Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Consistently wrong since 2002

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Our Failed Mainstream Media

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Our Failed Mainstream Media

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Mr. Pierce, needless to say, has a damning transcript, to which he adds:

… This is going to be a real crisis for elite political journalism from now until November, perhaps the deepest crisis elite political journalism has faced since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and that one didn’t turn out well at all. The Republican Party is about to nominate an utterly truthless fellow who doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know and is prepared to lie his way past everything he doesn’t know anyway. I’m afraid that elite political journalism is so wedded to “balance” that it is in no way prepared to cope with a post-reality candidate. (Professor Krugman shares this concern.) “Fair enough” and “gotcha” are not appropriate answers to the assertion by a candidate that he plans to heal the national economy by setting up a roulette wheel and two blackjack tables in the Department of the Treasury.

If hope is not a plan, then bluster and bombast are even less of one. Elite political journalism has a greater responsibility to the Republic than “balance” or “objectivity.” This is going to be a long six months.

Even Glenn “Pinocchios’ Kessler, the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker, meeps angrily:

…[M]ost politicians will drop a talking point if it gets labeled with Four Pinocchios by The Fact Checker or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact. No one wants to be tagged as a liar or misinformed, and we have found most politicians are interested in getting the facts straight. So the claim might be uttered once or twice, but then it gets quietly dropped or altered.

But the news media now faces the challenge of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Trump makes Four-Pinocchio statements over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false. He appears to care little about the facts; his staff does not even bother to respond to fact-checking inquiries.

But, astonishingly, television hosts rarely challenge Trump when he makes a claim that already has been found to be false…TV hosts should have a list of Trump’s repeated misstatements so that if he repeats them, as he often does, he can be challenged on his claims…

That’ll happen, Mr. Kessler, approximately three news cycles after the consumers to which ‘TV hosts’ are pitching their owners’ bullshit start switching away. Which, by my estimate, will happen as soon as the Twelfth of Never.

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  3. 3.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    Last morning in Firenze before moving on to Cinque a Terre.

    We shared a 1.5 kg t-bone last night, a plateful of Parma ham with fresh mozzarella, a bottle of wine and a shit ton of grappa. Can’t believe I’m actually hungry, but in fairness, we didn’t finish the steak.

    I can’t believe I’m hungry.

    Found this outrage this morning. I blame it on fails cultural values being imparted to the young thugs. Behold – a fight in the Vineyard Vines tent at the Kentucky Oaks.

    The struggle is real, yo.

  5. 5.

    Hill Dweller

    Did anyone here watch the Blazers/Warriors game? I’m going to be dead in the morning, but it was worth it to watch both the game and Steph Curry put on an amazing display in OT. I thought Curry’s performance in OKC earlier in the season was crazy, but his performance in OT tonight was almost unbelievable. And he is coming off an injury. Crazy.

  9. 9.

    Hill Dweller

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Steph was obviously really rusty for the first 2.5 quarters, but he started to get the feel as the game progressed. That said, I didn’t see that OT performance coming. I was honored to watch it.

  10. 10.

    akryan

    I think one of the underlying problems, maybe the most important actually, is that political coverage has boiled down into almost nothing but the horse race. Pundit 1: “Trump said this. How will voters react?” Pundit 2: “I’m not sure but so far polls don’t show any indication that it’s hurting him,”. That’s as close a anyone gets to analysis. What’s even worse is that there are a ton of actual things happening in the country and around the world but the only thing that is covered is election horse race news. It’d sort of be nice if we heard more about the impending vote on Brexit and what it would mean for the world economy. You would think that the possible implosion of the second largest economic zone in the world, and how it would effect America, would merit some discussion, Even more crazy would be journalists asking the candidates about the situation.

  12. 12.

    SoupCatcher

    @Hill Dweller:

    I was honored to watch it.

    That performance reminded me of a line from Tombstone where one of the characters says he’s never seen anything like that before. Then another character says he’s never heard about anything like that before.

    eta Change Deadwood to Tombstone. I don’t think anyone in the HBO series would’ve taken time out to talk about something. They just would’ve got to the killing.

  13. 13.

    gene108

    I had a very vivid, but pleasant dream, about having a pocketful of quarters and wandering through a video game arcade with some girls I went to HS with, but have lost touch with therefore we all looked like teenagers.

    The girls, for some reason were really good at video games. None of the girls I went to HS with hung out at arcades, unless a boyfriend drug ’em out there.

    There was also a bin, bracketed on the wall at shin level, where you paid a quarter to get a lemon wedge. The lemon wedges were important somehow. Then we were going to leave and do something else, but could not figure out what movie to see. Then I woke up.

    Now I cannot get back to sleep.

    At least I am up with happy dreams.

  14. 14.

    Turgidson

    Chuck(lehead) Todd does not believe it is his job to fact-check his guests. He’s said so explicitly. He considers lies to just be a form of “messaging.” If they are effective, the liar “messaged well” and Chuck(lehead) Todd can host another guest to talk about how the liar played good politics by lying.

