Okay, tacky headline…couldn’t resist. But those of us who cancelled our New York Times subscriptions in disgust during the 2016 campaign because of public editor Liz Spayd’s refusal to entertain the notion that her paper was playing with fire by vilifying Clinton and normalizing Trump might be interested to know that the Times is laying off Spayd effective Friday and replacing her with…Twitter. Excerpt of Times memo via @DylanByers:
Here’s the hackery from Spayd that finally drove me to shit-can my Times subscription on September 10, 2016:
“I am begging you to please refrain from drinking the false equivalency KoolAid,” said Rhiannon Hutchinson of Claremont, N.H. “There’s too much at stake in this election for the media to stoke the belief that Hillary’s mistakes (which she has definitely made) are even close to par with Trump’s admitted use of his money to influence political outcomes and the contempt he deliberately displays for America’s
citizens, journalists, allies, and longstanding traditions of immigration, equality, and tolerance.”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. Take one example. Suppose journalists deem Clinton’s use of private email servers a minor offense compared with Trump inciting Russia to influence an American election by hacking into computers — remember that? Is the next step for a paternalistic media to barely cover Clinton’s email so that the public isn’t confused about what’s more important? Should her email saga be covered at all? It’s a slippery slope.
That didn’t age well, did it? Spayd is as useless as teats on a boar. She won’t be missed.
Aleta
Mnemosyne
Heh. I’m darkly amused that the Times used the old we’re not firing you, we’re eliminating your position! dodge.
Timurid
What are the odds Spayd hoists the Jolly Roger and takes a job in the Trump administration or the RNC? They’re going to have plenty of openings on their PR staff…
The Moar You Know
“We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform”
The most terrifying words in the English language circa 2017. Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit and GTFO.
rikyrah
I love you all pulling receipts.
Keep nailing that trash to the wall!
NOBODY is going to forget what these people did.
Ghost of Fitzmas past
Making a lot of hay out of the covfefe thing here too I see. Does it make you feel better? are you really that stupid?
ThresherK
Proverbially, the NYT seems to have gone home with, one by one, week after week, every riffraff, trashy, useless PUA in the bar.
Part of me thinks they can’t do worse with Twitter, because they’re never gonna fcking learn why they sucked at it so bad.
rikyrah
Uh huh
From Benen:
Corner Stone
So, instead of hiring an actually competent PE, the NYT is going to let Russia bots drive their news coverage angles?
In Russia hot takes you!
piratedan
well, Spayd’s work is done, the NYT is no longer considered by many to be conscience of the country.
fuck ’em
schrodingers_cat
@piratedan: They lost that position after their cheerleading for Bush II’s war in Iraq.
schrodingers_cat
@Ghost of Fitzmas past: Are you getting paid or is this a labor of love?
Morzer
Or, in the Age of Trump, tweets on a boor.
jeffreyw
cookie me
Morzer
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s a one weird trick pony.
Brachiator
I missed the part where the Times had rebuilt their readers’ trust. When did that happen?
Morzer
@Brachiator:
At about the same time that Liz Spayd became tough and passionate.
Oatler.
“We here at MSNBC welcome our newest member, formerly of the New York Times…”
hovercraft
@Timurid:
I’d say she’s a perfect fit, if he can look beyond the fact that she comes from the NYTimes, remember to the buffoon they are one of his biggest critics, facts not withstanding.
Oh and Spayed, good riddance, I just wish you were taking Baquet, Douchebag and a few others with you, Maggie………..
Morzer
@Oatler.:
“So, Liz, welcome to Fox and Friends. Do you think liberals hated you for telling the truth about Donald Trump’s crushing election victory?”
cynthia ackerman
@rikyrah:
I’m told by a very reliable source that Republicans need to vote twice in the runoff for their vote to count.
Spread the word
Baquist
I love this headline. Gave me a much needed morning chuckle.
Wag
@Aleta:
Wow. what an amazing tweet! I miss ABL.
Frankensteinbeck
There’s a lot to be angry about here, but the thing that’s weirdest to me in that editorial is that he cites “Russian tampering in America’s presidential election is more important than whether the Secretary of State followed email protocols correctly” as an example of unfair liberal bias. He thinks this is a winning argument!
ThresherK
@Oatler.: I saw today, never knew before, that Spayd was at CJR, editor and publisher.
Her crapwork at NYT really made me, forget any useful thing she may have accomplished before.
George Spiggott
@piratedan:
So, Liz Spayed the Gray Lady?
rp
My god! Just apply some plain old f*cking judgment to your reporting. That’s all we want.
bystander
Can we have a thread where each of us can condemn Kathy Griffin?
