“Trump understood our gluttonous short attention span better than anyone, but especially better than Hillary, whose media strategy amounted to her ignoring us.” — from Amy Chozick's highly anticipated campaign memoir. https://t.co/k85N3jl96s
— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) April 20, 2018
Press strategy is part of an overall media strategy. And the national print press is part of an overall press strategy. And I’m sure whenever a NYT reporter called the Clinton campaign they got immediate attention. And Hillary never turned her crowd against reporters.
But sure. https://t.co/UADdS72Qkt
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 20, 2018
From the excerpts I’ve seen, Chozick’s new “tell entirely too much” book reads scarily like it was written by a teenage girl looking to pick a fight with her stepmother. Selfish beeyotch kept lecturing me about how that new boy ‘couldn’t be trusted’, so of course I *had* to go to the party with him, and now that I’m stumbling home barefoot with a roofie hangover, I want the world to know that it is ALL HER FAULT!
(A sentiment with which, of course, too many of her fellow NYTimes access journalists concur.)
Carlos Lozada, at the Washington Post has a thoughtful review of a thoughtless person book:
Amy Chozick, the lead New York Times reporter on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, believes that the news media’s focus on Clinton’s private e-mail server — a story the Times broke and that Chozick would write about extensively — was excessive. She even grew to resent it. Chozick also thinks that reporting on campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails turned journalists into “puppets” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and she struggles to explain why they did it anyway. She contends that sexism played a big role in Clinton’s defeat but also encounters it first-hand among Clinton’s campaign staff. And while she hammers the candidate for having no clear vision for why she sought the presidency, Chozick allows that competence, experience and policy were hardly selling points in 2016, when it “turned out a lot of people just wanted to blow s— up.”
These are some of the revelations and contradictions permeating Chozick’s “Chasing Hillary,” a memoir by turns poignant, insightful and exasperating. It’s a buffet-style book — media criticism here, trail reminscences there, political analysis and assorted recollections from Chozick’s past tossed throughout — and while the portions are tasty, none fully satisfies. In the unending debate over what happened in 2016, and whether journalists contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, Chozick offers plenty of self-recrimination, but she still blames Clinton for not grasping how the game was played…
“Chasing Hillary” offers some searing moments surrounding election night, as when the Clinton team’s data guru grasps that his Florida models were off (Latino turnout lower than expected, white turnout huge in the Panhandle), then turns to campaign manager Robby Mook and says, “But, Robby, if our models were wrong in Florida, they could be wrong everywhere.” Mook eventually delivers the news of impending defeat to Clinton. “I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she answers. “They were never going to let me be president.”
The next day, Times reporters consider what they’d missed — and why. “God, I didn’t go to a single Hillary or Trump rally,” a colleague of Chozick’s admits, “and yet, I wrote with such authority.”…
When she felt insecure at work, Chozick would channel Clinton. “I adopted Hillary’s mood,” she recalls. “I went around despondent and aggrieved, pissed off at the world, at my editors, at myself for not being ‘likable enough.’ ” But that’s not the Clinton she wants to remember, Chozick concludes. She wants to remember the Hillary who “tried to hold it all together — her marriage, her daughter, her career, her gender, her country.” The Hillary who taught her about grit, to believe she could excel but also to allow herself to stop striving.
“Hillary taught me all of that,” Chozick writes in her final lines. “So what if she hated me?”
Reading this book, I often had the same question.
People are still writing campaign books that give credit to Trump for being so much better at it than the person who won more votes? Without emphasizing how his racist barnstorm has divided the country and radicalized extremists? The winners really do get to write history.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) April 20, 2018
The excerpt the NYTimes chose to highlight did Chozick no favors…
Hi @amychozick! The 1st line (“Things were already looking bad when Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne”) is false. I would have been happy to tell you that if you’d asked, which you didn’t. Looking forward to the correction once you fact check. Thanks! https://t.co/gqppfDEEW1
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) April 20, 2018
Following this tweet, @AmyChozick's 1st line was changed to include attribution: "Things were already looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne." https://t.co/fOYtZfxTZO https://t.co/6zXokbKAa1
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 20, 2018
“Several people told me” is the media version of Trump’s “Many people have said” — that most pointless of metaphors, a transparent figleaf.
Chozick: "Things were looking bad when Chelsea pulled off her face mask & revealed she was lizard alien."@ChelseaClinton: Yeah, that didn't happen.
Chozick: "Things were looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea pulled off her face mask & revealed she was lizard alien." https://t.co/5zpcAe0zYZ— Stephen Robinson (@SER1897) April 20, 2018
Chozick and Haberman are still working off of a 30 year old playbook where they think to make it as women they have to take out the alpha woman.
1. They failed
2. They looked stupid doing it.— SophieCT (@SophieInCT) April 21, 2018
(Again: I strongly suspect this is very much still the playbook at the NYTimes.)
"I would have done better coverage on Hillary if she'd been more like the perfect Mom I never had!"
– pundits, in their memoirs
— Donna Gratehouse (@DonnaDiva) April 20, 2018
debbie
Considering the dispute over the opening line of the book, I predict it will be an instant remainder.
Villago Delenda Est
Amy Chozick is perfect for the Vichy Times, just as Haberhack is. Vile little mean girl who will never grow up.
Frankensteinbeck
You flaming, self-absorbed, hateful, misogynistic turd. That description could be the textbook fucking definition of ‘projection.’ And EVEN NOW you have no fucking idea that you assumed Hillary’s feelings based on your own imaginary Hillary Clinton doll and blamed her for your own depression. You stinking Beltway horse apple. We spent an entire year stepping in shit like you, no wonder we barely missed the finish line.
Chyron HR
Who?
oatler.
Hillary hate is a legitimate part of Confederate Christianity.
Nyrobbin
@Frankensteinbeck: I wanna embroider that rant on a pillow and have its baby!
Jerzy Russian
Christ, what an asshole!
Emma
I hate them. I hate them all.
debbie
Rereading those tweets, I want to scream, “Where are the fucking copy editors?” Do they even make such things anymore?
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@Frankensteinbeck: Your rant wins the Internet today. Eff Chozick and her ilk
germy
No thanks, I’m good.
germy
Jake Tapper has a novel coming out.
I think they’re all frustrated novelists.
bluefish
For me, it’s simple — I long to return to the days of standard, normal, recognizable political corruption. There is no politics without it — and no one becomes Pres. without getting their hands and feet soiled. But this current state of affairs reminds me of one thing and one thing only — Growing up in Brasil, as I did, between 1964 and 1979. Except that they did it BETTER! All the complaints and observations now about HRC and blah blah blah are so much BS — We need to get this thug out of the WH. It’s just as simple as that. For the rest, let God sort it out, as the man once said! The insistence on a certain kind of eternal ingenue purity is a sign of arrested development and a way, an excuse, to stay stuck in a psychosis!
geg6
@Frankensteinbeck:
This.
Another Scott
‘morning all.
Here’s hoping she gets her 15 seconds of fame on Twitter, but her book doesn’t sell at all.
Political reporting and books aren’t going to change as long as people keep buying this crap.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
When a known falsehood is attributed to unidentified sources, the smell of bullshit is strong.
JanieM
1. @Chyron HR:
My sentiments exactly.
2.
This is the perfect summary of their worse-than-uselessness. Who gives a sh!t about the world inside their heads? I’ve got much better worlds inside my own head if I want time-wasting entertainment.
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: Ding, ding, ding.
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
On the one hand, I am glad Amy Chozick is semi-“woke”, although she’s more upset they played into the hands of the Russians. Not that she and her ilk in the press corpse helped subvert an election. Which they did.
