The Republican party’s descent into post-truth derp and denial is the most important political story of our era. Establishment media has done a spectacularly poor job of chronicling it, because it does not fit well into any sort of “both sides do it” narrative. Many establishment journalists tried to jam the Trump boom in to the standard narrative by equating Donald Trump with Bernie Sanders, but it didn’t take, and they’ve moved on to treating Trump as just another Herman Cain/Steve Forbes who will inevitably be knocked off by a good ol’ GOP daddy.
I was pleased to see old friend young Conor Friedersdorf write a decent piece admitting that “farcical candidacies are difficult for the GOP to avoid or end quickly because the party is averse to certain truths that would help inoculate it against demagogues”.
And this nihilistic piece by Jack Shafer is even better (though it stupidly ends by saying Democratic candidates could get away with bald-faced lies too).
They’re indifferent to the truth, content to say the first things that pop into their brains. You can see this strategy at work in Trump’s story about the American Muslims celebrating the fall of the twin towers, or his bogus assertion that the federal government is steering refugees to states that have Republican governors, or his claim that “61 percent of our bridges are in trouble.” He’s just winging it. If something gets broken in the telling of one of his stories, he doesn’t think it’s his fault.
[….]Ben Carson brings the quality of moonshine to his lies. Whenever he goes on, he voices the sort of stuff you hear mumbled from the sozzled end of a dive bar.
[…]What’s keeping the rest of the GOP from accepting the new rules? Carly, stop being defensive about your Planned Parenthood lies and start claiming that you saw those fetuses being sold in person. Jeb, you’re already taking credit for the Florida housing bubble—why not plant your family flag on the Internet, too? And Rubio, you can start talking about how Kasich comes from a family of known criminals …
Bingo. Why not just compete to see who can be the most appealingly (to the GOP base) ridiculous liar? It’s the obvious strategy. We, and other unserious partisans Steve M, have been saying so for years.
Amir Khalid
I’m assuming you meant to say “it does not fit well …”
Indifference to the truth is pretty much Harry Frankfurt’s formal definition of bullshit, isn’t it?
Doug!
@Amir Khalid:
Thanks
Starfish
There is an active shooting at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood.
p.a.
David Brooks has a sinecure for life and Steve Gilliard is dead. Are there words in other languages that define this tragedy better than what we have in English?
Dr. McCoy
They are not sure if it was actually Planned Parenthood.
I live here.
The Planned Parenthood facility is part of a shopping complex, it moved from it’s location in Old Colorado City.
scav
@Dr. McCoy: Hard to tell if that makes it more or less a demonstration of the good old second amendment. Random targetting of passerbys or defensive of baybees random targeting of innocent passerbys — which wins the most brownie points of automatic forgiveness?
sharl
I wonder how much of the GOP/wingnut insanity is in the process of being normalized, in a manner similar to how the NYT and other domestic media refused to call waterboarding torture – which is clearly something that only foreign entities do {/snark} – and referred to it instead by various euphemisms, primarily enhanced interrogation.
A Reddit post (found via Weigel’s twitter feed) does a very good (and creepily plausible) version of how Trump might respond to a question addressing his creeping fascism. Final two paragraphs:
~
OT – On an unrelated note, the last time I checked, that shooter still on the loose in Colorado Springs is said to be in or near a Planned Parenthood facility. I highlighted that “or near” bit because the “pro-life” gun nut crowd are making sure to emphasize that part, if my social media feeds are any indication. So you might want to hold off arguing with similar such folks in your family or office until the facts of the situation come out, at least on the anti-abortion aspect. [The gun nut thing is valid, not that you’ll get anywhere arguing with that crowd.]
ETA: I see Dr. McCoy already addressed the topic of my OT bit…
Starfish
@Dr. McCoy: Thanks for keeping us posted.
SiubhanDuinne
@Dr. McCoy:
Hope you are safe and stay out of harm’s way.
Doug R
Were the good old days of yellow journalism really any better?
Amir Khalid
I was struck by Jack Shafer’s accusation that Hillary practises a form of deception by lawyerly parsing of the truth. I was not aware of this; so far as I know, not even the Juicitariat’s (until recently) most strident Bernista, whose name I am not keen to invoke, has seen fit to accuse her of it. Is anyone here familiar with the particulars of this charge?
MattF
But various Republican Establishment types have called Trump out both publicly and privately– and gotten zero response. Zero from the media, zero from the Trump fans. I think Trump’s brothers-in-arms are Limbaugh, Beck, and O’Reilly– the difference is that Trump is not only an entertainer, but is also reaching for political power.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: I will say that sozzled is in competition to be my new favourite word.
Wag
I want a time warp that’d take back to 1979 so we can warm America about the disaster coming if Reagan gets elected.
Calouste
There are about 30 Republican governors, so that percentage seems about right.
Yutsano
@Dr. McCoy: Agreed with all above. Please keep your head low and hopefully this passes before too much more blood is shed.
