Amy Chozick’s “sometimes cubicle-mate” at the FTFNYT stands up to defend her, and his employer. One of a long twitter thread:
Perhaps not every story we published about the e-mails met the standard of newsworthiness. But I think almost all of them did. Virtually every news organization in America made the judgment we did about news value and the public interest, probably for similar reasons.
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) April 22, 2018
To quote everybody’s mom: If ‘every news organization’ jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
Yes. It was pervasive. And the worst-reported storyline of the campaign. It played perfectly in to the Russians & Wikileaks, because instead of focusing on why they wanted that stuff out _& why the emails were misrepresented_ the press swallowed the bait https://t.co/fObNVcDbNP
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 22, 2018
This Chozick claim (via @brianstelter) is pretty off…
1. Comey's never mentioned "data projections"—just his sense from polls + media coverage that Clinton would win.
2a. "Data projections" (at least not 538s) never showed Clinton as having anything like an "insurmountable lead" pic.twitter.com/jZl4EzqPHS— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 20, 2018
3b. How the media (especially NYT) covered the Comey letter in particular and the Clinton email saga in general was both (a) highly questionable and (b) potentially quite an influential factor in the election. pic.twitter.com/HUWt348lDJ
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 20, 2018
I *really do* appreciate that Chozick is willing to be so self-reflective in her book. But the idea that polls/forecasts showed Clinton to be inevitable is a fairly persistent myth—instead, the media cherry-picked and misinterpreted data in service of that narrative.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 20, 2018
So if that’s the assumption, that they can put their thumbs on the scales but only if it causes minimal damage to someone’s candidacy, what are metrics? Is there a scale? Like, if it’s within 3 points, you don’t intervene, but if it’s over 3 points you can? Is there a buffer? /2
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 21, 2018
…of serious costs. But seemingly small costs added up. And while no single whack at her was sufficient by itself to cost her victory, theywere cumulatively necessary. Take just about any of the big ones away & she wins. /10
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 21, 2018
I'd say that Amy Chozick comes closer to grappling with her own guilt and culpability than anyone else at the Times, but then there's this: pic.twitter.com/TnxZ4IaTlF
— Max Weiss (@maxthegirl) April 20, 2018
TenguPhule
I’m not this naive.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
Just the Facts
Maggie Haberman: I’m defensively impervious to any criticism and will squeal at any call for self-reflection on my reporting.
Amy Chozick: Hold my beer…
Wild Cat
What do you expect from a rag that ran Times Square Blight articles on its front page throughout the 1980s without ever divulging that Deblightification would lead to massive profits for the newspaper because they owned a ton of property in the area they demanded to be re-gentrified?
Ben Cisco
@TenguPhule: Agreed. At this point, the press/punditubbies class are in the same boat as the GOP – feeling they’re obligated to double down in the face of all logic and reason indicating otherwise. They will NEVER cop to being complicit in their reporting. It would require sober self-reflection and dispassionate, fact-based analysis – two things I’m convinced are well beyond their capabilities.
Corner Stone
Of course they wanted to hurt and weaken Clinton. All of the media plus elected R officials were positively preening before the cameras/clicks, pre-emptively telling everyone who would listen that they were going to be in full on The Hunting of President Clinton Part II: Obstruction and Investigations Boogaloo.
They had whole careers to be made off hounding, chastising, wounding, denying, and destroying a President HRC.
Corner Stone
I sometimes agree with Nick Confessore’s analysis/opinion on TV but his defensive takes are beyond fucking parody. He and Jeremy Peters seem to be two of the worst on this. It seems almost like they feel they have to “stick up” for their female colleagues who all screwed the pooch so viciously.
wjs
“Please do not notice that we, the media, gave Trump free coverage and helped elect him because we knew he would save our failing businesses by acting like a racist jackass.”
rikyrah
Phuck outta here.
NO WAY..you will NOT be able to run away from what you did in 20161
UH UH
gene108
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Reporters don’t do math!
One of the biggest problems facing us today is the mathematical illiteracy of journalists.
Thoughtful David
That’s setting bar quite low, at a height where quantum effects become significant.
Brachiator
I really don’t want to hear anything from another reporter. The publishers and editors bear the main responsibility for this. They decided how deeply the emails story would be covered. They assigned the reporters. They decided what would be published.
The editors should also tell their readers why they have a reporter with an inherent conflict of interest covering the White House. Haberman (and maybe one of her NYT colleagues) have a book deal with Random House to report about their time in the White House. Who are they working for, their newspaper or themselves?
I’m also tired of the horseshit that everyone, Chozick, Comey, even Nate Silver, is flinging about the goddam polls. Whatever anybody believed about the polls is no excuse for their not doing their motherfucking jobs, or trying to tip the scales, or sell an extra newspaper, or slam Hillary or whatever the fuck they thought they were doing.
trollhattan
Shorter Nick Confessore: “Hey boss, how was that? Remember me at bonus time!”
O/T Somebody mowed down Toronto pedestrians with a van this afternoon. Possible fatalities.
Major Major Major Major
Has anybody in the “on Wisconsin!” narrative given a satisfactory explanation for Hillary outperforming Feingold?
TenguPhule
“And I will therefore vote for a nominee which is none of these things.”
Fuck Manchin.
PST
Every new organization in America pays close attention to what the New York Times thinks is news. It’s the Heather Chandler of news organizations. “All the other kids were doing it” isn’t much of an excuse if you are part of the tiny coterie of gang leaders.
TenguPhule
@Thoughtful David:
A weak nuclear force effect?