I despise them all. I want Trump to take out “big media” too. Start with the fucking Vichy Times. Clean out their rats nest of political correspondents, and their terrible editorial staff. Suspect the problem starts with the Sulzbergers, though.
Any paper that can’t see that the bigger threat was Donald Trump does not deserve its august reputation. Mostly, their coverage reminded me they were Judith Miller Land. For way too long.
Jayson Blair would be an improvement on their current political hacks. His sins, and the results thereof, were minor.
Kevin Drum covered Chozick’s aha moment yesterday. A Campaign Reporter Looks In the Mirror—And Isn’t Happy With What She Sees
germy
wikipedia:
Bill Arnold
This infighting is just bizarre to me. Anyway, her NYTimes sunday review piece is a genuine mea-culpa about coverage of Clinton during the 2016 Presidential race. Worth a read. (It’s not long.)
Covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign from before it started to the very last moment. By AMY CHOZICKAPRIL 20, 2018)
(bold mine) I could quibble a bit (without much evidence) about precisely how they were played and by whom, but her admission is very good to see, and it is also nice to see a description of the dawning of a reporter’s self-awareness.
(Note: the actual title of the piece sucks. If she picked it, she loses a lot of points.)
germy
Fact checking. Do they still teach it in J-School?
Elizabelle
Kevin Drum pulled out these Chozick book quotes: first:
Drum: “… on October 7, the day the Access Hollywood tape was leaked. That was also the day that Wikileaks released hacked emails that included excerpts from Clinton’s infamous Wall Street speeches:”
Schlemazel
@germy:
Well, they have been practicing writing fiction for most of their careers
martian
I think the worst, most unbearable thing to Amy Chozick, should she think of it, is that Hillary Clinton likely doesn’t even think of her, much less hate her.
Elizabelle
Second excerpt from Kevin Drum:
Kevin Drum’s take:
OldDave
@germy:
Which I take to mean: “the book is fiction”.
Bill Arnold
@Elizabelle:
[edit – i see from your later comments that we’re on pretty much the same page. And yes the KD piece is good.]
Not sure what you’re saying. You want state-controlled media? Where the state is controlled by somebody controlled by Fox and Friends?
I want them to change, hard. I want them to compete with the WaPo on taking out bad government (the Trump administration). I want them to (try to) win this competition. I want a strong press in this country again. I don’t want the foreign press e.g. The Guardian covering stories that should be covered by US press.
Schlemazel
@Frankensteinbeck:
you really should tweet that to her. If you won’t I will
Brachiator
This, among other things, suggests why the campaign coverage was often so lazy and stupid.
And Chozick’s memoir, or whatever it is, sounds like a mess. And there is something repellent and sexist and predatory about the title, “Chasing Hillary” (which was likely the editor’s idea).
The one interesting nugget was that the campaign’s Florida polling was wrong, and maybe was wrong elsewhere, which is something that I suspected.
Gin & Tonic
Added to the “Books I Intend Never to Read” list.
RepubAnon
I fixed this: “Things were already looking bad when, according to the voices in my head chanting Use the Clinton Rules, Chelsea popped the champagne…
Frankensteinbeck
@germy:
Sure as Hell doesn’t read like journalism.
delk
Pretty sure Hillary was aware of how the game was played way before Chozick was born.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Frankensteinbeck:
Quit holding back – tell us how you feel.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: How many pages in the book? Sounds like it should have been a postcard: “I’m a fucking putz.”
Josie
@Frankensteinbeck: Beautifully stated.
germy
@Frankensteinbeck:
Not even a very good novel…
Elizabelle
@Brachiator:
My god. I’d never focused on the title.
It brings to mind Chasing Diana (the situation, not the book). As in, the pack of press jackals pursued her to her literal death, in which they were complicit.
Gin & Tonic
I somehow find this delightful. G7 ministers having brunch this morning at Chrystia Freeland’s home in Toronto.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
WTF? You want the president to control the press? Which of course he would love to do. This is unfortunate.
You don’t like the Times? Read another newspaper.
And fuck the supposed august reputation of the Times. The Washington Post was a Beltway gossip rag until the Watergate/Pentagon Papers era.
And the Times and other mainstream media outlets are dying. Soon your dream might be realized, only you will only have Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And Trump will be happy.
Bill Arnold
Dana Houle is wrong. The Clinton campaign was utterly outplayed by the Republican propaganda/sentiment manipulation apparatus (including playing the press), some (a modest fraction) of which was very competent relative to her compaign’s best efforts. That she still won the popular vote is a testament to her base political strength relative to D.J. Trump, despite being outplayed.
Mike R
@Gin & Tonic:
excellent, succinct and accurate.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Meh.
She’s not some cub reporter just out of high school. Wikipedia says she was writing about HRC at the WSJ in 2007.
Cosmo (from 2015):
Yada yada yada.
I’m all for forgiveness and recognizing people learning from their mistakes. But the contrition should be substantial for substantial mistakes.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
NYT and CNN acted like they were on the R payroll during the entire campaign. Fuck Chozick and Haberhack and Healy and their entire politics desk.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Think there’ll be an angry tweet about not being invited?
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: You clearly don’t understand what I was saying. So: fuck you back, darlin’.
We suffer for terrible coverage like the Vichy Times, and the 24/7 news cycle of banality, infotainment, and sensationalism.
It’s what made the opportunity for Donald Trump. Yes, we would be much better with a professional press that is not so ratings driven.
I rather like the BBC. No idea how much government funding the Canadian press gets, but the foreign press seems much more curious and honest than our own “press corpse.”
Clearly, I am not speaking of the David Farentholds and the David Cay Johnsons and the Jane Mayers.
You know, real journalists, who do the hard, hard work and are not all about access.
Calm down before you wet yourself, Brachiator.
What’s more, reading another newspaper hardly addresses the problem that the Vichy Times is considered the Gold Standard.
Amir Khalid
@germy:
If Jake Tapper thinks Dan fucking Brown is a writer to model himself after, Tapper has absolutely no clue about writing.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Perhaps Brachiator will understand your comment.
Baud
You’re fooling yourself if you think they’ve learned any lessons. They will do the same thing in 2020.
The only lesson to be learned is by us, on who we can (and can’t) trust.
JMG
Off thread topic, but important news nonetheless. WaPo reports the lesser long-nosed bat has been taken off the Endangered Species list because its numbers have grown back to well over 200,000 following a major conservation effort by the US and Mexican governments. Their interest in this particular bat species comes because it is the animal part of the pollination/fertilization process for the agave plant. No bat, no tequila!
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@Baud: This is correct. Wait ’til they get to cover __________ , the 2020 Democratic nominee. I hope Chozick gets run over by a truck full of MAGA hats.
Elizabelle
@JMG: I love hearing about actual working bats.
As opposed to batshit insane political people and the lapdog press hacks. Thank you. Well done, lesser long-nosed bat. (And is there a “superior” one?)
PPCLI
@Brachiator: it might have been her. No doubt she put up with lots of “chasing Amy” jokes after that movie came out. The idea of “Chasing [someone who isn’t Amy]” by Amy must have seemed irresistibly clever.
piratedan
part of me wants to understand how Journalism works, do the political reporters craft an article based on what they learned are are they assigned to cover a specific aspect of the campaign, if so by whom? If the story goes sideways, what happens next? I kind of assume it’s like ordering from a menu, the senior folks all get to pick and choose what they write about, some of it is assignment work from an editor in regards to an angle to explore. Everyone wants to get published, so articles are slanted with that in mind to play to the editor’s biases.
while I do have a bone to pick with the rank and file (plenty of examples there) the folks who repeatedly request fodder to feed their own narratives are the folks I want to see kicked out of the profession. Unless these folks are the smartest folks in the room (and it sure appears to me that their own HRC biases were plainly evident) and can justify what backed their decision making process, they are most likely still in place and still throwing shade to cover their own asses.
