One of the many reasons why Tik Tok is upsetting the US establishment is that watching an hour of Tik Tok lives from around the world will give you a better insight into what is going with people in the world than any amount of think pieces in the BOM.
posted by asok at 3:22 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

if you ever find yourself saying "Nobody is saying X", you are probably wrong.

I missed the inappropriate curb stomping comment, but if you read my actual comment the word nobody does not appear.

One bad comment doesn’t change the general tenor of the non-violent complaints about the general fecklessness of the media in the disparity of coverage of the two candidates.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 3:23 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

One bad comment doesn’t change the general tenor of the non-violent complaints about the general fecklessness of the media in the disparity of coverage of the two candidates.

Media: Former President and current nominee Trump and a random person who supports Kamala Harris from a website both encourage violence against the press. Why is Kamala dodging questions about that?
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:28 PM on August 15 [5 favorites]

Gently, respectfully... when your interpretation of a comment on MetaFilter tells you that fascists and killers are hanging out here, maybe you could stand to think about how likely that really is, about what the context of this place really is, what people here are generally like, and whether there is a good faith/benefit of the doubt reading that makes more sense.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:34 PM on August 15 [16 favorites]

Media: Metafilter rails against media embrace of Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric, yet embraces similar language - who is the real villain here?
posted by Artw at 3:38 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

Unfortunately for Biden, competency isn't newsworthy because newsworthy = clicks /subs / ratings or to sum it up = attention. As long as our media is profit driven and dependent on viewer attention for its revenue thats how its gonna work. And theres zero attention for basic competence. Weird is newsworthy. So are disasters, conspiracies, drama, and all kinds of other bullshit that Trump specializes in. Its why hes always on the goddamn news. However, vibes are apparently also newsworthy. So hopefully Harris can ride this wave til November.
posted by Glibpaxman at 3:57 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

unless the outcome you want is dead journalists

The outcome I'd like is journalists just doing their fucking jobs. I'm sick of hearing how the media is being victimized.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:38 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

gonna stick to my total outlier take that wishing street violence on journalists is bad, actually
posted by sagc at 4:39 PM on August 15 [10 favorites]

I wrote about this in the other thread but I'm sad to see the continued fiction of "the media" as a unified entity promulgated here

And you still have no answer for the billions in ad revenue they make, while not fulfilling their responsibilities in a democratic society.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:41 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

Because no “media owner” outside of Fox News is getting within, like, four org chart rungs of actual copy, nor are they sending directives to editorial staff saying, “Go hard on Biden’s age, we need Trump to win!1!!” (BTW, “media owners” means what? Corporate execs? Shareholders? None of those people directly affect coverage or story angles.)

If all the front line reporters/editors/etc of outlets the NYT have independently decided to become so transparently in the tank for Trump, that's actually worse. At least other way there is the excuse of saying you're only doing it to keep your paycheck and feed your children.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 4:54 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

Here is the NYT calling Trump on a lie 4 days after his inaguration.(NPR had such a policy however.)

joeyh, thank you for this correction, and my apologies for my incorrect statement.I went looking for a source for my memory before posting and couldn't find one, but I did find NYT articles referring to his "mistruths" and thought that they backed up my memory. You've definitively demonstrated that I'm wrong over the whole course of his presidency, but are you sure that they never had such a policy in place? I vividly remember reading an NYT story in 2021 and feeling the sheer relief of seeing a lie called a lie, and I could have sworn I remembered some self-exculpatory statement by an NYT bigwig about why they'd felt they had to avoid it earlier. (But you're quite right that on the latter score I could be thinking of NPR.)
posted by It is regrettable that at 4:55 PM on August 15

For people looking to get involved with improving journalism in the United States, here are a few starting points for groups that are taking action to address concerns about the media:

Poynter Institute (media literacy tools at MediaWise)

Free Press

National Hispanic Media Coalition

Institute for Nonprofit News
posted by JDC8 at 5:07 PM on August 15 [9 favorites]

Harris won her first election just over twenty years ago, and Walz entered Congress in 2007.
These two are not shrouded in mystery, and yeah, it's been all of two weeks.