Brachiator
Establishment media is dying, and it misses all kinds of larger stories to ignore the media deathwatch. A soon to be breaking news story suggests that the LA Times is about to be sold to a local group of philanthropists. But over the holiday weekend, the under-reported story was the evisceration of the newspaper via buyouts. From LA Observed:
Ironically enough, this story has been most discussed on a closed Facebook group.
Columbia Journalism Review earlier had a good story detailing how Tribune Company was killing the LA paper.
You cannot have any quality political coverage if you don’t have good reporters and editors.
Villago Delenda Est
@sharl: What’s the problem with fascism? Because, The Donald, it leads to abuses of power as it has no accountability for power. It leads to tyranny. It leads to death.
Mike in NC
In 2020 their frontrunner at this time of year will be a convicted serial killer. In the end he might have to settle for the VP slot.
Mike J
@sharl:
So do you think the gun nut was going after the hand doctor, the optometrist, or the physical therapist?
Villago Delenda Est
@Wag: A lot of this has to do with the shitty grade Z movie star. The entire concept of deferring maintenance on infrastructure for short term budget burnishing at the expense of the long term. The smart thing to do is pay less now, than a lot more later. When you’re totally focused on the short term (that is, the next election) you don’t give a shit about the long term consequences.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike J: Hard to say at this point, but odds are good in Colo Springs that some deranged forced-birther is going after PP.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: “Both Sides Do It” DEMANDS that Hillary be attacked in the same article for SOMETHING.
pat
@Amir Khalid:
So lawyerly “parsing of the truth” is now equivalent to “making shit up.”
edit: Just to be clear, it is just this sort of “both-siderism” in the article that makes me despair.
Chris T.
Madness takes its toll.
Reply #1: Please have exact change.
Reply #2: I just use (EZ-Pass / Fastrak / insert your local system here)
Mnemosyne
@Mike J:
Given how sadly common domestic violence shootings are, it’s certainly possible that it’s an asshole who decided to try and kill his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend at another office and not actually related to Planned Parenthood being nearby.
sharl
@Mike J: Heh, I wasn’t talking about what *I* thought!
Just heard the final bit from a Colorado Public Radio reporter that it was in fact the PP facility that the gunman went into. [As opposed to, say, after an estranged spouse in a nearby business, or maybe an intended parking lot execution, like what happened outside my apartment last year. Those things happen, you know!]
ETA: Beat again, this time by Mnem!
Brachiator
Newspaper Death Watch Part 2:
Parting words from a Ventura California editor and columnist who is moving on to other opportunities.
Soon there may not be much of a media left to do more than make notes at Trump’s coronation. Of course, Trump has elegantly but effectively countered attempts by the press to report on him by deftly preaching to the choir that sings of the media being PC lackeys. Add to this the people who increasingly shun the news, establishment or alternative, unless it is comforting pablum of entertainment related stories or simplistic BS that appeals to their biases.
Mandalay
From a Reuters poll published today:
It’s not quite as bad as looks for Trump though, because Carson is also dropping like a stone.
A beleaguered Trump weakly winning the GOP nomination would be the ideal outcome.
MattF
@Mandalay: Maybe. But I’m wary of drawing conclusions from a single poll. The low response rate in polling these days makes everything more error-prone.
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
When is the next GOP debate? It would be interesting to see if any of the other GOP hopefuls attack Trump more vehemently. But even at 31 percent or so, Trump seems to have, for now, a strong core of support.
Mike in NC
@Villago Delenda Est: The media has forced us to think no farther ahead than the next election cycle, which begins the day after the last set of ballots are cast.
Yutsano
@MattF: The magic number used to be 400 respondents, weighted for various demographic changes. Now I wonder if that standard needs updating since cell phone refusals are much higher.
catclub
@Yutsano: How about bumfuzzled, as an accompaniment?
Anoniminous
@Mandalay:
Not what HuffPollster Poll of Polls is showing
rikyrah
@Starfish:
Domestic Terrorist
Helen
@Villago Delenda Est:
Earlier; maybe two hours ago, on MSNBC a person who is bunkered down in one of the stores said that her store is between the PP and a Chase bank and that “all the shots happened at the bank.” So there is a possibility this is a failed bank robbery and the robber ran to the PP for cover.
MSNBC doesn’t seem to have picked up on that. Like they didn’t hear it.
C.V. Danes
Trump is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is Trump. If you don’t think so, then consider that the Republican strategy to defeat Trump is to out-Trump him.
I present to you the fuhrer principle, 2015, folks.
catclub
@Brachiator: I thought that Kasich ad against Trump, where he modifies the “I didn’ speak up because I wasn’t a Jew” passage, to fit Trump, was a big deal.
98% of the way to Godwin, and Trump is Hitler in that story.
So far, crickets..
bystander
The inability of the media to conclude that telling a cascade of lies makes one a liar is the sine qua non of their moral bankruptcy.
sharl
Periodic updates from a Colorado Springs local media outlet here. Some rather ominous snippets there that I really, really hope end up well, or at least not with fatalities.
