I just cancelled my online NYT subscription. The public editor’s piece on “The Truth About ‘False Balance’” was the last straw. I can take sneering, and I can take ignorance, but I can’t take ignorant sneering:
The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates.
Josh Marshall correctly describes the situation at the Times as a crisis.
Mike J
FDR said Hitler was a bad guy, Mussolini said he wasn’t, we’ll just have to leave it there. Who are we to make a moral judgement?
scav
Indeed, who do they think they are, to impose the monetary value they think they deserve in recompense for reading their streams of text? Clearly, the readers should be able to come to the proper value for thir efforts.
SenyorDave
My mother is a NYT subscriber. She probably won’t cancel her subscription, but I’ll check with her. If nothing else I’ll suggest she call to cancel and see whether they offer her a sweetheart deal to stay.
I read what the public editor wrote and it is truly a ridiculous column. The bottom line is that there are any number of major stories that they could do about Trump that they avoid for the sake of balance. If I were editor of one of the major newspapers in the country, I think a major story on the fact that one of the candidates for POTUS is a racist would be a continuing headline story. Apparently for the Times it is just a minor story, not really worthy of looking into in detail.
catclub
The press implicitly decides what is important by what it chooses to report on. This is why not reporting an all the things that are now simply ‘given’ in Trump’s case is unhelpful.
Anoniminous
Infotainment mediums are desperate for that advertising cash so they are cranking up the “balance” and the HORSE! RACE!
MaxUtil
@scav: What? This isn’t a debate about whether or not someone should pay to read the NYT. Nor is it a debate about being mad because the fiction novel you bought had an ending you didn’t like. Journalism is an actual thing that the NYT claims to actually do. If they can’t be bothered to do it, why is that not a problem?
J.
Public Editor? More like the Public Relations person, or fluffer, for the Times. I was also appalled — as were a number (all?) NYT readers. (The comments on the piece were great.) The Times’s reporting has been shoddy on a lot of fronts for a while now. (Do they even employ fact checkers anymore?) And you are not the only one who’s cancelled his (or her) subscription in protest. But I doubt the Gray (Tangerine?) Lady will do anything unless several major advertisers pull out (sadly).
Nicole
Thanks a lot for the ear worm, Doug. I now have the Peter Paul and Mary version going loud and strong in my brain.
And you’re right. What a stupid op-ed. No, NY Times, what we want is for journalists to look at a pile of shit and say, “Hey, this is a pile of shit,” not, “This pile of brown, odiferous substance raises questions about Clinton’s emails. Also, some people say she looks tired.”
J.
@Mike J: Now substitute “Obama” for “FDR,” “Putin” (or pick your autocrat/dictator) for “Hitler,” and “Trump” for “Mussolini.”
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I did not read the NYT editorial. Is there any pushback in the comments section by any chance?
This basic journalism dynamic has been in place for a while. It goes like this: (Journalist soberly observes) “Ten thousand climate scientists declare climate change is real, caused largely by human activity, and is dangerous. Sarah Palin says it’s all a bunch of hogwash. Gee, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to the causes of climate change.”
Amir Khalid
@J.:
Their readers expect more honest journalism from them, but the public editor and her bosses don’t care; they think they know better than their readers. That century-plus as a newspaper of record has gone to their heads.
scav
@MaxUtil: Um, rather exactly making an equivilence between their refusing to make distinctions between truth and lies under cover of not imposing “values” and ideology and their willing imposition of a monetary value upon their prosing which we can walk out of (which dougj just did) — because they have abandoned one of the values (or even value-added) of journalism. OK, rather entirely dependent upon the multiple meanings of value, but there you are. Their deliberate and defended policy of confounding facts and opinion is the perfect definition of Bullshit.
? Martin
I agree that it’s a crisis. On the same day they can put out one very good piece, better than almost anyone else, and one that looks like it came out of the Washington Times, and then there’s a subject that they are completely silent about. It’s as if they turned over editorial control to one of Facebook’s algorithms.
Amir Khalid
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
To put it briefly, the NYT has come to mistake the style of objectivity for its substance.
Tom in Colorado
Canceled the Denver Post yesterday after 35 years. The have a new Politics editor who repeats all known falsehoods. I will miss the comics.
Davis X. Machina
There’s a conga line of Martin Luthers with tack hammers and manifestos lined up for a go at the door of the Cathedral Church of the Savvy.
shortribs
And of course they went with a “dark, shadowy” picture of Clinton at the head of the article.
MaxUtil
@scav: OK. I’m having a hard time following your train of thought. But it sounds like I misunderstood your first comment, so apologies for that.
Villago Delenda Est
Until these people are held responsible through the means of the end of their current livelihoods, things will not change. Major emotional events are needed to foster the change that is desired.
eric
First the Washington Post got Nixon, now it looks like they get the Times. Pathetic defense that plays word games rather than address with intellectual rigor the obvious shortcomings demonstrated for all to see. All while the Press celebrates the real reporting done by (one) Post reporter.
joel hanes
Josh is far too kind to the Village
“What is truth?” sait Pilate, and washed his hands
Villago Delenda Est
@srv: And you’re still a dipshit.
Davis X. Machina
OT, or more properly to be posted in earlier thread.
Why did LePage get elected, and re-elected? Jackholes like this don’t help.
Pogonip
What did the Marshall article say? I can’t get into it.
