Checking the headlines this morning, I saw this fucking gem:

That’s not the message that McConnell was sending- the message was “I am impotent as fuck and my 40 years in office meant not a god damned thing when it came to persuading my peers.” The media, as a collective, still is not up to the challenge and has not shifted their approach one iota. It’s just business as usual.
In science, there are these things called “paradigm shifts”- a great book I read many many moons ago as a much younger man called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I don’t have the book here as it is at home on the bookshelf, but basically his premise was that most of the time, normal science operates within an accepted paradigm, but there are things called paradigm shifts that upend the normal way of doing things, and over time the new paradigm becomes the new normal. I’m not going to go into all the old readings of the received view and the philosophy of science and Wittgenstein and all the other stuff- there is a fellow named Tom Levenson who writes here who is much smarter and versed on the topic and I know he can explain things to us without the anxiety and drug and alcohol induced haze that clouds my memory.
Basically, what I am saying, is that things have changed so profoundly in the last few decades that the media’s old approach not only does not accurately cover or represent what is actually happening, and applying their paradigm of politics and news coverage structurally no longer works. They no longer know or understand what they are seeing and are, because of their refusal to shift their approach, and as such can no longer accurately provide information to the public.
Basically, what is happening is if a doctor walked into a normal operating room and started talking about bleeding and leeches and ill humours while everyone else is practicing modern medicine. Or a physicist still talking about phlogiston.
So not only is this going on, with the practitioners in the media completely oblivious to the fact they are doing damage and not accurately reflecting the world anymore, but they are also consumed by an obscene arrogance, and react violently to anyone who points out the error of their ways. Add to it that many of the members of the media are not subject matter experts or, to be brutally honest, the smartest people in the room (those j school students bouncing across campus are not Rhodes Scholars or future Nobel winners), and you have a bunch of people who have no idea what is going on, no recognition of reality or their role in it, with a heightened arrogance that pushes them to not only look down on anyone who questions them and their status, but also a petulance to punish anyone who refuses to not act in accordance to the old media landscape that no longer exists but in their own fucking heads.
It’s depressing as fuck to watch.
Baud
More depressing to me is that so many liberals still don’t the media as it is.
Miss Bianca
It’s even more depressing, JC, when you’re a small-town journalist trying to accurately report what you see going on around you, all the while dealing with a bunch of people who willingly swill the Flavor-Aid that other media are pushing and who therefore, actively hinder any progress that threatens to be made on a local level.
Ask me how I know!
@mistermix.bsky.social
The message I heard from McConnell was, “I’m gonna do one little pointless act to try to salvage my reputation”.
Raoul Paste
This was a worthy post,
E.
@Baud: Yes, this is my parents, dutifully reading the NYT, dutifully voting dem, tsk tsking.
Last night I said aloud for the first time that I do not feel we can say we live in a democracy any more. Trump’s crypto coin and his immunity from prosecution are enough, by themselves, to disqualify us.
We are going to have a lot of work to get it back.
eclare
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
My take as well.
Miss Bianca
Speaking of journalistic measures, I am following my rep Brittany Pettersen’s battle to allow proxy voting in the House for pregnant Members, and Squeaker Johnson’s (literal) dick move to block the measure, even tho’ it is co-sponsored by one of his very own right-wing wackaloons, Rep. Luna.
Question – can any of you savvy and learned coves remind me when and whether proxy voting has been allowed in other circumstances? Such as during COVID? Wondering if Squeaker has ever had to vote by proxy himself…
TBone
On topic comedic relief!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZMxgPxXU
WTFGhost
Well, one of the biggest problems is, our media stopped caring about the truth in large context, especially in the political arena. “Why did we report that Hillary Clinton could have been indicted over her e-mail server usage? Because Republicans told us to! It was CLINTON’S job to make us stop saying she could be indicted!”
The simple truth was, she was never suspected of wrongdoing – there were people screaming that *of course* she engaged in wrongdoing, but that’s not “suspicion” that’s “baseless accusations.” (I’m sorry, journos, I didn’t make this rule; evidence-free accusations are “baseless”, and not a cause for “suspicion”. Words mean something. No wonder you’re journos – you don’t have to *believe* the words mean anything but a paycheck!)