And because of course:
catclub
OT: Bible passages ( from Leviticus, no less) that have not been quoted approvingly by Governors rejecting Syrian refugees: Lev 19:34
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mandalay: Will anything ever be considered beyond the pale for Trump? Clearly disprovable lies are not. Unveiled insults are not. And now disabilities is not.
geg6
@Helen:
Just saw on the local news a report confirming that it was definitely at the PP facility. Said the cops are inside with the shooter, still exchanging shots. If this isn’t terrorism, nothing is.
redshirt
Right wing media = Radio Rwanda.
They want their listeners/viewers to go out and kill liberals.
We’re in a war. It’s time we all recognize it.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): And now mocking disabilities is not. I miss being able to edit. But it’s a small price to pay for the advantages of MBBJ and EBBJ.
Mike G
Another way of saying they’re gullible authoritarian followers conditioned by religion to believe any made-up shit that reinforces their prejudices.
Muslims = bad
celebrating on 9/11 = bad
“Muslims were celebrating on 9/11 !!!”
Brachiator
@Doug R:
No, and crappy journalism has been the norm for British and American newspapers. It’s been that way since the beginning of the Republic. Alexander Hamilton used to attack his political enemies through a paper he helped found in 1801, the New York Evening Post.
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
I’m sick of this bullshit about what we lose when those papers go away. In the old days we had to read newspaper columns from Broder and Malkin and Will because we had no alternative. Now we can read Juan Cole and TNC and Krugman instead.
I’m really not seeing any downside.
cahuenga
Idunno. This ‘descent’ hardly feels like a new development. The GOP has been flat out lying and furiously dick-waving since the Cheney administration.
redshirt
@Brachiator: The difference is saturation. The Hearst newspapers were diverse amongst themselves and did not have nearly the reach of 24/7 propaganda channel alongside propaganda think tanks and propaganda web sites etc.
Brachiator
@catclub:
Trump supporters don’t care about allusions to the past. And they see Trump as coming to save America and make it great again. No connection at all to Adolph. Who was coming to save Germany and make it great again.
D58826
@Mike J: There is a bank across the street apparently so it could be a botched bank robbery. Or even if it was the planned parenthood office it still could be be a domestic dispute with an employee or client.. So lets not jump to conclusions. Remember first reports are sketchy and usually wrong. Now I would not exactly fall out of my chair if it turns out to be domestic terrorism but its to early to tell..
catclub
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
From Kevin Drum. Relevant
Mike in NC
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): At an upcoming Trump campaign stop, members of the audience will draw numbers to see who will join the candidate onstage to club to death a baby seal.
redshirt
@redshirt: For example, there’s a gun shop I drive by regularly and of course they have a sign out front where they like to put right wing topics. They were telling me to “behead ISIS” a year ago. I knew of ISIS, but didn’t really care, but here’s this guy who’s fired up enough to tell the world.
They’re training Brownshirts.
Mike G
@Brachiator:
I’ve noticed their op-ed page has gone hard-wingnut lately.
They always had a few wingnut special-needs cases like Jonah Goldberg but now it’s nothing but nutbars.
bago
@Mike G: Yep. It’s the only way to parse Sarah Palin. She just knows which words are “good”, which ones are bad, and throws them in the ad-lib pit.
Mandalay
@Anoniminous:
Well duh. All of those polls are older than the Reuters poll.
Tim C.
@Mandalay: Very much this. He local formerly dominant paper that’s also dying, The Oregonian, was at best a country club Republican mouthpiece whose editorial policy was “Meier and Frank is having a sale”. Now they get scooped regularly by the alt weekly, Willamette Week, that actually bothers investigating and reporting news.
Gex
As I recall Al Gore rather accurately tried to take credit for his work helping the Internet come to be and the media went out of its way to distort his statement such that it seemed like a lie and then excoriated him for their version of the story when not actively mocking him.
So no. No, Dems can’t get away with it. They can barely get the truth out without the press putting their thumb on the scale to help keep the GOP seeming like a valid political party.
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Really. Here’s Charles Foster Kane, doing a pretty good imitation of Hearst starting the Spanish American War:
And to talk about the reach of propaganda media as newspapers and magazines collapse is just not plausible.
And what the Web provides for most effectively is a way for people to roll their own propaganda as they flee to sites that reinforce their own opinions and biases. Here’s the irony: at best the Internets provides a lightning fast resource that people can use to discover the truth and verify facts. In response, people have deliberately created sites full of lies, mythology, conspiracy theories and nonsense so that those who need it can effectively hide from the truth. Who needs fact checking when they have Facebook friends who are as ignorant as they are? Who needs newspapers when you have a twitter feed tailored to your fears?
Meanwhile, here are more losses from the LA Times’ deathwatch:
Can the Web make up for this loss of expertise?
Althea
Shooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado. Four officers injured
Mike J
This clip explains the entirety of Republican philosophy.
Mandalay
@Tim C.:
I don’t know about the Oregonian either way, but the most hateful racism I have seen anywhere on the internet is in the comments columns on websites of local papers.
