We all should be so lucky as to be gifted with a dog who is empathetic. We have such a dog, Josie, who always knows when one of us requires comforting. I would have it no other way.
I think a weird counterintuitive fear of being perceived as biased against Trump is in play here. That and the experience-based concern that coverage of this kind now will feed the narrative of the “weaponization” of the establishment system (government, media etc) against a persecuted Trump. While I myself don’t buy that idea (quite the opposite, the man should be in prison already), I’ve had a few close encounters with those who do. And I have left those encounters with a feeling of profound disquiet about our future. As a former American diplomat, I truly never would have thought this could happen here. Let’s hope the needed critical mass of our fellow citizens wake up in time to put it to a stop once and for all.
First story - as in top left - on the NYTimes web edition today:
Headline: Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
Dek: With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
Graph 3: "He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race."
An improvement. But someone needs to us the phrase "exhibits symptoms of dementia".
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.
I wonder if in the race to expand the NYTimes subscriber base, the publisher has decided that Democrats consume opinion and Republicans consume headlines and photos. That would explain the Trump friendly headlines and obvious pro Trump bias in the copy editors' selection of photos of Harris/Walz vs Trump/Vance. They even had a grotesque collage of Kamala Harris's photo with Trump's face to accompany one of their bothsideism op eds.
I only saw a bit of the debate, so my comment is about what was broadcast afterward. I was disheartened by the reports of Vance winning. But the next day, it was clear from voter surveys that it was more like a tie and that Walz was the clear winner when it came to compassion, trust, and likability. I would like to see a thoughtful analysis of the gap between pundits' reactions and voters' reactions. Isn't this a reason to call them out? This indicates that despite Vance's slick presentation, voters had the good sense to look more than skin deep. Surprising but reassuring. The world that pundits live in and the world the rest of us live in are two different places. I'm really not interested in the pundit world. For all of their education and training, their focus sure seems rudimentary.
I actually wrote them a letter after they endorsed Kamala Harris for President asking why they didn’t communicate this idea to their copy desk where in my experience of newspapers is that the copy staff edits stories and writes headlines . Why did these people persist in sanewashing DJT. He is not a sane person! Why is the article about the Smith indictment minimized so much. Yes, the Middle East is a problem, but shouldn’t it have had the single column of coverage? While Smith’s indictment is much more important to us as Americans? And shouldn’t it have had a bigger head and two columns? Just sayin’
The 2016 front page you reproduced illustrates one of the biggest issues in improving political journalism: there is a huge "sunk cost" problem. Any serious effort in this direction would have to involve accounting for that page and its possible consequences, and doing so would implicate everyone in Times editorship from Dean Baquet forward. The page cannot be substantively defended, and its possible effects were appalling -- which would make the exercise very painful, and costly to the paper's reputation and self-image. Nor is this the only such situation involved in all the years of denial, and the toll for accountability keeps rising.
As well, a reformation project would require admitting that the "industry" of supposed "left-wing" critics that Maggie Haberman recently disparaged has regularly been right, and that in treating its members with disdain the Times has equally regularly been wrong. Doing so would also be excruciating.
What would motivate journalistic leaders to accept that amount of professional pain -- especially when they have available the option of "refuge-seeking" (in Jay Rosen's term) by continuing to evade the issue? That's not to say that emphasizing the necessity for improvement as you and others do is pointless. On the contrary, it is of enormous value, both for the record and for the chance that this advice will at some point be taken seriously. It is just to make clear that the problem is substantial and in many ways getting larger.
If a NYT editor broke the Omertà code, he or she might have said:
"The Oct 3, 2024 edition was a big news day, with the Mideast war, big Hurricane problems, the VP debate, and the dock strike all competing with the Trump news; and you know, if you've seen one set of Trump-related testimony, you've seen them all. The 2016 Oct. 29 edition had much less competing news going on, so we filled up Page 1 with what we assumed would interest the most readers. So: Hillary, Hillary, and Hillary!"
I've never liked the journalistic version of Parkinson's Law, viz. stories expand when space has to be filled, because it usually inflates the apparent news value of particular stories or photos. But in 2016 it was long obvious that the NYT was pouring it on thick in their critical Hillary coverage, just as they have been mostly easy on Trump in 2024, not to mention their practice of "sanewashing" Trump. After all of this time I am unwilling to give the major news organizations a pass simply because Trump has been so unusual as a candidate. They have had ample time to figure out how to cover Trump.