Just One More Canuck
@Tom in Colorado: gocomics.com should help you out
JMG
As a strict business proposition, the Times’ attitude towards Clinton is just silly. I’d bet anything over 60 percent of their readers are women (look at the ads!) and more than that are Democrats. They are risking blowback they can’t afford. It’s not exactly thriving as a company.
Betty Cracker
You’re right, Doug. I’m done with them too.
Miss Bianca
@srv: What does this even mean? Are you drinking at work or something?
Trollhattan
I hope the good Doctor L chimes in on this. Also rooting for WaPo to send a couple of divisions north to lay siege on 242 W 41st St. It’s Time(s).
nonynony
@Just One More Canuck: Also comicskingdom.com. Especially if you can’t get enough Funky Winkerbean. How depressing can a comic that started as a joke strip about kids in High School get? Keep reading Funky Winkerbean to find out!
hueyplong
I’d stop paying for NYT if I’d ever paid for it in the first place.
Let its death be yet another untimely demise attributed to Hillary Clinton.
May its corpse be discovered in the vicinity of the Mena Airport.
Marc
The Times is an irreplaceable news source for a lot of purposes, and I’ll happily continue my subscription to support it. No one else does some of the deep investigative or background pieces that they do, and they are more than coverage of the election. I also read, variously, things like the BBC (unfortunately increasingly shallow), the Guardian, and Le Monde. None are perfect. I’m also curious what the alternative is supposed to be – and if your answer is some left-wing equivalent of Fox News that tells you only what you want to hear, think about what that means.
Aleta
Subscriptions to cable also fund malpracticed journalism.
CONGRATULATIONS!
People pay for the dreck that the NYT has been serving up for the last 15+ years? You gotta be out of your fuckin’ mind to do that.
Ryan
Has anyone heard if any planes have landed safely today? I can’t find any mention of a plane landing safely in days! Are they even flying? Why is the media hiding this from us!?!
gene108
The media will never admit their wrong. Never.
Therein lies the problem.
Pogonip
@nonynony: One of the characters has Alzheimer’s now. I know it’s Alzheimer’s, rather than some other form of dementia, because Funky only uses ailments that get Googled a lot. Look for someone to come down with pneumonia, Parkinson’s, or both soon.
hueyplong
I hope that straw man survived the pummeling Marc gave him. There’s a lot of room between what the NYT is doing right now and a left wing Fox. If there is nothing in that gaping hole, whose fault is that?
James E Powell
@Marc:
One can always re-subscribe after Election Day. This is meant to send a message that what they are doing is not okay.
nonynony
@Marc:
Did you read the public editor’s piece of condescending tripe? Or Josh marshall’s response to it linked above?
I’ll take the Washington Post over the Times these days. At least the Post doesn’t seem to be completely mired in “theater critic” mode when it comes to talking about the election.
dnfree
I also canceled my online subscription today. Yes, they have written a lot of good articles that I will miss. But they have also FAILED to write a lot of good articles. The Public Editor in her column basically said the Times has done an awesome job covering the Clinton emails and the foundation, and meanwhile the WP has been covering Trump’s IRS issue, so it’s all good. That’s not “balance”–not everyone reads both papers, nor should they have to! (She also says those who are complaining about unbalanced coverage aren’t rational.)
rikyrah
I feel you.
SO glad people are calling them out on their shyt.
Mike J
@Amir Khalid:
Along with the decades of having lost out on the Watergate story to a small town local news paper.
WarMunchkin
I mean, it seems more like a manifesto or rallying cry for traditional journalists rather than an argument. I once saw David Sanger speak in person, god knows why I went to that, and I recall thinking afterwards, “man, he just made an argument that institutions are more important than facts”. And I think that’s basically what this is.
I see journalists as a tribe now just like any other; the difference is that we pay them to gossip about politics for their day to day living. This person is just pushing back against the counter-tribes.
Origuy
An ex-Marine hired as a cop in West Virginia lost his job because he didn’t kill a suicidal black man.
JMG
One thing I found interesting was Dean Basquet saying he’d go to jail to publish Trump’s tax returns. Sure sounded to me like an open plea to IRS employees for one of them to pull a Daniel Ellsberg.
Turgidson
@Marc:
Easy. A news source that knows how to separate fact from innuendo. A news source that treats a story where there is an actual, damning chronology of facts showing a political bribe more seriously than a story with no such evidence. A news source that doesn’t then say of the story with no evidence that it nonetheless “raises questions” and “casts a cloud” because if there was wrongdoing, that would be bad! A news source that pressures and badgers a presidential nominee with a known history of sordid financial dealings including with Russian business interests, a documented history of Scrooge-like charitable giving, and a flair for turning whatever he touches to shit just as much as they badger the other nominee for not giving a god damn press conference at their request. A news source that can call a lying racist a fucking lying racist.
That’s just for starters. Wanting a news source that does the above isn’t the same thing as wanting a left-wing Fox News. It’s just wanting a credible news source that can cover something as important as a presidential campaign without melting into a puddle of self-pitying bullshit.
dedc79
I did what I would have recently considered unthinkable – subscribed to the Washington Post. Mostly just because I think we can’t complain about a lack of in-depth and investigative reporting and then not pay for it when some journalists are actually doing it (Farenthold, particularly)
I understand the urge to stop funding bad journalism, but it’s self-defeating unless we also fund good journalism.
singfoom
The Times has some writers still worth reading, but I’m surprised at subscriptions. As an anonymous jerk, you get X articles per month and I’ve been able to read the pieces I’m interested in without giving them a dime. Except of course the ad revenue that they get from their advertising that the ad blocker doesn’t catch.