If those papers can’t even be bothered to keep hate speech off their web sites then I wish them nothing but misfortune. The sooner those bastards fold the better.
catclub
@efgoldman: How you get that from what I quoted is surprising.
I saw it as clear enough ( but stated ironically) criticism of a serial liar.
Mike G
@bago:
It’s a real pre-Piagetian mode of thinking. Two things that are bad must be connected, or anything done by someone designated bad must be bad.
Let’s examine a few popular right-wing fantasies of recent times —
Obama = bad
Obama pardoned two turkeys
= “Pardoning turkey very bad !!??!!!”
Bill Clinton = bad
Ruby Ridge = bad
= “Clinton was responsible for Ruby Ridge!!!”
Which would be a neat trick, the Governor of Arkansas running an FBI operation in Idaho in August 1992.
Al Qaeda = bad
Saddam = bad
Muslims = bad
= “Saddam is working with Al Qaeda !!???!! Must invade !!??!!!”
That little self-indulgent fantasy only cost us 4000+ American lives and a couple trillion dollars and kicked over the hornet’s nest of the entire Middle East.
Kay
@Amir Khalid:
Hillary does do lawyerly parsing of the truth.
Part of the the problem with false equivalency is it ruins any kind of legit or specific analysis or criticism.
They should use something other than compare/contrast, occasionally. They rely too much on “this is like THIS so therefore THIS”. That’s why they end up with so many fake comparisons. They only have one method of talking about anything so they reach for it even when it doesn’t fit.
Keith G
My emphasis.
I am guessing that is is less about the narrative than it is about the conservatives just being able to break legs (I was going to say bust balls, but have been told that imagery is problematic) and work the refs. And then there is the financial impact of challenging the candidates that one’s ownership is donating big bucks to.
For a different take on this, I direct you to a site that headlines:
What Should the Media Do When Donald Trump Blatantly Lies?
From Fortune website
mclaren
@Amir Khalid:
Problem with that definition: “truth” remains a social construct.
“Indifference to observed evidence” would work better.
jacy
My people in the Springs are showing local news reports that three officers have been shot. (KOAA TV)
Make that four officers and 5 civilians (KRDO TV)
smintheus
@Wag: We knew that Reagan’s election would be a disaster. People who knew better voted for him anyway.
Baud
H/T to random Reddit commenter regarding the Colorado shooter
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
Are you high? The Atlantic Monthly, that published TNC, is failing just as much as any other magazine, and the online version does not yet have a sustainable business model. The New York Times is also vulnerable. Syndicated columnists are next on the list to go. Grantland tried to provide a robust online journalism alternative, but has died a nasty death. Writers are furiously jumping from media property to media property only to find that there is no safe landing spot.
I don’t think that the old newspaper industry was a land of magical unicorns. Part of my point is that people stupidly continue to give power to mainstream media or Establishment media even as it is on its last legs. But there has not been much of the way of any flowering alternative media to take its place.
sharl
@Baud: Hahaha, excellent!
ETA: Regarding my comment way up thread, the incident in April of last year in my apartment’s parking lot wasn’t just a murder, but a murder-suicide…on the birthday of the ex-wife/murder-victim. So, extra win, or something…
By the way, did you guys know that there was (up until December of 2014) an active blog “murder-suicide.blogspot.com”??!? And I thought *I* stared into the abyss far too long and often.
redshirt
@jacy:
Well, since this was a Freedom Fighter trying to save babies, shooting police is unfortunate but sometimes necessary.
smintheus
@Mike in NC: The media has insisted on treating politics for decades as if it were a game, and the only thing that interests them is who is winning and to a lesser degree who is losing.
smintheus
@Baud: I expect at least one Republican presidential candidate to argue that this would not be occurring if foetuses could carry guns.
mclaren
@Mandalay:
Then you’re not paying attention.
The entire reason for reportorial stenography today, which leads directly to accepting a politician’s flagrant lies by default without challenging them, is that most newspapers no longer have the journalists with the time and money and staff to research and debunk politicians’ lies.
It takes real time and effort to dig up the hard evidence that yellowcake uranium fairytales are fantasy. If you’re a reporter and you don’t have that time and staff and research budget, all you can do is report the claims about yellowcake uranium and move on.
Hillary is telling a lot of flagrant lies right now — her arguments about why reinstating Glass-Steagall is a bad idea are, frankly, dishonest, and based on gross distortions and deliberate errors which could be debunked by journalists…if they had the time and the budget and the staff to dig up all the detailed facts refuting Hillary’s claims.
They don’t.
So they merely report Hillary’s lies about why reinstating Glass-Steagall would be a bad idea, and move on.
Mike J
@jacy: 6 patients at Penrose Hospital, 3 at memorial.
redshirt
@smintheus:
This is the best way to understand Republicans to me: It’s a game, a sport. They have their team, and there is the opposite team. Anything their team does is by definition good, and everything the other team does is by definition bad.
Nothing else matters – facts, hypocrisy, logic, etc.