Steve LaBonne
The only hint of a silver lining is that I don’t think they’re any longer as influential as they think they are, and though some liberals somehow still don’t get it their audience is shrinking.
trollhattan
News gathering and reporting infrastructure withers under profit demands, so endless rounds of expense slashing i.e., firing your professional staffers, are interwoven with converting hard news into clickbait eyeball gathering initiatives. That’s how we find ourselves with this current top-of-the-display-fold headline at our last local paper:
That’s it, that’s the most important news story in a metro area of 2+million in the nation’s largest state. And the headline does not do a headline’s #1 job of saying what the subject is. Remember the “inverted pyramid”? Back in Egypt.
Raoul Paste
@TBone: “ I have fired the horse catcher”
Thanks for the temporary relief
Starfish (she/her)
@Miss Bianca: Women voting? Why are you promoting a leftist and radical agenda?
BlueGuitarist
@Miss Bianca:
thanks for being a journalistic hero!
Pelosi introduced proxy voting, so Rs hate that even more.
Johnson voted by proxy nearly 40 times, according to Dem representative Jim McGovern
rawstory:
https://www.rawstory.com/mike-johnson-2670859831/
sorry xitter link for McGovern
https://x.com/repmcgovern/status/1879586189713547408?s=46&t=cdIVxMmIPG5io6ExW9A9zA
trollhattan
They’re shooting the dogs, shooting the cats.
Miss Bianca
@BlueGuitarist: Heheheh, thank’ee for the kind words and the links!
I’m no hero, far from it, just thankful that I work for publishers who really want to uphold *some* standards for truth-telling and local coverage!
Torrey
@WTFGhost:
Some of this has to do with the definition of “news.” A journalism student once journsplained to me that if people wanted to hear about something, that made it “news.” Presumably if people aren’t interested in hearing about something, it isn’t “news.”
I should mention that good journalism schools often require students to take courses that should prepare them to think critically (statistics, for example), but it’s hard to do that when your bosses tell you to go report on this other thing that people want to hear about and that they can put on the front page. Accurate representation of statistics fail to bleed enough to lead.
ETA: Joining the chorus of thanks and kudos to Miss Bianca. We need good people like you. And for at least some of the journalism faculty I’ve known, you’re the kind of journalist who makes them proud.
TBone
@Raoul Paste: any time I’m able to help anyone laugh instead of cry, it is my pleasure!
JPL
What I find depressing is that Pelosi and Biden let their egos get in the way. They didn’t know when to step aside for the young democrats and now both their legacies will suffer. The damage that they have done is immense
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan:
OMG, I feel almost dirty for laughing at this.
Librettist
The cost structure got smoked by the internet, and what’s left is selling anything to nobody.
Parfigliano
The media is not oblivious. They know exactly what’s going on. They approve.
Miss Bianca
@JPL: What I find depressing is people constantly harping on Pelosi and Biden’s ages when they have proven to be, respectively, the best Speaker and the best POTUS of my lifetimes, even in their alleged dotage.
Meanwhile, of course, there was none of this constant braying from the GOP side about Trump’s age and obviously age-related mental condition as any kind of impediment to voting for him.
So now they’re getting what they wanted, and we’re not. So remind me, how great did that “throwing over old man Joe for a younger model of Democrat” work out for us again?
oldster
Newspapers and tv coverage have been abominable. And that’s not even the bad news.
The really bad news is that what moves votes now has nothing to do with newspapers, tv coverage, or old fashioned radio (e.g. NPR).
One of the stats coming out of this election is that the more people were exposed to traditional media — even the WSJ — the more they voted Democratic.
The voters who put Trump over the top were not being misled by bad coverage in the NYT or the WaPo, or even by lies on Fox. They were watching TikTok and reading X and getting their impressions formed in completely different ways.
If the NYT and WaPo had been ten times better on their coverage, it still would not have affected the voters who voted for Trump.
This is the real paradigm shift we have to deal with. Instead of wishing that the NYT, Politico, and Axios were better, we have to figure out how to reach the people who have never looked at a newspaper at all. Those are the new voters, and those are the ones that gave Trump his (very slim) margin.
hells littlest angel
We are in the midst of some paradigm shit.
