I think it’s a serious risk to disagree with Adam; he’s basically always right. But I do find myself differing from him on one question: is The New York Times actively trying to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency, or are their actions better explained by a less evil, more dangerous tendency?
Adam’s on the overt evil side: they’re trying to shiv her side. I’m thinking that what we’re seeing is an unconscious process, which is actually a much more difficult problem to tackle within elite political journalism.
My view: I communicate with some NYTimes people, and I’ve known some there for a long time, though I’m not in close touch with that cohort these days. I don’t have any contact with the Sulzberger/Baquet level, but below that I’m quite confident that there’s no conspiracy going on. If you could ask just about anybody at the Times, I’m sure they recognize that Trump is a shit show and all that.
But that doesn’t alter the problem there, the way the deck is nonetheless stacked at the Times and other top-echelon outlets.
A big part of the reason, ISTM, is that within a lot of journalism there is a very particular definition of what a story is, and the concept of accuracy is narrowly defined. A story need not be about facts, but about claims of alledged facts — Clinton’s emails raise pay-for-play concerns; and to be accurate such a story need only rise to the level of “some see in the new email release more indications of a pay-to-play connection to the Clinton Foundation.” That is — the fact that someone is willing to say such a dreadful deed took place makes the statement and the story “accurate” even if no reasonable reading of the underlying material suggest such nefariousness actually took place.
That paradigm leads The New York Times and the rest of them to make the same mistakes over and over again — and to get played in the same way seemingly every week. The right wing media activist camp — think Judicial Watch and the email farrago — is very good at pushing the story buttons, and you have a circumstance where the Times bites, over and over again, and finds itself once again dipping into the Clinton well.
What makes that so wretched is that if The New York Times were anti-Clinton in the way, say, Fox News is, there’d be an obvious counter: consider the source. But because this is done within a framework that the top practitioners believe is the right way to do journalism, pushback often serves to confirm their judgment in their own eyes. If partisans complain, they must be doing something right. And given that the elite media basically talks to itself, it’s hard to insert a corrective, though I and many others are trying to do so on and off social media.
ETA: It’s also important to note that the Times did engage the Trump-Attorneys General bribery story today, placing it prominently on the website. There are some oddities in the story — not uncommon for a publication playing catch-up. And the test will be the follow up: how deeply the Times chooses to pursue each of the elements of the story in the days ahead. If they do give it the full effort, then (a) that will be good and (b) it will suggest that much of the crap coverage of Clinton we’ve seen is the product of pre-existing bias (Clintons are yucky) combined with the story dynamics and incentives discussed here.
There’s an interview with Bob Woodward that the Harvard’s press office published today that to me expresses the problem of a Village, an epistemically closed community of practice that can’t easily interrogate the ways its own methods undermine the mission that they do in fact, sincerly, believe they’re pursuing. Woodward says:
Bob Costa, a reporter at the Post, and I interviewed Trump and we published the transcript and there are all kinds of things in there. For instance, he says, “I bring out rage in people,” and he’s proud of it. He forecast a giant recession, he was very pessimistic about the economy, and since then it’s only done better. He was asked, because he was running in the primaries in the Republican Party, a party that contained Lincoln and Nixon, “Why did Lincoln succeed?” And Trump’s answer was, “He did some things that needed to be done.” [We then asked,] “Why did Nixon fail?” “Because of his personality.” And we had to say, “Yeah, but his criminality was part of it.” And Trump said, “Oh, yeah.” It tells you who he is.
The same with Hillary Clinton. There were just voluminous stories on her. Let me give you an example from The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2016, a two-part series they did on Hillary’s role in Libya. It explains her role, exactly what she wanted to do. At one point, after [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi’s death, it quotes her saying to some of her staff, “We came, we saw, he died.’ There was a series of spectacular Post stories about the Clinton Foundation, about her time at the State Department, and so forth.
The Trump interview is a story, sure. It was accurate, in the sense that I’m sure Trump said what Woodward and Costa said he said. It’s not revealing of very much — like what Trump has done and what his actions in the various enterprises he’s undertaken would tell us about a potential Trump presidency. But its accurate.
More important for the discussion of Clinton and whether press treatment of her reflects conscious or unconscious bias is the comparison between the kind of material Woodward celebrates as journalism about Trump vs. what he recognized in the Clinton Coverage. The Libya story he cites is a perfectly reasonable one one, exactly what you’d expect a newspaper to do. The Clinton Foundation stories…not so much, and so on.
The point’s obvious, I think. All of the stories listed above are “news” in some way. They meet (mostly) the narrowest criterion of accuracy. But they add up to a very different body of work, and evidence of very different approaches to the two candidates, born, I think, of the construct of the “sweet story” much more than of a planned journalistic campaign to derail Hillary.
TL:DR? You don’t need to invoke malice. An intellectual laziness* born of bad craft habits and professional norms fully explains what we see — which is bad news, as that’s harder to fix than explicit enmity.
*I don’t mean to suggest that Times journalists and their peers elsewhere are lazy in the sense that they don’t work hard. They work constantly for (in almost all cases in the print world) relatively short money. I’m just saying that they don’t sufficiently train the traditional journalist’s skepticism on their own endeavor, and so find it very hard to credit outside criticism, or to recognize what it is in fact they’re doing, not just day by day, but summed over the life of a campaign.
Image: Francisco de Goya, Fool’s Folly, 1815-1819
shell
So Mr. “I Know More About Isis Than The Generals” will demand a plan to defeat Isis from said generals, 30 days after he takes office.
Why do I think that exchange will go like this scene from ‘The Simpsons.’
Homer: (in his new role as supervisor) Um, are you guys working?
Employee: Yes, sir.
Homer: Can you . . . work any harder?
Employee: Sure thing, boss!
germy
I know I’m being simplistic here, but I always assumed it’s because the top dogs at the NYTimes are rich and they don’t want their taxes raised under a new Clinton administration.
BillCinSD
Is there some reason it can’t be some of both. There are many people at the Times, I imagine some are evil and some are less evil, but together they end up trying to elect Trump
MattF
So, why is the NYT vulnerable to getting taken for a ride by Hilz’s right-wing enemies? At the absolute minimum, there’s something amiss with the process. A simpler explanation is that the NYT thinks various RW sources are sometimes-believable, when it’s been demonstrated repeatedly that they’re not.
Major Major Major Major
The people who think there’s something insidious going on are alleging a pretty massive cover-up. Groupthink, the narrow-band focus on professional ‘goodness’ that Tom discusses here, and unconsciously absorbed bias based on the decades of anti-Hillary propaganda explain this coverage more than adequately. You see it in every profession and academic pursuit and hobby culture; the media just happens to be outward-facing.
dmsilev
@MattF: I was just going to raise the same question. Journalists sometimes claim that the bargain they make with anonymous sources is that if the story doesn’t hold up, they’ll identify the source. Somehow, that never seems to happen and, arguably even worse, the paper seems to go back to the same sources for more stories.
Doug R
So they’re stuck in their own loop? Maybe part of it’s Trump’s technique, the only time these stories get any traction is when he moderates a bit. Which is why he’s learn not to moderate. Part of that real estate promoter thing.
Roger Moore
Shorter: The right wing noise machine has figured out how to hack American journalism, and The Times is a prime example.