Brachiator
@efgoldman:
To think that this is almost a century ago. It was like this in most big cities. But from it’s founding in 1881 to around 1962, when Otis Chandler became publisher (having purged some of the more right wing family members from the paper), the LA Times was the official mouthpiece of the WASP ruling class. The competing Hearst papers could be as bad, but were at times more populist and pro-union (the Times was never a union shop). There were also smaller papers and a fair amount of diversity.
Oddly enough, the first great culling in the Los Angeles market came about when afternoon TV news expanded from 15 minutes to half and hour, and local TV stations increased their programs and coverage. This soon killed the afternoon papers. But this was small cheese compared to the impact of Craigslist and the Internet in more recent times.
Mike J
KOAA says 2 hostages removed safely from Planned Parenthood, 6 more people being held.
jacy
@Mike J:
It’s on the West Side, relatively near my mom’s house. They’re saying he’s barricaded in Planned Parenthood with an unknown number of people.
jayboat
@Mandalay:
Right on! I hate to see a lot of talented, creative folks lose their jobs- but it really isn’t the great loss that it’s made out to be in that piece. And maybe those people will put their talents to better use.
Now, as soon as someone creates that sarcasm font the universe will, once again be in balance.
maya
But, but. Howard Dean screamed!
Mike J
@jacy: My dad grew up over near Harrison High at the Stratton Home. I spent a summer with an aunt there, worked at Seven Falls to buy my first car.
sharl
Remember that 13-y.o. AA kid who twitter-trashed POTUS – sometimes outright lying in the course of doing so – and ended up as a welcomed supporter of Ted Cruz? Apparently (and fortunately) he is capable of learning and growing. Via Deray, here are excerpts from a CNN piece:
…
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
So what? You are clinging to this “sustainable business model” notion. There are a gazillion ways for TNC to get published regardless. The Atlantic needs him more than he needs the Atlantic. And even if the Atlantic folds, and even if TNC stops writing altogether, then others will come along. There are no financial barriers to prevent anyone from publishing their views on the internet, and their audience is potentially far larger than any local paper that is on the edge of going under right now.
You can fuck right off with your condescension. Asshole.
Mike J
@maya:
Dean lost. Trump is in first.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
This. The work of journalism has become unprofitable and, since we don’t have a government-supported source for that kind of work like the BBC, journalism is being killed off. Fewer and fewer outlets mean that there are more people competing for fewer jobs and, as with most corporate jobs, the people who are the best ass-kissers are going to get them.
And while the internet has done a number on advertising dollars, I still say that the (unrelated) consolidation of major retailers has done the same work. Here in LA alone, we used to have three major department stores (Bullocks, The May Company, and Robinson’s) that would compete to pay top dollar for the best ad placement in the LA Times. Now they’ve all been absorbed by Macys, and the LA Times needs those Macys advertising dollars far, far more than Macys needs them. That cuts the big Sunday advertising supplement revenue by 2/3rds even before Macys starts demanding discounts for deigning to advertise in the Times.
Baud
@efgoldman:
I learned it from watching you,
dadlibs.Kathleen
@Mike in NC: Trump’s next reality show: “Who Wants to Torture My Dad?”
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
Sure, as long as people are willing to work without pay, the sky’s the limit! However, most people still need to be able to pay rent and buy food, so the number of people willing and able to work full-time without pay is automatically self-limiting.
C.V. Danes
@Mnemosyne: Not just that, but people with organizations that can protect them from withering lawsuits.
Mandalay
@mclaren:
But these are the very same papers that could easily directly and aggressively confront Trump over his lies, but don’t. It’s not that they don’t have the resources. They choose not to. The financial burden of the papers doing that is $0.00, and yet they stay silent. And they rationalize it by saying they can’t call Trump a liar because he might sincerely believe the claims he makes!
They can’t even call Trump on his nonsense for free, and yet those are the same papers that you expect would expose wrongdoing in the world? Really?
Brachiator
@Mandalay:
Really? Name a few.
Media companies need talented writers and editors. That’s the entire point.
Other publications are trying to come along, but they are folding faster than they are surviving.
Just wrong. Internet sites are struggling with various models, from subscriptions to Patreon to traditional advertising. Nothing is really working so far.
You’re right. You are not high, just tremendously uninformed.
Germy
What happened with Matt Taibbi? I had read he was joining forces with a new media company ( I can’t remember the name) and then that deal evaporated and he returned to RollingStone.
smintheus
The bigger problem is that establishment media just doesn’t wish to call politicians liars or nutjobs; the both-sides-do-it narrative arose in the first place to help them to feed their habit.
Journalists faced the question of how to treat lying demagoguery during the rise of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and that whole who-lost-China gang. They chose to act like their job was to be stenographers for the liars. Did they learn anything from this adventure? Apparently not, because they’ve continued to cling to that discredited methodology that still fetishizes even-handedness to the point of feigning non-judgmentalism.
sukabi
@scav: doesn’t matter what the target, who will be the first to call it terrorism?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Yep. It was a one-two punch. The LA Times often led all newspapers in advertising lineage.