Nicole
I love seeing Nate Silver go after the NYTimes. Someone told me he took 538 from the Times because he was pressured to make things seem, in 2012, like more of a horse race than they actually were. (I have to google and see if that’s true, though, less I be like Amy C. and her popping champagne).
rp
@Major Major Major Major: Has anybody in the “on Wisconsin!” narrative given a satisfactory explanation for Clinton losing Pennsylvania?
Barbara
Amy Chozick exemplifies the infuriating double standard that many people use to evaluate women. Women are presumed to be incompetent and any mistake they make is seen as proof of that presumption. Whereas, men like Trump can fail over and over again and are still given the presumption that they know what they are doing. She will never admit it, but it comes through loud and clear in her writing.
TenguPhule
@Just the Facts: I’m fed up to the point I’m starting to refer to them as “butter dogs.”
They’re just that bad.
Corner Stone
@PST: Yeah, this “Herd Immunity” defense the NYT is trying on really is not going to cut it.
Thoughtful David
@TenguPhule:
Well, where it can be hard to tell if you went over, under, or through the bar. Or maybe all three.
ETA But it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a very low bar.
Corner Stone
@gene108:
While we have significant problems with our media, I am of the opinion this is not near the top of the list.
Roger Moore
Confessore talks about how FTFNYT spent a lot of time discussing whether the emails were newsworthy and whether it was legitimate to cover them. I’m willing to take him at his word that there was a discussion about that, but it must have been a general discussion about whether it was OK to write stories about the hacked emails in general. I suspect that what they don’t want to admit is:
1) Their decision it was OK to report on the emails was made under pressure not to let themselves get scooped by other media outlets. IOW, they let other people’s poor ethics influence their own ethics.
2) They applied that level of care only to the general issue of whether it was OK to talk about the hacked emails at all, not to the newsworthiness of each individual email-related story. Once they decided it was OK to talk about hacked emails, everything was fair game.
3) More generally, there was a frenzy over the whole email business. Everyone was in a rush to find something they could turn into a story, which made them vulnerable to people playing them by portraying innocent comments as sinister.
In general, the media got badly played by somebody who knew how to manipulate them. Everything, from the way the releases were timed to keep the emails in the news to the way individual messages were highlighted, was designed to keep them focused on cranking out stories rather than questioning what they were doing and how it was skewing coverage. They’re desperate to avoid self-reflection because it would show them in such a negative light.
patrick II
@TenguPhule:
They meant to certainly hurt hillery, but they killed her instead. I do believe they thought her when was inevitable,, but they preferred a wounded democratic president.
Brachiator
@wjs:
This was never going to save their failing business, not even if they sell out to Murdoch or to Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Major Major Major Major
@gene108: @Corner Stone: scientific and technological illiteracy too, but yeah, not in our top ten civilizational problems.
sukabi
@gene108: the problem is a lot of them claim ‘expertise’ they don’t have in any and all areas they ‘report’ on. And they don’t do the work to connect their story to how it got to be ‘a story worth reporting on’.
We’re left with a bunch of factoids with little or no relationship or concept with how it matters.
Barbara
@Brachiator: The reality is that if they had really covered him the way some have tried to do now they would have still generated increased readership.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major:
Arguably a major contributing factor to them though.
TenguPhule
@sukabi:
Thus, Balloonjuice to connect the dots for us.
Washburn
It’s pretty clear that, but for the NYT coverage, Clinton would be President today so the best thing for democracy is to determine the most effective way to silence the NYT before the 2020 election.
Gin & Tonic
Bloomberg News bought detailed flight records from Flight Aware, showing that when Trump visited Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant (the one he told Comey he didn’t even spend the night at) he touched down at 0615 on Friday, Nov 8 and left at 0358 on Sunday, Nov 10.
Corner Stone
@Roger Moore:
The timing and the ambiguity or outright non-newsworthiness of batches of emails allowed the conspiracy theory puke funnel to make out of them anything they wanted. Then that was highlighted by Fox and regurgitated back through other outlets to reinforce the CT. It wasn’t that any of the emails were newsworthy in and of themselves, just that the canvas was free to be painted into anything the RWNJ wanted.
patrick ii
That may he true (I doubt it) about each email story, but it does not account for the cumulative affect of hundreds if not thousands of email stories . Major media followed the daily bread crumbs laid down by the republican leadership and right-wing medico right to Donald Trump’s Russian House.
d58826
Maybe I missed it but did the media spend any time discussing Der Fuhrer’s NY mob ties? Or how in heavens name do you lose money when owning a casino?
TenguPhule
@d58826:
No.
d58826
@TenguPhule: ah the liberal media bias. snark
TenguPhule
@Gin & Tonic:
Fact checking is the lost art of reporting these days.
TenguPhule
@d58826: His fucking charity frauds barely got coverage. And only because ONE reporter at the Washington Post did his job.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
So the truth leaks out?
Gin & Tonic
Good Twitter thread right here. Kudos to the NY Daily News.
p.a.
Don’t forget the ‘job security’ aspect: get this b.s. out there and they thought to have ready-made scandal/articles for at least the first half of her administration. Because lazy hacks.
piratedan
for me, they made the story that the e-mails themselves were released… and, just like everything else regarding the political reporting process from the last election… what did we learn from those articles that waxed oh so poetic regarding those e-mails?