As Doug says in the OP, Josh Marshall at TPM fucking nails it. Given the population in NYC and the surrounding environs I don’t think they’re going anywhere. Though I doubt that Spayd will understand the criticism that has been leveled at her by Josh or anyone else.
His example proves his point perfectly.
It’s almost as if her salary depends on her not understanding this thing.
Major Major Major Major
Don’t forget that you can easily skirt article limits by using an incognito/private browsing window.
singfoom
@Marc: You cannot depend on one or a single digit number of media sources to keep you informed. A good variety, even those with viewpoints you disagree with helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. YMMV
Marc
@Turgidson: So what is that news source now?
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
Absolutely. srv’s comments follow no consistent ideology or pattern other than ‘What is the most ludicrous thing I can say that might get a rise out of someone?’
Marc
@nonynony: Ironically, the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War at the Post was a pretty severe reason for me not to support them in the first place. And for world news there’s basically nothing original at the Post at all.
Timurid
1. The NYT is run by:
a. Total incompetents
b. Medicine show hucksters
c. Lace curtain white supremacists
d. All of the above
Betty Cracker
@Marc: You sound just as clueless as the public editor. You should check out Marshall’s piece linked above rather than hopping on the Times’ strawman hayride.
Napoleon
@JMG:
That was a completely cost free promise he will never need to keep, which is why he made it. Very few people likely are in a position to ever get their hands on it and every single one of them that could would end up in jail or unemployed. This is like me saying I would turn down Ariana Grande if she ask me to sleep with her.
gogol's wife
The Public Editor’s inaugural column was about how the Times is too liberal, so I wasn’t surprised by this.
Josh Marshall’s piece is the epitome of tl;dr. And I’m someone who plows through Dostoevsky for a living. What did he say?
I’m really struggling with the decision about whether to cancel my subscription. I don’t know where I’d go for news about things other than politics (not to mention crosswords, and don’t tell me I can subscribe just to the crosswords because I have to do my crosswords in pen on newsprint and they have to be delivered to my house so I don’t have to get in the car first).
Turgidson
@Marc:
Not the New York Times. Which is what we’re discussing here. The WaPo is doing better work lately, but I wouldn’t give them a Gold Star either. And the open sewer that is their OpEd Page is hard to forgive.
The Times holds themselves out as the gold standard. Their coverage of this campaign descends into farce, and then the public editor flips their readership the bird when they get it pointed out to them that they’re miserably failing to meet their own standards. They can take today’s edition and shove it up their ass.
Frankensteinbeck
@Timurid:
‘Lace curtain white supremacists’ is a good phrase, and I think describes large portions of the national media. They would never use a racial epithet, but check first how scary he was when the police kill an unarmed black man, and don’t think it’s weird Trump would be concerned about all the dangerous criminals crossing the Mexican border.
Mister Forkbeard
I’m right with Doug! on this one, except I never had a NYT subscription to stop.
I was considering sending a message to the NYT that I was literally about to purchase a sub and decided not to due to their disastrous reporting and horrible response by the public editor (this is actually the case), but I don’t think they’d pay attention.
@gogol’s wife: Marshall is right on the money, but what he says is essentially: “The NYT Public Editor is basically taking a huge basket of accusations, answering the least credible ones in a strawman fashion, and then ignoring the central premise of the critiques as a whole. The fact that she even admits that the paper publishes pieces on Clinton that insinuate wrongdoing but actually prove the opposite and then dismisses that as “the reporters are just really invested in their work!” illustrates the enormous lack of introspection the NYT has on the issue.
JMG
I know if I published a newspaper and any of my employees told readers, “Oh, you can find that story in a competitor’s paper” that employee would be fired immediately. I can’t believe she was dumb enough to say that.
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
They’re only even addressing it now because the false equivalence is so bad that other national journalists are complaining. They don’t respect, or even consider a badge of pride, complaints by liberals both in the general public and politicians.
ET
Spayd needs to read that. Of course she still wouldn’t get it because she is so habituated to her environment and so needs to believe she is understands, that anything that is/seems contrary is nothing she has the language to actually comprehend.
Doug!
@gogol’s wife:
It sure is.
Betty Cracker
@Mister Forkbeard: Excellent summary!
Betty Cracker
President Obama is fed up with the coverage too. Remarks from a rally via TPM:
Good for him.
piratedan
@Marc: Marc, I can understand that… I think a lot of folks are having a hard time accepting the fact that when it comes to politics, and just about anything involving Hillary Clinton, that the NYT feels a need, if not an obsession, to denigrate her or her candidacy in some fashion. I don’t have an issue if there’s something that she’s done as being especially detrimental or perhaps even wrong. The fact that the Times feels compelled to have continued on this e-mail crusade and the Clinton Foundation false equivalency is telling. Whereas we have actual pay for play ongoing with the Trump Foundation and the fact that he’s deleted his own e-mails to remove any back trail on his civil lawsuits and we’re not hearing about ANY of this from the NYT. If she’s done something wrong, fine, find it, publish it. If you find evidence exonerating her, publish that too. The problem is, the Times isn’t doing that. Instead, they’re circling the wagons with every intent of continuing along their current path.
different-church-lady
They already fuckin’ DO that EVERY GODDAMNED DAY OF THE WEEK AND SUNDAY TOO.