Consolidation of department stores, supermarkets, electronics retailers, the aerospace and automotive industry, etc. greatly reduced display ad revenue. Then, Craigslist and others came along and killed off want ads. Newspapers and magazines have been struggling ever since. TV and independent delivery of advertising flyers instead of using newspaper inserts added to the misery.
The LA Times has also had some nasty side problems. For example, they had to pay sports columnist TJ Simers $7 million and change after losing an age discrimination suit.
You can also see how tough arts criticism has it. A former Times reviewer has jumped to a number of places, and is now at the Christian Science Monitor. Who knows how long that will last. A former Village Voice film critic is now at Time. I don’t what has happened to another, Amy Nicholson, who also wrote for the LA Weekly.
But I guess what I forgot is that both liberals and conservatives hate the media, and surprisingly for similar reasons. There are those on both sides who think that the media that fails them, or fails to cater to them, deserves to fade away. But independent bloggers and websites, the equivalent of pamphleteers of Alexander Hamilton’s era, cannot do the job alone, and certainly cannot do the job for free.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: America was having trouble
What a sad, sad story
Needed a new leader to restore
Its former glory
Where, oh, where was he?
Where could that man be?
We looked around and then we found
The man for you and me
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
– talkingpointsmemo dot com has been around for 15 years, and recently added a premium subscription to pay for the free web site.
– Digby dot blogspot dot com and juancole dot com have been around for years and accept donations.
– Greenwald and co at theintercept dot com have a financial backer, but allows them total editorial control.
– Before he gave up blogging Sullivan claimed that his web site was self financing via optional subscriptions..
These web sites reach a lot of people, and they are all getting by through different approaches without relying on corporate paymasters.
“Victimized” racists can get six figure donations in a few days on gofundme. Do you really think TNC couldn’t get a million bucks in a week if he said he wanted to set up a web site to address black issues without having to rely on corporate paymasters?
You are the one who is uninformed. You are clinging to the outdated notion that folks on the web need to have to have a business model based on how local papers did things fifty years ago. They don’t.
Mandalay
@smintheus:
This. And that is doubly true when the politicians deserving the criticism may actually become president. Trump freely admitted in one of the GOP debates that he doesn’t forgive.
There would be very real consequences for a paper or TV channel that aggressively went after Trump if he became president. We have already seen how he has taken on Fox and won, and how he is treated deferentially by CNN and MSNBC hosts.
The mainstream media is absolutely spineless.
Brachiator
@Germy:
He went to First Look Media, which could not withstand a second look. From the Wiki:
Glenn Greenwald and other founders are still trying to make a success of this organization. It would be good if they could find a way to make a go of it
Brachiator
@efgoldman: RE: Really? Name a few.
Well deserved, but awards are not a steady source of income. And book publishing is being challenged as well. Royalties aren’t what they used to be.
maya
@Mike J:
You missed the point: In Dean’s case the media gleefully participated in promoting a candidate’s downfall, which contributed mightily in Dean’s ultimate downfall – he only had that one state primary setback which they turned into an issue of his fitness to be president.
In Trump’s case the media is crickets regardless of what comes out of his mouth.
LT
I’ve taken almost no part in the redesign conversations, except to say I liked it at first, and I now it’s late in the process, but I’ve got to finally say:
EDIT EDIT EDIT: And that blockquote I just made is not the text and style I mean. Damn. Is it just the blockquotes in the posts themselves? Yes, I think it must be. (But the comment blockquotes are not great, either, just to note.)
Sorry, John and gang. Like I said, it’s late in this process. Ignore me. It’s not a big deal.
WaterGirl
@LT: I agree with you.
You might want to post that on the special thread for input on the website – you can find it by hovering over “About Balloon Juice” at the top, it’s called “Site Maintenance”.
Brachiator
@Mandalay: Wow. You really have a thing about “corporate paymasters.” Some people are just advertisers, small businesses who want people to buy their goods and services, not acolytes of corporate devils.
Greenwald and Sullivan are struggling. I don’t get the idea that you know much about the financials of any of the sites you think are successful.
Yeh, I think it would be very tough for TNC to set up an ongoing sustaining web site. I also think that it is tougher for a news organization with paid staffers to operate on what appears to be a donation model. In fact, I note that you are vague on exactly what the funding sources would be and how it would last for more than a week.
What in the world are you talking about? My point is that the old business models evaporated, and they are taking many talented writers and editors down with it. Web based organizations cannot imitate obsolete models and hope to survive.
Are you suggesting that everyone who works for a newspaper or magazine, TNC excepted, is a corporate lackey who deserves to be thrown out on the street, and that everything they did was done for the benefit of corporate masters?
No matter how you slice it, new organizations that can support well staffed news gathering operations are few and far between.
LT
@Brachiator:
WTF? That’s wrong and weird in a couple ways.
LT
@WaterGirl: Thank you, WaterGirl.
feebog
@Mike J:
Dean was in first place for quite a while.
mclaren
@Amir Khalid:
Hillary Clinton regularly lies by omission or by redefining terms. Let’s take a look at one detailed example:
Source: “My plan to prevent the next financial crash,” Hillary Clinton speech, 7 October 2015, reported in The Chicago Tribune.