Richard Shindledecker
Adam’s right
dogwood
I think these journalists, unconsciously perhaps, are motivated by approval from their peers. The coverage of Clinton might be raising concerns among many in the population at large, but these “investigative” pieces bring a lot of attention and admiration from other journalists and the tv chattering class. Stories about Trump scandals are a dime a dozen, so they aren’t so appealing to the highly ambitious beltway reporter, or the management who care only about the bottom line. I doubt these people care very much who gets elected. It’s a business not a public service.
cleek
i’ll buy that.
and also: in July / August, the press was all over Trump, while Trump was tripping all over himself. they had a run of three or four weeks where they really dug into Trump for the first time. and it was killing Trump’s numbers. then, either they realized (or were told) that they were starting to look biased to a certain segment of the population, or they got bored with Trump, or their audience got bored with Trump scandals… either way, they shifted their focus over to Clinton and now they’re trying to be as tough on her as they thought they were being to Trump – even if it means they have to invent or stretch stories to do it.
hovercraft
Yesterday there were quite a few discussions among the talking heads about all the push back that’s happening about the lack of balance in the media coverage of the two candidates. While a few agreed that the coverage had been maybe unfair, many said it was Clinton’s fault for not being more open to the media, while also acknowledging that the media sees “The Clinton’s” as America’s first family ( I think this may come as a surprise to the Bush’s), so the prize for finding the scandal that finally brings them down would be incalculable, so every hint of scandal must be pursued with zeal. They also acknowledged that since Trump churns so much bullshit and fodder for them, it comes so fast that there s no time to dwell on any one thing, before they have to move on to the next, so nothing really sticks. Then there were the asshole like Molly Boll and Dana Bash, who straight up said, yes the coverage is unfair, but she’s a politician and so we hold her to a higher standard then him, a first time candidate, and that’s the way it is, deal with it. Jonathan Allen at Vox was the most honest with his confession, but even he was pretty dismissive of the medias ability to sway the actual election results.
On balance you and the others have them talking and are forcing them to at least examine their coverage. It’s a start, not enough, but a start.Keep up the good work.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I would normally agree with you; I am loath under the best of circumstances to attribute anything to conscious conspiracy, because humans just don’t work that way. They’re always looking out for #1.
And I believe that the lower level NYT people are going about their jobs without an overt pro/anti Hillary agenda.
But I gotta divert from my lifelong practice: the NYT ownership most assuredly has it in for the Clintons. It has been that way for decades, and even though they’ll cave and publicly endorse, because the alternative is not one that even the NYT owners can stomach, they’d really like to shiv her. And they will, after the election, with a glee that will leave everyone with no doubt as to where they stood all along.
tl;dr: Adam is, in fact, correct.
Stan
@dogwood: “I doubt these people care very much who gets elected. It’s a business not a public service.”
Switching gears quite a bit but – this is certainly true at the local level. Local media in medium and smaller cities depend on incumbents for revenue and heavily favor them. It really hurts challengers badly.
Stan
I have also had political reporters literally say ” I ran a bad story about candidate X last week, so I need to write a positive one this week” or “….so I need to criticize X’s opponent this week”
NorthLeft12
Sorry Tom, for anyone to accept the completely specious premise that “some say/think/believe/etc.” is the basis for a fact based story is just ridiculous.
That is exactly the trap that has been endlessly mocked and derided on liberal blogs everywhere.
You know what? Some think/believe that Pres. Obama is not eligible to be President because he was born outside of the US. There are facts to completely disprove that lie, but that does not matter to the birthers.
Now, I would have no problem if a reporter disproved that falsehood, and then did a story on what kind of person believes such nonsense and why in particular do they believe it about Pres. Obama? Educated speculation like that, which in this case would specifically identify racism, would be entirely fair.
That is what journalism looks like, not repeating the lies and then speculating on how this is going to damage the person that the lies are made about. See?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@MattF: Yeah, that’s the real problem. They get burned again and again by the same sources and keep going back to get…burned again. Why are they not learning to treat those sources with the skepticism with which they treat everything the Clintons do?
Also, why do they continue to maintain near radio silence when Trump does the exact same thing they’re concern trolling Clinton over for weeks on end? News flash: both sides are doing it, so maybe cover the other side that’s doing it for a while! Where are the weeks and months of coverage of the Trump Foundation, its payments to politicians, what “causes” it supports, where its money comes from, and whether Trump grants meetings to its major donors? The only virtue of both siderism is that they should be covering improprieties on both sides but they aren’t. It’s now one siderism.
kindness
I don’t think you credit the haters in the press enough. OK, maybe they aren’t haters. Maybe they are just overgrown toddlers who need to gratify their own ego’s by making Democratic politicians look terrible.
The skewing is so overt and over the top it can’t possibly be coincidental or mistaken. No, the press longs to be in the position they were in in the late 90’s with Bill Clinton. It made them feel powerful and they want that feeling back.
Gindy51
@germy: DING we have a winner. All else aside this is the ONE reason that unites all the GOPpers my husband golfs with. they don’t care who is the GOP nominee as long as they don’t raise taxes on anything. They don’t trust any DEMs at all in the tax department so husband doesn’t even ask them about it.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
I think Tom’s post points out what that is fairly clearly: they’ve adopted a tabloid gossip standard of newsworthiness where “people are talking about it” or “clouds and shadows” are sufficient to justify publishing. “People talking” or “clouds and shadows” might justify additional digging, but publication should require solid evidence of wrongdoing.
Villago Delenda Est
Hack/Propaganda central.
Wipe them out. All of them.
sukabi
Don’t know Tom… if it was just a few stories or a few years I might buy the “caught in a loop” reasoning… but we’ve had 25+ years of Clinton bashing, W fluffing / Gore bashing, Iraq war cheerleading, spy outing excusing, torture apologizing and on and on and on… and it’s not just the Nyt… what do all those things have in common? They are all designed to politically benefit the GOP. If the “loop” they are caught in is pushing GOP propaganda, then I’d tend to agree.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big conspiracy to be the result of nefarious motives, so long as the people with nefarious motives are at the top of the organization. If the editor and publisher reward reporters who repeat right wing smears, you’ll get a newsroom that’s conditioned to do that, even if the individual reporters have nothing against the Clintons.
gvg
Well Tom, I think you are being naive. The NYT’s has been doing bad stories for decades on the Clinton’s. At this point they need to prove they can be fair to both Clinton’s or I will take it as truth, they aren’t. Decades before Trump. I will accept that some of it is now habit and it’s a habit of almost all reporters in the country too but it’s gone on too long and too consistently and it’s inserted itself into the minds of many liberals so that I have to argue with people like me, allies and family. So I kind of have a grudge too…then recall some of their OTHER bad reporting such as Iraq.
I don’t know why. I can see the long term pattern though and it’s not pretty.
Actually the speculation about why is the thinnest part of the theory. A lot of people think you can’t convict without a motive but really I think you should just stick to facts. They never say and repeat as nessesary-this story/theory has been disproved and you should distrust those claiming otherwise.
Hoodie
That’s consistent with the journalists I know. A lot of them are wonderful people, but even the best are subject to professional blindness just like a lot of other professionals, i.e., journalists can’t examine their own actions much better than lawyers, doctors, cops, etc. As you say, the bias at credentialist places like the Times is a bias in favor of the pushback, the sweet story, the story that no one else can crack. They’re emotionally invested in anti-Clinton stories because they think that’s harder than going after the relatively low-hanging fruit that Trump represents (leave that to lesser papers like the Post). They expend enormous resources looking for a needle in the Clinton haystack and become so invested that, even when the pursuit yields nothing, they publish their work like a math student who can’t get the right answer but wants credit for work shown. If they didn’t do that, they’d have nothing to print. The byproduct, however, is a distorted impression that Clinton is up to something nefarious, while Trump steals the silverware.
divF
I vote against an overt conspiracy against Clinton at the NYT, for the simple reason that someone would have leaked it by now. The Times is too big an organization to keep such an effort completely watertight.
Roger Moore
@cleek:
I assume that a lot of that anti-Trump news was the result of the Clinton campaign feeding their opposition research to their favorite reporters. I wonder if its dying down isn’t just a sign that the Democrats aren’t as skillful as Judicial Watch at spreading out the release of each story to keep it in the news for longer.