They can no longer smell their own shit.
randy khan
@singfoom:
I subscribe to the Times (and the Post!) because it’s the only realistic way to find the articles that don’t get blared across the intertubes, and those often are the best articles from my perspective.
Okay, I subscribe to the Post for the comics, too.
different-church-lady
@gogol’s wife: Look, I’m not saying Marshall is a good writer, but the only universe in which that thing is “too long” is one that is ruled by Twitter.
Bobby_D
I only sub to the WaPo, and that’s because it’s free (gov/military employee). Back in college I used to work in a little warehouse that distributed out of town and foreign papers to local libraries and book stores. It was fascinating seeing how 15-25 different papers covered the same story.
Betty Cracker
@piratedan: Exactly. That’s pretty much what I told them when I cancelled my subscription a little while ago. I don’t want my own bias spoon-fed back to me. They should investigate Clinton — she’s running for president, after all. But they need to investigate Trump with the same depth and vigor, and they haven’t, not by any objective measure.
eclare
@dedc79: Thinking of cancelling the Times and subscribing to the Post.
Mister Forkbeard
@Betty Cracker: I missed some important points, but that’s the shortest thing I could come up with.
But seriously, Obama did a much better job of explaining the problem in his speech, though he’s not talking directly to the NYT or explicitly rebutting the Public Editor’s piece. I’m gonna miss him when he steps down.
@different-church-lady: I would say he’s just being exhaustive and explaining in depth why the NYT Public Editor is wrong. It’s meant for us, but it’s also written in the hope that someone will get her to read it and respond – or that other journalists will read it and figure out there’s something legit to the complaint.
SiubhanDuinne
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
There is nothing but pushback. I can’t remember ever seeing such near-unanimity among commenters in my life. Really, it’s worth your clicking on Doug!’s link just to check some of them out. Blistering.
mapaghimagisk
I’m thinking of subscribing to TPM Prime and emailing a giant middle finger to the NYT.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@Betty Cracker: Right it’s not even the old false equivalency that the dipshit at the NYT was talking about. It’s the goddamned total lack of any vetting of Trump.
Turgidson
@Mister Forkbeard:
Yeah, that whole disconnect is particularly infuriating. I mean, I do get that they must have spent a lot of time and effort investigating whether HRC’s performance as SOS was linked in any way to the Clinton Foundation. And I’ll even stipulate that it was a story worth looking into in the first instance, and that a pattern of ethically questionable actions or possible wrongdoing would have been a big story IF FOUND. So I can see how they would want to have something to show for their efforts. But, once the investigation turned up nothing untoward and only a handful of benign but somewhat-interesting events, would it have been that hard for them to write one or two investigative pieces about the Foundation, basically with this format:
“We explored whether the Clinton Foundation or its donors were granted special access or favors to HRC when she was Secretary of State. What we found was that Foundation donors contacted HRC’s aides to request access or assistance. Our investigation showed that they were not given any special treatment. HRC met with individuals who had made donations to the Foundation in her role as Secretary of State [such as the Prince of Bahrain and Muhammad Yunus], but there is no reason to believe their donations granted them access they would not have had, given their long-standing relationships to the US government.”
Explain why the story was worth covering. Lay out the facts uncovered, and discuss whether anything nefarious is revealed BY THOSE FACTS. And for the love of cupcakes, OMIT any stray editorializing about whether something “raises questions” etc. – hey, Poindexter, the point of the investigation and the write-up was to FUCKING ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. How does it make sense to write a piece about a bunch of non-scandalous facts and then conclude or at least strongly imply that there is a scandal anyway, because “questions”?? The fuck is that?
/rant
bystander
I know it’s lookist but Spayd is the person I avoid sitting next to on the subway.
different-church-lady
@Mister Forkbeard: Exhaustive in both senses of the word. Marshall tends to be repetitive and verges on elliptical at times. But saying something is tedious is different from saying it’s “too long.” It’s not too long in an objective sense, it’s just not written well enough to support its length.
gvg
@eclare:
You know, that might be the best way to make the point, especially if you enclose a copy of the new order to the post showing you actually did it. Someone else above said he would fire an employee that referred you to a competitors paper.
Barbara
@gogol’s wife: This is the kind of illogic that makes me gnash my teeth. In her FU to “liberals” she pontificates with complete certainty that what they “want” is to impose their world view on editorial judgment. Yet, apparently, it was okay for her to ask the NYT to shape itself to her expectations. She was constructing a straw man to rail against, but she thought complaints against that same straw man were perfectly acceptable from the other direction. In other words, she doesn’t mind point of view so long as its hers and she is projecting onto the readership what she herself complained about in her first column. The most execrable article in the NYT so far was the vile hit piece by innuendo against Clinton based on Anthony Weiner’s outrageous behavior against his wife. That thing belonged in the National Enquirer. But I think a lot of what we are seeing isn’t malice so much as it is laziness. It is just so much easier to be spoon fed email junk from Judicial Watch than to go out and find stuff about Trump. I noted on Maggie Haberman’s twitter feed that her first line in the profile is that she is a mother of three. So am I (but I would never put that on my CV). I really think sometimes the most obvious explanation is likely the most accurate. Real journalism is hard and the political desk is where you go when you want less hard work.
different-church-lady
@Turgidson:
“You provide the prose poems, I’ll supply the
warscandal.”Elizabelle
At minimum, the NY Times needs to stop reminding us they are the paper that employed Judith Miller. And should have known better.