Sounds great! Right? Right! So where’s Hillary Clinton’s speech urging that Wall Street crime lords get prosecuted and sentenced to long prison terms for colluding in criminal fraud?
[crickets]
Nowhere. Hillary Clinton has never urged any prosecution for Wall Street crimes. Why not? Well, maybe it might have something to do with how Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea married a high-powered hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs, Mark Mezvinsky. And Chelsea and her hubby just purchased a pre-WW I apartment overlooking Central Park West for 10.5 million dollars, and indicting her hubby for colluding in fraud might put a dent his Chelsea’s home life. She and her hedge fund hubby might have to move out of that 10.5-million-dollar apartment.
Source: “My plan to prevent the next financial crash,” Hillary Clinton speech, 7 October 2015, reported in The Chicago Tribune
Great! So what’s Hillary’s plan?
Source: op. cit.
Her plan is evidently “to put our economy on sounder footing” and put more regulations on the existing banking system.
Let’s examine Hillary’s claim in those 2 paragraphs. Has president Obama “put our economy on sounder footing”? Has Hillary helped in that effort?
.
Source: "The Ten Reasons Why There Will Be Another Systemic Financial Crisis," Forbes magazine, Robert Lenzner, 8 December 2014.
So Hillary is lying. She is lying because she claims that because Obama got the Dodd-Frank legislation passed, this ends the dangerous casino-like operation of Wall Street. But that’s not true. It’s not true for the reason specified above — Dodd-Frank doesn’t help because Dodd-Frank only applies to the assets on the books of the Too Big To Fail banks and financial investment houses like Goldman Sachs. The derivatives of the world’s shadow banking system account for much more money than the official assets of the TBTF banks.
Has any legislation been proposed by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to fix this problem of unknown derivatives positions taken by TBTF banks?
No, it has not.
As detailed in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance & Financial Regulation, on Monday, April 16, 2012, there is not even any agreement (as of 2012) about how big the global shadow banking system is, nor how to regulate it:
Source: “Shadow Banking and Financial Instability,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance & Financial Regulation, on Monday, April 16, 2012.
So according to Harvard Law School, no one even knows how big the shadow banking system is, contrary to Hillary’s claim that we’ve…put our economy on sounder footing; “banking risks can be present and indeed can be even more severe in a shadow banking system, or in a system which involves inter-linkages between bank balance-sheets, shadow bank balance-sheets, and capital markets,” even though neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have proposed any legislation to regulate the shadow banking system: and even the academic experts aren’t sure how to regulate the shadow banking system (“… should we just put a cordon sanitare around traditional banking, or do we need also to regulate shadow banking itself?”).
So Hillary Clinton is lying when she says that “Thanks to President Obama’s leadership and the determination and sacrifice of the American people, we’ve…put our economy on sounder footing.” 40% of all corporate profits now come from Wall Street casino c(r)apitalism. Hillary Clinton is lying when she says that she has a plan to prevent financial crashes.
She’s lying because her “plan” to prevent future financial crashes involves the Dodd-Frank legislation that regulates traditional banking and stock market activity. But the shadow banking system falls completely outside the traditional banking and stock market trades, to the point where even the expert economists who specialize in Wall Street aren’t sure how big the shadow banking system actually is — 10 trillion dollars? 15 trillion? 20 trillion? Bear in mind that the annual U.S. gross domestic product is only 14 trillion dollars.
Does Dodd-Frank protect us from a future financial crisis?
Source: “The Ten Reasons Why There Will Be Another Systemic Financial Crisis, Forbes magazine, Robert Lenzner, 8 December 2014.
But wait! Hillary is telling yet another lie by omission. Because she claims that Obama has fixed our financial system (he hasn’t), and she claims that she has a plan to prevent future financial collapses (she doesn’t, because the Dodd-Frank legislation won’t do it) — but she also completely avoids mentioning the other big cause of instability in the U.S. financial system: concentration of financial power in a handful of gigantic Too Big To Fail banks and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs (where Hillary’s daughter’s hubby works as hedge fund trader in the shadow banking system, coincidentally).
Source: “Market Failures and Regulatory Failures: Lessons From Past and Present Financial Crises,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Viral V. Acharya, Thomas Cooley, Matthew Richardson and Ingo Walter, 5 December 2009.
Hillary goes on to claim:
Source: HRC Chicago Tribune op-ed, op. cit.
Great. So where are Hillary’s proposals?
Nowhere. She has proposed no bills. She has not even called for president Obama to direct his department of justice to investigate and indict the financial criminals who bought mansions and yachts with the life savings of the victims they criminally defrauded. Nor has Hillary promised to personally do so herself if elected president. And it’s not as if there’s no evidence of criminal fraud by the major banks or by Goldman Sachs. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly (and as various obots have shouted me down by publicly stating), Goldman Sachs and all the major banks in America have publicly admitted their complicity in criminal fraud.
Source: SEC government website, 2010.
