You beat Heather Cox Richardson to it on framing. She wrote last night:
This story is about the stealing of our records and the endangerment of our national security—and the heroism of archivists—but it is also a story about the media. The defining narrative of the 2016 election was about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, allegedly mishandled. Again and again, the email story was front-page news. A 2017 study in the Columbia Journalism Review by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about “all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Today, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America noted that the Trump story should mean that finally “political journalists should stop pretending to believe Republicans when they pretend to be outraged about purportedly illegal or unethical behavior by Democrats.” He compiled a long list of all the Fox News Channel stories about Clinton’s emails and said, “Based on the 2015–16 baseline, Trump flagrantly violating the Presidential Records Act should be a massive story.” Aaron Rupar, author of the newsletter Public Notice, tweeted the obvious: “If two prominent reporters broke news that Joe Biden was flushing documents down White House toilets, [Fox News Channel personality Sean] Hannity would anchor special Fox News coverage that would last through 2024. Trump flushing documents down WH toilets has been mentioned twice on Fox News today, once in passing.”
The media should have stopped believing — or pretending to believe — Republicans when they claim to be outraged about Democrats’s”misdeeds” way back in the 90s. By the end of that decade it was obvious to anyone with just a smidgen of objectivity that Republicans were engaged, not only in performative outrage, but in creating Democratic outrages out of thin air.
If Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. hadn’t forced the media to admit this fact, the Republican’s outrageous claims about Bill and Hillary Clinton murdering their close friend Vince Foster should have been more than enough. Republicans spent millions of our tax dollars just on investigations of that vicious and totally insane lie, with little pushback from the mainstream media. Not one of the four Republican-led investigations found any evidence that Foster had been murdered. Those investigations were conducted by Special Counsel Robert Fiske, the Senate Banking Committee, a House committee led by Indiana’s Dan Burton, and the last run by Brett Kavanaugh for Ken Starr. Kavanaugh’s memos which were released under FOIA request showed he had reassured colleagues that he didn’t really believe Foster had been murdered. His investigation alone cost us taxpayers over $2 million.
Not only should the Foster slander have been treated with extreme outrage and scorn by the media it should have proven to them beyond any doubt that Republicans had adopted lying as a main political strategy — if not the main one. A top Republican operative heeping scorn on Democrats for living in the reality-based world and braggin about how Republicans are creating their own reality should have removed all any remaining doubt.
Republicans have been using lies to frame the public’s perception not only of Democrats in general but also their issues.
Thank you. I've made the point before, but will store up to do it more directly: Much as the Wall Street Journal is a first-rate news organization, whose products comes wrapped around a print version of Fox News (the edit page), so too has the NYT become a phenomenal all-fronts tech/business/arts/finance/books/etc news organization, that comes packaged with a print version of a "both-sides" cable news channel. Why their US-politics framing is what it is, and why the paper so stonily resists any reckoning with criticism of it, is ... more than I can answer right now.
The latest illustration of why eliminating the NYT Public Editor was such a mistake. Not all of them were good (and at least one was really bad). But they represented some little bit of accountability or obligation-to-explain.
Margaret Sullivan was a Times public editor. She now writes a media column for the Washington Post which is buried in the Style section under Perspective, not in the main Opinion section. She has done some very good media critiques but most people probably aren’t aware of them because the usually are not posted on the Post’s main page.
She's done a few lousy ones as well--one on an article in the NYT by one of their auto writers about driving a Tesla from DC towards Boston in winter, and having the thing run out of charge. I can't remember the details of what she said, but she criticized the writer, when it was the limitations of the Tesla that were at fault. But Sullivan's brother had a Tesla. On the other hand, I've seen some good ones from her.
In my view, she was one of two really good Pub Eds at the NYT (the other being the first, Dan Okrent). I agree with her much more frequently than I disagree on her WaPo pieces.
She was one of the two or three, out of four or five who never responded to my criticisms of their immigration coverage. I was thorough and consistent in my criticisms. That said, I haven't read her much in the WaPo, but I do remember most recently being impressed by a column she wrote, so I'm not surprised by your reaction to her WaPo pieces.
Thanks for this update to the underlying question - how events and new information are contextualized is as important as that which is being added to the Big Picture - and thank you all the more for the link to Timothy Noah's powerful depiction of DC and the "Asknots" who literally as well as figuratively keep the lights on. I was one of them during the late 70's and early 80's even if I lived far from Washington, and I knew many "lifers" whom I respected immensely for their commitment and sacrifices. I think it is all the more impressive to consider how that expanded network of dedicated public servants enabled an aggregate prosperity that has unfortunately been so unequally accessible to large swaths of the general public (that was a product of ideological choices rather than economic necessity).