Also, am I a bad person because every now and then I want to unleash my inner Kathy Griffin?
Lastly, can we all reach out to give Brannon a hug? Or whatever Trump’s son’s name is?
Cheryl Rofer
The Times still hasn’t explained this.
Spayd’s reaction is interesting. Overall, it hasn’t aged well, but there are some insights that the Times should have followed up on.
The Midnight Lurker
@Ghost of Fitzmas past: Yeah! Making fun of Trump for misspelling a word on Twitter is so petty. You’d think the guy ordered a burger with Dijon mustard or something.
Morzer
@George Spiggott:
From Gray Lady to Gray Spaydy. Winning! Bigly!
MisterForkbeard
@Aleta: I give Trump credit for joking about this too. I mean, it’s minimal credit, but at least he’s got some kind of a sense of humor – or whoever runs his twitter account does.
Ghost of Fitzmas past
@schrodingers_cat: I’m sorry to underestimate the power of the typo to shape policy. After all, President Obama was utterly finished nationally after “57 states”
No, you are right. Go ahead and do a victory lap over this. It’s not sad at all. Really.
Chyron HR
@Ghost of Fitzmas past:
Last time this year you were still #NeverTrumping it up, and now you’ve been reduced to “He PROBABLY didn’t have a stroke, libturds! Lots of people his age have trouble expressing themselves coherently!” Life is funny.
RareSanity
@rikyrah:
It won’t work.
I live in the 6th (going to early vote today), and it is mostly college educated, with a large minority population. This isn’t Newt Gingrich’s district anymore, demographics wise. Along with a lot transplants, there are YUGE Latin (actually Brazilian), Indian, Asian, Turkish, and Persian communities in the district.
Trump only won by 1%, and even that victory I kinda chalk up to the “Hillary is going to win anyway” reason a lot of Democratic leaning voters didn’t vote. As GWB said, you can’t get fooled again.
Although in this environment where nothing seems to make sense, it’s hard to feel confident about what seems so obvious to the eye.
Frankensteinbeck
@MisterForkbeard:
Definitely whoever does damage control, and not Trump himself. Trump has a long public record of having absolutely no sense of humor when he’s made fun of at all, and not much of a sense of humor otherwise.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Cheryl Rofer: Yeah, they vomited that defense up pretty quickly after the story broke elsewhere. I’m surprised they were never pressured to address that. Or at least, not pressured enough.
germy
MisterForkbeard
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s what I was thinking. If it WAS Trump, it’s a marked improvement. He can never admit he’s wrong or joke about himself.
My mistake is in thinking that maybe Trump was the author, instead of just immediately assigning authorship to his staff.
@Chyron HR: The amazing thing is that he can’t get off the idea that maybe it’s just funny and everyone is enjoying a joke, rather than making a serious statement about how this will ruin Trump forever. Bad trolls troll badly.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think it was just Trump cheating at Scrabble again. ‘Covfefe is totally a word! See, it’s right there on Twitter!”
germy
@bystander:
She had her Beatles Butcher Boy album cover moment.
rikyrah
“Only 8% of Americans think GOP health care bill should pass”
Call your Senators and demand they #ProtectOurCare.https://t.co/dnjNb6B9v7 pic.twitter.com/AZvzLOMz5Y
— Jason Sparks (@sparksjls) May 31, 2017
Frankensteinbeck
@MisterForkbeard:
I don’t know exactly what kind of crisis caused that tweet, but my best guess is the correction was issued after a staffer finally found his missing phone.
The idea is to repeat over and over that we’re all doomed, so that we fall into despair and lose political motivation. It’s ratfucking 101.
maurinsky
The headline is perfect.
ruemara
They can’t be destroyed fast enough. I’m pro the 4th estate, but I have yet to see the 4th estate of America do it’s fucking job correctly in the past 9 years.
In other news, I sunk money into another video camera. correction, an actual video camera versus a DSLR. I’m getting paranoid about overheating even though I’ve filmed events before with them without a glitch. This is going to be a lean set of months. Yes, I’m talking about cameras, I can’t take the hourly fail of American politics all the time.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
“This guy over here is jaywalking, that guy over there is kneecapping the food truck vendor who didn’t pay his protection money on time. Who’s to say which is more important? That’s for our readers to decide.”
“But, for our readers to decide that, wouldn’t we have to cover the jaywalking and kneecapping incidents with the same degree of comprehensive detail so that our readers have all the information they need to make that judgment? Why are we planning a PBS documentary about the jaywalker, and only a couple of tweets about the kneecapper?”
“Quiet, you.”