Betty Cracker
@Miss Bianca: Counterfactuals are unproveable, but I’m convinced Trump would have won by a wider margin if Biden hadn’t stepped aside for Harris. She gave us a shot. It didn’t work, sadly, but it was worth doing because Biden was heading for a loss, so something had to change, IMO. Do you think he would have won? I know some people here do. I’ll admit I’m astonished by that belief. Not looking for an argument. Just trying to understand what that perspective is based on.
Miss Bianca
@oldster:
Oy. Thinking that our investment in time, energy, and money is best off spent on community organizers, rather than trying to compete in any sort of media arms race, whether legacy or social. The other side has a huge and demonstrable advantage there. Not saying cede the field, just saying, person-to-person campaigning seems to be the only way to win. Kay has been making this point for years.
Alce _e_ardillo
@@mistermix.bsky.social: And he only did it because he knew his vote didn’t matter…
JPL
@Miss Bianca: Fair.
ewrunning
Preach! Not only are they not smart, they’re lazy and just report the conventional “wisdom” they get from talking to each rather than digging for the truth (or talking to those who do and actually understand what’s going on).
Steve LaBonne
@oldster: Reality is going to do some of the work for us by biting them very hard in the ass.
oldster
@Miss Bianca:
Community organizing is super important. Some people are good at it. Some people have other skills.
I say, let everyone put their efforts where they can, contribute what they can, in whatever way works for them.
Hell, if someone wants to keep working the refs at the WaPo and NYT, I welcome those efforts, too.
CCL
My dad, fourth generation newspaper folk, hated, hated, I mean hated, the term “journalist.” He was a “reporter,” damnit, he reported the news. He didn’t “journal” it.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: I am not at all sure he would have won. All I know is, he won in 2020. I find it interesting and deeply sad that both times Trump won, he won against women candidates, and the one time he lost, it was to a white male candidate.
Would Biden have won? Probably not. There was an anti-incumbent sentiment not just in this country, but all around the world. But I will say this – he *might* have won, or at least lost by similar margins to Harris, if the Democrats hadn’t been so eager to jump on the “Oh, my God, he’s so old and he’s got to go” train that, far as I can tell, was mostly ginned up by bad actors and billionaires. Or celebrities like George Clooney, who could confidently blow his shit from his cushy villa on Lake Como.
All I can tell you is that Biden had millions more voters than Harris did, and those voters vanished somehow. Maybe, just maybe, some of those voters were just as disgusted as I was by what struck me as a display of feckless disloyalty and panic on our side. But, unlike me, they didn’t decide to vote for Harris anyway – maybe they just stayed home.
tl;dr: no, I think Biden would likely have lost. But if we had stuck with him, we might have been able to keep Harris as a candidate for 2028.
Librettist
@oldster:
The right wing entry level click bait is so impossibly stupid on youtube – it looks and feels just like their garbage children’s clips.
Democrats need to aim lower when targeting on those outlets. The dur-hur I watch MSNBC messaging is not effective gateway content. See also: Adlai Stevenson
NotMax
The melding of news and entertainment squelches understanding of either.
Miss Bianca
@oldster: Understood.
prostratedragon
On the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Bulge, Heather Cox Richardson takes a historical look at the international and domestic accomplishments since and flowing from there, that the American Nazis are so intent on destroying.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), opening scene.
emjayay
Disease is too about ill humours and miasma. Just ask the future Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Melancholy Jaques
@Parfigliano:
Exactly, And this apparently needs to be repeated constantly & loudly because people are still talking about mistakes & failure to learn & the like.
Starfish (she/her)
Air Force is going to quit teaching about Tuskegee Airmen as part of their basic training curriculum because of the DEI pants wetting of the most DEI executive branch ever.
Melancholy Jaques
They only react like that when it is Democrats pointing out the error of their ways. When Trump & Republicans call them liars & enemies, it’s thank you sir, may I have another.
NotMax
@Starfish (she/her)
All at the behest of the ones who rail and wail about “cancel culture.”
eclare
@emjayay:
Truth. Sigh.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
The message I heard was “I’m an old man trying to get into Heaven.”