This week, they should remove reporters Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick from the Hillary beat. Pronto. And shitcan their editor too. Liz Spayd should be replaced, immediately, by one of the previous ombudsmen. The last crucial weeks of a presidential campaign is not when you leave these circle-jerkers in place. They are, at best, incompetent.
Did anything of this magnitude happen when the Judith Miller debacle blew up? I don’t recall so many people cancelling.
rikyrah
The Youngstown, Ohio, Trump Republicans
by Martin Longman
September 13, 2016 1:57 PM
If you’re familiar with the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s song Youngstown, you might have had the same experience I had while reading Farai Chideya’s latest piece for FiveThirtyEight. The article looks at what’s happening along the eastern border of Ohio where support for Trump is strong. As a point of departure, it features Allan Banner, an Ohio construction worker who recently went back to work operating heavy machinery.
Banner, 66, grew up on a farm in Liberty Township, Ohio, between Youngstown and Warren, that his family has owned for nearly 200 years.
Here’s how Springsteen’s song begins:
Here in northeast Ohio, back in eighteen-o-three
James and Danny Heaton found the ore that was linin’ Yellow Creek
They built a blast furnace here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls that helped the Union win the war
Long roots in eastern Ohio.
A sense of rootedness in the Mahoning Valley community is connected to how Banner views work. He said his great-great-grandfather cut timbers to support the roofs of the coal mines; his father and grandfather worked in the steel industry. Banner and his brother worked union jobs in road construction and rebuilding or tearing down steel mills.
………………………….
This is the history of the region for people like Allan Banner, and both he and Mary Theis [an 81 year-old entrepreneur also featured in the article] describe well what’s happened to it.
Turgidson
@Betty Cracker:
Awesome. I’m sure the press will just re-collapse onto their fainting couches in response to Obama’s critique, rather than actually take stock of whether he has a point or not. But Obama has the megaphone and platform to talk past them to the voters (and he’s learned through hard experience that it’s necessary to do this to get the facts out), and I’m damn glad to see him using it. I hope he keeps doing it every time he’s on the stump and any other time he has an audience.
James E Powell
@Turgidson:
How about a headline like “foundation investigation reveals no special favors”
eclare
@gvg: Good point. As someone noted above, I want to not only not support bad journalism but actively support good journalism. Also, I’ve noted the Guardian has had some really good articles lately.
Aleta
@gogol’s wife: I believe there is quite a fight going on at the Times. Personally I think that either canceling or sending complaints as a subscriber is important.
Jim Rutenberg at the Times is one of the writers who opposes the public editor’s view. He wrote this August 8.
I could be wrong, but I haven’t seen that Josh is canceling his subscription to the Times, or even advocating others do that (but I’m not sure). Until now NYT reporting has been one of the sources that TPM depends on. As far as I’ve seen, it looks like he is in the camp of “criticize loudly and often.” Again, could be wrong on that.
Mister Forkbeard
@Turgidson: Right. It is absolutely a question worth looking into. But as you stated – it’s BEEN looked into repeatedly, and there’s no indication that anyone did anything wrong. In almost all cases, it’s explicitly clear that the right thing was done. In the few cases where it’s not explicit, there’s no actual indication of wrongdoing or malfeasance, it’s just that there’s no explicit record of doing the right thing.
At this point, there’s no excuse to keep mentioning the Clinton Foundation except to report on Republican attacks on it… and then to note that the attacks are completely without substance, and to note that Trump’s foundation has several provable ethics problems to say the least.
Elizabelle
Incidentally, Spayd was previously managing editor at The Washington Post. And was editor at the Columbia Journalism Review.
The role at the CJR makes me wonder if some of the obtuseness is schooled into journalists training at elite j-schools. Because the political reporting does usually sound like they just interview each other.
Barbara
@rikyrah: I am from the other side of that border. The idea that the jobs that will allow high school graduates to make more than my college educated professional parents (it’s true, that’s how good it was in the 60s and 70s for manufacturing laborers) will come back any time soon is crazy. Even if manufacturing comes back, it will employ fewer people, they will need to have technical or college degrees, and they will not be unionized. What they need is way better community college and secondary education resources and a clear message that you will not get ahead if you drop out. The fact that now, after more than 30 years of declining industry, they are still pining for the world that was 1975 is just sad. I mean that, it’s really sad.
piratedan
in short, Ms. Spayd and a boatload of her staff probably need to be kept in a room to watch Absence of Malice about four times in succession but based on the reporting that we’ve seen thus far, all they would get out of it was that back in the day Sally Field and Paul Newman were good looking people.
Mister Forkbeard
@Aleta: Is there a place to send complaints and/or cancellation notices to the NYTimes? I am about to drop both my local papers when I move, and I’d considered subbing to either the Post or the Times. At this point, I couldn’t support the Times even if I hate the Post’s editorial board – the Times is now posting editorials as straight reporting.
I would love to make this clear to them and how they’re losing significant amounts of trust and revenue.
