Election Countdown, 32 Days to Go: Two Contrasting Front Pages.
‘See things steady and see them whole.’ That's what the press is supposed to do. That's not what we are getting.
The front page of the New York Times on October 29, 2016. (Red highlighting added, by me.)
This post consists of two images. I will mostly let them speak for themselves.
The image at the top of this post is the front page of the New York Times ten days before the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton election of 2016. The news that dominated the “above the fold” territory on that page, with a big photo and three separate stories, is something that deserved to be at most an asterisk in history. That was Jamey Comey’s announcement that leaked Clinton emails had been found on Rep. Anthony Weiner’s cell phone laptop. Not long afterwards, the importance of this finding was determined to be nil.
The only reason the Comey-Weiner episode is more than an asterisk in history is that last-minute saturation coverage of it, exemplified by this NYT front page, could well have made the difference in tipping the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.
To the best of my awareness, no one in a position of responsibility at the New York Times has ever taken responsibility for, or answered questions about, the thinking behind this coverage.
The image below is the front page of the New York Times this morning. This is the first morning’s paper since bombshell revelations yesterday, from special counsel Jack Smith’s pleadings to the DC Federal Court. In substantive importance, Smith’s filing can best be compared to Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes.
See if you can detect any slight difference in the two stories’ prominence and play.
NYT front page, October 3, 2024.
Why did the NYT play the first story the way it did? We don’t know. They won’t say.
Why did it play the second story so differently? We don’t know. They won’t say.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is one thing. The attitude of our leading journalists boils down to: “You can ask. We won’t tell.”
This is not good enough.
It is difficult to believe that there would be no leaks on this…
Just thinking from another angle about the whole big shake-up of humanity going on, where in that way of 2 steps forward 1 step back people like you get fodder like this for waking up a world that needs to get riled up.