    That’s what he thinks his job is. No one should be surprised that he can’t or won’t push back on his lying Republican (but I repeat myself) guests.

  15. 15.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @Turgidson:

    I’d troll Chuck on Twitter, but he blocked me a couple of years ago.

  18. 18.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Our “elite political journalists” are mostly offal, unfit for any role at all aside from selling used cars.

    Which is why they go with The Donald so well.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  19. 19.

    opiejeanne

    @Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: I have very fond memories of the steak one night in Florence. It was a group dinner (Rick Steve’s tour) and it was just so good I nearly wept. We walked there and later tried to walk home from the restaurant but realized we’d had too much to drink so we shared cabs. We stayed in a hotel (Hotel Loggiato dei Serviti) in the Piazza della Santissima Annunciate which is across the Arno from the restaurant and a pretty long walk. Nice place. We got to see almost all of the “important” sites before the city pretty much closed down due to a tornado that touched down near our hotel and damaged many buildings. We missed the scary part because we were taking a cooking class about a mile away and were on the ground floor of a tall building off a narrow alley. All we saw was torrential rain and apocalyptic hail but walking back there were more and more pieces of red clay tile as we got near our hotel and we were shocked at the debris in our square. Our window looked out on a garden with a very large pine tree which was now reduced to toothpicks and we could see a piece of that tree had gone through the roof of a church about a block away.

  21. 21.

    bystander

    I’m still standing by in Rome, and I’m not leaving until I find out what those William Tell hats are for on the armed guards. Garda vs. carabinieri? Actually, headed home Thursday and I’ll be happy to return to a stovetop that works, drains that drain and a fully optioned, two speed French bulldog.

    I’ve gotten my Trump info here and NYTimes, and no Moanin’ Joe at all.

  22. 22.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @bystander: Joe of the Morning has turned against Trump(for the moment), though Halperin is still cheerleading for the clown with the opossum on his head.

  26. 26.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Turgidson:

    Chuck(lehead) Todd does not believe it is his job to fact-check his guests. He’s said so explicitly. He considers lies to just be a form of “messaging.” If they are effective, the liar “messaged well” and Chuck(lehead) Todd can host another guest to talk about how the liar played good politics by lying.

    I wonder what he’d say if anyone asked him who he thinks his audience is for this shit. We know it’s really his fellow Villagers, but he can’t admit that. And he sure isn’t adding any value for anyone else. It’s more like “don’t expect me to tell you what’s true and what isn’t, what the candidates would actually do and how it might affect you. Screw you, Americans, you’re on your own.”

  27. 27.

    NorthLeft12

    @srv: Cinque Terre ………aaaaahhhhh, one of my favourite spots in the world [so far]. My wife and I stayed in Monterosso too. Three glorious days. The Chelsea vs Man U Champions League final happened the second night we were there. Had a fantastic time with all the tourists squeezed into a tiny bar and watching the game. Funny, the only Italians watching the game were the bartender and the servers. Food, sights, hospitality, everything was first class.
    Hopefully you are up for some serious hiking, but don’t miss out on the boat ride down to Riomaggiore.

    ENJOY!

  28. 28.

    Thornton Hall

    But they Do switch away. Only 5 million people watch cable news. If the NYT released the clicks on their political coverage it would never be close to the Well Blog.

    The media matters because it is consumed by the media. It is then repeated endlessly thanks to a code of journalistic ethics that imagines this stuff is good for us, i.e., in the public interest.

    It’s the last part, journalistic ideas of what journalism is, that needs to change.

  29. 29.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    Something just occurred to me.

    Sony, Netflix, and to some extent Google, and others, are trying to route around the cable monopolies. We know that the networks are losing viewers. Maybe MTP slitting its own throat really doesn’t matter any more. Maybe the audience is so fractured that only some tiny fraction of the population (Washington insiders, people who watch some TV before they head to church, etc.) even cares any more.

    Who cares about Time magazine cover stories any more?

    The media landscape is changing. Narrowcasting seems to be the way we’re headed (tailored messages at WH.gov, on YouTube, on FB, on Twitter, radio news reports at the top of the hour, etc.). If someone were an evil genius, they would probably try to get control of the AP to shape the news of the hour. That may be the only way left to really shape news memes. (I don’t think Drake outselling Beyonce on day 1 is “news”, myself. YMMV.)

    Nothing profound, but maybe beating up on Todd and Brooks is fighting the last war.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  31. 31.

    low-tech cyclist

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    maybe beating up on Todd and Brooks is fighting the last war.

    I’d love to see that be true, and a dozen years ago, I really expected it to be true by now. But I don’t think it is yet.

    The problem isn’t so much the actual viewership of the Sunday morning talk shows, or even the readership of the NYT or WaPo op-ed columns. It’s that those places shape a conventional wisdom that defines the media environment generally. And yes, there are places where you can get news that’s outside the reach of that CW, but the outside’s still a lot smaller than the inside, as far as I can tell.