Trump had no political experience when he became president, and it showed, and we suffered for it:
CNN journalist Jim Acosta banned from White House after Trump calls him 'rude, terrible person' (NBC, Nov. 7, 2018) Lawsuit.
White House sets record for longest span with no press briefings [35 days] (ABC, Jan. 22, 2019)
White House revokes press passes for dozens of journalists (Columbia Journalism Review, May 9 2019)

The last ‘daily’ White House press briefing was 170 days ago (CNN, Aug. 28, 2019 / Byline: Chris Cillizza) "It’s hard to keep track of all the ways in which Donald Trump is eroding long-accepted norms surrounding the US presidency. Attacking foreign allies. Praising foreign enemies. Not telling the truth over and over again – about little things and big things. Raising questions about the validity of US elections. Giving cover to white supremacists. Amid all of that abnormal behavior, this fact too often gets lost: There hasn’t been a daily press briefing at the White House since March 11.

Trump White House goes 300+ days without a press briefing – why that’s unprecedented (The Conversation, Feb. 24, 2020)

Vance had no political experience when he assumed office on January 3, 2023; he's Thiel's stooge, and he has negative charisma. Let the public know that.

The Democratic ticket has a wealth of public statements, actions, interviews, and Congressional voting records to look through while they're, you know, campaigning their asses off during an extraordinary time in the history of the US. They were vetted, to a certain extent. (Harris wrote two nonfiction books, published 10 years apart.)

Project 2025 is the published platform of the Republican ticket, and they ought to be asked about it incessantly, obliged to explain it and defend it, because it is completely bananapants.
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:20 PM on August 15 [21 favorites]

DirtyOldTown, not sure if you're referring to me, but, point taken. FWIW, I don't believe that there are wannabe journalist killers in here. And I understand poeple's frustration. The Washington press corps and the national news desks have failed miserably. And maybe that's what people mean when they say "the media."

But, TSHBO, tons of the people in "the media" are indeed "doing their fucking jobs." All you have to do is skim MeFi for a week and you'll see an FPP about some good journalism being done somewhere. In spite of being "victimized," like the small-town Kansas police fascists who raided a newspaper, seized notes and equipment, harassed staff and now are finally being held accountable. Or, you know, like my friends who were shot and killed for "doing their fucking jobs." That's what makes it hard to come in here and see a lot of good people being tarred with a big, sloppy brush.

Reporters have tried and and are still trying to take on the Trump blitz of lies. A few years ago, we were lauding Dave Farenthold's investigations at the Post and Daniel Dale's daily fact check at the Toronto Star. Dale is still doing that work at CNN. And just two weeks ago the Post published an investigation of how Trump basically used a bribe from Egypt to finance his campaign. There's also coverage like this all the time. The stories are out there but they're just not moving the needle.

So how could the national news orgs move the needle? Like a lot of people here, I'd like to see a wholesale change in how news orgs cover a candidate like Trump. That press release from KamalaHQ the other day is a model -- don't repeat the lie, just attack it and mock it. Augment that kind of coverage with both long-form and daily coverage of the evidence of Trump's mental incompetence. Run the criticism from his former staffers (Mattis, Kelly, Esper etc) front and center and every day. Write pieces that debunk GOP talking points by showing comprehensively how Biden economic policies (while still flawed) have helped people. Realize that democracy is literally at stake, play hardball and throw out the tradition of impartiality.

But remember that only a handful of news organizations have the money and personnel to do that. Hold them accountable, while also respecting and supporting the local reporters -- like the guy here in my hometown reporting on Republican hacks using literal Nazi tactics like purging books from colleges. And maybe say a prayer that no politician sends gun-toting lunatics after them for doing their jobs.
posted by martin q blank at 5:38 PM on August 15 [12 favorites]

he right’s argument against media is that journalists hate America and their coverage is part of the woke agenda orchestrated by the Jews to keep the white man down.

the left’s argument against the media is that the billionaire owners of media companies have a financial interest in helping the candidates they believe will be better for their investment portfolios.