1) that they were illegally obtained, but here ya go (and we’re not going to speculate on how they appeared in our collective in-box)
2) what’s in them… ummmmm political stuff
3) there’s some personal stuff too from the inner workings of the DCC
4) they apparently don’t like Senator Sanders much because long time Dems think he’s an outsider
5) they reflect poorly on the Clinton campaign because … reasons…
There ya go, I’ve effectively put together a synopsis of the last six months of the Clinton campaign coverage from the FNYT…
isn’t she a fucking train wreck that we were lucky to avoid?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
So what they’re saying is, “Well, if Hillary CLinton hadn’t been such a mean, mean poopie head, we wouldn’t have been so tempted to beat up on her.” I don’t know any other way to read this shit. We didn’t like her, so we beat up on her. But it’s her fault for not making us like her.
I can understand why some people aren’t the world’s biggest fans of Hillary Clinton. No politician is going to light everybody up. But I just flat don’t get the hatred. What, really, is so awful about her? Nothing. What’s great about her? A lot, to my mind. She knows what she’s doing and she would have stood steadfast against Republicans as they tried to undo everything Democrats have done for the last 80 years, and she would have done what she could to make things better around the margins while trying to wear down the other side.
I know a whole lot of people thought we should have run Johnny Unbeatable, who not only would have won the election 70,000%-0%, but also would have magically made everything good happen in America and in the world while staving off everything bad. I guess that would have been great but Johnny Unbeatable didn’t run in 2016. I have my suspicions that maybe Johnny Unbeatable isn’t even a real guy.
And, shit, nobody fell harder for Johnny Unbeatable than the press. Johnny Unbeatable was not only unbeatable, he was new and fresh and hadn’t taken horseshit hits from Republicans and the press for 25 years, and best of all, he just loooooves the press. Loves ’em, loves ’em, loves ’em! He buys the press flowers and chocolate every day, and he tells them how amazing and fun and cool and sexy they all are. And they deeply resented Hillary Clinton for not being Johnny Unbeatable.
I don’t know how we fix this. This country isn’t going to work in the long run if the press can’t tell the fucking difference between an honest politician who has made compromises in her career but sometimes seems aloof from a groping, slobbering psychopathic money launderer for Russian mobsters who eggs his fucking fans on to beat people up at rallies, and if anything, thinks the former is worse.
I guess this book maybe makes it look like the press, some of them anyway, are willing to look at what they did wrong, but they deeply resent the idea that they should, and even when they own up to fucking up, they still insist that it was never their fault, and any mistakes they made, they only made them because mean, mean, poopie-head Hillary Clinton made them do it.
I don’t know what we do here, other than just endlessly and tirelessly point out this shit. Whatever the answer is, it’s up to us to find it, ’cause these zeroes are never going to come up with it themselves.
TenguPhule
@piratedan:
I was told if I voted for Hillary Clinton the economy would tank, we’d be a laughing stock abroad and that a warmonger would destroy our military.
So I voted for Hillary Clinton and all of it came to pass.
Corner Stone
@trollhattan: I’m sure Trump will be teed off when he hears about that record leakage.
patrick II
Nick Confessor
That’s why we call you “The Village”.
Groupthink is not actually an admirable quality.
TenguPhule
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
“She’s not from around here. She does not belong and we will make her regret not going away.”
Our national media is made of stuckup Highschool cliques.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: This is an update from their earlier story on this from last June or July. The significant new information is they’ve got verified flight logs and that contrary to the earlier reporting, the President did not make a stop in NY on his way to Moscow.
TenguPhule
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Step 1: Dig a very deep pit.
Step 2: Dump the Republicans, national media and third party voters into it.
Step 3: Fill over pit with concrete.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
He’ll be pissed for sure.
gene108
@Corner Stone:
It is near the top of the list.
Take healthcare for example. When Bush, Jr. was pushing high deductible plans and HSA’s as a way to control heatlhcare costs, via the magic of the free market, not one damn reporter seems to understand price elasticity of demand and how medical care does not fluctuate based on price.
I have a choice between getting dialysis or not getting dialysis and probably dying in a few weeks or months. My nephrologist, who I like and believe gives me good care, makes the rounds at a couple of dialysis centers. I am not making my decision based on price of services, because I have very little negotiating power.
Plus the fact no one really knows how much shit costs, because the contracted rates between insurers and providers and how those are arrived at is opaque as fuck.
There’s probably more shit relating to the economy that gets totally fucking ignored, especially when economic decisions intersect policy decisions, because the reporting on the policy gets shunted to the political reporters like Chuck fucking Todd, who could probably learn a thing or two about math from your average kindergartner.
So when Republicans can make claims about deficits are the worst, run away inflation because of quantitative easing, lack of business confidence in the government hurting hiring decisions, and on and on and on, without getting any push back, because the push back involves math, and our political reporters would rather talk about how its a win for McConnell and loss for Obama, rather than whether the numbers that are being pushed at them add up or not, we become less well informed as a country.
Their mathematical illiteracy is why they decided Paul Ryan is an economic policy wonk FFS.
Tell a reporter the average is ‘x’ and they assume it is the median number in their reporting, being utterly clueless that an average can be raised or lowered by outliers, but that’s not how reporting is done here. And this happens over and over again.
TL;DR: Basically, when it comes to reporting on the economy not being able to do basic math means people can lie all the live long day to our journalists with impunity.
germy
While most of us wept in horror when drumpf won, the vile editor at the NYT was pleased and excited:
link
TenguPhule
@germy:
This is why Village is right.
No Quarter.