No one has ever reported what the fuck in the e-mails that were hacked were so incredibly damning.
We have one guy, being filmed, indicating that he casually sexually assaults beautiful women because he’s rich and powerful and gets off on it…
on the other hand, we have the Podesta risotto recipe… yet, which got the majority of coverage… the fact that the DCC was hacked, as if that somehow maybe disqualified them from running the country that they were burgled electronically (despite all of the other breaches of security that were taking place in the corporate world for the last five years) compared to a guy who wouldn’t release his taxes, was playing the demagogue all across the nation and had an admitted history of skeevy behavior, socially, sexually and financially.
How come No fucking one ever stood back and questioned that.
GregB
“Whatever food they throw at you, you eat, and wherever they go, you go. And so much of what you write has a shelf life of a day — and with the web and Twitter, a shelf life of 20 minutes.”
I saw a photo montage about what the Rohingya are suffering through in Myanmar, but then I read about this type of adversity, now I don’t care about them.
The horror of catered food is one of the under reported human rights abuses of our times.
tobie
Quote from the Post Book Review: “And while she hammers the candidate for having no clear vision for why she sought the presidency, Chozick allows that competence, experience and policy were hardly selling points in 2016.”
This.Just.Kills.Me. Making government work for you, strengthening the middle class, creating jobs for the 21st century, and reinforcing the ties that bind us were all central themes HRC hammered on again and again. And yet she is repeatedly harangued for not having a clear vision. WTF? What, Ms. Chozick, was Donald Trump’s clear vision? If you say, it was “Make American Great Again,” then you have to concede that HRC had a vision and motto, too, namely, “We are stronger together.” But I suspect the real mobilizing theme of Trump’s campaign was “Make America White Again,” and that came out loud and clear in his otherwise rambling, incoherent, internally contradictory, and vulgar speeches at his rallies.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Agreed. The liberal media is not liberal. They are actively anti-D.
kattails
Annie, I don’t do Twitter, thanks for this perfect selection of quotes. I need to go to a really cheap thrift shop, buy a lot of really cheap crockery, and just smash some now and again.
schrodingers_cat
@GregB: Wasn’t inferior snacks the complaint against Gore too? I want to know what snacks the Rs provide that are so much better. Lobster and caviar?
Buckeye
I read this as the “whiners really do get to write history” and thought that’s true too.
As for Chozick, her belated awareness of being used probably isn’t going to last long. She’s still part of the problem and will remain so.
Steve in the ATL
@Elizabelle:
Lol right
JMG
@piratedan: If you want to see the problems with political journalism, there will be a fine example over in sports this week — pre NFL draft coverage. All team personnel lie about everything, player evaluations especially, the week before the draft in the hope of confusing or deceiving other teams. Every NFL reporter knows this and in fact will write or broadcast the fact. But they will also repeat each lie giving their sources anonymity because they don’t want to alienate said sources. This will be defended by “that’s how the game is played.” Maybe it’s football, but that’s not how journalism should be played. And in fairness, just as in politics, there are NFL reporters who don’t and won’t play it.
Mnemosyne
@Bill Arnold:
Let’s use a metaphor here: your preferred football team is playing in the Super Bowl, and loses by 1 point. After the game, it comes out that the coaches of the opposing team had stolen the playbook and figured out the signals of the losing team, and used that information to eke out a win.
Would you say that the team that lost because of massive and systematic cheating was “utterly outplayed” by the other team, or that the team that cheated was “very competent relative to [the losing team’s] best efforts”?
This is why people are pissed at Chozik and the NYT. They know that the Republicans cheated, because they’ve seen the evidence for themselves, and yet they still blame the Democrats for being the victims of that cheating.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
I did not insult you or attack you personally. You need to check yourself.
The BBC gets regularly slammed for it’s biases. It is also a cesspool of sexism. We could also talk about how it protected Jimmy Saville, the pedophile, for decades.
But of course, the BBC is not a newspaper, nor does the British government control the press, even though conservative papers eagerly kiss the ass of the elite.
So, you contradict yourself. And big deal. Your rant comes down to wanting the reporters you like and hating the reporters you don’t. And you don’t seem to know much about the editors or much about how editorial or news assignment decisions are made.
Is this where I can say, fuck you?
No, this is bullshit that you and a few others insist upon. The Post has been scooping the shit out of the Times. And as another poster has noted, the Guardian has been writing consistently better stories than the Grey Lady.
Things change. CBS news used to be considered the gold standard in broadcast news reporting. Murrow, Conkrite, etc. Today, nobody gives a shit.
But you are certainly welcome to keep doing your couch fainting over how the New York Times has failed you.
NotoriousJRT
@germy: Some “juicy” things are best avoided.
Steve in the ATL
@schrodingers_cat: caviar, borshch, blini, solyanka, etc.
p.a.
“Is our journamalists learning?”
Too late, if at all.
danielx
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
scott (the other one)
If she’s now committed to taking seriously her duty as a reporter, she should name that colleague. Obviously, she won’t. Because she, like the rest of the FTFNYT, still doesn’t really take her duty as a reporter seriously.
Elizabelle
I am going to chill offline. Cannot deal with this topic; it’s like ripping off a scab. Looking at the reader comments on the Vichy Times Chozick excerpt (and props to the FTF NYT for opening it up to comments) — quite a lot of Wilmer and blaming a flawed candidate.
However, when you rank the top-rated comments: again, the NYT readers get it. They’re often way ahead of the NYT political hacks in understanding the real world.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: I don’t pie people, but I find you insufferable. You often have some good insights, but I have wondered about you before.
I cannot speak to the behind the scenes at the BBC, but it is so clear they put out a far superior TV broadcast to the swill we get.
Brachiator
@PPCLI:
Interesting point. Either way, it is an obnoxious title.
PJ
One of the problems with reporters like Chozick is that they believe whatever story they are covering is really about them, and their own personal reactions to the story and the act of covering it, which, in their coverage, ultimately trumps the facts they are supposedly presenting. Thus, their preoccupation with how they are treated by the campaign, whether or not they believe Hillary likes them, etc. (I recall, back in the ’00s, how campaign journalists would praise GWB because he was “just likable” because he would invite them to fly on his plane, would take the time to speak with each of them about their personal lives, etc., whereas Gore and Kerry were distant, wonkish, elitist, etc. The substance of the candidates’ respective political platforms was largely irrelevant to their reporting, which played into Nader’s narrative that their was no real difference between Gore and Bush.)
This seems to be a generational problem. Once upon a time, journalists were under no illusion that politicians saw them as just another conduit to advance their own political prospects and to promote their particular policies. I was recently flipping through one of Russell Baker’s memoirs, and he talks about how, after just being appointed the Times’ head reporter on the Senate, he received a personal phone call from Lyndon Johnson, who was then Senate Majority Leader, to congratulate him. At first he was flattered, and then common sense came back to him, and he understood that Johnson was just buttering him up (and sizing him up) to see if he would play ball with him with regard to favorable coverage, and, not only that, but that the call was on speaker-phone (then a novelty), and that this was a performance not only for himself but for Johnson’s colleagues who were there with him.
TL/DR: Too many journalists today think the most important thing with whatever subject they are covering is to be friendly with them, or to have good feelings about them, rather than investigating and reporting on the truth.