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@The Midnight Lurker:
Yeah, or put his feet on the desk.
low-tech cyclist
Spayd, from Betty’s post:
This is a ‘slippery slope’ that newspapers deal with every freakin’ day, that’s what’s so ridiculous about what Spayd said there.
Every day, a newspaper has stories on the front page (above and below the fold), and on page A2 and A3 and A17, and some stories just don’t get covered because of finite space and resources. Every day, the newspaper has to make value judgments about how important each story is, relative to the others on its plate, by virtue of the reality that each story has to go in a different place in the paper.
What a goddamn idiot Spayd was. Good riddance.
Roger Moore
Has anyone at FTNYT ever tried reading an internet comment section? I can’t imagine anyone who has thinking one is a practical alternative to anything, except possibly a cesspool.
Chris
@low-tech cyclist:
Also, “slippery slope” is listed under “logical fallacies” for a reason.
Morzer
@Roger Moore:
Daddy, don’t oo wuv us no more?
SgrAstar
@The Moar You Know:
They should have done this ages ago. The Post allows instantaneous commenting on almost all of their articles, and there doesn’t seem to be a problem. Readers need to be heard.
Major Major Major Major
@Morzer:
Brilliant turn of phrase!
raven
@Roger Moore: Like every other comment section.
jl
@Roger Moore: It’s a joke. They aren’t going to do shit anymore to address their crummy reporting and analysis. It would be embarrassing, if it were still really the national paper of record.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: I suspect that, some day still long in the future, they will do a two-page layout like they did for their screwups on Wen Ho Lee and on the aluminum tubes. Long after the damage has been done.
hovercraft
Oh look, Corey made a funny.
GOPOLITICO
Lewandowski: Trump needs staff who have a ‘preexisting relationship’ with him
…………….“When you have a communications team, they have to have that relationship with the president to understand how he communicates. Because he is the greatest communicator, as a president, we’ve ever had. He’s better than the staff. He knows the media better,” Lewandowski said Wednesday morning on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”…………..
………..“When you have a president who is so active, who is so articulate, who is so good at communicating with the media, sometimes you’ve got staff who have to keep up with him, and it’s much easier, I think, if you ask people who had a preexisting relationship to understand how the president functions,” Trump’s former campaign manager said. “That makes it much more cohesive. So just getting up to speed in a very difficult environment when you have so much negative media attention is a hard thing to do, I think, for anybody.”…………
Should we send out a search party to see if Corey can find his way back out of Twitler’s ass, or just leave him up there? Gah!
quakerinabasement
Slippery slope? I thought it was called “news judgment.”
sigaba
@Mnemosyne:
“You did such a terrible job, you gave the management a new insight into the very meaning of what you do, and we realized it was redundant, because we realized that no matter what shitty tendentious crap you write, there was never a falsifiable way to prove if you were doing a good job or not.”
“But what about Ross Douthat!?!”
“Of course, by that same rationale we should probably fire all of our conservative editorial writers and hire people with half a brain. Unfortunately all of the brilliant intellectually-honest conservative writers out there are all professed racists, nationalists and Gilead militiamen. You can see the bind we’re in.”
nightranger
So true seeing as how the Kremlin practically runs the Whitehouse now. Well done Spayd.
Yea so to avoid any appearance of slipping it under the rug then spent 5x more time on it than all the 10x more insane stuff going on with tiny hands.
Morzer
@jl:
The fundamental problem with the NYT is that they think the most important thing for their mission is pandering to their readers. It isn’t. They should be starting from the premise that good journalism aims to deal in facts and get to the truth. If they don’t have that, they won’t have the readers’ trust either and without trust they aren’t going to be able get people to sign up for more.
MisterForkbeard
@Chris: Problem: They covered the Hillary Has Emails “scandal” much more than they covered Trump’s Russian problems.
So now we’re talking about spending 2 hours on jaywalking and 3 minutes on kneecapping, in order for people to understand that Jaywalking is serious. Oh, and let’s not accept the jaywalker’s apology and keep insisting she’s arrogant and unapologetic. And remember to insist that any minute now, the kneecapper is going to stop beating people and be responsible!
Cacti
Crucial to rebuilding reader trust?
Who did they do that with?
The Vichy Times is as much an establishment propaganda mill as they always were.
glory b
@Ghost of Fitzmas past: He was referring to 57 PRIMARIES, which there are, when you include the protectorates(I think that’s what thy are referred to in the aggregate), like Puerto Rico.
But why am I talking to you?
Betty Cracker
@Major Major Major Major: Agreed. I am so stealing that, @Morzer.
hovercraft
@bystander:
Can we have a thread where each of us can condemn Kathy Griffin?