JPL
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I tend to agree because of the decades of trashing the Clintons. This is not a new thing.
gogol's wife
I’m so “chuffed” (as Daisy would say) that I knew that was Goya before looking at the caption.
DrBB
I hope the generals tell him we should build a wall around ISIS and make them pay for it.
(In reply to Shell @1)
burnspbesq
Because of my background and experience, I take an exceedingly dim view of the notion that unsubstantiated allegations are per se newsworthy.
In my view, a rule analogous to Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure should apply to media actors. Rule 6(e) imposes on government actors an absolute requirement of secret with respect to matters occurring before a grand jury. Violations are felonies.
The rule I would propose is that reporting on unsubstantiated allegations of criminality, corruption, or unethical behavior is per se unethical and defamatory. Investigate your ass off, and if there is something there, by all means report it. “Something” doesn’t have to be admissible evidence that establishes every element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, but it should be within shouting difference of the quantum and kind of evidence that a reasonable prosecutor would regard as cause for empaneling a grand jury.
“Raises questions” should be off limits.
Trollhattan
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
It’s hard to countenance NYT Clinton hatred with Trump hatred, since they’ve been crossing paths with Trump for more than a decade longer than the Clintons and know every nasty little detail about him and his bizarre family, intimately. New Yorkers are practically unanimous in their hatred of all things Trump and I don’t believe for a nanosecond that doesn’t extend into the NYT boardroom.
sukabi
@cleek: but they didn’t dig into the actual scandals, they focused on the stupid shit he says, tje lies he tells from one minute to the next..no real indepth reporting on his actual pay to play with states ags on trump u. Nothing notable on his mob dealings, modeling agency using undocumented foreigners or that he screwed them out of rent $$. One or two mentions by a few reporters, but not the zeal, carpet bombing that Hillary’s coughing gets.
john (not mccain)
The NYT has never gotten over the fact that two uppity crackers from Arkansas rose to the highest level of power in the US. They never will get over it.
Kathleen
@sukabi: I was going to make the same point but you’ve done better than I would have.
JPL
@DrBB: Thirty-one percent of Trump supporters already want a wall along the Atlantic Coast. Don’t give them anymore ideas.
Bobby Thomson
@Major Major Major Major: what cover up? The bias is out in the open. And it succeeds because intellectuals don’t call it out.
DrBB
@dmsilev:
But then they’d lose access to important sources! Of bad information.
germy
@sukabi: I want to see a ten minute segment tonight on the CBS Evening News about the Freedom Kids lawsuit. Interview with their songwriter/manager, interview with the sad and disappointed kids… the whole works.
ChrisGrrr
@CONGRATULATIONS! and @sukabi : thank you. If the Clinton-bashing had anything like a recent basis, attributing it to some less deliberate motivator might make sense.
(And no, I’ve never been gaga about Mrs. Clinton.)
The NYT has been nowhere close to objective for many years now.
Poopyman
Funny how that happens with the Clintons. Can you name anyone else for whom the NYT has the same blind spot? You’re citing a systemic error, but only in the case of the Clintons?
Or TL:DR, what everyone else said.
eric
@burnspbesq: yes. the problem is the race to the bottom and the allure of the scoop. Unlike Charlie, reporters get the golden ticket the way veruca salt got hers … you open enough stories, you are bound to have at least one with real merit. To me it is that simple, better to report and be wrong than to not report and be right. Once the story is out there, if you cant add anything, then you have no scoop and you might as well stop. If you can add “facts’ by way of secretive leaks, then by all means print the leaks, even though your source is likely compromised. With the Clintons there is no shortage of leaks, including current government officials in the House.
piratedan
wonders how I can be a newspaper reporter’s “source” as the ephemeral “some people say” guy….
if these guys are journalists, where in the fuck is the tidbit provided ever considered within context… as in.. my source is a lifelong Republican who has worked for GOP politicians and policies for years so that makes him a credible source on HRC’s health and trustworthiness as a public figure… so lets investigate to see if its true… well shit… its not, so lets publish an article anyway with a truly misleading headline that casts doubts on the very one thing we couldn’t find evidence of… mission accomplished! all that is missing is a fucking aircraft carrier of integrity.
Davis X. Machina
@john (not mccain):
When the Times finally brings down an administration, and the scalp count is Washington Post 1, New York Times 1, everybody will chill out.
Wait…. Because now that Alan J. Pakula is dead, can the score ever be even?
catclub
@MattF:
This, this, this. All this. Charlie Brown and Lucy, repeated forever.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I think you’re dead on with this. These people don’t know what they’re doing. They think they’re doing the world’s best work. I don’t know how you break through to these people, but I guess what you’ve undertaken with a few of them is likely to be the best way. The only hitch here is that I think it’ll only work if you know them, and few of us know anybody that high at any outlets. So it falls to you. Thank you.
Betty Cracker
I’m on Team Tom. There are no doubt individual NYT employees who are out to shiv the Clintons (MoDo has devoted her entire career to it), but I don’t think the rank-and-file reporters have STOP HILLARY marching orders either. They’d sincerely find that suggestion ridiculous and would be deaf to further conversation with anyone who made it.
You’re right to note that bad craft habits and professional norms are harder to fix, Tom. I think you set a great example of how we non-industry folks can address it in a constructive way with your correspondence with the reporters.
cleek
@sukabi:
no, they didn’t dig into the scandals, they dug into Trump. there is so much surface garbage with him that they don’t have to dig to find dirt. but they did, for a few weeks after the GOP convention, make a point of showcasing his idiotic statements and his racism and his incoherence and unsuitability. they stopped treating him like a celebrity joke candidate and actually started to wonder out loud if this guy was really all there. but that’s over. now they’re into Clinton-bashing.
maybe they’ll get bored with this after a couple more weeks.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
“Raises questions” means that the reporter’s work isn’t done. The point of news reporting is to answer questions, and talking about something raising questions is like turning in incomplete homework. The stuff with Hillary is even worse, because they keep using the “raises questions” line even after they’ve found the answer. They’re just unhappy with the answer they’ve found, so they keep up the insinuation of wrongdoing.
Aleta
In 2014 The Times broke a detailed story on corporate donations to AGs in a number of states. It included a section on Bondi ( a mention of Trump and Giulianni), and exposed of a lot of emails and amounts received from top corp. by Dems and Rs.
(In June they did the story about the Freedom Kids that Raw Story, Daily b and other internet pubs are featuring today.)
I’m not happy about their Trump stories (quite a contrast in how NBC and the Times wrote a story, with the same details, about “support of 88 generals etc for Trump” today. You can really see the difference in their (M Haberman’s) effort to be so neutral that it’s barely even beige.
eric
@Betty Cracker: They are “told” by the stories the editors select for publication. Nothing explicit needs to be said, just like the sports coach that does not punish the player for improper physicality — the message is clear, though not spoke: give me more of “that.”
catclub
@Roger Moore:
I would say that the anti-Trump stuff is just starting to build (Krugman et al. yesterday, more on Bondi today, and others), and will be very good timing for the election.
PGFan
I’m loving that you’re (Tom) engaging in this process with reporters. One thing I’d really like to know is what these folks actually think of Judicial Watch? From my vantage point JW is a pure hit-scam-anti-Clinton operation that consistently come’s up empty, but consistently gets treated as a legitimate source. Why is that?
piratedan
@PGFan: I think it’s the same reason that all of the Sunday morning punditry review continues to invite folks like Bill Kristol and John McCain back despite their abysmal track record of accurately understanding anything going on in foreign policy.
Namely, the GOP has an aura of legitimacy with the media, despite Nixon and being pretty much on the shitty end of the stick on damn near every issue for the last 50 years. Wish I could understand why.
eric
@PGFan: because swinging and missing for a strike is better than taking a ball. no risk, no reward. There is no risk of defamation, so there is no downside. The paper can always explain critiques as sour grapes by the affected party. Being in print means never having to say you are sorry.
low-tech cyclist
Tom, I think your understanding is correct of how that view of ‘story’ and ‘accuracy’ has let the NYT be played repeatedly.