Tim Noah is a dear friend, and I thought that was really an important article. But I'm not sure that "the Asknots" is going to catch on as a term. If so, great! And in either case, thanks to him for the piece, and to you for being part of that corps.
I remember when the media labeled the”asknots” who worked for good government policies with the derisive term “goo-goos”. Most of the media finds these people too boring to bother with.
I really appreciate you writing about framing. Framing is particularly corrosive to our political discourse because it works on the subconscious level, then political debate happens only within the frame the media adopts, shutting down any information that contradicts the media’s chosen frame. I hope you keep writing about this and pointing out the frames the media are using.
For example the media has long framed Republicans as good economic stewards — better on the economy and more fiscally responsible. Democrats are reckless spenders and taxers. For year the media ignored the strong evidence that Reagan’s supply side economics was a failure. His claim that tax cuts for the rich (the “producers”) would pay for themselves could have been easily debunked. The evidence was clear from the start that his tax cuts helped explode our national debt as did Bush’s and later Trump’s.
Yet over the years polls have shown that the public has internalized that media’s frame despite the clear evidence that not only does the economy do better under Democrats, Democrats are more likely to reduce debt (except during economic crises when taking on debt is necessary).
In the 90s Republicans loudly proclaimed that Clinton’s and the Democrats’ tax increases on upper incomes would crash the economy; instead we not only had a strong growth, we had a budget surplus that was paying down the national debt.
No wonder our democracy is in such danger when voters have been so badly misled for decades on major issues.
Interesting, thought provoking posts on framing that also got me finally to start paying attention to the wonderful Webb telescope, and to read Timothy Noah's illuminating Asknots piece.
There are so many underreported stories. For example I would like to see more coverage about the expansion of the Panama Canal which has allowed increased shipping to the East Coast ports from Asia. I think the last reporting done by mainstream media was about Republicans accusing JImmy Carter of betraying the country by giving the canal away.
I began subscribing to 'Breaking the News' recently. It's a valuable, perhaps unequaled, tool for understanding journalism, and I love it. Thank you, Mr. Fallows, for creating it.
When I saw the Trump story about classified document being among those taken illegally, I remembered that a national security or foreign policy official from a Democratic administration and taken a small number of documents (I think, he claimed, to refresh his memory for a book), but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks for noting the highlights here.
As noted in a reply several comments up, and in many previous posts, I agree. Overall the NYT is an incredible (in a good way) operation. The framing of US politics is out of sync with everything else.
The mention of Mark Leibovich’s "This Town" recalled his discussion of a young African-American aide to Terry McAuliffe, whom Leibovich dismissed as a political prop. Said prop, Levar Stoney, is now mayor of Richmond and tearing down Confederate statues. Not the greatest of Leibovich's sins, but a memorable one.
In the small world of Virginia politics, I was mayor of Harrisonburg when Levar was SGA president at JMU. I think we still serve together on one infrequently meeting board or committee.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this. I'm one of those people who currently reads newspapers online, and I wasn't aware of this.
The NYT has definitely deteriorated since the end of the last century. My father, who read it religiously, scoured it, would be appalled.
I pay particular attention to immigration. I suspect that if the mainstream media had done a decent job reporting on it, and the Democratic party had altered their policies based on good reporting, TFG never would have been elected, as immigration was his signature issue when he first ran. I wrote regularly to at least 4 NYT ombuds over the years. Two of them ultimately told me they were thinking of writing about my complaints. Both of them were gone from the NYT within around six weeks of my hearing from them. The NYT's bias was apparently policy coming down from Sulzberger Jr. Their coverage was much better before he took over.
At some point, I will write about the time when there was a chance the NYT public editor would be ... me . (It happened when I was about to move to China — and did in fact go to China, which was the right choice.) But, as noted above, it was the wrong choice for them to eliminate the position.
I agree with Reich’s belief that it’s not corporate money that is mainly responsible for the mainstream media’s bias:
“ Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.”