No Drought No More
The problem the Times with integerity transcends its atrocious coverage of the 2016 campaign. Recall that thirteen years earlier, the paper had served as a conduit through which the lies of republican party war mongers was broadcast. Lies that Hillary, of course, and far too many other ambitious democrats with bad judgment have essentially allowed to stand unchallenged ever since. The democrats themselves helped perpetuate the Times treacherous decision making long before Hillary announced her candidacy for 2016.
FlipYrWhig
Shorter campaign media, 2016: “After thirty years of being trashed in the media, Hillary Clinton for some reason was awkward or cautious with the media, and it was up to me and my friends to figure out why. We concluded that it was because she was a stuck-up bitch.”
tobie
@Bill Arnold: I think you may be right about media strategy. The same holds true for the press operation of every Republican candidate in the primaries. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what motivated the electorate and the press in the election. No one expected the rage of the electorate at a time of economic recovery with near full employment and rising wages for the middle class after decades of stagnation.
I suspect years from now we will learn that the Russians were dicking around in US internal affairs for the final years of Obama’s presidency. Notice that there are no longer any BLM protests following police shootings since Nov 2016? No recordings of police brutality? No lone wolf attacks like The Pulse nightclub and San Bernardino? There may be good reasons for this…and then again there may be have been nefarious online efforts to promote these actions and in the case of things like the Pulse nightclub shooting to radicalize unstable individuals.
GregB
@danielx:
Words out of the mouth of the propaganda king of our times: People are saying………
FlipYrWhig
@PJ: Yup. I think it’s basically something like “I’m too smart and cynical to get played for a chump by politicians’ public statements and their promises, which are all calculated for effect, so I’m going to go for the _inside_ story.” Whereupon, because they’re NOT really all that smart, they immediately get played for chumps by politicians’ _private_ statements. And why there care so much about stupid shit like “authenticity” and “being comfortable in their own skin.” It’s similar to the way traditional sportswriters value clubhouse/locker room interactions and “team chemistry” and all that bullshit.
bluefish
@Bill Arnold: Darn tootin’! Spot on — and thanks. Love “propaganda/sentiment manipulation apparatus.” Ready for that t-shirt!
GregB
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, I seem to recall that the Bush fare was to die for. Seems like he made campaign catering great again.
geg6
@Brachiator:
You don’t seem to understand the place of the NYT in journalism, it seems. They are often scooped by other outlets. But the Times is still the thought leader and standard by which other papers measure themselves. My mom was a print journalist, I worked for a newspaper for six years and I still have friends in the business and work daily with communications faculty teaching journalism. There’s lots of good journalism out there but no one has the stature, earned or not, if FTFNYT. To deny that tells me you have no understanding of how things work.
Another Scott
@Elizabelle: Via TheHill today:
NewsGuard:
That sounds like a potentially useful site, but I worry that it will be too coarse.
E.g. No doubt that FTFNYT will get a “Green” rating, but their slanted, relentlessly negative, over-the-top emphasis on unimportant trivia (Did you know that Hillary Clinton used e-mail?!?11), will not affect that rating.
And the GOP will find some other term to use to rile up their voters.
“Fake news” back in the olden days of 2016 actually meant things like troll farms in Macedonia. There’s a whole continuum between that and things that FTFNYT did. It’s not going to be easy to create useful ratings.
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian
@debbie: “Who needs copy editors? We have Spellcheck now.”
–The Bean Counters
Frankensteinbeck
@PJ:
I think a big part of it is that as superficial, self-absorbed, ignorant socialites they respect bullshit and find actual knowledge unconvincing.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
We agree that the Chozick memoir is terrible, and that much of the NYT political reporting is atrocious, and was particularly bad during the 2016 presidential campaign. And I think that all of the New York and New Jersey media have always been to cozy with Trump. This tarnishes any reputation these rags think they might have.
rikyrah
@Frankensteinbeck:
Tell it
tobie
A propos of nothing, but I found it amusing that Mitt Romney was unable to secure the necessary votes at the Utah Republican Party convention to be the party’s nominee for the Senate. In fact he came in second to a veritable wing nut named Mike Kennedy, so Kennedy and Romney will have to face off in a party primary for Orrin Hatch’s old seat. The anti-establishment sentiment on the GOP side is clearly alive and well. Kennedy sounds as loony as Todd Akin.
No Drought No More
It won’t help his cause at the upcoming trial, but if this guy has a sense of humor, he’ll legally change his last name to Newman before then:
“A mail carrier in Brooklyn stashed about 17,000 pieces of undelivered mail for more than a decade because he was “overwhelmed” by the amount he had to deliver, the authorities said…. The carrier, Aleksey Germash, told investigators he “made sure to deliver the important mail,” according to a complaint filed in federal court…”.
Another Scott
@tobie: Hehe. :-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Fair Economist
@Another Scott: The FTNYT, and much of the rest of the media, accomplishes its bias without producing much explicitly fake news. There weren’t a lot of simple factual mistakes in the endless EMAILZ! coverage. The bias arose from the choice to cover that rather than numerous genuine financial scandals from Trump, from the extreme editorial slant, and from dropping context. How often did the FTNTY mention that Hillary’s server was objectively more secure than the State server she had avoided? Did they mention with the Comey letter that it was nearly impossible that there would be any new emails on Weiner’s laptop, because the FBI already had looked at all the emails from the account forwarded from? No, and that’s the bias, but that bias doesn’t show up on “fact-checking”.
germy
“There’s nothing wrong with the New York Times that a miracle wouldn’t fix.”
(paraphrase. Actually said by Alexander Woollcott about Oscar Levant.)
Roger Moore
I think this is ultimately the big disconnect: Clinton didn’t think it was a game to be played. As long as our news media treats politics as one more reality TV game show, we will continue to elect reality TV stars to office.
Bill Arnold
@Mnemosyne:
They did all that. They also outplayed the Democrats on the messaging front, badly. Trump would have lost significant support (multiple percentage points) otherwise, because he was objectively a bad candidate.
My favorite years are those when I don’t even know who’s playing in the super bowl. :-) Not a fan.
Another Scott
Exhibit #234,134,902 that we need to do things differently. BBC News:
The jokes write themselves, but… :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
germy
@Another Scott: Brill is one of those rare animals. He admits when he was wrong:
(wikipedia)
Crovitz, on the other hand:
tobie
@Fair Economist: The media also deliberately upped the ante on what information was exchanged on the private server. HRC never sent or received classified material on her private server. Period. She used the State Department’s system for classified cables. I don’t know if it was the FBI or the State Dept that retroactively classified material on the server to make her email practices look more suspicious. Elijah Cummings revealed this during a Congressional hearing with Comey but as usual the press ignored it because it didn’t fit their predetermined narrative.
germy
@Another Scott: I’ll bet anything police take him in alive.
Just like the lady who “looks like everyone’s grandma” (well actually, not mine) who killed her husband and then a woman while on the lam. She was arrested unharmed.
schrodingers_cat
Its not that NYT lost its bearings only in the run up to 2016. They were cheerleaders for Bush against Gore and also promoted the Iraq war in a big way.
ETA: Judith Miller and her “reporting”. I remember PBS’s Frontline promoted that too.
Frankensteinbeck
@Bill Arnold:
Hard to win a messenging game when the delivery men work for the other side. There was nothing, NOTHING Clinton could do that would have made coverage of her any more positive than ‘Emsils!!11!!’ The press had their opinion of her, and didn’t give a damn about what she actually said or did. That is really the point of the OP.