No, she went too far, but she was merely expressing what many people feel, says my friend.
Also, am I a bad person because every now and then I want to unleash my inner Kathy Griffin?
No, again according to my friend.
Lastly, can we all reach out to give Brannon a hug? Or whatever Trump’s son’s name is?
No, Barron has access to shit the rest of us will never have, I feel sorry for the kid, but he’s got bad genes, he’ll have to prove to the world that he’s overcome nature in about 15 years, and then it’ll be safe to embrace him. Sorry to be harsh, but we must safeguard the species.
Aleta
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31052017/exxon-shareholder-climate-change-disclosure-resolution-approved
Morzer
@Aleta:
I guess the investors had a particularly strong morning covfefe that day. Good for them.
jl
@Morzer: It’s a barely disguised FU to people who have expressed, with evidence and logic, deep concerns about much of their political reporting and analysis.
hovercraft
@MisterForkbeard:
It wasn’t him, the babysitter came on duty at six, saw that he’d wet the bed and cleaned up. They need an overnight babysitter, how many more weeks till Barron’s done for the year? Maybe Steve “Say’s Who” Cohen could move in for a few weeks, he strikes me as a lawyer who could exacerbate Twitler’s legal situation nicely while being entertaining.
Ghost of Fitzmas past
@glory b: I am not slowing down the rest of the class to let you catch up, ok sweetie?
Morzer
@jl:
I would have thought that saying FU to the readers who care most about the NYT was a poor business strategy, but perhaps they figure they’ve already lost them and the less traveled road to Breitbart is the way to leverage creative synergies.
The Moar You Know
@SgrAstar: Fuck that. Readers are idiots. They frequently have less than nothing to offer.
Look at any random comment thread anywhere, but especially on your local news sites.
If readers want to be heard, they can do what Cole did (and what I did, finally pulled the plug on mine last year) and start a blog of their own and see if anyone thinks their ideas have any value.
hovercraft
@Aleta:
Wow, that is truly awesome. Can someone ask The Secretary of Exxon, I mean State for a comment? Oh sorry I forgot, he doesn’t speak to the media, or travel with them. I guess that’s better than Scott Pruitt, who not only doesn’t talk to the media, but also doesn’t disclose his schedule, who he meets with or where he travels to.
Frankensteinbeck
@glory b:
Because nitpicking is the Balloon Juice religion.
EDIT – And as a devout practitioner, I mean that in an affectionate way.
Ares Akritas
Domenech… Domenech… Domenech… Domenech… Domenech
Here’s something to consider: on March 21 2017 the NYT featured a piece by Ben Domenech on health care (https://nyti.ms/2mKT6xT). Yes, Domenech. That Domenech. The plagiarist, opinions-for-hire Domenech.
Not only is Domenech not a health care expert, but he’s a notorious serial plagiarist and was bribed to write favorable opinion pieces about the government of Malaysia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Domenech). How can anyone trust someone with Domenech’s history and afford them the precious opportunity to appear in the NYT’s opinion pages? Are his opinions so unprecedented, so transcendentally valuable that he can be forgiven for repeatedly betraying his readers?
Whenever anyone finds any excuse for how abysmal the NYT’s journalism can be, just think Domenech… Domenech… Domenech… Domenech… Domenech.
jl
@Aleta: Interesting to watch different powerful economic factions gravitate to opposite sides on man made climate change issues. Those who are exposed to the risks caused by use of fossil fuels start to speak up and make demands. Those who are in a position to grab the profits from fossil fuels and shift the risks to others, or can protect themselves, continue to stonewall, obfuscate and deny to others and themselves. There will be more actions like this.
Now that the economics of renewables for new projects beats fossil fuels, there will be some epic and savage crony capitalist battles. I’m lumping the renewable projects in with crony capitalists, because often they are, though not always.
Edit: just to be clear, many battles will be ginormous crony capitalist battles, because that is the game, at least in the US. Don’t hate all the players, hate the game.
Morzer
@Frankensteinbeck:
Some of us are atheists! Refudiate that, my friend!
bystander
@hovercraft: Wow. You’re better than a Miracle 8-Ball.
schrodingers_cat
Ghost is a reincarnation of an old troll that was banned. Kremlin bosses must have provided a new ISP.
Kay
The emails weren’t the start of it, in my view. Benghazi was the start of it.
They never found anything in Benghazi. Nothing. Yet it was covered for 2 years. Benghazi set the stage for the email coverage- they never found anything there, either.
Benghazi rested on the idea that Susan Rice’s boilerplate diplomatese was some kind of smoking gun, and it just wasn’t. Nada.