[giancarloespositio_we_are_not_the_same.jpg]
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:00 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

people advocating for reporters and editors being curb-stomped. I suppose it was hyperbole, written in haste

The comment should have been deleted for that imagery. Late to the thread, I was shocked to read it. Maybe the mod on duty isn't familiar with the horrific act and those (skinhead racist/homophobe/fascists) who are the ones who tend to use it to kill their victims? Otherwise, wow.
posted by aught at 6:08 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

The stories are out there but they're just not moving the needle

Trump has a press event today, say, in Bedminster, New Jersey. No one asks him about the Egypt payola. Not one journalist found it within the scope of their job to ask. Not one.

The media is not the victimized but the victimizer. The media exists, it is real, its effects as a monolithic entity are real, and it is hurting Americans as much as innocent people outside the United States.

So I really don't want to hear thread derails about this or that comment being fascist or mean to journalists, I just want some acknowledgement that the press is not doing fulfilling its basic obligations to our society. The tedious derails can be taken to Metatalk, for all I care. Tired of it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:20 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

Whelp, there’s some trouble brewing between Harris and Wallz
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:22 PM on August 15 [6 favorites]

Jeez louise, yasaman's helpful link upthread:

"Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled her housing policy plan Thursday that includes a pledge to construct three million new housing units in her first term as president and to create an expanded version of down payment assistance for homebuyers.

"The Democratic presidential nominee’s plan, shared with The Nevada Independent and The Wall Street Journal Thursday afternoon, seeks to address housing shortages and soaring rental prices — building off plans pushed by President Joe Biden by calling for more home construction and greater financial relief for homeowners. It also calls for federal lawmakers to pass stalled legislation seeking to address the rise of corporate housing purchases.

"Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are rolling out their policy planks during an accelerated campaign after Biden stepped down from the top of the Democratic ticket last month and immediately endorsed Harris. On Friday, Harris is expected to unveil the campaign’s economic policy platform."

The Nevada Independent, a website that "operates as a project of Nevada News Bureau, Inc. which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization" and is a publishing partner of ProPublica... and the perpetually pinstriped WSJ? They are cannily covering a lot of ground.

Yes, there are excellent reporters doing outstanding work in difficult circumstances; I'm thankful that their pieces are frequently linked to, quoted, and discussed on this site. (Fwiw, YOU PEOPLE enticed me into a Texas Monthly subscription — a place I have never been, for any length of time.) The campaign criticism thus far from a small group of journalists and media folk (Ezra Klein & "The Kamala Harris Problem" should go on tour, after Klein quits the band in a huff) isn't representative of the entire field. The noise level can make it seem otherwise, sometimes.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:22 PM on August 15 [8 favorites]

I didn't have #notallmedia on my metafilter 2024 bingo card. (That said, as someone who works in the medical industry I have solidarity and respect for the people of integrity still working in a field overrun with toxic problems, so uh, yeah #notallmedia)
posted by Jarcat at 6:22 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

Brandon, I'm not clicking, it's TikTok. Is this an argument over hot sauce, or a dance-off?
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:23 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

It's a funny little thing about hotdish being bland.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:28 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

whew, thanks
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:32 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

So, how's it going? I visit a few news sites as of this moment:

Reuters: "Biden, Harris hail Medicare drug price cuts that will save billions"

Washington Post: "Biden, Harris tout drug-cost deal in first joint appearance since president ended bid"

ABC News: "Biden, Harris greeted by chants of 'Thank you, Joe' at 1st joint event since he exited race" with subtitle "The two touted their work to lower Medicare prescription drug prices."

DW/Deutsche Welle: "Biden, Harris hail lower Medicare drug prices and each other"

New York Times: "Medicare Set to Save Billions as U.S. Limits Prices for 10 Medications"
posted by gimonca at 6:44 PM on August 15 [4 favorites]

Her team is creating the news at rallies, and is leveraging social media. Answering questions from Fox "news" or the horse race press corps is only going to allow them to feed the narrative they want to spin. Crowd sizes are not that important, they can skip asking about crowd sizes. They're reporters - they can go to a PO1135809 rally and they can go to a Harris rally...then report on the crowd sizes. What either candidate thinks about crowd sizes is irrelevant.