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
That actually hurt us. It made too many people think it was someone else’s responsibility to oppose Trump, and they chose to assert their own privilege an entitlement over fight for our democracy.
Librarian
I have never heard of Amy Chozick until this very minute.
Brachiator
@geg6:
I worked in the newspaper industry for a number of years, and used to know a number of the editors and reporters at the New York Times, including my college roommate and three other college friends. Still know a few. One of my former employees is related to the family that owns the Times. I know a few stories.
And I know a fair amount about the reputation of the NYT. I remember incidents when the NYT would regurgitate or follow up a story that originally appeared in the LA Times or another paper and then magically be commended for its “original” reporting.
Maybe I’m just more jaded. The NYT is coasting on an old reputation that is fading. And like other newspapers, it is dying, and soon it may not matter much what anyone thinks about it.
ETA. I used to work for the LA Times, which was a regional power, helped make Richard Nixon, and was for a time the most profitable newspaper in the US. Today it is totally irrelevant, and may not exist at all five years from now. The NYT is on the same track, although it may hang on a little longer.
Wag
Missing from the “when Chelsea popped the champagne” is the context. Implied is that she was popping the champagne in celebration, when it is more likely that it was the nearest alcoholic beverage so she could begin to drown her sorrows.
zhena gogolia
@Nyrobbin:
Me too!
FlipYrWhig
@Baud: Trump was allowed to run as the *honest* candidate. Think about how fucked-up THAT is. Thanks to the media falling in love with his “unfiltered” nature, a/k/a being an asshole 24/7, the guy who literally defrauded people out of millions and used donated money to buy portraits of himself was the honest one. SM fucking H.
Cermet
@Brachiator: As you point out
I look forward to her or another NYT reporter writing one of the orange fart cloud titled: “Grab them by the Pu$$y” so they can finally deal with the most foul and sexist creep that has ever run for president.
zhena gogolia
@PJ:
Frank Bruni resembles that remark. Now he’s the great wise man of the NYT.
Mary G
@Wag: She was breastfeeding. Probably not drinking alcohol.
VOR
I was re-watching “All the President’s Men” last night. There was a throwaway line at an editors meeting about how Watergate couldn’t be a big story because none of their senior reporters were on it. By that they meant the reporters with “relationships”, i.e. access. There was another case where Woodward calls someone for the first time and the guy says something like if you print that it will damage our relationship. Woodward says “what relationship?”
McClatchy reporting on the Iraq War is another example. All the big names with relationships such as Judith Miller got the story wrong. They were fed lies and printed it. Or everything was off the record – I remember Tim Russert saying he assumed everything was off the record by default. McClatchy lacked access so they did the grunt work, talked to lower level people, and were closer to right than the big papers.
Wag
@Mary G:
She might have made exception on that night.
lollipopguild
@oatler.: Check out Toles cartoon “The Gospel according to Trump”.
Kathleen
@Frankensteinbeck: SHILLARY LIKED CHELSEA MORE THAN MEEEEEEE!!!!!!
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Doesn’t matter. People can awaken, become more self-aware and aware in general, at any point in their lives. It’s harder as one gets older for reasons of brain biology (plasticity) and older people have to work harder to change, but they can, and should be encouraged. Abuse is fine too (but not threats or sexism or whatever), but mix in some encouragement, IMO.
Not particularly arguing except on tactics of change.
Thoughtful David
@Elizabelle:
From your Drum quote:
Really? Why? Those emails had been covered extensively and investigated extensively by mid-2014. Why did they need to be covered any more in 2016? The story should have been why are the Republicans trying to push this story? What are they trying to distract from? That was the real story.
Smiling Mortician
I really want this to be an open thread because I want to tell you all about the student paper I just read where the student refers to Major Strasser (paper is about Casablanca, obvs) as Major Stressor.
Sadly, this isn’t an open thread so I didn’t just tell you about that awesome typo/autocorrect.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: Shorter Amy: “MOTHER PENCE BAKED HOME MADE COOKIES FOR OUR PRESS PLANE AND SHILLARY CLINTON NEVER BOUGHT ME AN EZ BAKE OVEN FOR MY BIRTHDAY!
Brachiator
@VOR:
Yes! One of the great things about this wonderful movie is how it gets the little details right, and how those little details had huge repercussions. The senior reporters missed the story that was right in front of their noses because they were too cozy with White House officials and considered themselves to be part of the Beltway establishment.
You also get a sense of this in “The Post,” where Katharine Graham hosts parties attended by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. They are all buddies who are members of the same club.
Matt McIrvin
@VOR:
And one of them was Bob Woodward.
Brachiator
@Cermet:
I think that NYT reporter Maggie Haberman already has a book deal with Random House to write about Trump after his term ends. I doubt that it will be honest, and I think that her reporting is tainted by her need to maintain access to him not for the NYT, but for her own fortunes down the road.
Joey Maloney
Off-topic, sort of? But maybe not? HAHA Goodman seems to have finally lost his fucking mind. Or dropped the mask, I have no idea which.
Is there someone we can call to do a welfare check on him?
Joey Maloney
(Did I use a bad word? Will someone let me out of moderation jail?)
Washburn
Its becomes clearer every day that Clinton’s “loss” was solely the result of Russian interference and media bias and that Clinton really ran a flawless campaign.
I look forward to her running in 2020.
afanasia
@bluefish: “eternal ingenue purity” – perfect…thank you :)
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Washburn: Snark? I would really hate to see any 2016 retreads run in 2020.
B.B.A.
@Washburn: Please, it’s Martha Coakley’s turn. /s
Kay
@Washburn:
No one ever says that, though, which is what makes the defensiveness about admitting that the NYTimes (specifically) treated Clinton unfairly and that there was Russian interference in the campaign so strange.
There were a lot of factors. However, the NYTimes has a duty to explain to the public why THEY were a factor.
I suspect they flogged the email story ludicrously out of proportion to the actual email story they broke the email story.
That’s a business decision, so they can dispense with the bullshit about the purity of the press. They made a business decision to promote their own story and their own reporters over the public interest. Why won’t they admit it?
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
But this didn’t matter. The people who hated Clinton kept harping on the dubious points that she set up the server without permission or appoval, that she (typically) set herself above everyone else, that she may have risked leaking classified material, and that she was able to delete sensitive material that might be important to herself and her husband.
I remember some town hall or debate where some “regular person in the military” claimed that he would be court martialed for what Clinton “got away with.”
It was total bullshit, but keeping it out there feed the lie that Clinton was self-serving and dishonest.
And we can easily contrast this with how his supporters simply ignore Trump’s real violations of law and policy.
Kay
What’s amusing about the NYTimes irrational, unprofessional treatment of Hillary Clinton is that the Clinton’s have been very, very good for certain media personalities at the NYTimes.
Maureen Dowd is an average writer and an average thinker. Without her hatred of the Clintons she wouldn’t have had a career. They look down their noses at the Clintons as if they’re shady used car dealers, but Times personalities have made a shit-ton of money exploiting this narrative Times personalities created. It worked out well for them.
tobie
I didn’t have coffee this morning so I’m not at my best today, but I think there are some extra words here. Quick question: If I recall correctly, the email story broke because HRC was asked by Chaffetz and the House GOP to turn over emails during the Benghazi hearings. That’s when it was discovered she had a private email server. The NYT didn’t even break this story.
Where is the outrage about the private email served used by Mike Pence as governor? Or Pruitt’s private servers? Just kidding….IOKIYAR.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh good lord, back to Hillary isn’t a perfect saint again. I think the real question is how Obama managed to avoid being constantly over analyzed by the press. Or is it, the black refused to do that to Obama and the women couldn’t stop with Hilary like this NYT idiot?
germy
Kay
Just a head’s up- political media hate Elizabeth Warren too and if she runs they’ll Hillary her. It’s already started.