Felonius Monk
Can we actively campaign for her to be relegated to some weekly supermarket flyer and not to any major or minor newpaper?
Uncle Cosmo
@ThresherK: In Spayd’s sorry case, as of today PUA translates to Packed-Up Arsehole. How many months did that take?
So instead, throw open the doors to the Rosbots. Save a few rubles & disclaim all responsibility for the result.
Would love to see what the IC digs out re just who in the Midtone Monochrome Bitch’s management is compromised by Rossiya-Bratva LLC.
Morzer
@Felonius Monk:
Supermarket flyers occasionally provide good deals. Why futz that up with Liz Spayd?
Kay
Don’t forget the coverage of the Wikileaks emails! Ordinary campaign emails were treated as evidence of a criminal conspiracy. They completely ignored that they only has ONE SIDE’S emails, too.
This was a multi-pronged hit job. It took real effort and hundreds of people.
germy
@Felonius Monk:
Shipping News.
Elizabelle
Spayd is and was a moron. Executive Editor Dean Baquet needs to go next. Although I would suspect the real problem with the Fuck the Fucking New York Times is in the publisher’s suite. Fish rots at the head, and all.
FTF NY Times announced they’re going with even less editors. That should work out well for them. (Allegedly, they’re going to hire more journalists for the digital edition.)
You cannot cut your way to a good product. Something’s going dreadfully wrong at the Grey Lady.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Felonius Monk:
I hear The Hue and Cry in Crab Hollow, Nova Scotia is looking for an obituary writer….
TenguPhule
@Roger Moore:
Have you tried reading the FYNYT comment section. The Trumpers on it are a fucking cesspool all on their own.
hovercraft
Speaking of nitpicking, has the BJ hive or is it a pack of jackals, dissected this piece offal?
To our allies’ alarm, Trump’s foreign-policy vision takes shape
By Steve Benen
germy
@Elizabelle:
Kusher tried it at the New York Observer.
It never works.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: The FTF NYTimes internet comments section is actually way better than most. They moderate the comments, so it’s not the cesspool you see at other news sites.
Interesting to me: longtime reader-commenters have been screaming at the FTF NYTimes for months now. Especially when they normalize Trump, and gaslight us.
Do notice that FTF NYTimes now highlights a feature with writing “we can’t miss” from the left and right. More normalizing, is my guess. In all honesty, haven’t read their daring picks for stuff we should read from “the right.”
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
Completely untrue.
You can cut your way to a great product, put it requires you have great starting material to work with and you don’t mind ending up with less of it at a premium price.
Hence why sushi and filet mignon command such high prices.
But that’s a business strategy intended for inanimate objects, not people.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
The wingers on the FYNYT are as bad as every troll here combined and then some.
schrodingers_cat
I have been listen to Sufi music for Zen.
Arziyaan from Delhi 6*, Music by A R Rahman, sung by Kailash Kher and Javed Ali and written by a Prasoon Joshi.
Kher and Joshi are both Hindus, btw. I could translate it for you, but I will probably kill the poetry, which is brilliant.
Arziyaan sari mein chehre pe likh ke laya hoon
All my requests are written on my face.
Delhi 6* the postal code of Chandni Chowk, the heart of Old Mughal Delhi. You can see Jama Masjid built by Shah Jahan (of Taj fame) in the video.
Captain C
@Corner Stone: Why not make it official?
TenguPhule
@hovercraft:
I welcome our new Canadian overlords provided they hang our current overlords high.
Elizabelle
@TenguPhule: But the Trump-maroons are a lesser presence. You can sort for “most recommended” (which functions actually as “most sane”, and then skim the “most recent” comments for an unranked sample.) You will see some stupid comments from rightwingers, but nothing like at the LA Times and Washington Post, where the trolls apparently gather in between watching Fox New and Town Hall and Hot Air and agitating about their latest bowel movement.
Mike J
@Aleta: Exxon shareholders weren’t voting for disclosure about climate change, they were voting for disclosure about climate change regulations and how they would hurt the bottom line. No applause from me.
Captain C
@schrodingers_cat: Assuming they still had it after Whitewater.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
I still have so much trouble accepting how fucking played every fucking media outlet was on this.
The soulless bastards CUT STATE DEPT SECURITY FUNDING BEFORE THE ATTACK.
And yet not a single Republican was held to account for that. Not one.