  33. 33.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @low-tech cyclist:
    2014 confirmed for me that the national news media is terrible at shaping opinions, but great at defining what is discussed. ISIS and Ebola were THE topic even here where we revile these losers. Speeches Obama gave that the MSM pretended didn’t exist disappeared even for his fans.

  34. 34.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Um, FTR the name is simply “Cinque Terre”, the Five Lands (in fact 5 small towns squished between the sea & the coastal mountains between Genova & Pisa). No “a” involved. If you’re going to visit foreign climes, you should at least get the names right.

    Never been to that corner of The Boot, whose primary charms for Murkins (Ricky Steves premier among them) seem to be its location & (concomitant) relative inaccessibility, which I suppose keeps the crowds down. It was my brother’s family’s favorite stop in 2 weeks there a decade back. YMMV

  35. 35.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @bystander: I answered you the first time you asked, a couple threads back: They’re bersaglieri. Google it. Or dig up that older thread where I posted a couple of links, mir ist’s gleich.

  38. 38.

    Shana

    @Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Many years ago, when I (and all my friends) were in our early 20s, the small town born and raised mother of a friend came to visit her in the nice area of Chicago where she lived, which was considered the big bad dangerous city by the mother. Mom was so concerned about gang activity and nothing the daughter said could convince Mom she wasn’t in immanent danger. After a while daughter decided to have some fun with mom and started pointing out all the preppies walking around the neighborhood as gang members. The name of the gang? The Pastellos.

  42. 42.

    JustRuss

    @Turgidson:

    Chuck(lehead) Todd does not believe it is his job to fact-check his guests.

    Worse than that, he said it would be bad for his career to point out that they’re lying. So even on the rare occasions when he does know his guest is full of it, he’ll keep his mouth shut.

    At least he’s consistent.

  43. 43.

    gratuitous

    Amazing, isn’t it? Chucktodd is on the air for an hour each week, has his guests lined up plenty of time beforehand, and is completely unprepared for anything they might say. I remember Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, when he’d have an author on. Of course, the author is there mainly to hype and sell his or her book, but also to drum up at least a little interest in the book’s subject.

    Now, you know that Stewart didn’t have time to read through each and every book, being on four nights a week every week. But he always had two or three pertinent questions about the book’s content, as well as showing some familiarity with the subject. Stewart’s author interviews – even when I didn’t care about the book – were always high caliber. Compare and contrast that with chucktodd’s seeming ignorance of why he’s on his set, recording a conversation. “Who is this person? Why is he or she here? Oh, candidate for president! I wonder how that’s going for them?” And so on.

  44. 44.

    Applejinx

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    If someone were an evil genius, they would probably try to get control of the AP to shape the news of the hour. That may be the only way left to really shape news memes.

    But that’s already happening, and it’s on our side (for what THAT’S worth: be careful what you wish for).

    People cut me a lot more slack now that I am sorta looking for openings to get my facebook Berniac friends to go along with his eventual capitulation, but my observations on what the Clinton team (loosely defined) have done to compete with Bernie have NOT CHANGED. Clinton loyalists control Twitter and kill trending things that aren’t supporting her. Clinton loyalists took over the Onion and spin ‘funny articles’ to carry a pro-Clinton payload, where possible. It’s all over media that Facebook is suppressing wingnut media (yay? but oops that they’re known to do it?) and the way Mark Zuckerberg pushes #BlackLivesMatter, I can’t picture him not coming down solidly as a Clinton loyalist.

    This kind of activism is indistinguishable from wealthy oligarchs throwing their weight around to get their political way, and particularly w.r.t. digital media these people are COMPLETELY at home with astroturfing. It’s what the internet is made of and they’ve got no shame at all, and now that there are high stakes for failure, you’ll see these essentially liberal oligarchs putting a heavy thumb on people’s lived digital experience. (JUST AS FOX HAS ALWAYS DONE by the way)

    It’s been about ‘curating’ people’s feeds for years, and that’s what this is. You don’t have to wait for what you suggest: it’s already here and it is profoundly centerleft liberal Democrat, for some very good reasons. The question to ask is not ‘do we fight #BLM because rich people like using it as a stalking horse’ but ‘what happens when those rich people also want capital gains tax cut to nothing or negative values’, some insane shit like that which benefits them. They’re operating in a winner-take-all system too. If the guy from Uber thinks he can better control all future transportation verticals by getting real cozy with Hillary Clinton, he will do that without hesitation. In many cases like with Facebook, Twitter, these platforms really have something to offer a political candidate. Not only data (meaningless if the people have no money to spend) but ability to literally manipulate the vote directly.

    Welcome to the world of the future where democracy runs backwards, and the winner gets to program the populace. And THAT is why I’m supporting Clinton. At least there’s a social justice aspect to it all, and I believe she’s loyal to the constituencies who’ve been there for her, and remembers.

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