Don’t nominate Warren unless you want a replay of 2016. That die is cast.
Kay
@tobie:
They broke the email story, which is why they all flogged it. They made their own story the central issue of the 2016 campaign, to the exclusion of policy and to the exclusion of any kind of due diligence on Trump.
They did that because it’s good for their business.
James Powell
@germy:
With very few exceptions, they all hunger for fame and acclaim. They want to believe that they are as important as the people and events they talk about.
germy
@Kay: They’ll do it to any Democrat, though. Won’t they? Is there a Democrat they actually like?
Bill Arnold
@Washburn:
No, she didn’t. The playing of the US press in particular was dominated by the American right/Republicans and their allies.
It was embarrassing to watch at the time; the Republicans were grabbing most of the news cycles, with what was objectively (and obviously) bullshit, and they were writing the Clinton/Trump narrative with only ineffectual counters, and their timing was pretty good (not perfect). I was (and am) a complete autodidact in this area, and the plays were obvious; where were the Democrats’ professionals? Mind you, I agree that the US press was wired for Clinton Hating, but in part this was due to a Republican long play starting in the 1990s.
TL/DR; do not underestimate/understate the competence of the Republican political operatives and their allies. Don’t overestimate either.
Tim C.
I think, for the media and many institutions there was this blindness to the idea that Drumph was so terrible and obviously a narcissist train wreck, he couldn’t ever win. So they were free to maintain “balance” with the very serious people. She can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned. Ms Chozak gets no credit for any of her admissions. If she had resigned and said all this for free, maybe, but atonement can only be earned by actually doing something, not cashing in on the exact same horse hockey that she used to elect Putin’s choice.
James Powell
Chozik confirms what we already knew about her, about the NYT, and about the press/media in general. Almost without exception, they are vain, ignorant, petty, spiteful egotists. They have no regard for truth or for the consequences of their actions. Our politics and our nation would be better off without them.
Every day I pray for the demise of the New York Times.
Kay
Also, Sherrod Brown seems to have a hostile relationship with them- he refers to them as “corporate media” which can’t have made him any friends and I know he makes a deliberate effort to focus on Ohio outlets rather than national, so he’s out too.
You should really nominate the person who is essentially preapproved by the political coverage team at the NYTimes unless you want an uphill fucking battle. That’s the hard truth.
germy
tobie
@Kay: You’re right. Sorry. I just checked Susan Bordo’s twitter thread and that jogged by memory. There was an FOIA request for Clinton’s emails and that led to an investigation not of HRC but of whether material had been classified correctly. Mike Schmitt and Matt Apuzzo of the NYT misreported this investigation in an article entitled, “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email.” So a meme was born and Apuzzo wins a Pulitzer all the same. This is maddening.
Brachiator
@Kay:
When Down was out pushing her book, I think she mentioned that early on she covered Donald Trump for the society pages.
I always thought it was bullshit that the NYT executive editor did not pull her in with the business editors and reporters and ask, “What do we actually know about Trump, including the ‘off the record’ stuff?”
Kay
@germy:
You won’t get “like”. Shoot for “unknown so they don’t have time to craft a narrative or someone they don’t find immediately objectionable”
They dislike Warren. Just a warning.
germy
@James Powell:
I prefer to see some folks replaced with competent and fair journalists. There’s a bunch out there, many currently unemployed.
Let the infrastructure remain. Just get rid of the rotten apples, the contrarians and ratfuckers.
bluefish
@Kay: Yes, yes, and yes. Thanks! Dowd’s snide, snarky, exhausted by her own imagined brilliance schtick should become an ancient, risible artifact of the past. Let other such hipsters beware. What we’re now experiencing as a result has made many of us far, far less tolerant. (Though, that said, it would be fun to see her take on Kellyanne’s deer in the headlights meltdown with Dana Bash of this morning--How DARE you, Dana, invade the sanctity of my marital bed! Pass me my smelling salts while I quiver with atomic blonde outrage over the unfairness of it all. Pop culture has its place).
Kay
@Brachiator:
The NYTimes long relationship with Donald Trump is absolutely essential to any analysis of what happened. Obama had this huge advantage- he was Chicago based. They weren’t interested in him. Lynne Sweet was the only political reporter who knew anything about him and she’s a straight shooter. He lucked out.
Bill Arnold
@Fair Economist:
I learned of this in the NYTimes in mid 2016, FWIW: paragraphs 11-12:
Hillary Clinton’s Email Was Probably Hacked, Experts Say (2016/07/07)
And yes, the entire US press corps, not just the NYTimes, subsequently ignored this and regurgitated the unedited Republican narrative instead. Why? I think there was a lot of gullibility involved, and that it was mostly Republicans (and allies and etc) playing with this gullibility.
Kay
@bluefish:
She did one good thing. Her punditry on sex abuse in the Catholic church was good. Not the best, but good.
Kay
Trump’s circle is getting more and more narrowly NYC-based as this goes on, too, to the NYTimes coverage will suck more and more.
With the addition of America’s Mayor, who they also love, we may as well throw in the towel on them for the duration. It’ll be garbage.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay:
Fixed that for you – there’s no winning this game. Democrats have to change the game.
Matt McIrvin
@germy: They’ll do it to any woman. They can fall in love with Democratic men (cf. Barack Obama).
I agree that Warren would be in for some serious media trouble if she ran, but I’m a bit reluctant to use that as a reason not to nominate her just because it really boils down to “no women ever”.
Bill Arnold
@Kay:
The New York press, excepting the WSJ and the NYPost, largely have no love for either D.J. Trump or R. Giuliani. They could be a lot more obvious about this lack of love, though; the message that D.J. Trump was/is (very likely) corrupt and a bit of a con-man (or worse) was understood by many in the NY area but it was not properly communicated to the rest of the country.
New York Results, 2016 election. Note only Staten Island went for Trump.
StringOnAStick
My now elderly aunt was a high level reporter for the main paper in a small and not that influential western state; I recall how once when we were visiting from out of state, she came home for lunch and had a HUGE glass of rum and Coke before returning to work, and realized that she did this every day. I also recall that all she really cared about was the gossip side of any story, not the facts. As a reporter she sucked, but if you wanted to know the personal backstory on everyone involved, she knew it and obviously slanted her coverage based on significant biases as far as the issue at hand went. She worked decades in that job and retired from it, so obviously what she was cranking out was what the paper wanted: gossipy crap written by a vindictive lush with little regard for facts. I guarantee you she voted from Dump. I think seeing her act is what made me try to look for alternative sources than mainstream news, starting fairly young.
And yet I still fell for the “NPR is unbiased journalism” because for awhile it was the best you could get here. Now that the overseeing Board is majority R, the coverage is crap. It stuns me that I can read things like the truth about “that server”, that is was never hacked and the classified emails on it were retroactively classified after she’d sent them , and yet I never heard that on NPR. I read such good stuff here by everyone and especially Adam, Cheryl and David that tells me our civil life is in danger of being burned to the group, and when I hear NPR it sounds like business as usual. My husband banned NPR or any other news from his car and he seems a lot happier for it. I need to do the same.
StringOnAStick
@Matt McIrvin: Warren has been very clear that she does not want to run for President. She knows she can do more in the Senate and I hope she sticks to that statement. Plus we need someone younger than a Boomer to run in 2020.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Bill Arnold: Lesson: Republicans have learned that Gaslighting works on the establishment media. They will repeat your lies with little caveat or pushback. Bigger lies are most effective at shaping the narrative and moving the Overton Window.