For me the Sept 5 Op-Ed essay in The Washington Post by A.G. Sulzberger (Chair of the NYT Co.) was revealing. He explains pretty well the techniques employed by Viktor Orban in Hungary to neuter the local press. A.G. continues by expressing great concern about the future of press freedom in the U.S. If the NYT is threatened, he said they will pursue various legal defenses, as they have in famous cases in the past. But then he pointedly says that despite pressures to do so, the NYT must not become "political" in its coverage, as that is not its journalistic mission, and it would harm its credibility--and brand.
Two broad problems: The NYT is very political when it wants to be, and everyone knows it. (See the deluge of stories & opinion pieces designed to force Joe Biden from the election campaign, or the many Hillary Clinton stories, or various other episodes over the past 50 years. The Times also has given younger journalists greater latitude to express themselves in political terms, which is obvious in some stories and headlines.
.
The other problem is what happens when push really does come to shove? If Trump regains power and the Supreme Court continues on its present path, then legal defenses against Orban-style attacks on the press may not be viable. Then what? I am sure there are people in Times management who are quite aware of what could happen. The other factor in the background is that the NYT in various ways has focused relentlessly & very successfully on maintaining, growing and broadening its subscription base into new audience segments. (Now around 11,000,000 subscribers). Success here is what determines financial viability, since advertising no longer pays for the bulk of Times revenue. The NYT deserves great credit for solving an enormous business problem where others have mostly failed. But: I am convinced this business imperative contributes to Sulzberger's incoherent argument.
This topic takes me back to the glory days of the New York tabloids a half-century ago, when the page one banner headline was known as "the wood" (for the large wooden type traditionally used to set it). I can imagine the words "SO WHAT?" dominating the page after release of Smith's brief, with a subhead along the lines of "Trump as Pence Fled Mob." Same idea as the Daily News' famous head on October 30, 1975, after the president rejected the city's bailout bid, "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." Modern headline writers still have their moments, but there was something special about that visual shout into the eyeballs of a million people as they emerged from the subway.
Somewhat related: I think one of the toughest jobs today is chyron-writer for cable TV news.
I'm still in shock about all the coverage (not just at the Times ) that claims that Vance "won" the debate. Since when is lying in almost every answer "winning" a debate? I'd call it running away from a debate. How low have we sunk here. He didn't answer the questions and whatever answers he gave were mostly lies.
But I want to take it a step further and also complain about Ross Douthat's appalling column that showed up halfway through the debate where he claimed that Vance blew Walz away. No apologies today as far as I can tell about rushing off to bed instead of honestly reporting Vance's complete meltdown at the end. All this may be par for the course these days but here's what I still find hard to comprehend. Douthat is the Time's resident conservative Christian as a convert to traditionalist Catholicism. Vance is his friend and co-religionist and also a convert. I spent many years teaching at a Jesuit university. I am not Catholic and certainly don't agree with a lot of Catholic theology. But there are two things I admired all the years I was there: an emphasis on honesty and an emphasis on serving the poor and immigrant communities in a way that honors them as decent human beings. How can a professed Catholic smear immigrant communities the way Vance does which is nothing but full on hatred and lies and how can Douthat admire a man of such hatred and say that he "won" a debate in which almost every question was treated as an opportunity to trash immigrants? Why is this man still a columnist at the Times?
There was one bright light, though, at the Times today and that was Masha Gessen's column. She nailed it.
The corporate media is interested in clicks, ratings, money, and tax breaks, so they cover TFG as if he’s a normal candidate. That’s why I canceled my subscription after 40 years.
I hope so, too. I fear that there will be violence no matter which candidate wins and, if and when that happens, it’ll be interesting to see how the media covers it.
NYT has abrogated its responsibility to the public good. Shameful.
We all should be so lucky as to be gifted with a dog who is empathetic. We have such a dog, Josie, who always knows when one of us requires comforting. I would have it no other way.
I think a weird counterintuitive fear of being perceived as biased against Trump is in play here. That and the experience-based concern that coverage of this kind now will feed the narrative of the “weaponization” of the establishment system (government, media etc) against a persecuted Trump. While I myself don’t buy that idea (quite the opposite, the man should be in prison already), I’ve had a few close encounters with those who do. And I have left those encounters with a feeling of profound disquiet about our future. As a former American diplomat, I truly never would have thought this could happen here. Let’s hope the needed critical mass of our fellow citizens wake up in time to put it to a stop once and for all.