I said something similar to this in a related thread yesterday, but what the hey: I think that it would act as a corrective if the rules of journalism (explicit or implicit) said that once you dig into one party’s allegations of impropriety by another party, and find no substantiation, then (a) that’s your story, and (b) it’s not a big story, but rather a three-paragraph story that gets buried on page 17.
And that story should be no more than a quick ‘soandso claimed suchandsuch, we looked into this, found that Bill Clinton Makes Too Much Money, but otherwise we found no evidence of anything improper.’ Or, ‘found that Doug Band didn’t get a special passport, or anything else of value. He got a meeting, and that was it.’ No front page, no 2600 words, no Raises Questions bullshit. Just the fact of allegations that turned out to be a nothingburger.
And after awhile, editors would get tired of sending reporters running after shiny objects that weren’t real stories.
germy
Here’s the Headline of the Day (from crooksandliars)
Villago Delenda Est
@Hoodie: The WaPo scooped them on the story of the 20th Century: Watergate. The NYT has NEVER gotten over that. This is why they were so wed to the non-scandal of Whitewater, where the Clintons were the victims of the perps, not the perps.
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
And they’re even crankier now that the Boston Globe beat them to the Intrepid Hollywood Journalists prize with Spotlight.
NYT: always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
Iowa Old Lady
When people form a group that competes with and shows off for one another, there’s a tendency to swarm over some person or theory, buy into it, and try to look “deeper” than everyone else. If they don’t, they feel like they look ignorant of shared knowledge.
I see this on Goodreads, a book review site. There’s a core of reviewers there who recognize one another’s name and try to gain prestige. For instance, in reviews of Grasshopper Jungle, an award winning YA book, lots of people feel compelled to say how strange the book was, while to regular readers of science fiction, I suspect it fell in the range of normal. Another YA book I saw had everyone saying how terrible the cover was. I swear it looked exactly like a dozen other cover, but once someone says that, everyone in the in-group feels compelled to show they know what’s being talked about.
maurinsky
The Press (in general) is not a fan of Hillary Clinton (in general). Did everyone read Karen Tumulty’s piece in the WaPo this weekend, about how Clinton is responsible for creating the vast right-wing conspiracy, because she’s so secretive?
I mean, someone has to be salivating over the number of page clicks and subscriptions they will get with the insanity of a Trump administration.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@JPL: I’m willing to compromise with Trump supporters on a wall along the Atlantic coast with two caveats. One, I get to decide which side of the wall the Trump supporters live on. Two, the wall must be built below the high tide line….
Cat48
So, Adam thinks they’re trying to “gore” Hillary? I just woke up & she was being gored on MSNBC. They were saying she could easily lose the race. That was news to me as I had just woke up for the day. I hate Thomas Roberts when he covers elections. I honestly think I could do better. I’m thinking about running away like Baud :)
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@DrBB: And yet they never think how that the continuation of their past 20 years of “reporting” on the Clintons might limit their access of her…… *edit* only talking about the “access” here, I’m sure she would be a much more reliable source to reality than their current sources.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, add me to the list of people that Does. Not. Get. why Judicial Watch still gets the time of day from any professional news organization. They were specifically set up to smear the Clintons, and that’s where you think you’re going to get your unbiased information? WTF?
eric
The other reason is the BELIEF among many that the Clintons play people for suckers and no one wants to be the sucker. I think that is part of the reason people “distrust” hillary….though cant say exactly why, but they would hate to find out later that they should have been more distrusting. The fact that she has been in public life for 30+ years and there has yet to be an honest to goodness scandal, suggests (i) she is great at hiding the dirt (hence dead body conspiracies) or (ii) she is really pretty clean for a politician, all things considered. The second is unthinkable to the NYT.
Cat48
@maurinsky:
I read part of Tumulty’s article & had to stop. It reminds me of someone saying if she’s raped, that’s her fault too.
Let’s just ignore they’ve sued Obama for everything, including that his blackness was making him scared. The press loses credibility when they suck up Freedom Watch & Judicial Watch as 100% truth bc they most certainly are not. They’re owned by the same creepy person.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@cleek: I will buy that and I think they say Trump was about to implode and they were going to get the blame for it from the Right and, worse, no real election to cover, so they bailed. I wouldn’t be surprised now they gave Hilary Equal Time(tm) they go back on Trump, but because Trump is more fun.
Chris
Like I said in the last thread, I think the mainstream media has spent the last three or four decades internalizing the worldview of “both sides do it, but liberals are worse.” Whether because they’re actually conservatives, or because they’re disproportionately from a (white, male, upper-middle-class and higher) background where they pick up a lot of conservative ideas by osmosis, or because decades of conservative political victories have taught them that that’s what The People believe.
Trump’s nomination shocked them because for the first time in who-knows-how-long, the Republican candidate is someone so manifestly incompetent that they can’t say nice things about him like they did for Romney, McCain, or Bush. But they can’t change their spots, so instead they’ve gone all-out on trying to prove that Hillary Clinton is just as bad as Trump.
piratedan
@eric:
they’ve been looking for unicorns and they have two… Obama and Clinton, and they STILL can’t bring themselves to believe it… It’s that fallacy.. oh.. we know the GOP is corrupt, that’s standard, but these guys have been getting away with being honest public servants for the last three decades and we simply can’t believe it.. there has to be something more, something that they’re hiding… somehow, someway. the NYT is going to find it.
Villago Delenda Est
@PGFan: The entire “Get Clinton!” industry was basically a bunch of guys in Arkansas playing the city slicker reporters for fools, hungry for scandal. Gene Lyons nailed the idiot naifs of the NYT perfectly. This was a grifting scam from the getgo…an intermediate stage of the grifting that we’re seeing that is the Drumpf Campaign. Why did these people do this? There was money to be made stringing along both the NYT and the Right Wing Wurlitzer who hated the Clintons for tossing the Bush Crime Family out of office.
eric
@Davis X. Machina: I think the bigger fear is 2-0. THAT is far worse because that is an insurmountable lead.
Cacti
I know the question is about the NYT in particular, but an admission by Dana Bash yesterday on CNN pretty much let the cat out of the bag:
Here you have a bobble head explicitly acknowledge that Trump is purposely being held to a lower standard. Even though he’s a candidate for the highest office in the land, he’s being graded on a curve.
What? Did anyone expect that the first major female nominee for POTUS was going to get held to the same standards as one of the boys? Not bloody likely.
geg6
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I completely agree with this. Completely.
HRA
@john (not mccain):
“The NYT has never gotten over the fact that two uppity crackers from Arkansas rose to the highest level of power in the US. They never will get over it.”
Yes, this is where it all began and it was not only the NYT. It was spoken of by at least one person in a group of friends, fellow workers, etc. and not only by any elitist. It still continues today.
PGFan
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, I’ve been following all that for years and that’s what makes it even worse. Judicial Watch is obviously part of that industry (Get Clinton!) and it’s galling that “elite reporters” don’t seem to grasp that. Not just NYT.
Feebog
I’m sorry, trying to make a story out of a Clinton aide asking for a diplomatic passport and being turned down by the State Department does not pass the smell test. It is not a story. On the other hand bribing a couple State Attorney Generals with sizable campaign donations to make them look the other way at your Trump University scam, crickets. Not buying this bullshit. Something is seriously wrong with the way the NYT develops and evaluates political stories.
? Martin
Top story at CNN – Apple eliminates the headphone jack. Not that there’s a racist, sexist, proto-fascist running for President that wants to deport 5% of the country and block even visitation from 20% of the world population.
We’re so doomed.
sukabi
@PGFan: but if you’re buying merchandise for pennies on the dollar out of a beat up van in a dark alley REPEATEDLY, how do you NOT KNOW that the merchandise is hot?