What they like to do is allow one candidate to lie without interruption or fact checking, while they hold another candidate to a higher standard. If she answers the question, she's feeding the narrative. If she asks them WTF?, she's shrill/combative...it behooves her to just continue to make the news and the press corps can figure out how they want to cover that.

The MSM (NYT, WaPo) and Fox "news," in particular, are focused on her not making herself accessible - that's the problem Biden faced. If they can't seed a press conference with bullshit, they're left to complaining that she isn't talking to the press. Biden was punished for it, so why would she bother to reward them with access, given there's no upside and potentially tremendous downside?

Good for her. Who in their right minds would abide someone like Steve Doocy lobbing grenades at her in the form of "When did you stop beating your husband?" questions, when all she has to do is continue to get her message directly out to the people? The reporters have to focus on the facts, and what she says on the campaign trail, versus making up shit to increase their ratings. Let the CNN's of the world figure it out on their own.
posted by Chuffy at 6:56 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

I’m guessing that “Candidate’s bold strategy on avoiding the press” and “Candidate X has learned important lessons from the past” would be the norm

No, they’re probably not going to actively applaud icing them out even if the candidate is a man. Biden did this and coverage of it was critical.
posted by Selena777 at 7:14 PM on August 15

I was curious what MeFi would make of that article, and had some thoughts, but honestly didn't expect:

The children and sociopaths who make up our political press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago... They are monsters and deserve to be treated as such.
posted by Pedantzilla

and the reaction: "[33 favorites]"

That's still up, as far as I can tell.

Now I am very tired and can sign off with sagc: "gonna stick to my total outlier take that wishing street violence on journalists is bad, actually"

Not a good thread, folks.
posted by doctornemo at 7:21 PM on August 15 [9 favorites]

I had all these things I wanted to say and then GCU Sweet and Full of Grace said all of them.

except ...- every reference to Trump should be preceded by "Convicted felon and habitual liar".

Fairness and accuracy in reporting and all that.
posted by philip-random at 7:25 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

"Curb stomping" is the act of murdering, or attempting to murder, someone by forcing them to lie with their mouth open, biting against a concrete curb, and jumping on or kicking the back of their head. This is likely to result in the victim's jaw shattering, possibly also their maxilla and cranium, and may cause paralysis or death by cervical dislocation. Death may take hours. It is strongly associated with neo-nazi hate crimes, and Wikipedia lists a few notable cases, with victims including a teenager that neo-nazis thought was Jewish, a gay man outside of a gay bar in Salt Lake City, and someone who as far as I can tell was just a victim of opportunity for the nazis to prove to each other that they could kill.

It's a pretty fucking gross metaphor. Maybe some of you didn't know how horrific this is and how closely associated it is with neo-nazi violence in particular. Now you do.
posted by biogeo at 7:38 PM on August 15 [16 favorites]

Nation sports editor Dave Zirin on Twitter:

Wow. Trump finagled a free hour to spew on CNN before they cut away, not getting the media qs they were promised . Yes they have people sympathetic to Trump. Yes they have people who think Trump is ratings gold so broadcasting hate is worth it. But they are also just marks.
posted by mediareport at 7:58 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

I just finished The Playbook by James Shapiro, which is about the short-lived Federal Theatre Project, and in particular, how it was killed. The newly formed HUAC, then known as the Dies Committee used classic red-baiting techniques to ensure it was defunded.

What makes that relevant to the topic, is that the book describes how the NYT (and other papers) printed much of what Martin Dies alleged (mostly without evidence) because it was exciting. The point being, the media seems no different now that in the late 1930s. The shiny object get all the attention.

p.s. Great book!
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:07 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

I can't agree more that blatantly calling for reporters to be violently murdered is a obvious violation of our community norms. The mods owe us an explanation for why they have decided to allow that comment to remain visible. If this is now the kind of behavior that is acceptable, please (a) clarify that in the FAQ and (b) tell us so we can decide if this the kind of site we want to support.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:10 PM on August 15 [11 favorites]

I was well aware of the nature of curb stomping when I read it for the metaphor it is in the context of this thread.

