Archives for 2024

Another day, another school shooting. Four dead, nine injured, hundreds traumatized in a school 35 miles northwesteast of Atlanta.

(That Onion headline is 10 years old, btw.)

Speaking of Deja VuPost + Comments (85)

It’s early in the morning where I am, so I’ve been terminally behind. Here are some of yesterday’s tabs.

This is worth 6 seconds of your time (via Jeff Tiedrich):

Aaron Rupar has a good piece about Harris’ strategy of not getting down in the mud with Trump:

Harris is also reconfiguring journalists’ relationship with her as a candidate in a way that’s frustrating many members of the press while also creating serious hurdles for Trump.

For over a decade, nearly every non-Trump candidate has played by the same rules in their interactions with the press. The first rule was the presumption that members of the “fourth estate” posed important and “tough questions” because the voting public needed answers to them. The second is that any politician who refused to fully engage with and answer the press’s questions was acting dishonorably and likely had something to hide.

But what those rules didn’t take into account is a reality that’s only grown more apparent in recent years — that the press often asks insipid questions, and indeed can easily by manipulated to serve as conduits for entirely bogus claims and theories pushed by GOP partisans.

This phenomenon was exemplified during the 2016 campaign — specifically, the press’s nearly two year long pursuit of the Hillary Clinton email “scandals.”

From the outset of the primary campaign in 2015, Clinton accepted the proposition that the email imbroglio, initially ginned up by right-wing partisans in the House, had to be addressed by providing the press with the “facts.” This was exemplified in a September 2015 Meet the Press interview in which HRC allowed NBC’s Chuck Todd to spend virtually the entire segment deposing her about the intricacies of her IT record keeping. Todd greeted every factually accurate response from Clinton with skepticism and further questions.

Clinton learned too late that answering the press’s “legitimate” questions made her more, not less, vulnerable. Once the proposition that there was a “scandal” had been legitimized, it was inevitable that Clinton would be placed on the defensive for the entire campaign. This situation was relentlessly exploited by Trump, who inevitably lied or otherwise obfuscated when presented with questions about his own shady conduct.

If this fucked up Goldilocks analogy isn’t the most predictable response ever, I don’t know what is:

Dana Bash has hit back at critics of her interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying she knows it was “just right” because it “p**sed off” both the left and the right.

This is either a lie or an indication that she’s been marinating in DC press culture for so long that she’s forgotten what actually informing viewers means:

“My job wasn’t to nail her,” Bash added. “My job was to illuminate and to get an understanding of of her positions, of her sensibility, of her approach and of her goals.

Here’s a good piece by a MSNBC contributor on what it would sound like if the media covered Trump without cleaning up his nonsense.

Finally, you know it wasn’t going to go well for RFK the lesser when the judge’s ruling in Michigan began with “Elections are not just games, and the Secretary of State (SOS) is not obligated to honor the whims of candidates for public office.” Because he’s on the ballot line for a minor third party, Michigan law states he can’t withdraw, so he’ll be on the ballot there in November.

Yesterday Once MorePost + Comments (58)