That’s essentially what these “elite journalists” are doing. And it just doesn’t pass the smell test.
arrieve
@Hoodie: This.
Lit3Bolt
Journalism is not art. It is not a higher calling. It is not made to inform you of facts.
It’s a business. Businesses make money. If making money involves gossipgossipgossip from unaccountable sources, Primary Colors-style book deals by hacks, navel-gazing about “the media’s role in elections,” baseless accusations, innuendo-laden headlines that have nothing to do with the story filed, little to no editing because DEADLINES/HOT TAKES, narrative-crafting based on ahistorical assumptions because “people just know,” and op-ed after op-ed of “Democrats are genderless man-eating, elitist poor-loving, limp-wristed bullies” then I think you have your answer at which approach the NYT and their ilk will take.
Mike in NC
After 12 straight years of Republicans in the White House, the Beltway media became comfortable with that notion. Two terms for Reagan, two terms for Bush the Elder, two terms for Quayle, ad infinitum.
But then those terrible Clinton people came along and spoiled the narrative. Now it’s payback time.
SenyorDave
@? Martin: Top story at CNN – Apple eliminates the headphone jack.
I want to meet the head of CNN and wring his neck. They have Corey Lewandowski as an analyst while HE’S BEING PAID BY TRUMP??? No conflict of interest there. Of course, that CNN’s star reporter is Wolf Blitzer speaks for itself.
I watch this when I need a laugh – Andy Richter destroying Blitzer on celebrity Jeopardy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD5lbUwpbC8
Barbara
Since everyone has their theory, I’ll give you mine. The first is that all media have consciously or otherwise shaded their coverage to proactively rebut accusations of “liberal bias.” That includes NYT — anti-Clinton stories help to reassure them on this score. It gives them something to point to. So the take away is, keep hammering them about how their coverage of Clinton reads like a parody that belongs in the Onion at times (especially if the byline is Patrick Healy).
Second, I understand why Clinton loathes journalists, but there are many politicians whose coverage proves the opposite — that being nice and jaunty and palling around helps to soften their coverage. McCain and George W. Bush both got the benefit of this tendency. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but it clearly is. Today, I read a noticeable softball from Amy Chozick about Clinton. I assume that is her bone to Clinton for having been allowed on the plane (or her way of telling us that she is important enough to be allowed on the plane).
Third, I think most of us underestimate the level of bias against women. Women are presumed to be incompetent and every flaw, however small, validates the presumption. Men are presumed to be competent such that evidence has to be overwhelming to overcome that presumption. Trump has been getting the benefit of that ever since he announced. He is not more successful than scads of other real estate developers. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence that his “empire” is flailing, that he is an out and out crook, that he gives bribes, that he is a racist know nothing, and so on. A lot of, maybe even most of, bias is implicit.
Barbara
@Hoodie: The Post has been 10 times better than NYT this year. There is no question.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Major Major Major Major:
Good comment. Mostly agree with this.
Major Major Major Major
@Bobby Thomson: “Let’s all get together and cover the Clintons poorly in an insidiously subtle way that’s so hard to explain to most people that they’ll sound like partisans when they accuse us!” implies a high level of coordination and a lot of non-vocal and non-obvious players.
“Journalists suffer from groupthink and blinders and are easily led” is simpler, sufficient, and comports with observed reality. “The New York Times” doesn’t have to be biased from the top down or whatever in order to print biases things, they just have to be hackable by experts at it like Judicial Watch.
jl
People here have criticized Josh Marshall and his TPM blog for veering too much from hard news coverage into horse racey BS during the heights of poltical campaign frenzies. And I’ve agreed at times. But when really important issues come up, like the organized and serious campaigns to wreck Social Security during the W administration, and GOP attempt at fraud wrt to the Obama ‘grand bargain idea’, I think he gets down to business and makes up for it.
I like Marshall’s arguments wrt to press coverage of Trump, which attempts to get down below all the balance arguments, and analysis of political and media Kabuki theater. It is simply that on wide range of topics, Trump emits butt ignorant stupid BS with zero substance, zero logic, zero facts and zero common sense and common knowledge that any HS kid should understand. Most of what Trump dishes out is obvious silly nonsense. It is sound and fury, signifying nothing. And it is intellectually dishonest and journalistic malfeasance not to recognize that. There is a good post on Trump’s idiotic fantastical pure BS foreign policy ideas taking this point of view on the front page of Talkingpointsememo blog right now.
Betty Cracker
@efgoldman: I agree about the Venn diagram, but elite journalists do seem to live in dread of being caught out of step with the little people, hence all the paeans to flyover country values.
@Barbara: All three facets of your theory sound plausible to me.
Betty Cracker
@jl: Marshall’s analysis has been stellar this election season, IMO.
low-tech cyclist
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, the NYT were the perps. You’d think that, 20 years later, they’d have figured that out.
Major Major Major Major
@Major Major Major Major: basically, you don’t need to be biased to have bias.
Iowa Old Lady
@jl: Marshall has been insightful. I like his Trump’s Razor too: when deciding on the reason for some Trump action, always presume the stupidest one is the true one.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@burnspbesq: John Adams is giving you a hearty “hear, hear!” from his grave.
American judicial precedent, not so much. Oh, I get where you’re coming from. Largely agree, frankly. But it ain’t gonna happen.
Ian
@JPL:
Why in the name of FSM would we need a wall on the F*ing Atlantic ocean??? Do these people think a shitton of cross Atlantic refugees are coming???
Turgidson
@shell:
Sure, but if Trump puts Business Hammocks in the White House, all is forgiven.
jl
@Betty Cracker: The stuff Marshall and the TPM staff have produced seem to do some good for me in arguing with the hard core rump wingers that remain in my family. One good thing about Trump is that is has stripped away some of the less committed less insane wingers in my family and revealed the true irrational bigots and bitters.
I don’t think anything will convince them to join up again with reality. But at least pointing out how a lot of what Trump says is just stupid butt ignorant magical thinking with no content at all, at least that stops them in their tracks for awhile. It is just so easy to argue and obvious if you think about for a moment,there is no response. The hard core wingers in my family will never ever vote for a Dem, even the most conservative business Dem. But maybe they will get discouraged and embarrassed and stay home on election day. Or vote for the libertarian for some other, also nutso, minor third or fourth party candidate.
JPL
@Ian: I do wonder how many think we should build a wall around Syria, Iraq and Iran. The percentage would be higher.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major:
And of course the reporters think of themselves as the savviest people in the room. “there’s no way a bunch of people who actually *believe* in stuff could put one over on me. “
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Ian: Muslims swim. One word that should strike terror (no pun intended) into the entire Eastern seaboard: Burkini. Burkini jihadis. I guess that’s two words.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I have been pleased to see that some of my more conservative relatives have turned against Trump. Even my retired cop cousin has said he’s voting for Johnson in Illinois, but will vote for Clinton if the polls start to get close.
Trollhattan
Donny wants the military to be the Biggest, Yoogest, Scariest military in all the militaries.
Mnemosyne
@Mike J:
I can’t remember the exact quote, but the old adage about dealing with con artists is that you’re in the most danger when you decide that you’re smarter than they are, because that’s how the con operates.
Villago Delenda Est
@HRA: That asshole Broder, who unfortunately is late and will never take the tumbrel ride he so richly deserved, hated the Clintons with a passion. “He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”
Thus my nym.
Wipe them out. All of them.