Not a single fucking reporter on Capital Hill remembered that Congress controls the purse strings.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
But the worst ones are editor picks. No, I’m not kidding. They have bent over so far to “both sides” that they give the worst RWNJ special highlights.
jl
Corrupt institutions like the Trumpster and the NYT are so arrogant as to think they can act as they will and continue their influence. It won’t happen. NYT keeps up this garbage, it will be a high toned provincial rag that has sophisticated and precious arts, books, and home beautiful sections, and stale news, and a stable of arrogant and meretricious opinion columnists (with a couple of accidental exceptions). Krugman has admitted he was an accident, and wrote about how his column has turned out to be nothing like the NYT intended, a wonky economic analysis bit. The outrageous Dub campaign’s economic lies and fantasies came along unexpectedly. The fact that NYC will continue to be one of the countries premier and most influential and important provinces will just make the more pejoratively provincial nature of the NYT more pathetic. Kind of like a mediocre Harvard department.
Same with Trump. Baring Trump’s idiotic BS sparking a military catastrophe, what I think is most likely to happen is that the modern international order will continue, led by Europe, China, Japan and others. Trump thinks the US is the indispensable nation, just as he is the indispensable man. Neither exist in the modern world, as some wise man once said. For example, China has made really huge and irreversible investments so that it can become a leader in producing renewable energy capital. It may see Trump’s idiocy on climate change as an opportunity to advance more quickly in that area, and make its enormous investments pay off more quickly. I doubt Trump’s BS will alter their course.
Technological leaders like Germany and the Netherlands (and, ahem, California!) have shown that countries can make important progress in increasing sustainable energy production without economic hardship. Trump isn’t going to change that.
Probably the best hope we have is that Trump will only make the US more of an economic and social backwater. If we root him and his GOP enablers out of power quickly enough, we can catch up
TenguPhule
@Morzer:
We deny that nitpicking is the official BJ religion.
Its our official sport.
Jeffro
“SLIPPERY SLOPE!” is a shitty argument…everything in life is, technically, on a slippery slope. You make judgments based on the best available information and work together on an ongoing basis so that there’s no need to go to – or tolerate – extremes.
sherparick
@Ares Akritas: But he is not a “liberal,” so he represents a “legitimate point of view.”
jl
@Mike J: Thanks for the clarification on what happened at Exxon. Much more ambiguous picture than I thought.
Elizabelle
I wonder what Margaret Sullivan, previous FTF NY Times ombudsman, now at the Washington Post, thinks about this. I hope she addresses it.
Sullivan was terrific. The WaPost’s gain is the NY Times’ loss. Margaret Sullivan wrote a fabulous article chastising Hannity and Gingrich and other purveyors of those terrible lies about the late Seth Rich. She was out early on that one.
WaPost: The Seth Rich lie, and how the corrosion of reality should worry every American
Liz Spayd could never think through, or write something, as good as what Sullivan achieves on a consistent basis.
I would like to know who thought Spayd was up for the job, and kept her on after she bombed, over and over, during her brief tenure. I took a lot of her columns as dares to cancel my FTF NYT sub.
That person, or group, is a lot of what is wrong with the FTF VIchy NY Times.
LurkerNoLonger
@rikyrah:
Who are these 8% and how can I avoid them for the rest of my life?
Uncle Cosmo
@Aleta: My best guess at the Exxon Board of Directors’ private response:
Show the shareholders then actually conducting a successful campaign to throw those worthless shits out on their butts & I’ll eat a bucket of Pennsyltucky Fried Crow with gusto…
jl
@hovercraft: Shorter version: We are stupid vicious people who will throw the US into the dustbin of history, and we’ll try to take the rest of the world with us.
As I typed above, I think the rest of the world will say ‘no thanks’ and we can enjoy the dustbin all by ourselves.
TenguPhule
@jl:
Wishful thinking.
Trump fucking up military operations has already happened, its just a question of how big the next catastrophe is. The “modern international order” is about to go very very ploin shaped.
American reliability was the bedrock of the current international system. That’s why so many nations are so slow to react, most of them literally can’t remember a time when we were not the big brother on the shining hill sticking our nose where ever we pleased. They may not have liked it, but on balance for the most part they learned to work with it.
Now all the old rules no longer apply. Multiple countries are just starting to feel their way towards starting from scratch. This increases the chances of things going wrong between different nations over things as simple as ships in the wrong economic zone.
The world is now less secure then it was five months ago.
trollhattan
@Ghost of Fitzmas past:
Shouldn’t you be off
stalkingscolding Kathy Griffin?jl
@LurkerNoLonger: Maybe the GOP House and its big money donors make up most of that 8%.
hovercraft
@TenguPhule:
I’ve finally figured it out, he’s playing Supremacy: The Game of the Superpowers a political, economical, and military strategic board wargame!