Those of you pearl clutching are missing the point completely and would best be served by simply recusing yourselves from the remainder of this thread.
posted by khrusanthemon at 8:37 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

As someone who has worked in the left-wing media that some here are claiming doesn’t exist, if you want better reporting, fucking pay for it. Most journalists are working unsustainable hours for unsustainable pay. Donate to Pacifica or High Country News or Mother Jones or Pro Publica or your local nonprofit journalism outfit if you don’t like what you’re seeing. News organizations respond to whoever their customers are.

And please don’t call for violence against the press of any kind. It hurts all of us, but the people covering protests and small-town corruption and corporate crime are the ones most likely to wind up dead.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:48 PM on August 15 [10 favorites]

Close races drive readership/viewership/engagement. The better Harris is doing, those running corporate media will feel more pressured to level the field.
posted by brachiopod at 8:50 PM on August 15

It seems to me that by not holding constant press conferences she's forcing the press to do it's damned job

Seriously. For anyone wringing their hands about this article, in what world is reporters yelling a few questions at Harris the best way to get information about what Harris wants and what Harris is likely to do if elected?

Who cares what Trump says in speeches? It's not remotely related to what he'd actually do as president. Project 2025 is what people are voting for if they vote for Trump. Report on that.

I'm sure there's plenty of documentation out there about what a Harris administration would try to do. Find it and report on that. Do some reporting!
posted by straight at 8:56 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

What's most broken about all this is the press insisting on reporting "news" — meaning something that happened an hour ago. Project 2025 is full of juicy information about a potential Trump administration. But the NYT can't put it on the front page tomorrow unless Harris (or Trump) says something today about Project 2025, making it suddenly "news."
posted by straight at 9:00 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

I was well aware of the nature of curb stomping when I read it for the metaphor it is in the context of this thread.

yeah, I've been leafing through some old Hunter S Thompson stuff lately. Curb-stomping sounds like a hamfisted version of something he would've thrown around, except he would never have dismissed the media in its entirety as anything, being smart enough to know that it profoundly isn't. It's a chaotic system, which when it's working for you, you hardly notice, but rather like the weather, as soon as it isn't, well start complaining.

Anyway, sloppy comment. I wouldn't call the negative responses to it pearl-clutching, but neither did it occur to me to take it at face-value.
posted by philip-random at 9:00 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

and now I must correct myself because I realize the curb-stomp was aimed not at the media as a whole but "The children and sociopaths who make up our political press corps". Still kind of a foolish thing to say about the entire political press corp, but not a dismissal of "the media in its entirety".
posted by philip-random at 9:04 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

“Curb stomp” was about as clever and poetic a “metaphor” as any other violent act in this context, and that’s reading it charitably.

But it worked. It upset people, and it got attention.

And rage-bait works for the same reason, because a rage-addicted public will engage with it more, which, incidentally, is also why Trump has been such a cash cow for billionaire-controlled news media. He whips those who love him and those who hate him into a frenzy of righteous indignation. He’s addicted to the attention, the press can’t live without the attention, and the audience keeps returning, like a dog to its vomit. (Not a particularly refined simile, but that’s the Bible for you.)

Systems get this way if we let them. If you’ve never watched a parent/teacher/boss enforce a double standard that benefited assholes, bullies, and abusers at the expense of everyone else, maybe you won’t recognize it when you see it, but I think that’s rare. The GOP decided ages ago that it, and it alone, was exempt from critical thinking, empathy, and ethical standards. It was the responsibility of the press AND the public not to swallow that nonsense, but here we are.

The Harris campaign has flipped the script. It’s getting attention, it’s not taking the bait, and that’s got the attention-deprived Trump in full narcissistic meltdown. Clickbait news, having long since decimated and demoralized its workforce, is scrambling because its cash cow’s going dry.