Hoodie
@Villago Delenda Est: And they keep chasing that white whale to the point of forgetting basic journalistic ethics, just like Ahab forgot his responsibility to his crew. I have a friend who’s an editor with a regional paper of record, and he sometimes exhibits the same cluelessness as to professional responsibility that you see playing out with the Times. These guys often seem to believe that it’s a fair world where all they have to do is regurgitate factoids and the public will sort it all out as long as you include all the appropriate caveats in the story. It overlooks that the decision to publish the story is as important as what is included in it. One time I bitched at him because the paper took money to distribute a ridiculous anti-Muslim DVD of an Alex Jones/General Boykin flavor along with the Sunday edition. His reaction was that the readers would be able to discern that it was hokum and not sourced from the paper and that if they refused to distribute it they would be accused of bias, like being accused of bias is worse than associating themselves with nutty, malicious nonsense that you ought to be biased against. The mere association of the newspaper’s brand with this nutso video risked giving it credibility to some number of people who mostly read the papers for the sports pages and received truth and don’t read the in-depth stories or look at the corrections on page A27.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: yep. Honestly the journalists I know are some of the most easily led people I know. They’re just wired to either believe what “everybody knows” or believe the opposite because if “everybody knows” it then it couldn’t be true.
randy khan
The issue with the Clintons, in particular, is that many people in the media feel like they got caught at least twice (Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky) and didn’t have the grace to recognize it and go away. On top of that, Whitewater just felt like it should have been a crime to ever-suspicious reporters, and the Clintons still got away with it. It all created a general feeling among media types that there must be something there, and they’re going to keep looking until they find it.
And, yes, I do recognize that neither Flowers nor Lewinsky was Hillary Clinton’s fault, but they’re a matched set as far as most reporters are concerned.
JPL
@Trollhattan: Maybe it’s time that he starts paying taxes.
Villago Delenda Est
@Trollhattan: But we ALREADY HAVE the biggest and hugest of all the militaries on the fucking planet!
Major Major Major Major
@Hoodie: is it the Denver post?
Villago Delenda Est
@randy khan: The Clintons TOOK A BATH on Whitewater. They were the actual victims of whatever fraud was going on. Yet the scum of the Village made the Clintons the villains of the piece.
This is why the only apology the Clintons should ever entertain from that hack Gerth and the NYT is a Captain Needa apology.
low-tech cyclist
Since the media is so big into narratives, you’d think a “Trump is a freaking nutcase” narrative would have worked for them. Especially given that it’s, you know, true.
And Trump has given them opportunities for story after story that would have fit that narrative perfectly. Maybe just one or two on a slow news day, but six or eight on a really good day.
Villago Delenda Est
@low-tech cyclist: But…but…he’s running against Hillary, the She Witch of the West!
Turgidson
@cleek:
Trump also obliged them by saying spectacularly, would-be-hilarious-if-not-so-fucking-serious awful things, particularly about the Khans.
He isn’t doing as much of that lately, and his campaign has stayed on topic better since Conway came aboard and started Gish Galloping all over the media landscape.
Combine those things with the Clinton campaign’s decision to lay low and watch Trump self-destruct while filling HRC’s schedule with fundraising events, and the conditions get set for the media to get bored with Trump and get back to basics with some old-fashioned Clinton Rules nontroversy journamalism.
I hope (but am not particularly optimistic) that now that we’re post-Labor Day, the Clinton campaign is kicking into high gear, sending out her surrogate A-Team, she’s throwing the media some “oh hey, didn’t see you back here, how are you?” bones on the plane, and debates are coming up, that the media’s coverage will get pushed off its Clinton Rules bullshit, or at least devote equal time to some of Trump’s actual scandals. And, really, how much longer can Trump go without saying something so bizarre and offensive that the media is forced to cover it and seek out Republicans to humiliate with it? This is about as long as he’s ever gone without an incident.
jl
@Trollhattan: Which we will never have to use. Just Trump barking demands from the WH with his yooge best and most terrific military of all, well, everyone will do just what we want and be good.
Remember that Trump is bald face lying about all the 20/20 perfect hindsight decisions he would have made which would have produced the perfect peaceful world with the US in charge. Trump lies about Iraq. He says he opposed, but at the time he said more or less that he hadn’t thought about it much, but seemed like a great idea to invade. Trump lies about withdrawal from Iraq. He says he opposed it, but at the time, he said Obama was weak and stupid and indecisive in not getting the hell out of that quagmire sooner. Trump says he opposed intervention in Libya, but at the time he said the US should teach some lessons to bad actors, and everyone would take notice and behave after that.
The fact that the Trump Big Lies on his foreign policy history is not ten times a bigger story than all the supposed HRC scandals put together, shows how corrupt, worthless and completely incompetent and malfeasant our worthless corporate media truly is.They are staffed useless dipshit facke news actors suborned by the mountains of cash dumped on them by amoral rotten corporations that have no interest in informing the public, but rather in maintaining a very corrupt political and economic system.
Edit: the sad thing is that some of the real reporters are very good, but they can’t break through the wall of corrupt editors and producers, and incompetent fake news actors, corrupt ignorant pundits and other BS artists the corporations put up as a facade
Mnemosyne
@randy khan:
Here’s Whitewater in a nutshell: a con man scammed a lot of people for money, including the Clintons, and when he got caught, he scammed the press by claiming that Bill and Hillary were in on it the whole time.
That’s it. That’s Whitewater. And the NYT keeps getting scammed by similar con artists over and over and over again because they totally know they’re due to win that game of 3-Card Monte. There’s no way the other guy could win every time — it’s against the law of averages!
Look up the Gennifer Flowers stuff sometime. She claims that Bill met her in hotels that hadn’t been built yet when she says they met there. She’s a con artist, too.
scav
@low-tech cyclist: Another problem with Trump is an utter nutcase unfit for the presidency is that it fails utterly the NEW part of news. It was true yesterday, the day before that and will be so for all of next week. There’s no drama, no zing. Gravity holding the atmosphere next to the planet isn’t generally included in the daily weather report.
There is literally nothing unexpected about Trump’s having dodgy ethics, business and moral practices or an antagonistic relationship to truth.
Hoodie
@Major Major Major Major: No, did they do that too?
randy khan
@Villago Delenda Est:
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t disagree at all – all the media noticed was that Whitewater seemed to stink to high heaven, not where the smell came from.
PGFan
@Hoodie: I think you make a really important point, which is that the sheer fact that an article is printed/published, especially in a major outlet, gives it a level of credibility immediately. It’s the “there must be fire because here’s the smoke” effect. Taking Judicial Watch accusations seriously validates them — that’s the problem.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
Or Kathleen Willey, who could and should have been charged with multiple counts of perjury, but was allowed to skate for being politically useful to Ken Starr.
quakerinabasement
I’m late to the party, so just one observation for Tom:
Increasingly, the “someone” willing to say these things is the writer reporting the story. This election cycle has seen several high-profile stories about “clouds” and “shadows” and “raised questions” that are entirely invented by the reporter–no one else is quoted saying these things.
That’s hard to do by accident.
scav
@low-tech cyclist: Thought of a slightly different attack on what I’m trying to communicate as a hypothesis. Narrative is more than simply a coherent story over time. There needs to be dramatic tension. A narrative arc with cliffhangers and tension. Trump’s unfitness is pretty much a drone element in the music. There’s a bit of tension involved in which exact shoe is going to drop and how hard (and perhaps be shoved forcibly into his own mouth while denying any shoe breath out of the other side) but no real tension in that will it happen or not. (although it certainly amuses a subset of political yoga addicts — the faint disbelief as to how exactly he managed that particular contortion.)
Lizzy L
@Turgidson:
He did, yesterday. Except that it is not being perceived as bizarre or offensive. From the NYT: “Well, I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s David Muir in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
When he says Hillary Clinton doesn’t look presidential, he is talking about gender. There is no other thing he could be talking about. This is bizarre and offensive. Yet no media representative that I know of has challenged this assertion, or made him defend it.
Either they share his bias, or they are cowards, or both. I vote for door #3.
Roger Moore
@low-tech cyclist:
The media isn’t into any old narrative. They’re specifically into narratives that serve a purpose. Trump being crazy doesn’t serve their purpose, so they aren’t going to buy into it.