May Comey ROT in h, oh, never mind.
I hope we elect a President for all Americans.
First story - as in top left - on the NYTimes web edition today:
Headline: Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
Dek: With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.
Graph 3: "He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race."
An improvement. But someone needs to us the phrase "exhibits symptoms of dementia".
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.
I wonder if in the race to expand the NYTimes subscriber base, the publisher has decided that Democrats consume opinion and Republicans consume headlines and photos. That would explain the Trump friendly headlines and obvious pro Trump bias in the copy editors' selection of photos of Harris/Walz vs Trump/Vance. They even had a grotesque collage of Kamala Harris's photo with Trump's face to accompany one of their bothsideism op eds.
Excellent point. I had not thought of that.
I only saw a bit of the debate, so my comment is about what was broadcast afterward. I was disheartened by the reports of Vance winning. But the next day, it was clear from voter surveys that it was more like a tie and that Walz was the clear winner when it came to compassion, trust, and likability. I would like to see a thoughtful analysis of the gap between pundits' reactions and voters' reactions. Isn't this a reason to call them out? This indicates that despite Vance's slick presentation, voters had the good sense to look more than skin deep. Surprising but reassuring. The world that pundits live in and the world the rest of us live in are two different places. I'm really not interested in the pundit world. For all of their education and training, their focus sure seems rudimentary.
Maybe after the election, fates willing, we will get some retrospective coverage of this sort.
I actually wrote them a letter after they endorsed Kamala Harris for President asking why they didn’t communicate this idea to their copy desk where in my experience of newspapers is that the copy staff edits stories and writes headlines . Why did these people persist in sanewashing DJT. He is not a sane person! Why is the article about the Smith indictment minimized so much. Yes, the Middle East is a problem, but shouldn’t it have had the single column of coverage? While Smith’s indictment is much more important to us as Americans? And shouldn’t it have had a bigger head and two columns? Just sayin’
Just sayin' indeed! I assume you did not get an answer. (But good questions.)
No, of course not. If they publish it they’ll let me know (har har).
The 2016 front page you reproduced illustrates one of the biggest issues in improving political journalism: there is a huge "sunk cost" problem. Any serious effort in this direction would have to involve accounting for that page and its possible consequences, and doing so would implicate everyone in Times editorship from Dean Baquet forward. The page cannot be substantively defended, and its possible effects were appalling -- which would make the exercise very painful, and costly to the paper's reputation and self-image. Nor is this the only such situation involved in all the years of denial, and the toll for accountability keeps rising.
As well, a reformation project would require admitting that the "industry" of supposed "left-wing" critics that Maggie Haberman recently disparaged has regularly been right, and that in treating its members with disdain the Times has equally regularly been wrong. Doing so would also be excruciating.
What would motivate journalistic leaders to accept that amount of professional pain -- especially when they have available the option of "refuge-seeking" (in Jay Rosen's term) by continuing to evade the issue? That's not to say that emphasizing the necessity for improvement as you and others do is pointless. On the contrary, it is of enormous value, both for the record and for the chance that this advice will at some point be taken seriously. It is just to make clear that the problem is substantial and in many ways getting larger.
Yes, thank you, another important clarifying (and cautionary) note.
If a NYT editor broke the Omertà code, he or she might have said:
"The Oct 3, 2024 edition was a big news day, with the Mideast war, big Hurricane problems, the VP debate, and the dock strike all competing with the Trump news; and you know, if you've seen one set of Trump-related testimony, you've seen them all. The 2016 Oct. 29 edition had much less competing news going on, so we filled up Page 1 with what we assumed would interest the most readers. So: Hillary, Hillary, and Hillary!"
I've never liked the journalistic version of Parkinson's Law, viz. stories expand when space has to be filled, because it usually inflates the apparent news value of particular stories or photos. But in 2016 it was long obvious that the NYT was pouring it on thick in their critical Hillary coverage, just as they have been mostly easy on Trump in 2024, not to mention their practice of "sanewashing" Trump. After all of this time I am unwilling to give the major news organizations a pass simply because Trump has been so unusual as a candidate. They have had ample time to figure out how to cover Trump.