That’s why he surrounded himself with the masters of the universe, they are totally going to beat all those pesky little countries in Europe, have you looked at a map, they are all tiny! Russia is the only country big enough to pay attention to, and they have more nukes than us! And also too they say nice things about me, did you hear what my friend Vlad said yesterday? He said the democrats were just making excuses for Hillary losing.
Mnemosyne
@Ghost of Fitzmas past:
We’re not the ones who were dumb enough to vote for him, sweetie. You were. Now you pay the price.
TenguPhule
@ruemara:
They’ve abdicated all responsibility since 2000, my friend.
jl
@TenguPhule: Please note that I did mention that Trump’s plan does risk military catastrophe. That is a danger.
Anyway, why aren’t you working on your bunker? We could put up a page to buy you a backhoe, cement mixer and some rebar.
You have a passport, right. If not, you should apply for one rather than waste your time commenting here.
TenguPhule
@hovercraft:
The only flaw in your theory is that we know Trump couldn’t finish the instructions manual and is obviously making it up as he goes along.
TenguPhule
@jl:
He’s already caused it. So far we’ve been lucky that the damage has only been small scale to date.
jl
@TenguPhule: Why aren’t you working on your bunker, then? You’ll need a deep one.
Downpuppy
For me, ultimate Spayd was her Atlantic interview
Call your readers children, and 2 weeks later, you should be gone.
LurkerNoLonger
@jl: On the bright side, 92% of Americans agree it’s a bad bill. You can’t get 92% of America to agree that water is wet. Great job, Republicans!
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: Yeah, that was hair-raising. They’re basically saying the point of America is to swing its dick and kick ass and cooperation is for fags. And those are the _reasonable_ people with Trump’s ear. Ack.
Elizabelle
@TenguPhule: I’ve noticed that myself, frequently. It’s appalling. I’ve seen the readers quibble with the FTF NYT about how they assign their “Times pick”, because I’d suspect you hit on the algorithm.
Is this all about appeasing advertisers? Because advertisers’, readers’, and citizens’ needs are not identical.
? Martin
The problem with social media as a moderating function is that due to the zero marginal cost of use, it gets massively abused. Trump just gained 3 million new robotic followers, that can now all amplify his message above that of others because there is no cost of doing it. This is why email is such a shithole – spam is effectively free, unlike the junk mail in your USPS mailbox.
As was recently noted, when drivers see a car crash they instinctively slow down and look. Social media analytics see all of this attention to car crashes and the result is an inference that everyone wants car crashes, so that’s what it delivers. How will the NYT determine which social media feedback is regulating and which is undermining? I don’t think that’s possible.
Aleta
@Mike J: For sure it’s self-interest, and risk analysis is what the investment firms are after. But does it possibly also imply a reminder to the administration that the Paris Accord is about what’s good for business, and that US companies have a financial interest in negotiating regulations for US benefit? Of course it’s not a decision that short term profit should give way to long term investment in renewables. But maybe the requirement for more information suggests there might be more ways to look at decisions? Well. then again, maybe not, since it gives more power to the investment firms. Oh well.
Gravenstone
@Ghost of Fitzmas past: Surely there’s a wood chipper somewhere that you can shove your head into? Whilst it’s running, of course.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
I think they just look for the lowest rated comment with the most replies and think “Ah, conflict! Excellent driver of eyeballs, lets get that asshole some more attention!”
TenguPhule
@jl: If you’re gonna be an asshole, step up your game. The regulars are much better at it.
Elizabelle
@Downpuppy: Hadn’t seen that. Published May 16.
Spayd is deeply stupid. From the very first response:
Is Spayd the Stupid talking about Obama — who was president when she “entered the job” in July 2016? Controversial and deeply divisive? It’s a sloppy answer. And she’s so “both sides [befuddle me, so I can’t see the forest for the trees.]”
ETA: rest of sentence: that you cannot tell what she’s referring to. She is a sloppy interviewee, a sloppy thinker, and a patronizing writer. Not what you expect coming out of the Columbia Journalism Review. Very disappointing.
I wonder if she’s staring cognitive problems?
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
But if you moderate the comments, how can you trust them to give you an unvarnished opinion? I generally like moderated comment sections because they tend to cut the filth and the less clever trolls, but there’s a real temptation to eliminate opinions you don’t want to hear. That temptation is going to be even bigger if/when you start using the comments as feedback. Instead of getting a hack Public Editor to justify why your terrible editorial decisions are great, you just need hack moderators who will disappear any critical comments so you can pretend nobody objects. Without a serious commitment to a better editorial approach, you can’t trust any mechanism they propose.