You beat Heather Cox Richardson to it on framing. She wrote last night:
This story is about the stealing of our records and the endangerment of our national security—and the heroism of archivists—but it is also a story about the media. The defining narrative of the 2016 election was about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, allegedly mishandled. Again and again, the email story was front-page news. A 2017 study in the Columbia Journalism Review by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about “all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Today, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America noted that the Trump story should mean that finally “political journalists should stop pretending to believe Republicans when they pretend to be outraged about purportedly illegal or unethical behavior by Democrats.” He compiled a long list of all the Fox News Channel stories about Clinton’s emails and said, “Based on the 2015–16 baseline, Trump flagrantly violating the Presidential Records Act should be a massive story.” Aaron Rupar, author of the newsletter Public Notice, tweeted the obvious: “If two prominent reporters broke news that Joe Biden was flushing documents down White House toilets, [Fox News Channel personality Sean] Hannity would anchor special Fox News coverage that would last through 2024. Trump flushing documents down WH toilets has been mentioned twice on Fox News today, once in passing.”
The media should have stopped believing — or pretending to believe — Republicans when they claim to be outraged about Democrats’s”misdeeds” way back in the 90s. By the end of that decade it was obvious to anyone with just a smidgen of objectivity that Republicans were engaged, not only in performative outrage, but in creating Democratic outrages out of thin air.
If Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. hadn’t forced the media to admit this fact, the Republican’s outrageous claims about Bill and Hillary Clinton murdering their close friend Vince Foster should have been more than enough. Republicans spent millions of our tax dollars just on investigations of that vicious and totally insane lie, with little pushback from the mainstream media. Not one of the four Republican-led investigations found any evidence that Foster had been murdered. Those investigations were conducted by Special Counsel Robert Fiske, the Senate Banking Committee, a House committee led by Indiana’s Dan Burton, and the last run by Brett Kavanaugh for Ken Starr. Kavanaugh’s memos which were released under FOIA request showed he had reassured colleagues that he didn’t really believe Foster had been murdered. His investigation alone cost us taxpayers over $2 million.
Not only should the Foster slander have been treated with extreme outrage and scorn by the media it should have proven to them beyond any doubt that Republicans had adopted lying as a main political strategy — if not the main one. A top Republican operative heeping scorn on Democrats for living in the reality-based world and braggin about how Republicans are creating their own reality should have removed all any remaining doubt.
Republicans have been using lies to frame the public’s perception not only of Democrats in general but also their issues.
Thank you. I've made the point before, but will store up to do it more directly: Much as the Wall Street Journal is a first-rate news organization, whose products comes wrapped around a print version of Fox News (the edit page), so too has the NYT become a phenomenal all-fronts tech/business/arts/finance/books/etc news organization, that comes packaged with a print version of a "both-sides" cable news channel. Why their US-politics framing is what it is, and why the paper so stonily resists any reckoning with criticism of it, is ... more than I can answer right now.
The latest illustration of why eliminating the NYT Public Editor was such a mistake. Not all of them were good (and at least one was really bad). But they represented some little bit of accountability or obligation-to-explain.
Margaret Sullivan was a Times public editor. She now writes a media column for the Washington Post which is buried in the Style section under Perspective, not in the main Opinion section. She has done some very good media critiques but most people probably aren’t aware of them because the usually are not posted on the Post’s main page.
She's done a few lousy ones as well--one on an article in the NYT by one of their auto writers about driving a Tesla from DC towards Boston in winter, and having the thing run out of charge. I can't remember the details of what she said, but she criticized the writer, when it was the limitations of the Tesla that were at fault. But Sullivan's brother had a Tesla. On the other hand, I've seen some good ones from her.
In my view, she was one of two really good Pub Eds at the NYT (the other being the first, Dan Okrent). I agree with her much more frequently than I disagree on her WaPo pieces.
I think Okrent was one of the two who responded favorably to my criticisms.
She was one of the two or three, out of four or five who never responded to my criticisms of their immigration coverage. I was thorough and consistent in my criticisms. That said, I haven't read her much in the WaPo, but I do remember most recently being impressed by a column she wrote, so I'm not surprised by your reaction to her WaPo pieces.
Thanks for this update to the underlying question - how events and new information are contextualized is as important as that which is being added to the Big Picture - and thank you all the more for the link to Timothy Noah's powerful depiction of DC and the "Asknots" who literally as well as figuratively keep the lights on. I was one of them during the late 70's and early 80's even if I lived far from Washington, and I knew many "lifers" whom I respected immensely for their commitment and sacrifices. I think it is all the more impressive to consider how that expanded network of dedicated public servants enabled an aggregate prosperity that has unfortunately been so unequally accessible to large swaths of the general public (that was a product of ideological choices rather than economic necessity).
Tim Noah is a dear friend, and I thought that was really an important article. But I'm not sure that "the Asknots" is going to catch on as a term. If so, great! And in either case, thanks to him for the piece, and to you for being part of that corps.