The Moar You Know
I’ve had occasion to dig through a lot of the WWII era and 1980s NYT front pages and the idea that this paper has been anything but a pukefunnel for the vilest of American conservative interests for its entire existence is something I’ll never understand. There has never been anything remotely liberal about the rag at all.
zhena gogolia
@TenguPhule:
There were a few stories in the NYT. But it wasn’t relentless, day after day, like the e-mails.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I mentioned it because they now have the logs. From a couple of decades in IT, “let’s take a look at the logs” is kind of a default response to an issue.
germy
Of course they did. They simply didn’t like her.
germy
@The Moar You Know: Didn’t they do a marvelous piece about Hitler’s vacation villa back in the day?
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: I’m a big fan of checking sources.
TenguPhule
@zhena gogolia: Not about the mob ties. The casinos only got mentioned in passing as Trump “formerly owning” them. Trump barging into a charity event that he had NEVER contributed to in order to steal free press for himself? It was a small print story on A6, not bold headlines wall to wall across the country.
low-tech cyclist
Confessore:
One more time: a ‘newsworthy’ story can mean anything from A1 above the fold, to buried at the bottom of page A17.
Maybe some of those stories belonged on A1. But there were an awful lot of dribs and drabs that should have been on A17, but wound up on the front page anyway.
I remember during the run-up to the Iraq War, Walter Pincus of the WaPo was doing some great reporting that gave much reason to doubt the Bush Administration’s line. The WaPo buried his coverage on A13 and A17 and so forth, while front-paging stories that pushed us towards war. Even though Pincus’ stories were actually very fucking newsworthy, just not the sort of news the WaPo editors felt like front-paging.
The NYT could have buried many of those Hillary email stories, and Clinton Foundation stories, and whatnot, in the back pages. To fail to do so – and then have a front page totally dominated, ten days before the election, with what turned out to be a nothingburger of a story in every way but its impact – that was a fucking choice, and a fucking awful one.
I will blame the NYT for pushing Trump over the finish line until I die, or until Alzheimer’s gobbles up my memory, whichever happens first. Fuck the NYT.
TenguPhule
@low-tech cyclist:
Death or brain damage is not a vaild excuse to stop blaming them.
TenguPhule
FYWP has killed the edit function.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Gin & Tonic: I love documented facts.
germy
Excellent comment from CP over at LG&M:
Corner Stone
@gene108:
No, it is not.
They made him into a wonk because that was the narrative they chose. Does not matter that a fifth grader could have taken a 3 minute read through of his 19 page “Budget for America” or whatever bullshit he was peddling, and tell it was bullshit garbage. That is not mathematical illiteracy at work. You don’t have to be average at math to ask a simple question when someone boldly claims, “Murders are up by 300% under the incumbency of my opponent!”. Ok, did it go from 1 to X or did it go from 100 to X? That does not take math skills.
Explaining price elasticity is not our problem with the media. Just like we made fun with the idea of people turning down an ambulance ride when they are having a heart attack because it’s out of network. Or Rand Paul price shopping for emergency services vs Lasik surgery. That doesn’t take math skills.
Media is failing us on purpose not because they don’t know how to explain 2+2=4.
low-tech cyclist
@PST:
Damn straight.
Chyron HR
Remember, it’s Hillary’s fault that 63 million people voted for a morbidly obese, physically repulsive, Nazi rapist. PERIOD.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
Actually it does. Fundamental concept math skills.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
Our media is convinced there are five lights.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
Wisconsin rallies probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Tens of thousands weren’t able to vote because of the Voter ID laws there.
The Moar You Know
@TenguPhule: What LYING SACK OF CRAP said that? They had no other goal at all!
low-tech cyclist
@TenguPhule:
You’re right! And before either of those events should overtake me (hell, probably in the next few years, the way things are moving), I’m sure we’ll have customizable bots that we can set to fire off our opinions on assorted social media until the media themselves evolve beyond recognition. I’ll make sure to have mine issue regular FTNYT missives weekly between then and the heat death of the Universe.
balconesfault
Saw Confessore making the rounds on TV yesterday … on MSNBC he was just a smug little punk. Definitely a Backpfeifengesicht.
Aleta
From a piece by Jennifer Palmieri in Politico Magazine
There’s much more to her article.
Kathleen
@TenguPhule: This
Corner Stone
@TenguPhule: Asking the question is the important part, not making the plusses and minuses add up.
Tim C.
@patrick II: This 1000 times. The goal was a weak Clinton presidency, they would have had 4 or more years of bullshit scandals, Bobo and company could have mansplained to everyone about how shrill she was, and yeah, they’d have held everything in 2020 most likely. Instead NPR has some nevertrumper trying to troll liberals by saying it’s our fault they chose Trump.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: Dana Houle.
Ramalama
A van has struck 10 people in downtown Toronto just now. The G7 meeting is going on there. No indication yet if it’s terrorism related.
Kay
Mistakes were made. Oh, well. Maybe next time they’ll investigate both candidates instead of just one?
If they won’t then campaigns will just have to allow for it and try to compensate with funding investigations of their own because someone will have to do the work.
These are private companies. There’s no way to force them to cover both candidates with the same investigatory zeal. But there will have to be some sort of replacement for what political journalists are supposed to do, and I suspect that hole will be filled by someone or other.
ruemara
I hate them more than Trump voters. If anything, the media class is even more brazen, unapologetic and absolutely enfuriatingly adamant that even if they were wrong, Hillary was more wrong and they don’t have to do a goddamned thing. FUCK THEM. Fuck them in perpetuity. Fuck them for the for the deaths they’ll cause, fuck them for the terror. They are horrible people with not a shred of common sense or decency.