BruceFromOhio
Since Iraq, I give NYT the same weight as HuffPO – none at all. Fuck, may as well read Drudge if you are going to trudge through all that muck just to conclude “That paradigm leads The New York Times and the rest of them to make the same mistakes over and over again”
I’ll take the Sacramento Bee reporting over all of the above. Or McClatchy’s DC Bureau. Sure, the Bee may reprint Bobo or Pincus’ latest, and McClatchy has a “me too!” vibe that can be endearing or depressing, depending on the topic. Either is more likely to commit acts of journalism on a more meaningful (to me, anyway) basis than any of the dinosaurs.
ETA: @Roger Moore: This.
Also, was reminded that Pincus no longer writes for WaPo. Alas, even less reason to read that rag.
catclub
This is really good reporting on the Bondi story.
Just needs a catchy ‘Human Bondiage – gate’ title.
It covers all those things that never seem to get discussed. Was the money returned from the Bondi PAC? They tried and Trump org turned them down.
How do they claim that they put in the Kansas charity as a mistake when they also give its address – but I bet they did not send the check to that address.
catclub
@Lizzy L:
I bet Elizabeth Warren will set off some reporting by bringing it up.
I think Hillary in her airplane press interactions will start nudging them to bring up these things that they should follow by themselves.
They need mention by Hillary before they can go after anything.
JPL
@catclub: There have been several articles about Bondi, in FL papers. Trump is tied to her now, and hopefully that helps Hillary carry Florida.
aimai
I really think that the situation at the Times is a combination of things but somewhat related to the Tragedy of the Commons. Its no individal reporters role to balance the coverage honestly. Its not even clear that it is the editor’s role to do that. But in addition they are caught in a self imposed “duty” to be evenhanded between the two candidates even though its obvious that the two candidates are basically impossible and evil vs. very reasonable and good. If you feel you are unable to “tip your hand” in the coverage by honestly covering both candidates (since honestly covering Trump is horrific and honestly covering Clinton would result in favorable press) then you are stuck with an endless series of falsely “even” stories.
But even worse, to my mind, is the comfortable assumption by the Times that Clinton is going to win, so there is no need to put a thumb on the scale. Rather than push voters to see Clinton as the better choice they are determined to punish Clinton for being obviously the better choice and calling into quesiton the Time’s own coverage and supposed neutrality. And they are doing it secure, as they see it, in the conviction that mommy will still get elected and will still treat them fairly. They are free riding on the illusion that the american people will miraculously see through their own crappy reporting and still vote for Clinton.
I have hated the Times ever since I began reading Media Whores Online and really begun reading through the coverage to its awful core. I have never lost that hatred and if this election season is any example I never will.
Villago Delenda Est
@Trollhattan: One of those 88 is LTG (Ret) Jerry Boykin, who is dominionist scum, and was reprimanded for comments he made in uniform about his god being bigger than Allah. Who is the same god.
Utter disgrace to the uniform he once wore.
Cacti
@catclub:
The Orlando Sentinel has been reporting since June that Trump may have bought off the Florida AG’s office in the Trump University suit.
Crickets from the national media until 3 months later. This story was purposely ignored. That’s why I’m with Adam that the librul media’s kid gloves treatment of Trump is journalistic malfeasance against Clinton, rather than a blind spot of neglect.
Turgidson
@Lizzy L:
Agreed it’s some of both. Male journalists won’t find that comment jump-off-the-page shocking (even if many of them do understand that it is offensive), so it won’t get the kind of scrutiny the comments about the judge or the Khans did. And, given that he said uglier things about Fiorina and had a p!ssing match with Megyn Kelly, they may not think this comment will generate the same level of outrage-clicks.
Matt McIrvin
The world leaders that Donald Trump most admires and considers a model are people who regularly have journalists murdered when they become inconvenient. If you’re a journalist, you could react to that in two ways. If you think you can make a difference, you could do your best to keep this man from getting elected. Or if you don’t, you could do your best to avoid being inconvenient.
Doug R
Is it White Privilege? They feel they are the guardians of the public good so the Clintons and Obama couldn’t possibly be in it for good? Our coalition friends like Propane Jane got no problem with the Clintons, if they want to make a few bucks while improving the world, it’s no big deal.
Ironically the press born of privilege can’t believe that’s all, there’s got to be something evil hiding in there somehow.
geg6
@Major Major Major Major:
If you are “hackable” by puke funnels like JW, you have unconscious bias. And the fact that this “hacking” only happens in one direction would seem to confirm said bias. Sorry but you argument and this idea of “hacking” isn’t very convincing to me. I just don’t see how it can happen if there isn’t previous bias.
Origuy
OT, but maybe someone could FP this:
The Marin Humane Society donation page
catclub
read the whole thing. Scientific vote/delegate/electoral vote gathering, pioneered by the Obama data team.
burnspbesq
@efgoldman:
Eat me. The rule of New York Times v. Sullivan is just as open to reinterpretation in light of experience as any other judicial interpretation of any other provision of the Constittution. As I’m sure you know, but choose to ignore for obscure reasons.
Major Major Major Major
@geg6: alleging unconscious bias is very different from alleging malice. I’m reacting to the latter.
Trollhattan
@Origuy:
Weird. Being Marin, rest assured they’re all artisan cats.
JMG
There is a deep individual/institutional bias in journalism that hasn’t been mentioned here except obliquely. Media outlets and all reporters hate, hate, hate going into stories that have been broken by other outlets. It is a professional humiliation. The more prestigious the outlet, the more that bias exists. That accounts for the time lag between the Sentinel stories and them being picked up by the Post and Times. It surely contributes at least a little to the endless search for a “new” Clinton scandal.
The exception, of course, is cable news. If two meteors hit the Times and Post buildings, CNN would not be to be able to function. A week without any polls (public polling is illegal in France for the week before an election, a splendid idea) and the talking head shows would not know what to say.
sukabi
Yes it’s sexist, but in a “dick measuring contest” between drumpf and Clinton, my money’s on Hillary.
Bobby Thomson
@Mnemosyne: laziness. Sorry, Tom, but people so laboriously call “both sides” for a quote to add to an oppo press release are not “hard working.” They’re not just intellectually lazy. These are people who majored in journalism because it allowed them to hit all the best keggers without any serious repercussions.
Ridnik Chrome
I sometimes wish I could send all these media clowns to an alternate universe where Trump actually wins the election. But then I realize it wouldn’t be much of a punishment, since they would probably get along just fine there…
Origuy
@Trollhattan: Actually, these are nearly all tuxedos. Pix (Facebook)
Iowa Old Lady
Kay will want to pay attention to the education speech Trump gives at a charter school in Cleveland tomorrow. She probably should have meds on hand.
Trollhattan
@Origuy:
Aww. If they want to get to the bottom of it, they need to check the Chron social pages to find out who’s recently had tiny formal dinner parties.
Trollhattan
@Iowa Old Lady:
Oh god. Put the Michelle Rhee lookout team on red alert.
Peale
@Iowa Old Lady: Let me guess. Despite almost a decade of rising NAEP scores and falling drop out rates, our schools are a disaster especially the schools of minority kids and that has nothing to do with financing school districts but everything to do with lazy school teachers who need to be replaced with non-union workers ASAP.
Lizzy L
@Ridnik Chrome: EXACTLY. Most of them probably see him as a buffoon, but not in any way can they imagine him to be a personal threat.
Insert quote about history, repetition, & doom here: Santayana or Burke, as you choose.
Mai.naem.mobile
I wonder if demographics don’t play a part. The Boomer reporters are slowly retiring and the Gen Xrs are taking over bigger reporting jobs and higher management positions. The Gen Xrs came of voting age during Reagan/Bush 1.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mai.naem.mobile: Yeah right. Who was in charge during the 90s?
nutella
I think Tom is too kind.