I remember when the media labeled the”asknots” who worked for good government policies with the derisive term “goo-goos”. Most of the media finds these people too boring to bother with.
Yes, well put.
I really appreciate you writing about framing. Framing is particularly corrosive to our political discourse because it works on the subconscious level, then political debate happens only within the frame the media adopts, shutting down any information that contradicts the media’s chosen frame. I hope you keep writing about this and pointing out the frames the media are using.
For example the media has long framed Republicans as good economic stewards — better on the economy and more fiscally responsible. Democrats are reckless spenders and taxers. For year the media ignored the strong evidence that Reagan’s supply side economics was a failure. His claim that tax cuts for the rich (the “producers”) would pay for themselves could have been easily debunked. The evidence was clear from the start that his tax cuts helped explode our national debt as did Bush’s and later Trump’s.
Yet over the years polls have shown that the public has internalized that media’s frame despite the clear evidence that not only does the economy do better under Democrats, Democrats are more likely to reduce debt (except during economic crises when taking on debt is necessary).
In the 90s Republicans loudly proclaimed that Clinton’s and the Democrats’ tax increases on upper incomes would crash the economy; instead we not only had a strong growth, we had a budget surplus that was paying down the national debt.
No wonder our democracy is in such danger when voters have been so badly misled for decades on major issues.
Interesting, thought provoking posts on framing that also got me finally to start paying attention to the wonderful Webb telescope, and to read Timothy Noah's illuminating Asknots piece.
Thanks. And this is a reminder to me to get back on the "what about the telescope?" beat.
There are so many underreported stories. For example I would like to see more coverage about the expansion of the Panama Canal which has allowed increased shipping to the East Coast ports from Asia. I think the last reporting done by mainstream media was about Republicans accusing JImmy Carter of betraying the country by giving the canal away.
I remember those days! Actually was on the presidential trip to Panama to "give away" the Canal, as Jesse Helms put it.
I began subscribing to 'Breaking the News' recently. It's a valuable, perhaps unequaled, tool for understanding journalism, and I love it. Thank you, Mr. Fallows, for creating it.
Thank you, I appreciate your reading this, and your support.
When I saw the Trump story about classified document being among those taken illegally, I remembered that a national security or foreign policy official from a Democratic administration and taken a small number of documents (I think, he claimed, to refresh his memory for a book), but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks for noting the highlights here.
beautiful writing, thank you!
Thanks!
The Times is wearing -- and so indispensable.
As noted in a reply several comments up, and in many previous posts, I agree. Overall the NYT is an incredible (in a good way) operation. The framing of US politics is out of sync with everything else.
The mention of Mark Leibovich’s "This Town" recalled his discussion of a young African-American aide to Terry McAuliffe, whom Leibovich dismissed as a political prop. Said prop, Levar Stoney, is now mayor of Richmond and tearing down Confederate statues. Not the greatest of Leibovich's sins, but a memorable one.
I had forgotten that, but recall it now that you bring it up.
In the small world of Virginia politics, I was mayor of Harrisonburg when Levar was SGA president at JMU. I think we still serve together on one infrequently meeting board or committee.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this. I'm one of those people who currently reads newspapers online, and I wasn't aware of this.
The NYT has definitely deteriorated since the end of the last century. My father, who read it religiously, scoured it, would be appalled.
I pay particular attention to immigration. I suspect that if the mainstream media had done a decent job reporting on it, and the Democratic party had altered their policies based on good reporting, TFG never would have been elected, as immigration was his signature issue when he first ran. I wrote regularly to at least 4 NYT ombuds over the years. Two of them ultimately told me they were thinking of writing about my complaints. Both of them were gone from the NYT within around six weeks of my hearing from them. The NYT's bias was apparently policy coming down from Sulzberger Jr. Their coverage was much better before he took over.
At some point, I will write about the time when there was a chance the NYT public editor would be ... me . (It happened when I was about to move to China — and did in fact go to China, which was the right choice.) But, as noted above, it was the wrong choice for them to eliminate the position.
Agree as does Robert Reich, this is an insightful piece he wrote for the Guardian, with the possible exception of the final line: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/09/whats-really-wrong-mainstream-media
I agree with Reich’s belief that it’s not corporate money that is mainly responsible for the mainstream media’s bias:
“ Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.”
I agree that these decisions by the press reflect cultural / social pressures, more than business interests of the corporations.
I had not seen that; thank you!