Mary G
@Aleta: That was a great piece. Too bad everyone in the village will characterize it as making excuses for not winning without reading it.
germy
low-tech cyclist
@germy:
Our media’s addiction to ancient narratives that ceased being true decades ago really is a big fucking problem with our democracy, and I have no idea what we do about it.
Because it’s been 40 years since the GOP was the more responsible party with respect to budgets and deficits, yet the MSM still reports in a way that strongly implies that they still are.
It’s been 20 years since they’ve been the more responsible party on defense and foreign policy. Ditto.
There was a time when the GOP really was good at the nitty-gritty details of policy, and Dems did a lot of handwaving. It’s been quite the opposite for at least 25 years now, but you’d never know that from the way the MSM covers things. All the GOP has anymore is handwaving and opinions; they are totally uninterested in policy. While the Dems don’t feel like they can propose anything until they know exactly how it will work, how it will be paid for, and what the consequences might be. This policy gap should be a factor in story after story after story. But it gets overlooked in its entirety.
I really don’t know what we do about this. But when we have two parties, and only one of them is remotely capable of governing, that’s a Big Fucking Deal. It should dominate the MSM coverage of everything. You can’t possibly treat the two parties as anything like equal. Yet they do. Bothsidesism is killing this country.
patrick ii
@Corner Stone:
@gene108:
I think gone108 is more correct. People who don’t have decent math skills disregard its importance even when the math is doable. The disregard for even basic math correctly noted by Corner Stone is more prevalent in people who don’t do more complicated math well. They have a different view of economic problems and consider just political solutions .
Major Major Major Major
@Tim C.: yup. The idea that they have more grist with trump than they would with Clinton, so they tried to make trump win, just doesn’t pass the smell test given that they’d probably already templated half the articles for the scandals about Clinton they planned to invent.
Kay
So what would one do if they were planning on running against Trump in 2020? I suppose they’d put a lot of money toward doing some investigating into his business deals- at least the public records thereof. There’s a lot of strings to pull on given the special counsel’s investigations and what has been revealed so far. Looking into Michael Cohen alone could keep one whole person busy for months, or Manafort! Good Lord. He’s a goldmine of sleaze. Add to that the corruption that has surfaced INSIDE the Trump team just since the election, none of which has been really explored.
Maybe take 1/4 of the money that usually goes to media companies to pay for political ads and reallocate that to a really good investigative team?
Campaigns spend plenty fo money. They don’t lack for “spending”. Maybe Democrats could take a fresh look at WHERE they spend campaign bucks and really think creatively about that. There’s no reason any of it has to go to political ads. They could try something really new.
Kathleen
@ruemara: I want to treat that comment to a gourmet meal. You have eloquently voiced my own feelings.
Jeffro
@Corner Stone:
True indeed.
1) if they explain that 2+2=4, they’re agreeing with the side that does indeed know its basic math and angering that which does not, and they’ll get yelled at
2) also it’s easier to just report that “some say 2+2=4, while SOME say that 2+2=tire rims and anthrax” and let the “controversy” sell papers, instead of reporting facts as facts and moving on to the next topic
Radiumgirl
@Gin & Tonic: Do you have a link to that? Not doubting you, would just like to read it.
gvg
off topic, they caught the waffle house shooter alive. police did a massive door to door search but it doesn’t say that’s how they caught him. TPM has a story about his past and definately paranoid delusions. Once jumped into a pool wearing a womans pink coat, taylor smith was stalking him and his family was involved… dad really really should have known better about the gun, unless he is also delusional. He once said something that implied support for soverign citizens.
Archon
Sure the press didn’t do Clinton any favors it still doesn’t obscure the fact that 60 million people took time out of their day to vote a truly vile human being the most powerful man in the world.
Recriminations of the press and Comey and Russia are fine and necessary but I do wonder if part of this is, we as a nation want an explanation of what happened that allows us not to really process the fact that there is something deeply, deeply troubling about our country having so many people prepared to support Donald Trump for President, a person antithetical to what we thought were shared values as Americans and what we wanted and expected out of our leadership.
JMG
If NPR told the truth about the Republicans, Congress would shut it down in a day. Cable and broadcast TV news are operated by near-monopoly companies whose bosses are in the main fervent Republicans. Chuck Todd tells the truth, he gets fired. The Times and Post have no such excuse. They are marketing themselves as the truth, and sometimes they both are. But the Times also operates on the principle it never makes a mistake. Fifty or sixty years of that attitude, you get enormous mistakes and incredible snotty defensiveness about them.
danielx
@low-tech cyclist:
When the only interests you have are tax cuts, punishing poor people and bombing brown people, policies are sort of extraneous.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
To me this is the big thing that makes the idea of smart consumers price shopping for healthcare the most ridiculous: you can’t price shop without prices. Yes, there are plenty of services where you could comparison shop, but for the most part they’re the less expensive stuff that isn’t driving the price of healthcare. The expensive stuff, like major surgery or cancer treatment, is impossible to price, not just because people are trying to conceal their prices but because nobody knows in advance what the course of treatment is going to be. There’s also the whole thing about the impracticality of price shopping for emergency care.
MattF
1) The NYT email fiasco was a shot across the bow of the Clinton campaign– saying ‘This is how we’ll cover you when you’re elected.’ They hated her, and that should not be forgotten. And they would have been brutal, given the opportunity.
2) The WaPo actually covered Trump’s pathological dishonesty with no-kidding reporting. Remember Farenholt’s stories on Trump’s lies about his charitable donations? NYT did no such.