Bill Arnold
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
No. (Respectfully :-)
The game should be played with intent to win, while the US left-of-center is also actively working on redesigning/rewriting the rules of the game.
Gin & Tonic
@germy:
It took over a half-century for the NYT to acknowledge (but not apologize for) Walter Duranty’s cover-up of Stalin’s genocide, so I hope nobody’s holding their breath.
Yutsano
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Wilmerite. Ignore.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Bill Arnold: If the game relies on being treated fairly by the NYT, it’s time to change the game (or play a different one). Do Dems really need the approval of the NYT to win?
J R in WV
@piratedan:
“part of me wants to understand how Journalism works, “
I grew up in journalism, my family (starting with like my great-great-grandfather – I may have the number of greats wrong….) founded and ran small town newspapers that, by the time I was a kid, had brown up a bit. Then I married a woman who went on to become an AP correspondent. So I was around reporters a whole lot. I even was one briefly.
When a news organization assigns a reporter who is so pig ignorant about their assignment that they don’t, for example, know what a caucus is while covering an election campaign, that news organization is seriously deformed. Because an ignorant reported is hopelessly vulnerable to being rolled without even knowing it.
Wife once worked covering the state house. Legislation being proposed, hated, wrestled over, winners and losers. She wrote a story with a lead to the effect that “The bill went through like Sherman marched through Georgia…” and then got a call from the desk back at the bureau, who said “I don’t understand this lead?!?!!”
Wife said General Sherman’s army marched through Georgia, shattered the Confederacy and ended the Civil War, etc, and the legislation was marching like that. Desk reporter (who had a masters degree from major reputable University) said, “Well, I’m from New York, we never learned about the Civil War…” as if NY didn’t have draft riots, supply hundreds of thousands of soldiers, have monuments in every town to the war dead, etc, etc.
One of the major formative events of the nation, she didn’t know who won and how? Ignorant. And that describes Amy being sent to cover a presidential campaign, never having even read a single book about one, not knowing how they work at the most basic level. Pig ignorant about elections, national security, everything, evidently, sold a fable by Republicans, spinning the lie the Rs told her for months, then surprised at the results. Still Pig Ignorant. Always gonna be.
Some organizations are doomed to fail, over and over, and major news orgs are no exception. The rewards and penalties are all broken, just like with big banks, investment funds, venture capital, etc. I don’t know what’s wrong at that level, nor how to fix it. But things are screwed up when failure leads to more attempts to fail all over again. People should wind up out of that career if they fail that badly, whether we’re talking news reporting, banking, business like Enron, etc.
That guy, Eric Greitens of Missouri, he doesn’t get to run for office again. Rod Blagojevich — Governor of Illinois serving 14 years in prison, eh doesn’t get to run again. Amy, Maggie, the rest of that bunch, they shouldn’t get to do a political campaign again, they should be doing obits for the rest of their career, unless they fuck that up, then they should be in retail, like 7-11 after that.
Fair Economist
@tobie:
How often do you see mentioned the fact that almost everybody in both the W and Orangemandias administrations used or uses private servers maintained by the RNC? I think I’ve seen it mentioned twice since the election.
germy
Bill Arnold
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Yes. And this works, until it doesn’t. A press person that becomes aware that they’ve been thoroughly gaslighted is especially formidable as an advocate – that sort of change hits people harshly, and they often compensate with anti-X evangelism. A culture shift requires a fairly small percentage of individuals as the vanguard. The models suck and there is considerable scholarly argument about this since the initial physics-style paper(s), but it’s maybe 5-15 percent. Since news organizations are small, shifts need a fairly small number of people.
Fair Economist
@Bill Arnold:
And typically of the FTNYT, the title is misleading, because there is no evidence at all that Clinton’s email server was hacked and a fair amount that it was *not* (notably the Russians were never able to produce anything from it.) And, again typically, the title is technically true because I’m sure you can find 2 (Republican) experts who are willing to say it was “probably” hacked.
Fair Economist
@Bill Arnold:
Doesn’t seem to be working with Ms. Chozick. Literally even today she’s still pumping the champagne story about about Chelsea even after Chelsea herself refuted it.
zhena gogolia
@Smiling Mortician:
There are certain parts of autocorrect I wouldn’t advise you to invade . . . .
Bill Arnold
@germy:
Sheesh. That guy compromised, and/or has lost the ability to think clearly, and/or is a solid Republican ally.
(She won the popular vote!!!)
Washburn
@James Powell:
Well put, I wholeheartedly agree that our nation would be much better off without the press/media in general.
James Powell
@Elizabelle:
It’s even worse than that. First, you’re right. the NYT is considered the Gold Standard so anything they print, including rumor and innuendo fed to them by Republicans, is regarded as fact by the rest of the press/media, particularly cable.
Second, the NYT sets the agenda for every press/media other than FOX and RW radio. If the NYT says EMAILS!!! is The Big Story and that laundering Russian money is not a story at all, well everyone else in the press/media goes along with it.
Third, the NYT is regarded as the far-left edge of what is acceptable in American political discourse. Anything to left of the NYT is regarded as insane, not worthy of attention. Whereas the full spectrum of RW voices – even avowed white supremacists – get print space and airtime, anyone who is to the left of the NYT’s corporate and military friendly slightly left of center positions is regarded as too left to print or broadcast.
What to do about it? I have no effin’ idea.
germy
@Bill Arnold: It’s a parody account. But it’s a perfect parody.
Bill Arnold
@Fair Economist:
Not arguing that the title was wrong. I only personally spotted it because when rushed I tend to read the first few paragraphs, then skip to the last few to find any such buried stories, then maybe read the middle.
That the point was ignored thereafter, by everyone, was unconscionable, and means that basically nobody, in the press at least, is reading everything. They need to step up their game, a lot.
Citizen Alan
@Joey Maloney:
Who the hell is HAHA Goodman? I was afraid for a second that this was referring to John Goodman and that being around Roseanne had driven him insane.
J R in WV
@scott (the other one):
Yes, obviously. The colleague of Chozick has cheated his employer by not doing what s/he was assigned to do, writing as if they had done it. Even the Times fired a reporter for reporting from events he did not attend. Filing expense reports for things he didn’t spend to go to events he didn’t attend.
Simple fraud leading to a take-over of the government by the enemy!!!
Ms Chozick – knowing of the fraud, not reporting the fraud, is an accessory after the fact to the fraud. As well as aiding the take-over of our government by the enemy. Self-confessed, in print !! Will any editor in charge take charge and put her outside the building? Probably not, even tho Ms Chozick already pleaded guilty in print. She also pleaded guilty to being incompetent to cover national politics by not knowing what a caucus primary is, which isn’t a crime, I guess, but is certainly a firing offence!
Bill Arnold
@Washburn:
Alternative, that doesn’t endgame as authoritarian-state-controlled propaganda into our earbuds at all times? How would we get through our days without the mellifluous voice of Dear Leader Trump to brighten them?
I’ll assume you mean some form of interpersonal communications networking, that scales, but how do you defend free communications against authoritarianism/fascism?
Bill Arnold
@germy:
Smiles with egg on face. I was just getting a clue. (And, yes, I feel rather shallow for thinking even for a minute that GG was that bad.)