Gravenstone
@hovercraft: So to Trump, the world economy is basically Thunderdome? Two countries enter, one country leaves!
Tazj
@Kay: Didn’t they go over Rice’s talking points on the Sunday shows and compare them with notes given to her by the CIA. I thought Republicans did exhaustive comparisons of the two and there was no scandal. Yet, you still had people like Ron Fournier insisting that if Rice had been more “honest” from the beginning Republicans wouldn’t have been so suspicious and there wouldn’t have been as many investigations.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
You can cut your way to a better product as long as you’re cutting crap. For example, FTNYT could undoubtedly improve their editorial section by getting rid of their hackier columnists.
Elizabelle
Whoa. Dara Lind of Vox just put up a great article. She doesn’t like Spayd any more than we do.
The New York Times is getting rid of its public editor for exactly the wrong reasons
subhead: The Times has forgotten there’s more to accountability than reading your Twitter critics.
Roger Moore
@LurkerNoLonger:
Steer clear of the country club set.
NorthLeft12
Yes, the Times is so grateful for Ms. Spayd’s faithful service and fine example they are completely eliminating the Public Editor position…..well at least until the next fiasco that exposes how low their journalistic standards and relations with their readers have sunk……and also don’t happen to have any position available for her.
I would like to feel sorry for her [never nice to lose a job] but the fact is she did not represent the readers very well at all, and basically served as an excuser of the Times and their shoddy journalism and their ruinous [for normal Americans] vendetta against Hilary Clinton.
Heckuva job Liz!
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: Yes, but there’s a limit to how much ugliness and trollery one puts up with to ascertain that “unvarnished opinion.” I really think some trolls put up comments to drive other readers away from what might be a productive thread. I see that all the time at the LA Times and at the WaPost. Digital sewers. You just don’t want to be in the same digital room. You’re getting splashed with their urine, and bile.
Reading the comments solely by “most recommended” can absolutely be rewarding one’s own biases, I will agree, and it can get boring. But the ugly and uninformed comments that are just plain degrading and mean do not add anything to the discussion. It’s so obvious that some of these morons never even read the article. They’re just foaming at the mouths, to foam.
It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?
PS: the WaPost has a great feature. It’s an “ignore user” button at the bottom left of each comment. You can use it to weed out the obviously deranged, and those who are purely trolling. Life is short.
NorthLeft12
@Elizabelle: Exactly! Where is my fershlingerer LIKE button?
Captain C
@Elizabelle:
I think you answered your own not-quite-question. Pinch is perhaps the real problem.
Mary G
I cancelled after the Hillary/Trump thing with Matt Lauer during the election. Spayd or some assistant sent me the most condescending email about my complaint I’ve ever gotten.
NorthLeft12
@Brachiator: @Morzer: Your two posts together gave me the best laugh I have had all day…….and that is a day that #covefefe came into existence.
Well done people, well done.
Miss Bianca
@Aleta: Holy crap! Just when you think there’s no hope left in the world, the investor class decides to get woke? ; )
ThresherK
@Uncle Cosmo: Heehee. I wasn’t making any gender-specific reference to Spayd (or any NYT public editor) or trying to make a new acronym.
The idea of NYT anthropomorphised as someone who willingly, repeatedly makes bad choices and learns nothing from it, however…
Miss Bianca
@jl: There may be hope! My friend Michelle Nijhuis, writes about the idea of “inoculation” against fake news campaigns, specifically about climate change:
The good news is that no matter what your political persuasion, a message that warns against the effects of climate change denial really seems to work!
Mike Toreno
I came to believe that Spayd never wrote anything except while drunk. So I believe that when she got the reader comment you mention, she only read as far as this:
“I am begging you to please refrain from drinking”
and had to refute it any way she could.
joel hanes
@Kay:
The emails weren’t the start of it, in my view. Benghazi was the start of it.
Whitewater was the start of it. They stooped and never recovered.
TriassicSands
Liz Spayd — good radiance.
I can stop sending messages to Spayd about what a terrible job she is doing. More free time. Yay! One final comment — Ms. Spayd…you were terrible at your job.
Facebones
I said it elsewhere, but the Times replacing Margaret Sullivan with Liz Spayd was like when HBO replaced the Sopranos with John From Cincinnati.
Nick Fury's Eyepatch
World-class title, Betty!
Morzer
@Facebones:
Take the gun; leave the covfefe.
different-church-lady
What could possibly go wrong?
SFBayAreaGal
@joel hanes: Thank you Joel. The hate goes that far back. I remember those days.
NorthLeft12
@Aleta: Honestly, this is just good business practice. If I was a shareholder I would want to know how my company will be impacted by climate change.