3) Hiring Maggie Haberman to cover Trump lays bare the NYT attitude. They find Trump amusing, and don’t take the damage he does seriously
Kay
Instead of complaining about this (the complaints will be ignored anyway) maybe use the 2016 election as a wake up call and radically rethink how we run campaigns?
We aren’t going to change the approach of the NYtimes. They’re not interested in fixing anything. So accept that and start to think about how to do this DESPITE that fact.
What could one have done to counteract the daily flogging of the email story? Not in the ordinary sense- I’m not talking about Clinton going to the NYTimes and explaining the email story, because we all know that’s bullshit.
What could Democrats have done WHILE political reporters were flogging the email story to the exclusion of everything else? How could we have gone around them?
IF we know the D candidate will be vetted more vigorously in 2020 THEN what can we do about that? How could we reorganize campaign spending and priorities top to bottom?
Just One More Canuck
@Major Major Major Major: @Corner Stone: @gene108: I think the biggest problem is that most of the national media are fucking idiots
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@low-tech cyclist: @Jeffro: Exactly
2+2=4? Opinions differ… tune in at 11:00
rp
@patrick ii: I agree, although it’s a much bigger problem than math skills. It’s the fact that few reporters know much about the complicated subjects they cover, whether global warming, economics, law, even the US government and political history. As a result, they’re easy to manipulate.
efgoldman
@piratedan:
Look at it this way (and no, I’m not saying it would have been “better” in any way). McTurtle and Granny Starver wouldn’t have allowed her to govern in any way; she probably would have had a bastard of a time getting anybody confirmed, certainly not a SCOTUS justice; the Dems woudn’t be energized, and the conventional dynamic (president’s party loses seats in first midterm) would happen in November.
Sometimes things work out. The interim sucks, but…..
schrodingers_cat
@Just One More Canuck: They know which side of their bread is buttered, they have been complaining about snacks the Ds give them. (First it was Margaret Carlson and now this Chozick person)
The political media are R enablers. They are either Rs themselves or their bosses are. Their CW always favors Rs even when the facts don’t.
germy
@rp:
As a result, they focus on (A) the horse race and (B) the theater criticism.
lumpkin
Amy Chozick’s book starts out with a blatant lie, that was thrown in for catty, malicious reasons. Why would anyone believe anything she says? That she did this and that she really hasn’t been called out over this demonstrates that the Clinton rules are still in effect.
Kay
People could also stop buying these campaign books. All these books do is turn this into a game where the reporter who has the wildest story of campaign reporting gets a fat book deal.
This is your actual government. They’re fooling around with it for their own career and financial gains.
It’s all zany craziness and fun – “gamechange!” “look at crazy Trump!” “Here’s what Palin screamed today!” – until one of these fucking maniacs they elect gets people slaughtered.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Sessions is getting rid of all the protections child refugees have. People are already paying for this with their lives, just not in the NYT offices, yet.
Tokyokie
@PST:
The New York Times page 1A budget moves on the NYT Syndicate wire every day in the early evening, and local newspaper decision-makers recalibrate their front-page calls accordingly.
Hell, I remember in the aftermath of the first Iraq war, the L.A. Times had a story on the Bush I administration extending some sort of agricultural aid money to Saddam Hussein in the years before the invasion. My paper ran it about 10 pages deep into the A section of the Sunday edition, and when I approached the guy on the wire desk that night between editions, saying it was the best story in the paper that day, he sort of shrugged it off because it was from the wrong Times.
Several months later, NYT had pretty much the same story, and we splashed it across 1A.
(I’m really thinking of changing my Balloon Juice handle to Buttery Males.)
germy
But then the police would have shot him when they showed up.
Another Scott
@Aleta: Thanks for the excerpt.
I’ve heard Comey claim that he “had to” speak up because to do otherwise meant “the FBI would have been destroyed”.
I hope someone asks him “who would be the ones destroying the FBI”?
The obvious answer is: Republicans.
So, he was too afraid of his own party to do his job and follow the rules and traditions, and not be a political pawn.
He had no business being FBI Director if he wasn’t able to put his fears, and his gigantic ego, in a box and do the job.
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@germy: The NRA complains because the body count was too low. If it’s below ten, it’s not a real massacre. Just like a colored guy to spoil the fun.
schrodingers_cat
@MattF: Frontline had the same fucking attitude when they covered both candidates just a week before the election.
Shorter Frontline,
HRC: What a fucking ambitious bitch, how dare she have any aspirations beyond being the first lady.
DJT: What a lovable scamp, so naughty!
Nelle
My daughter is a free-lance journalist, about to quit. The first time she was told by an editor to go out and get someone to say such and such I was shocked. I’m not naive but still shocked. It still happens. The narrative is apparently in place before the reporting is finished.
Covering Trump rallies and getting the venom from the crowds was deeply unnerving her. It was despicable.
FlipYrWhig
Here’s another thing about the email story. Have you ever met anyone who can explain it? I mean, if it was so newsworthy and all, and worth all this coverage, shouldn’t we know what the fuck it was? I’ll even spot anyone the beginning: “Hillary Clinton had emails on a server that she was told she shouldn’t have had, and then _____.” What goes in the blank? I guaran-damn-tee you no one at any newspaper or cable news outlet can fill in that blank.
It’s like those “scandals” from the halcyon days of scandals that had to do with not properly withholding payroll taxes for the nanny. Ya think Donald Trump ever did something that bad? He’s almost certainly done something that bad every 2 minutes since puberty.
schrodingers_cat
HRC was unacceptable to the Beltway bots if not emailz they would have manufactured another story.
patrick ii
@rp:
That’s what I tell people when I discuss reading blogs. Who would you trust about climate change — climate scientists or someone with a journalist degree. The same goes for economics, actually any field with expert opinion.