For me the Sept 5 Op-Ed essay in The Washington Post by A.G. Sulzberger (Chair of the NYT Co.) was revealing. He explains pretty well the techniques employed by Viktor Orban in Hungary to neuter the local press. A.G. continues by expressing great concern about the future of press freedom in the U.S. If the NYT is threatened, he said they will pursue various legal defenses, as they have in famous cases in the past. But then he pointedly says that despite pressures to do so, the NYT must not become "political" in its coverage, as that is not its journalistic mission, and it would harm its credibility--and brand.
Two broad problems: The NYT is very political when it wants to be, and everyone knows it. (See the deluge of stories & opinion pieces designed to force Joe Biden from the election campaign, or the many Hillary Clinton stories, or various other episodes over the past 50 years. The Times also has given younger journalists greater latitude to express themselves in political terms, which is obvious in some stories and headlines.
.
The other problem is what happens when push really does come to shove? If Trump regains power and the Supreme Court continues on its present path, then legal defenses against Orban-style attacks on the press may not be viable. Then what? I am sure there are people in Times management who are quite aware of what could happen. The other factor in the background is that the NYT in various ways has focused relentlessly & very successfully on maintaining, growing and broadening its subscription base into new audience segments. (Now around 11,000,000 subscribers). Success here is what determines financial viability, since advertising no longer pays for the bulk of Times revenue. The NYT deserves great credit for solving an enormous business problem where others have mostly failed. But: I am convinced this business imperative contributes to Sulzberger's incoherent argument.
This is an excellent analyses. Thank you. I think this puts things in clearer perspective for all of us.
This topic takes me back to the glory days of the New York tabloids a half-century ago, when the page one banner headline was known as "the wood" (for the large wooden type traditionally used to set it). I can imagine the words "SO WHAT?" dominating the page after release of Smith's brief, with a subhead along the lines of "Trump as Pence Fled Mob." Same idea as the Daily News' famous head on October 30, 1975, after the president rejected the city's bailout bid, "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." Modern headline writers still have their moments, but there was something special about that visual shout into the eyeballs of a million people as they emerged from the subway.
Somewhat related: I think one of the toughest jobs today is chyron-writer for cable TV news.
I knew someone who was a (subversive-minded) chryon-writer for Fox for a while. She had fun while it lasted.
I'm still in shock about all the coverage (not just at the Times ) that claims that Vance "won" the debate. Since when is lying in almost every answer "winning" a debate? I'd call it running away from a debate. How low have we sunk here. He didn't answer the questions and whatever answers he gave were mostly lies.
But I want to take it a step further and also complain about Ross Douthat's appalling column that showed up halfway through the debate where he claimed that Vance blew Walz away. No apologies today as far as I can tell about rushing off to bed instead of honestly reporting Vance's complete meltdown at the end. All this may be par for the course these days but here's what I still find hard to comprehend. Douthat is the Time's resident conservative Christian as a convert to traditionalist Catholicism. Vance is his friend and co-religionist and also a convert. I spent many years teaching at a Jesuit university. I am not Catholic and certainly don't agree with a lot of Catholic theology. But there are two things I admired all the years I was there: an emphasis on honesty and an emphasis on serving the poor and immigrant communities in a way that honors them as decent human beings. How can a professed Catholic smear immigrant communities the way Vance does which is nothing but full on hatred and lies and how can Douthat admire a man of such hatred and say that he "won" a debate in which almost every question was treated as an opportunity to trash immigrants? Why is this man still a columnist at the Times?
There was one bright light, though, at the Times today and that was Masha Gessen's column. She nailed it.
I'll just say that I absolutely agree about Masha Gessen's great column.
Thanks for highlighting that. (For others, here's the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/opinion/masha-gessen-vp-debate.html )
The corporate media is interested in clicks, ratings, money, and tax breaks, so they cover TFG as if he’s a normal candidate. That’s why I canceled my subscription after 40 years.
Me too...but after only 9 years.
I have long understood why the youth don't watch TV (neither do I). Now I understand why they're not interested in reading newspapers either.
I hope so, too. I fear that there will be violence no matter which candidate wins and, if and when that happens, it’ll be interesting to see how the media covers it.
I hope we'll all be in a position, a month or two from now, to talk in some calm about "what the media can do differently..."