Turgidson
@James E Powell:
Go with it!!
OzarkHillbilly
@Aleta: It’s hard to report on the NYT, which is what Josh is doing here, without reading the NYT. It’s a business expense.
different-church-lady
@piratedan: No, no, they’d probably also fantasize about which Hollywood actor would portray them in the movie version of their take-down of The Clintons.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Ha, there are plenty of people here that comment on all kinds of shit they don’t read or watch.
gogol's wife
@different-church-lady:
I wasn’t referring only to the length — if it were well written the length wouldn’t be a problem. I always think of tl;dr as “Get to the point already! Stop the throat-clearing!” If a writer is incisive and compelling, length doesn’t matter. Fallows is a good example. I can read him at any length.
les
@Marc:
Well, it’s not the NYT. You seem to be saying we shouldn’t bash or unsubcribe unless we point to a better alternative (I’ll charitably allow that you’re not seriously saying anyone here is demanding a left wing fox). Point is, if the NYT were the only paper in the country, this would still be shitty journalism. And it’s perfectly appropriate to say, you don’t get my money for shitty journalism.
Betty Cracker
@Aleta: You’re right — Marshall is in the complain often and loudly camp. I’ve been doing that for a few years now, but that column by Spayd was the last fucking straw. I admit I’ll miss the NYT, which I perused multiple times per day. But I just can’t support that anymore.
Iowa Old Lady
One of the commenters on that article makes the good point that if only Clinton supporters are complaining, Spayd might ask herself why. It’s not like Trump wouldn’t complain about criticism.
Turgidson
@raven:
Guilty as charged. I comment on David f’ing Brooks and Ron [LEEEAAAADDDD] Fournier without reading their crap all the time. But I try to get the highlights from driftglass or Charlie Pierce, or from the front-pagers here, first.
But I don’t run a somewhat high profile political news blog/website like TPM. He absolutely should keep subscribing – even (or maybe especially) when the NYT’s coverage of something is atrocious, it still has an outsize role in dictating what stories get the talking heads yapping. So long as he’s running TPM, Marshall needs to see what they’re saying even if it is crap.
different-church-lady
@gogol’s wife: I agree with you about Marshall. But we should stop using “too long” and “badly written” as synonyms. Twitter-journalism is killing us, and talking as though 500 words is an epic slog doesn’t help.
gogol's wife
@Aleta:
I wrote to both Spayd and Baquet to complain about her inaugural column. No reply whatsoever.
Calouste
I think we should start referring to the former “newspaper of record” as the “white-supremacist-enabling New York Times”.
FlipYrWhig
@Turgidson:
But, see, when you get right down to it, that’s what they’re reporting. They’re not investigating, then reporting, the underlying facts. They’re investigating whether something raises questions, then they’re reporting that it continues to raise them, insofar as it’s hard to answer anything definitively in a cynical postmodern world where what counts as either “facts” or “questions” is always indeterminate. “‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.'” In a political world where everything is treated like bullshit, reporters are going to detach from themselves and cover whether the bullshit is connecting with an audience. “If Joe Q. Politician can be effective in spreading bullshit, we can only admire him for that,” they think, “and if he can be effective in spreading the rankest of bullshit it proves just how impressive his bullshit-spreading abilities are.” And “effective” means “good at fooling idiots, not us, who are above it all.” This is what happens when you create a generation that nourishes itself on sarcasm, irony, and quoting things at one another, a/k/a Gen X, a/k/a my generation, let them wallow in how it’s uncool to care about things or try very hard, then unleash them into the wilds of journalism. SM mothafuckin’ H.
James E Powell
@piratedan:
Wilford Brimley’s 10 minutes were golden.
gogol's wife
@gogol’s wife:
I used to write regularly to the Public Editor, when it was Arthur Brisbane. To give him his due, he ALWAYS had an assistant reply directly to me, and occasionally he himself wrote to me. That ended with his tenure. The last one never answered me either.
SiubhanDuinne
I haven’t yet cancelled my NYT subscription, and just saw a book review over there.
The Book under Review is by Maureen Dowd. And it’s not so much an actual “book” as it is a collection of MoDo’s columns about Donald and Hillary, dating back to at least 1999.
It’s called The Year of Voting Dangerously, and it retails for $30.
The best part is that the reviewer is Jim Vandehei.
Aleta
@Mister Forkbeard: Someone else may know better, but I guess I’d go with:
[email protected] (for readers of The New York Times)
[email protected] (for readers of The International New York Times)
Even though it’s “letters to the editor,” I’m pretty sure your position will be noted and counted with (what I hope is) huge number of other complaints.
Felonius Monk
Is it time for organized pressure to be put on NYTimes advertisers?
Aleta
@gogol’s wife: If you are still a subscriber, you can post a complaint in every article that they open to comments. Then anyone can read your criticism. People are doing a lot of that.
Turgidson
@FlipYrWhig:
Ah yes, this is a variant on the Chucklehead Todd thesis for political journalism. GOP lies about the ACA were none of his business – all he was supposed to do was note that they were “messaging successfully” against it. And fact-checking them would have been doing the White House’s “sales” job for them, so of course he wasn’t going to do that!