Generalists are great when you can find a good one, but reporters at major newspapers aspire to it but seldom achieve it.
gwangung
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
People act like this is humorous…but the press literally does this (see creationism…and climate change denialism)
gene108
@low-tech cyclist:
You are over thinking this. GOP is the go to Party of most white men, representing the interests of most white men, therefore the GOP is always more serious about serious issues than Democrats, who represents blacks, Latinos, gays, and other non-serious groups.
sharl
I didn’t see anyone mention it – though I only did a very cursory scan of the thread, so sorry if I missed it – but a comparison of the news coverage word clouds of the respective Presidential campaigns should be shoved into the faces of these NYT apologists whenever they pop up. It’s an excellent way to get the point across quickly. Gallup did a really good word cloud comparison; some people on Twitter incorporated into their tweets, e.g.,
MattF
@gwangung: There’s the inconvenient little detail that creationism/climate change denial is an article of faith, and so no argument could convince those who hold those beliefs. But you never get serious coverage of that.
zhena gogolia
@FlipYrWhig:
Before the election, I specialized in asking my highly educated colleagues to explain this. Not one of them could.
Humdog
@Archon: You have hit the salient point here. All our working the refs or changing campaigning or whatever is, in a large way, distracting us from the fundamental problem. A large portion of Americans are proud obstacles to progress or even decency. We cannot divorce them. What to do?
Tenar Arha
@patrick ii: OMG, this! There are experts on climate denial, or holocaust denial, on people who deny the efficacy of vaccines, there’s even experts on how denialism works, but the papers/media don’t interview the experts on it, they put the deniers on tv, which just reinforces the denialism!
ETA oops got some extra evens & no really’s in there that I have to try & fix
Gravenstone
@Major Major Major Major: Republican’s targeted voter suppression in the majority Democratic portions of the state. Period. Full stop.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
No. This is an undead horseshit trope.
They fucked up by the numbers.
This was intentional
efgoldman
@Humdog:
Fuckem
Another Scott
@gene108: That seems to be the simplest explanation.
Especially when one remembers the under-their-breath/when-the-cameras-were-off comments by Tweety and the other well-known political reporters about HRC and other Democratic women over the last N-years.
It’s infuriating.
Cheers,
Scott.
bjacques
Meanwhile, in Toronto: CNN International just showed an anonymous bystander’s cellphone video of the van driver after he stopped. He was pointing something at the police, looking like he wanted to go out in a hail of bullets. Sorry, that only works south of the border.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/23/world/toronto-collision-pedestrians/index.html
TenguPhule
@low-tech cyclist:
Step 1: Dig a very deep pit….
TenguPhule
@Kay:
But then Hillary Clinton’s former campaign advisers would have a sad and not get paid.
/Hiring those worthless fuckups was one of her few real sins.
Calouste
@Archon:
But enough about the Russian presidential election.
Gretchen
@FlipYrWhig: Exactly! That’s what was so maddening about the email « scandal ». There were at least 3 email stories, two of which didn’t really involve Clinton at all, but they were all conflated so the tide of « email stories » seemed overwhelming. Sure, there was her private server, which was her choice, but was also the only server that didn’t get hacked. Then there was the DNC email hack, which mostly showed petty infighting among Dem operatives, and the Podesta hack in the Clinton campaign, which gave us such breathtaking scoops as his lobster risotto recipe. But my brother is still saying Clinton should be locked up for her crimes. What crimes? Emails! What was the crime involving the emails? Silence.
TenguPhule
@efgoldman:
Sometimes it looks darkest right before it goes pitch black.
Steeplejack
I haven’t read the whole thread to see if anyone mentioned this, but one thing that struck me hard in the raft of material up top is the headline for the Times‘s big October 29, 2016, story: “New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign in Race’s Last Days.”
They were not “new” e-mails. They were copies of the previously vetted ones that were found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. The FBI took an unconscionably long time to confirm this, and the Times ran with an anonymously sourced story. It’s tempting to say that somebody got played, which they did, but there is so much complicity to go around for all the parties involved.
And in the crucial last days before the election everyone was left with the impression of “Oh, crap, another Hillary scandal/crisis” that could be used as a cudgel to beat her.
Turgidson
@Archon:
Indeed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always down for a good ”vent about the NYT’s historically, mind bogglingly, infuriatingly heinous coverage of 2016 and ButHerEmails” session. And I’ll continue to point my insignificant finger in their direction as one of the biggest catalysts for this daily disaster of a political era we are now in.
But it bothers me even more that any of my fellow countrymen, even Hair Furor’s own family who know him best and ought to have been the most horrified by the idea of him being POTUS, actually voted for that fucking fuck. But it wasn’t just a few morons voting for him. It was 63 million fucking people. Most of whom would do it again even after the past year plus of non stop asshattery, corruption, chaos, and in spite of the mountain of evidence that the fucks used (or were used by) the Russians to steal the election.
I thought Mittens was a pretty shitty human being who had no qualms with lying his ass off about Obama to win that election. I obviously thought Bush 43 was a malevolent, incompetent jackass who belonged at a courtroom in The Hague rather than the White House. But I could at least kinda sorta see the case for why someone might vote for them, even if I thought they were being duped to some extent. There is not a single coherent reason for supporting that stain on humanity other than just being a huge fucking asshole and liking the idea of the president being one too.