Hint: when a firm admits that it “misled investors,” it is admitting to interstate wire fraud according to 18 USC 1341 and 18 USC 1343, which I have directly quoted here repeatedly:
Source: text of 18 USC 1341, the statute defining interstate federal wire fraud.
So if Hillary Clinton were serious about her claim that “as president, I will seek to extend the statute of limitations for major financial crimes, enhance whistle-blower rewards, and increase resources for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate and prosecute individuals,” Hillary would be screaming from the hills right now for the Department of Justice to indict Jamie Dimon and his unindicted co-conspirators for interstate wire fraud, conspiracy to commit interstate wire fraud, and accessory before and after the fact in multiple counts of criminal fraud. Unindicted co-conspirators like Mark Mezvinsky, Hillary Clinton’s daughter’s husband.
For some reason, Hillary Clinton hasn’t done that. Gosh. I wonder why…?
But that’s not the end of Hillary Clinton’s lies by omission and redefinition. Hillary goes on to claim:
Source: Hillary Clinton Chicago Tribune op-ed, op. cit.
Can you see the problem?
Hillary claims that she favors “a different way” from an updated Glass-Steagall act to prevent financial gambling by Too Big To Fail banks. Instead of preventing the gambling with 20 trillion dollars of unsecured monopoly money that belongs to individual depositors, Hillary proposes to force the crooked thieving bankers to pay back that 20 trillion dollars if they lose it.
You can see how absurd this is. The Too Big To Fail banks and the Wall Street crime lords like Jamie Dimon are making big bucks by using derivatives to enormously amplify the amounts of money they’re gambling with. And if their gambles blow up and the world financial system crashes, the Too Big To Fail banks won’t have anywhere near enough money to pay back all those losses. Jamie Dimon and his criminal buddies at Goldman Sachs won’t have anywhere near enough cash to pay back what they lost, because they’re gambling with borrowed money.
I could continue like this, but you get the idea.
What Hillary Clinton specializes in doing is simple. Hillary Clinton crafts cleverly-written phrases that sound as though she’s calling for reform, when she actually proposes to block financial reforms and keep on doing more of the same.
Hillary Clinton specializes in concocting lofty words that sound as though she stands for progressive ideals, when Hillary actually wants a continuation of the Bush-era deregulated free-for-all thievery that lets Too Big To Fail banks and hedge funds at Goldman Sach gamble with the public’s money, and keep the profits if they win their gambles, while forcing the public to pay if Goldman Sachs and the banks lose their crazy gambles.
How about that? It’s a game of roulette where I get to gamble with your money! And if I lose, you pay — while if I win, I keep my winnings! That’s what Hillary is actually proposing.
But Hillary is expert in sounding as though she proposes the exact opposite.
Last, and worst of all, Hillary is lying by omission about what the real problems are. Hillary makes it sound as though all we need to do is pass a few laws, and the whole situation will be fixed, and financial collapses will be a thing of the past.
But the real problem is that the risk in the U.S. financial system is systemic, and it’s caused in large part because the banks are Too Big To Fail and haven’t been broken up, and also because there has grown up a gigantic shadow banking system that is completely unknown even to the regulators, so even if the regulators wanted to fix it, they couldn’t, because all the risks are hidden behind closed closed doors in secret basements in the Too Big To Fail banks and in Goldman Sachs hedge fund trading rooms (where Hillary’s daughter’s hubby Mark Mezvisnky works as a hedge fund trader).
So Hillary Clinton is using lawerly language to lie and lie and lie about essentially everything involved with financial reform.
Hillary is lying that the problem is fixed, she’s lying when she says she has a plan to prevent future financial crashes, she’s lying when she says the proposals she’ll offer will solve the problems, and she’s lying about the real causes of the financial crash.
Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg of Hillary’s ongoing lies of omission and distortion. Take Hillary’s response in the Democratic debates to the question of whether she favors an increase in the minimum wage. Bernie Sanders said plainly that he favor federal legislation to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Hillary Clinton said “I favor increasing the minimum wage, but we should let th states decide.”
But that’s exactly the situation we’ve got today. Right now, today, this minute, states are free to raise the minimum wage — they’re just not required to do so. So what Hillary is really saying is:
But Hillary very cleverly phrased it as though she was in favor forcing a nationwide increase in the minimum wage.
It’s the same old story. Obama part deux — Hillary is a basketball point guard, like Obama — she fakes left and moves right.
Adam L Silverman
McLaren: I’ve freed or tried to free your comment from moderation twice now. If its not showing up, please break it up into multiple, smaller replies to Amir and use the link button to bracket your links.
Thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@mclaren: success!
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to set mclaren off.
Mike S.
@Germy:
Taibbi was supposed to form something like “the intercept” w/Pierre Omidyar (first look) and it all fell apart before it got off the ground.
Taibbi was accused running the project like a sexist pig and he shot back with something like ‘those allegations are bullshit, Omidyar failed to give editorial independence’.
Who knows what really happened – the intercept, rolling stone, and wired all have takes on it if you care to read them.