I guess I still held out hope that the NYT’s professional guidelines were considerably more stringent than the Chucklehead Todd standard. The 2000 Dowd-led assault on Al Gore was a black eye, and the complete and utter surrender to BushCo over Iraq and warrantless wiretapping should have killed that hope for good. This cycle put the last nail in that coffin, for now at least.
Aleta
@gogol’s wife: I wonder who hired these last two. It’s like they came from an insurance company training seminar or something.
Carol
@tom in Colorado The previous politics editor at the Denver Post was blatantly biased toward the republicans. I didn’t know it could get worse.
gogol's wife
@Aleta:
It’s very frustrating to comment over there. It takes hours for the comment to be moderated, and by that time you’re lost in a sea of hundreds of comments, no matter how quickly you got on it. UNLESS — you’re one of their “preapproved” commenters, who are marked by a green check mark. Don’t ask me how they determine who’s pre-approved. It’s yet another of their little annoying quirks. So I don’t usually comment except on Downton Abbey or crossword puzzle threads.
WarMunchkin
@mapaghimagisk: As soon as I get a job again, I’m gonna subscribe to TPMPrime.
They way I see it (and no real direct offense met to the people here who are doing this), sending a vocal letter of outrage to the NYT about unsubscribing seems a bit too much, like writing “Why I am voting for Jill Stein” articles. Just unsubscribe, it’s not worth paying for (except maybe the non-politics related stuff; if you can earmark your money for that, by all means). Paying for real journalism is helpful, and TPM has accomplished something real. I’d be glad to support it.
Also, in a debate about what is real journalism, are we really saying Josh Marshall isn’t worth it because he wrote too many words? We’re big boys and girls, right. Real journalism takes money to support and the time from readers. If you expect everything in 500 chars or less, you will receive about that level of quality.
Yutsano
This is why I don’t read anything from the Times unless I’m home with my Adblock on.
Aleta
@Betty Cracker: Coming from a long term subscriber and writer, your cancellation should get their attention, I’d think. Unless they are already cruising outside of any moral gravitational field. (Hoping that’s not so.)
Mister Forkbeard
@WarMunchkin: I get what you’re saying, but in the case of the NYT it seems like it’s a good idea to explain to them why you’re leaving, not just that you are. I mean, the following happened:
1) NYT fucks up journalism for months /wrt Trump and Clinton.
2) The public (and some media outlets) call them on it.
3) They respond by publicly stating that they’re doing a great job, and that the left just wants the NYT to be all pro-Hillary all the time – it’s YOUR problem, not theirs.
At this point, it’s perfectly reasonably to stop your subscription and let them know that the disrespect and malpractice from #1 and #3 are enough that you won’t give them any more money.
Aleta
@gogol’s wife: I never knew about the green checkmark!
Villago Delenda Est
“Goodbye is too good a word”
How about “Adios, motherfuckers!” instead?
Betty Cracker
@Mister Forkbeard: Co-signed. Also, I know some big paper editors in real life, and I’m told they really do take this kind of thing seriously. I’m not saying the NYT will necessarily shit-can Spayd and clean house in their Washington bureau because a bunch of people cancelled their subscriptions in a huff over that column — it’s not that linear. But they do take notice.
marianne19
Doug, I also cancelled today after 25+ years of print and then digital. They offer 99 cents for a year! I said,” not today, I m pretty angry.”
marianne19
@SenyorDave: First offer I got was half price. Second was 99¢ for a year! Must be having a bad day.
James E Powell
@Villago Delenda Est:
I suggest “Fare thee well”
WarMunchkin
@Mister Forkbeard: Well, maybe, but I do think we can benefit from positive-certain-media advocacy in addition to negative, like TPMPrime above. I don’t know, are you more likely to subscribe and pay for a news source if a friend or colleague tells you that they think it’s reputable? I see Marshall frequently pushing TPM on the Editor’s Blog, but maybe there are better ways to fund news outlets that are dedicated to the craft.
Also – is journalism accredited at all? AFAIK, a journalist is one who writes for a journalism company. Is it like engineering or medicine or law where you have to go in front of a board or something and get re-credentialed?
Mister Forkbeard
@WarMunchkin: Oh, absolutely. I don’t have a NYT sub to drop, but I signed up for TPM’s Prime last month. It’s just as important to support good journalism as it is to remove your support from bad journalism.
TPM is definitely biased, but they’re open about it. And they do great investigative work.
Betty Cracker
@marianne19: Ha! Me too! I said it wasn’t about the money, it’s the principle.
JustRuss
@Turgidson:
A-fucking-men. Honestly, is this so damn hard?
Mister Forkbeard
@JustRuss: To be fair, no one’s proven a bribe yet. But… what IS there and Trump’s own statements indicate that there’s a really high chance that it was. And that seems like it would bear some investigation, doesn’t it? It’s certainly about 10x more likely to be a a legal or ethical problem than any “questions raised” about the Clinton Foundation and HRC.
James E Powell
@Mister Forkbeard:
Is that the standard for Trump? Things need to be proved before we can say or ask anything?
Because that’s definitely not the standard for Clinton.
Mister Forkbeard
@James E Powell: Nope. But it does bug me when people use sentences like the following: “…there is an actual, damning chronology of facts showing a political bribe” when the facts do now show a bribe, but suggest that one is pretty damned likely instead.
Especially if we’re trying to get the press to act rationally, saying there’s something proven when there isn’t doesn’t help. It makes it sounds like the breathless crap I used to see BernieBros spewing from USUncut.com all day long.