Harris isn’t neglecting the news media at all. She’s just getting it off its ass. It could use the exercise.
posted by armeowda at 9:18 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

Could I suggest we give up the curb stomp derail? It's bad but one comment does not need to destroy an entire conversation. I think in good faith we can all agree that calling for violence against anyone is not acceptable? It shouldn't have been said and shouldn't have been liked but there are more charitable readings of it that anyone who liked it wants journalists dead.

And I'd point out that

metafilter: "press corps should've been curb-stomped decades ago"

Cool, definitely not fascist imagery! This is why people above are saying "maybe demonizing the press isn't going to have the outcome you want", unless the outcome you want is dead journalists.
posted by sagc at 11:39 on August 15 [75 favorites −] [⚑]

This comment almost immediately followed the original comment and consistently has had more agreement.
posted by cirhosis at 9:37 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

Just call the media "enemies of the people." They seem OK with that.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:50 PM on August 15

Could people suggest "serious" national news outlets that are alternatives to the NYT/WaPo? Familiar with my local joints, Defector, ProPublica, and Mother Jones but if there are others I should check out I'd appreciate the rec. Also helps to have more things to recommend to friends/family.
posted by yeahwhatever at 9:52 PM on August 15

With the momentum she has right now, and has had since she announced, there's almost nothing to be gained by being led by the press. She's in a position to call her own moves, and she's being wise to do so. The way she was able to dog walk Trump back to the original debate date shows what kind of advantage she's holding regarding PR. This grace period will end soon enough, but for now, she owes the press nothing and doesn't need to have the appearance of giving in.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:53 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

Media corporations have fired armies of journalists since 2013. "Pivot to Video" was a massive bloodletting; I had friends who decided to end their lives, others left the country, others still moved into the service industry. Most reporters I work with now come from independent wealth, and will have a tendency to cover serious issues as if they are topics at a cocktail party. I don't think the US has recovered from the loss of these intellectual workers since 2013.

We are down so many skilled laborers, because reporters have always lacked unions. We have lost the embodied skills of all of those intellectual workers that built our consensus reality on the daily. If reporters still had time to write stories, they could, I dunno, research or reprint what they had written about Kamala Harris's policy positions in 2019, or 2020, something any one of us could also probably do internet searches for.

Access journalism is a scam, and demeaning to everyone, and must be denied. It led to a reality TV star winning the presidency, because he knew how to get Billions in earned media and dominate the news cycles. Remember how it was always infrastructure week? Media corporations have openly stated that they had used the Trump shenanigans to make lots and lots of money, and they have now warped their business models around politics of these shallow aesthetics.

It's also convenient that you don't need to hire journalists, researchers, writers, and fact checkers if the business model is to pundit on the horse race.

Campaigning against Trump is refusing to play this game; why give up? Why would any political candidate just cede the ground so that it's more favorable to the opposing political candidate?

We need to do what we can to end access 'journalism,' so I am glad that the Harris campaign is not giving in to this right wing demand, to play this delusional horse race game that Trump and Fox are best at.

Louisiana elections are famous for this bullshit. And that is why we have 36% turnout in our elections. An essential part of conservative strategy is to convince everyone that elections can't matter, and cannot be about anything more than petty drama among the candidates. "Biden is old" "one candidate insulted the other one's wife", etc, until we believe that elections cannot be about anything substantive. An essential tactic in this strategy is to run the political press like a reality TV show, and suppress quality information with quantity, or, as it is said "Flood the Zone with shit"

it is good for candidates to refuse to play these games. It is important for building political movement. but that's another discussion.
posted by eustatic at 10:14 PM on August 15 [7 favorites]

more on the age of manufactured nihilism
posted by eustatic at 10:35 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

But all of this is the administration's responsibility to report. The press is not meant to be a cheerleader for the president. That's not a road we want to go down. The press should have an adversarial relationship with the president, because the president should, reasonably, be talking up all the good things he has done; the press should be the one saying, "That's nice, but." I do not know why the Biden administration has been so bad at communication, but it's not the duty of the press to be their PR agency.