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
What planet were you living on for eight years where the Press was not over-analyzing Obama? One of the first big “scandals” of the Obama Administration ( if we define scandal as something the media obsesses over pointlessly) was when he said that he thought a particular white cop had acted stupidly in arresting a black Harvard professor for allegedly breaking into his own home. Now just ask yourself for a second: if John McCain had become president, would anyone anywhere in the media have ever bothered to ask him his opinion about the arrest of a particular black man by a particular cop? Would anyone have ever thought the issue was something that the president needed to weigh in on if that president had not been a black Democrat?
Quaker in a Basement
“And we’re NOT going to be IGNORED!”
germy
@Bill Arnold:
easy mistake to make. He captures the real greenwald’s tone, arrogance, and opinions perfectly.
B.B.A.
@Bill Arnold: You can ban white men from speaking. I don’t think any white man – including me – has ever had anything worthwhile to contribute to public discourse.
Citizen Alan
@germy:
I should say so. Until you pointed out it was a parody account, I did not have the slightest doubt that it was legitimately from Comrade Greenwald
J R in WV
@Wag: \
No, you’re missing the point – it is a total fabrication, a lie, that Chelsea had anything to do with any alcoholic beverages on election night – she was nursing her new-born child, not drinking alcohol. Chozick made that whole thing up, it is a fabricated lie she needed for a lead with POP in it. Should be fired for printing a falsehood!
J R in WV
@Wag:
If you read the original post, Chelsea Clinton has already denied the “fact” aka lie that Chozick fabricated. So, maybe not. Adults don’t have to “drown their sorrow” like that.
germy
@J R in WV: Chozick wanted to make a point that Chelsea (and the Clintons) were arrogant and clueless, so sure of their victory they were popping champagne bottles before the final results came in.
Chozick is holding onto that falsehood like a pitbull with a steak in its mouth. She may tweak around the edges of that falsehood (editing the sentence from “Some people told me it happened” rather than “It happened) but she’ll never let it go, because it serves her larger point.
But she is the arrogant and clueless one, not HRC.
bluefish
@Kay: That’s true — had forgotten about Mo’s writings on that score. And interesting point you make also about how, as the NYC gang becomes a central focus, we can expect the quality of NYT’s coverage to devolve into … an even more tepid pudding. I’m always torn when I see the American press, the legit press–to include the Gold Standards, the usual suspects–criticized with too much ferocity. I understand and sympathize as I find it also hugely frustrating and often enraging but I grew up in a place and time when it was all propaganda all the time — except for the heavily censored arts, where folks found ways to subvert and critique through metaphors that the censorship folks often didn’t catch. We can and should do better but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, I suppose, is my attitude. Which makes me feel what I am — old now and probably vaguely complicit in a scene I still feel isn’t of my own making. The new always come though and we’re on the brink right now. This gal’s book looks like it could be its own parody account so … another learning opportunity, maybe.
I continue to think that Hillary should NOT have apologized for the use of the word deplorable(s). Should have taken a page from DJT and doubled down. We see now fully and daily just how deplorable the deplorables take pride in being. Too much exposition often worked against her — as it did for Gore and Kerry both — And when you wanted her to swing hard, she’d often punt. But, clearly, the election of The Beast, is not something I fault her for. She was robbed, hard, and so here we are. We only see her through a thick, thick veil of Maya and projection.
James Powell
@germy:
In other words, even after this alleged mea culpa, she still repeats anything anti-Hillary as if it were fact. “Some people”? Who are these people who lie about the Clintons? Why do you publish whatever they say without checking?
jayjaybear
@Matt McIrvin: Ugh. Woodward’s ass-kissing all through Dubya’s 2 terms was disgusting. It became fairly obvious that the REAL journalist in that team was Bernstein. Woodward was just the doorman that got Bernstein to the right people.
r€nato
The Iraq war… the swiftboating of John Kerry… the Great Housing Bubble… the Russian manipulation of Election 2016… how many times do we have to live through these failures of the country’s most powerful media outlets and the subsequent mea culpa’s, until they finally get it right the first time around? I’m more than a little tired of hearing it from them. If you had an employee who kept screwing up and kept saying, “sorry… sorry… sorry…” you would have canned him or her long ago.
There comes a time when no amount of “sorry” cuts it.
James Powell
@bluefish:
I was screaming that at the time. My tote-bagger friends were all clutching their pearls and tut-tutting at Clinton’s grave error. She should have continued it. Every living Democrat should have repeated it and agreed with her. There were plenty of examples not the least of which was the Republican nominee himself.
But both Clintons consistently backed down whenever the Beltway Courtiers join the RW pitchfork & torch parade.
r€nato
@James Powell: perfect example of Josh Marshall’s “the bitch-slap theory of electoral politics.”
No matter how loudly a wingnut screams, they still only get one vote each and oh by the way, not a single one of them was ever going to vote for Hills.
sigyn
@Wag: That’s how I drank my champagne, choked down with sobs.
sukabi
@germy: they might as well write fiction, as that’s what they all push as ‘news’…distorted “how I see the world” version.
D Myer
@debbie: Agreed.
cleek
the best winners get the losers to write it for them.
TriassicSands
Yes, but if the election had been fair, Trump would have won the popular vote in a landslide. To be fair, we have to subtract the 50 million “illegal aliens” who voted for Hillary and add the tens of millions of Russians who would have voted for Trump if, well, if Russia had annexed the US. No wonder Trump feels so victimized.
VeniceRiley
As long as I live, I will never forgive the journalists, Trump campaign and fellow traveller Republicans, Comey, Russia, Wilmer and his -ites. Evangelicals and white dudebros. They can all burn like the planet likely will. Criminals, scoundrels, and fools.
I am in the majority.
sukabi
@TriassicSands: That could present an interesting problem… No matter if that would have made Drumpf feel better, the real question is would Putin put up with Drumpf taking his ‘glory’? Pretty sure the answer is NO!
different-church-lady
Because she’d be good at it and she wanted to help people? Yeah, no vision at all…
ellie
@Schlemazel: I will! I will give you a hat tip Frankensteinbeck!
Anne Laurie
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Remember, the NYTimes started championing Obama back when he was Hillary’s opponent in the 2008 primaries. By the time he’d won the nomination, the Empty Suits had convinced themselves that he was “one of the good ones” (yes, *very* dogwhistle) and that publicly supporting him would make the NYTimes look properly “woke”.
Anne Laurie
@Kay:
I sincerely believe Warren has better sense than to run for President. She’s got a job-for-life doing the stuff she likes, after all.
What we Democrats have to watch for, even in 2018, is the NYTimes deciding that any Democratic candidate must be ‘fatally flawed’, because look we were so mean to them, over nothing!!!
Dem campaigns have to be prepared in advance to point out the sordid history — that the Timesmen were happy to turn their paper into Fox News with an Ivy League degree on the wall.
AxelFoley
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Huh? Obama most definitely was over analyzed by the press.
Anne Laurie
@James Powell:
Also too, “Some people are so invested in the narrative about the Clintons’ elitist behavior they tell each other stupid refutable lies about it” could be considered an actual news story.
But the narrative is sacred to Chozick and her associates!
lethargytartare
@Bill Arnold:
maybe they were behind that empty podium?
jonas
@PJ: I recall, back in the ’00s, how campaign journalists would praise GWB because he was “just likable” because he would invite them to fly on his plane, would take the time to speak with each of them about their personal lives, etc.,
Don’t forget McCain’s famous barbecues! Invite a bunch of journos over, give ’em ribs and a few beers. Let ’em swing on your tire swing. In. Your. Pocket. For. All. Eternity. An honest title to Chozick’s book would be: “Hillary: If Only She’d Given Us Cookies or Beer or Something, We Might Not Have Been Suckered By Russian Propaganda.”