Turgidson
@James E Powell:
That’s certainly Trump’s preferred standard. And while I’m sure the NYT doesn’t think that’s the standard they are using for him, it certainly feels that way sometimes.
Hillary has been in the “guilty until proven innocent” basket for twenty-plus years now, and not just with the Times, though they are the most rigorous adherents to that rule. FFS, she could serve a successful two terms with no new (real) scandals, and the Times would probably still be dropping periodic turd sandwiches about her emails and how they are “casting suspicion” on something.
Turgidson
@Mister Forkbeard:
And to be fair to me, I didn’t say a bribe was “proven.” But there are more enough facts there to lead a reasonable reader to come to the conclusion that it very likely happened, without larding up the story with any nonsense about how the who thing “raises questions” and “creates an ethical cloud”.
But as you say and we agree, the apathy with which the press is treating the Trump story, where there is more than enough smoke to suspect fire and go in search of it, with the Clinton Foundation coverage, which assumed a 5-alarm blaze was occurring just over the horizon even though no smoke was in the air, is just stupefying.
Mandalay
The best reason to cancel a subscription to the NYT is their shameful coverage of national security issues, where they blatantly act as a mouthpiece for the government.
Read any of their recent articles on hacking which constantly make bold and unsubstantiated allegations from anonymous sources: “intelligence officials”, “a government official”, “United States officials”, “U.S. officials”, “federal law enforcement officials”, “private security firms”, etc. This is bullshit. There is no defensible reason that claims and allegations relating to hacking should allow the NYT to circumvent their self-imposed rules against citing anonymous sources.
Mrs. Whatsit
@marianne19: You got better offers than I! I got 30% off for a year, followed by 50% off. :) Still cancelled my subscription (without taking it out on the poor employee trying to get me to reconsider.
Mandalay
@Mister Forkbeard:
Yep, such as…who was behind the hacking of the DNC?
The media says with a sly chuckle and a wink that “We don’t know for certain that PUTIN DID IT!!!…” when the reality is that they don’t have a fucking clue, and don’t understand why the supposed “evidence” presented to them by biased sources, such as the security firm used by the DNC to prevent hacking (think about that), is worthless.
Mister Forkbeard
@Turgidson: Yep. Totally agree with most of it. And you’re right, you didn’t use “prove”, you said that it showed bribery. Which is close, I suppose.
And absolutely no argument that there’s completely different standards between the two candidates. “No evidence of quid-pro-quo” for Clinton invites more investigations and breathless articles, but Trump’s likely bribery gets a collective “Huh, okay. That’s neat.” from the general media.
Berial
The best summation I’ve seen is this: “The press is not a pro-democracy trade, it is a pro-media trade. ” They care about what affects THEM and not much else wrt how they cover these candidates.
https://newrepublic.com/article/136730/media-botching-election
Mister Forkbeard
@Mandalay: Nice of you to pop in and spout another conspiracy theory about hacking that just so happens to make the democrats look bad.
It WOULD be an absolute travesty to just accept the DNC’s word on the subject, which is why several different security firms AND the FBI all looked at the evidence in question and said it was very likely Russian state actors. Most stories about the DNC hacking say it was likely Russians but it’s not confirmed – the reason being that the metadata involved can be faked. However, there’s no indication that it was faked, so for now: very likely the russians.
Why are you here, man? Do you ever actually make any decent points or convince anyone of anything, or do you just show up and make an ass of yourself and then leave?
germy
sorry seems to be the hardest word
Rachel in Portland
@Betty Cracker: That’s what I said, also, too.
Mandalay
@Mister Forkbeard:
Exactly. At least the media are blissfully ignorant of why the evidence against Putin is so flimsy. You show vague inkling about one of several reasons for why the evidence is so flimsy, but you are still gullible enough to swallow the claims of the security company protecting the DNC’s data (which they later backtracked) and Robby Mook.
Clapper is on record as stating that the NSA does not know who hacked the DNC. It is an inconvenient truth that there is no real evidence linking Putin to the hacking, and there are a gazillion people out there trying to hack every system of any significance all the time. You know nothing about hacking or computer security, and would do well to STFU until you get a clue.
Betty Cracker
@Mister Forkbeard: The answers to the questions contained in your last sentence are no, no and yes, yes.
eemom
@Nicole:
Late as usual, and I don’t dislike PP&M, but Dylan’s own version of that is one of his best.
Mnemosyne
@Mister Forkbeard:
Well, c’mon, you have to admit that when you have a candidate whose campaign was being run by political operatives who also ran campaigns for Putin’s associates in Ukraine and Russia, and when that candidate has known financial ties to Russian banks, it’s obviously crazy to think that someone in Russia hired hackers to steal documents from the DNC to benefit that candidate. No, it’s clearly most logical to assume that it was someone else entirely, with no ties to the person who benefited most from the theft.
God help us all if Mandalay is in law enforcement. Look, just because this guy has the keys to the stolen car in his pocket doesn’t mean he’s the one who stole the car. It must be someone else entirely who’s never been anywhere near the car. Logic!
J R in WV
@Doug!:
Josh’s article is under 2600 words. When we are talking about the future of our nation, if that’s TooLong;Didn’tRead then fuck you lazy bastards!!!
different-church-lady
@J R in WV: what I said, only better put.