About half this country is just fucking sick in the head at this point, at least with respect to politics. Probably irrevocably. It is disturbing.
TenguPhule
@Humdog:
Step 1: First, dig a very deep pit.
Elizabelle
@sharl: Yes. That word cloud analysis is deadly. And Harvard’s Shorenstein Center analyzed the media coverage, and determined that Hillary received much worse press than Trump.
News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters [Page includes a link to PDF of the study; this is an overview article.]
Those facts should be thrown at Chozick and all the press corpse who fabricated “the narrative.”
Cheryl from Maryland
@patrick ii: Totally agree. I remember at work (from which I have retired), that a senior management person said we needed to cut X amount from a budget. I pointed out that the entire budget was only 2X and that her suggestion would be hard unless we re-envisioned the project. She gave me a dirty look as she didn’t want to re-envision the project. The meeting ended quickly. Math, I love you.
Elizabelle
@efgoldman: That is one of my hopes, too. That this terrible period is what we have to go through on the way to a correction for the better. As much as Hillary was robbed, as were we all, perhaps this will be more of a pyrrhic victory for the GOP and the plutocrats that own them. Set their own selves on fire; just hope they don’t take us out too.
It can happen here. It did.
Humdog
@Turgidson: I want to think we can afford to write them off. By getting those who stayed home or those who went third party to turn out for Dems, we may have the numbers to swing a few elections. But those 63 million malevolent morons will still be fouling the land. I am disgusted by them, and some of them are family. I am so ashamed.
Turgidson
@FlipYrWhig: strangely enough, Hugh f’ing Hewitt was the only one I remember who came close to actually describing what “the issue” was. But as is his custom, he only did so out of partisan hackery. He found a couple obscure government regulations she supposedly broke and cited them nonstop, making it sound like she’d broken numerous criminal laws rather than a couple never-enforced guidelines. And even the MSNBC night anchor team let him prattle on without pushback on numerous occasions.
Turgidson
@Steeplejack:
I could have missed it, but did Comey or anyone with inside information ever explain why the FBI couldn’t have used any number of widely available doc review platforms and determined within a few minutes that all or nearly all of the emails were duplicates? And maybe done so before Comey consulted with his confidantes Integrity and Rectitude (but apparently not DOJ standard procedure) and sent an unprecedented prejudicial letter to Jason ”Benghaaaaaaaaazi” Chaffetz?
FlipYrWhig
@Gretchen: I’m positive that the number of people who think that every story with “emails” in the title was related is, let’s see, back of the envelope, carry the one, EVERYBODY.
Here’s what I think the world thinks the email story was:
“Hillary Clinton had a secret email server she was using to hide her embarrassing failures like Benghazi, and she almost got away with it by deleting classified things, but then Wikileaks hacked her computer and revealed what was really going on, which was that she was doing anything possible to win, like cheating Bernie Sanders.”
The fact that none of that is accurate seems to have been no hindrance to its being believed by all media, all Republicans, and rather a lot of Democrats.
Steeplejack
@Turgidson:
In a word, no.
Rick
@Major Major Major Major: I’m in Wisconsin. I voted for both in the general election (although I was not with either of them at the time of the primaries, I was in the Bernie camp): It was many people understood they’d get Drumpf, so they voted for Hillary but few people actually THOUGHT about Ron Johnson. It was a very sad election, but it wasn’t JUST Wisconsin.
Footie
yeah, $$$$$ mea culpa, $$$$$ mea culpa.
Bill Arnold
@Major Major Major Major:
Climate change denialism is a big, potentially(likely) civilization-killing deal. Fortunately it’s mostly (not entirely) a US phenomenon.
LongHairedWeirdo
I have a minor nitpick here. The Twitter thread seems to be based upon the DNC e-mails, not the “lock her up” e-mail scandal.
Reporting on the DNC/Podesta e-mails might have been important, but has nothing to do with Comey, or the sickness in a democracy that allows a major political party to make false accusations of criminality of a political opponent because SHE MIGHT WIN.
Gvg
@FlipYrWhig: my experience with the email scandal explanation is people say my employer would fire me if I used non company email for work. I could not budge several people from that. Their own life experience rules over theory or explanation of a different life or responsibility level. Secretary of State sets a lot of work policies. Most people cannot really understand how different it is high up in responsibility. I don’t get it myself, but I try.
She knew if she used the government servers it was less secure. Which is still a problem and that infuriates me. Nobody seems to be doing the normal problem solving as we go in my government.
J R in WV
@Turgidson:
Late to this thread, but it wasn’t half the country that voted for Trump. It was almost exactly 20% (of the total AMerican population), because over half the country didn’t vote. Some were too young, others not qualified because of Republican ratfucking of the voter regulations in states otherwise inclined to vote Democratic in Presidential elections.
21% or so (of the American total population) voted for Ms Clinton, who won the popular vote by 3,000,000 votes, nearly.
All these numbers are from my memory, and hence approximate. Wiki would help, but it’s late.
J R in WV
@Gvg:
“people say my employer would fire me if I used non company email for work.”
In the case of Hillary Clinton, she was the employer, head cheese, the boss of bosses, reporting directly to the President of the United States. Who’s gonna fire her?
At your buddy’s job, there’s a boss. Who’s gonna fire the boss for using Uehoo.org instead of Buddy’sWork.Com??? No one, he owns the place. We’re not talking about employees we’re talking about the BOSS here !!!!!
But you aren’t wrong, it is hard to get people to understand it isn’t like them, it’s like the owner. Plus she was using that private email server for her private business, like who’s getting dinner together after work…