This is an odd suggestion for the role of the press, since it makes the press's job something other than trying to communicate the truth to its readers. It's apparently always for the opposition: like the Devil's Advocate in a Catholic beatification proceeding, trying to argue against the candidate no matter what.

I personally think the press's job is to leave their readers with an understanding that matches reality. If the IRA is exceeding goals on renewable power generation but lagging behind on e-vehicles, I want to know both facts from the media I read, not just the part that's falling short. If I only read about the part that is not working, I end up not informed at all.

There are certainly reporters--especially "celebrity" political reporters--who act as if their job is to be adversarial. But that is wrong. Being adversarial can be a tool to help you get to the truth, because on some issues politicians and bureaucracies will obfuscate, prevaricate and outright lie out of self-interest. Better reporters focus on policy.
posted by mark k at 10:44 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

fwiw, Senator Sanders Calls Out Trump’s New Crowd Size Lies For What They Are: A Foundation For Election Denialism (TPM), & at MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell is damning the current Trump coverage as "2016 all over again" [FPP]
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:44 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

I don't want to make this about Biden. But all of this is the administration's responsibility to report

As I read somewhere I can't find right now, if Democrats wanted credit for the Infrastructure bill, they shouldn't have nicknamed it the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal.

Could people suggest "serious" national news outlets that are alternatives to the NYT/WaPo?

Talking Points Memo, which has been referenced repeatedly in this thread, does several $million of excellent original reporting every year, and provides editorial coverage of many important political stories. It's where I first read that I should keep an eye on a certain rising Illinois state senator.

And, like Defector and some of the other ones you mentioned, the staff of TPM can reflect on US media from a critical angle. I'm sure you can be a Sincere Liberal Reporter at WaPo/NYT/WSJ/etc, but it seems that the people who can even conceptualize reasons to bite the billionaire's hand don't last long. Hence the talking past each other—referring not just to this thread or to MeFi, but to similar conversations I've had in person, which were similarly omnifrustrating.
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 10:45 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

Talking Points Memo, which has been referenced repeatedly in this thread, does several $million of excellent original reporting every year, and provides editorial coverage of many important political stories. It's where I first read that I should keep an eye on a certain rising Illinois state senator.

TPM is great and definitely passes my "if I believe what I read there, I generally won't embarrass myself" test.

The limitation is that TPM is primarily political reporting. They don't do policy stories, as a general rule. I do think there's a baby/bathwater problem with some of the WaPo/NYT anger. They can have horrible framing and editorial choices on the horse race aspect of the political race, but they still do valuable reporting on the policy side.
posted by mark k at 11:02 PM on August 15 [2 favorites]

I think we have a rose-tinted view of the press based on Edward R Murrow, The Pentagon Papers, and things of that sort. It's clear that this was a tiny blip of well-regulated news bookended by Hearst on one side and Murdoch on the other. We can demand more of the press, but let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:27 AM on August 16

Posting this from the Tim Walz thread... KamalaHQ issued a press release 'FOR PLANNING PURPOSES RELUCTANTLY' re:

TODAY: Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different House

It's very funny and well played IMO.
posted by tovarisch at 3:10 AM on August 16

Just a little reminder about what side the New York Times is on:

New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it

On Democracy

In one small paragraph, Kahn outdid himself. He:

Dismissed the importance of democracy as a political issue.
Disclosed that the Times coverage is poll driven.
Asserted that coverage of the economy and immigration is favorable to Trump.
Whined that more coverage of democracy was tantamount to becoming a partisan publication.

posted by rambling wanderlust at 4:13 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

This is an odd suggestion for the role of the press, since it makes the press's job something other than trying to communicate the truth to its readers.

I find this entire sentence deeply bizarre. I read your rebuttal and you can consider this my engagement with it; I don't agree with anything you've said. Thank you.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:15 AM on August 16

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Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance. August 15, 2024 8:00 AM Subscribe

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Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance.
August 15, 2024 8:00 AM Subscribe