What’s most likely happened in the NYT newsroom is that the reporters have noticed that people who write critical articles about the Clintons, no matter how thinly sourced, are rewarded. They also remember that one guy who wanted to write a critical story about Judicial Watch that time and was immediately transferred out of political reporting over to handle the wedding announcements page.
It’s not prudent or necessary for management to put this into writing but employees will see the pattern of rewards/punishments and adjust their work accordingly.
Peale
@Lizzy L: They share his bias on most things. Or at least they share what they perceive what republican voters will be concerned with as always being the top concerns that need coverage.
So there is never going to be a “daycare crisis” or a “student loan crisis” or an education funding crisis (unless you can blame lazy teachers for it). Instead there will be ISIS Crisis, Immigration Crisis and national security threats galore. Because republicans say so.
TEL
What I see happening at the NYT is that (a) some of the politics reporters are of the gossip-y breathless mean girl type who show little ability to do actual investigative reporting, but are happy to attach their names to Judicial Watch press releases or “report” on the latest right-wing meme and at the same time (b) those same gossipy pieces are landing the coveted A-1 spot of the paper. I’m speaking of two reporters in particular: one of the reporters (Amy Chozik) happily tweets Hillary health-related conspiracy theories along with a lot of other gossipy stuff, and another of the reporters (Patrick Healy) was moved from theater criticism to politics. There may be others, until recently I’ve been trying to ignore NYT politics coverage. I came across these two after the past week’s embarrassing pieces fluffing Trump and going after Hillary.
Its not too far of a reach to believe that the other reporters see what it takes to get that A-1 piece, and will frame their coverage accordingly. This to me suggests that the editors/owners (?) have a definite anti-Clinton bias, even if many of the reporters do not.
geg6
@Major Major Major Major:
Are you alleging that unconsciously racist people can’t act on that bias maliciously? I don’t think you really believe that.
Cacti
@Peale:
It’s not just because Republicans say so. It’s because those are what a majority of white males say are crises. And what race/gender cohort do the majority of journalists at major publications/outlets belong to?
Turgidson
@catclub:
I try to remember this part of it when the coverage gets to be too much. The Clinton campaign’s GOTV advantage may be worth 2-3 points this time around. In which case she’s probably winning by about Obama 08 levels right now and isn’t at her ceiling. But we’ll see.
Roger Moore
@PGFan:
The bigger problem is that people have validated them that way enough now that it’s too late; they’re now counted as a credible source.
nutella
@Roger Moore:
Both stories in Tom’s earlier posts were written up as ‘Clintons smell funny’ when the actual, accurate story and headline should have been ‘Judicial Watch sent us false allegations AGAIN’.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
My guess is they’ll claim their reporting and check sending are separate operations. They had two similar entries in their charity database- they did pick one with a close-sounding name- and “accidentally” picked the wrong entry at reporting time. It’s a plausible enough excuse that people who want to believe can easily do so.
rikyrah
Kay has been absolutely blistering in her disdain for the press and the obvious lopsided negative coverage of Hillary. And unlike other papers across the country, THEY KNOW TRUMP. I think that is why my hatred of the Times is greater than other publications.
I want Hillary to win, if only for them to have to shove it. And I wouldn’t give any major outlet an interview for a year.
jl
@rikyrah: I read that Obama would stiff the national press corps for local reporters and outlets. I like that approach. Shows you are not afraid of taking questions. And IMHO, local media often much better than national corporate media.
Main downside, if you pick good local media outlets, is sometimes they are obsessed with some complicated local issue. And can’t get good answers that involve local traffic pattern history and shopping mall traffic jams, or local door jam factory closing. So no news and pol gets slammed for not knowing every detail of the local outrage involving dangerous kink in local turnpike or lousy bus routes.
debbie
Anyone who doesn’t think the NYT is intentionally undermining Clinton or that the NYT doesn’t have a firm grasp of its influence and how that can be used is naive. Adam’s absolutely right.
ETA: I say this as someone who read every page of the NYT every day from 1978 to 2003, and increasingly rarely since then.
Blueskies
@jl:
Aleta
What I wonder is whether decision making at the Times has been affected by a changed relationship between owners, business managers, publisher and editors. Whether there is more pressure from editors for reporters to write less complicated stories, less depth.
Thanks Tom for writing about this.
Blueskies
@nutella:
EXACTLY!
JMG
As a retired newspaper person, sports (worked for Murdoch a few years, checks always cleared) let me assure you that the top management of the Times would sooner have Trump or Josef Stalin be President than admit they got played, and played for generations. As for the Sulzbergers, they suck at the publisher’s only job, making money. The bought the Boston Globe for well over a billion in the early ’90s and sold it to John Henry for a sticker price of less than $100, plus taking on the paper’s debts, meaning Henry got the paper for nothing.
MomSense
@debbie:
Agreed. This is intentional.
Barry
@Major Major Major Major: “The people who think there’s something insidious going on are alleging a pretty massive cover-up.”
Why? What cover-up is needed?
Barry
@NorthLeft12: “You know what? Some think/believe that Pres. Obama is not eligible to be President because he was born outside of the US. There are facts to completely disprove that lie, but that does not matter to the birthers.”
In addition, note that ‘some people say that 9/11 was an inside job’ was not newsworthy.
What’s the difference? Both are lunacy, but one is acceptable to the Establishment, and one was not.
aidian
@germy: The point about professional standards and professional norms in journalism is dead on point and way underappreciated by critics across the ideological spectrum.
It’s also the single most difficult thing to change. There are usually good reasons these norms and standards developed (objectivity, verification, newsworthy-ness, etc.). To change them you need managers who aren’t tied to these particular practices but are still invested in the positive traditions and values of the profession — to not throw out the baby with the bath water. Those people are unicorns. I’ve never worked for one and I wish I did.
One correction to the OP:
“They work constantly for (in almost all cases in the print world) relatively short money.”
Journalism at nearly every level is terribly underpaid. I consider it a public service, and for that I sacrifice a good percentage of what I’d make otherwise. But at pretty much every level, print-based newsrooms pay better than broadcast outlets. Your local newspaper pays a little better than your local TV station. Staffers at the NYT make more than staffers at CBS or CNN or whatever (the exception is the anchors, who can make big money, but that’s not nearly as true as it used to be and it’s always been the exception rather than the rule.)
smintheus
There’s a pretty simple test to evaluate whether the Times is doing its job by its own standards: Does the Times report on stories that left-wing and partisan Democratic media are promoting using the same low threshold (‘people are talking about it so it must be news’) as the Times applies to memes the right-wingers and Republican media push so successfully?
The answer, obviously, is no they don’t. There are all kinds of well documented scandals swirling around Trump, widely discussed on the left, that the Times and their ilk barely touch if they mention them at all. If the Times writes negatively about Trump, it’s usually to bemoan his latest piggish statement. Not Trump’s Mafia ties, just his hyperbole that “some critics think borders on racist”.
C.S.
Tom, others have alluded to the problem embodied in this sentiment, but I think I can be more explicit . . .
What you are describing is a press failing, a fault of the profession. But the actual problem people see is not a fault of the profession. The problem is the New York Times. Specifically them. And the faults of the Times should not be laid at the feet of the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, or whatever, as a step towards airily theorizing about the mores and norms of the profession. Other papers might run egregiously anti-Clinton stories, fair or unfair or biased as the case may be. But those papers take their cues from The NYT. The NYT sets the parameters. It’s failures validate the failures of other outlets, but the successes of other outlets (the Post and Miami Herald, in the case of the Trump pay-for-play story) should not be used to cover for the NYT.
Barry
Tom, think of this like the ‘pipeline issue’ in academia. If you talk with the professors, of course they don’t discriminate, and they are all fine chums.
Talk to the peons, and it’s another story.