Ryan
You’re saying that the reliable dependency of movement conservatism, which we all grew up with, is gone and buried, and I think you’re right.
prostratedragon
@Starfish (she/her):
“Why the Tuskegee Airmen Were So Badass,” from that mouthpiece of wokism, Popular Mechanics, describes the formation and battle history of the unit. Among other things, they flew escort for the Daimler raid, going up against German jets with their little Mustang prop planes. But then, I guess them kicking Nazi butt is one reason we can’t talk about them all of a sudden.
scribbler
@Betty Cracker: The perspective is based on the unending weight of racism and misogyny on white voters.
Betty Cracker
@Miss Bianca: That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
Doug R
I thought Mitch’s tattoo said “No regerts”?
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: You’re so welcome!
The only thing I would add is: Harris’s nomination and campaign struck me as a Hail Mary pass, meant to make up for a shit-ton of outright fumbling and own-goaling on the side of the national Democrats. I come away from the loss thinking, “The fact that we came as close as we did to winning, despite all that shit, and all the odds against us, is something worth celebrating and gives me what measure of hope I have for the future.”
At least enough hope to keep on charging!
trollhattan
@prostratedragon:
Fighters escorting bombers over enemy skies is so 20th century. {eyeroll}
Betty Cracker
@Miss Bianca: True, and that’s something to hang onto.
Aziz, light!
Many moons ago I earned an M.A. from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the noble and essential function of the press to seek the truth.
I may as well have been studying phrenology for all its worth today.
Elizabelle
The worst part is, how do we depropagandize those who are gettable?
Maybe FOTUS will do it for us, by fucking up hugely. But …
Jon D. Rudd
When Kuhn talked about paradigm shifts one key term he used was “anomaly.” The stage is set for a shift when an existing paradigm begins to suffer from too many anomalies (facts not explainable by the theory). Classic case in point: Ptolemaic cosmology during the late Middle Ages. The model of an earth-centered universe was increasingly incapable of explaining observed planetary motions. Astronomers spent a long time trying to stretch the facts to conform to the standard model. The result was a fantastic set of planetary loops (epicycles) which still failed to make the data “work”. Something had to give and thanks to a certain Polish astronomer in the early 1500s, it finally did.
We can see something analogous in the behavior of the mainstream media over the past several decades. In this case the anomaly is the increasing radicalization of the GOP. For 25 years the mainstream media kept clinging to the model of Gerald Ford/Senior George Bush Republicanism squarely in the face of evidence that the party was going down an extreme Right-wing rabbit hole. The media’s finally beginning to accept the new paradigm after ten years of Trumpery, but the movement is glacial (or what we used to think of as glacial).
frosty
@Miss Bianca: The best Presidential campaign I canvassed for in 20 years was run by a community organizer. I agree with you.
m.j.
Doonesbury on the opinion page…
Juju
@Betty Cracker: It was the mixed race woman thing. There were a lot of people who voted for Biden who didn’t vote for Harris or vote at all because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman, or a mixed race woman. Would it have been different if Biden had stayed in the race? I don’t know, nobody does. When Biden dropped out I panicked because I thought we were going to lose for sure, even with an intelligent, capable and talented candidate as the VP. I did feel optimistic near the end of the campaign, especially after the convention and the debate, but I was not completely surprised that Harris lost. I have heard too many people say , “ I’m willing to vote for a woman for president, just not that woman”, rinse, repeat. It was also so interesting that age and possible dementia became a non issue after Biden dropped out even though Trump has his own health and cognitive issues. I still sort of believe the only way we will ever have a woman president is if she takes over while vice president.
tam1MI
A friend of mine pointed out that, in the wake of a bitter and divisive primary in 2008, there were Dems who withheld their votes from Obama (the PUMAs). In the wake of a bitter and divisive primary in 2016, there were Dems who withheld their votes from Hillary (the Bernie people). But yet we are expected to believe that in the wake of a bitter and divisive forcing out of a President, a mere 4 months later, NO ONE would withhold their votes on that basis. Yet they can proffer no explanation as to why the pattern would be broken in this, the objectively worse case.
Juju
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I’m glad I didn’t have coffee in my mouth when I read that.
VFX Lurker
The real reason people screeched over Biden’s age. They just couldn’t stand the thought of a Madame President, or a second Black President.
JustRuss
I went to a “good” journalism school, some of my peers are very high up the food chain at national outlets, and stats wasn’t required, or anything else that I’d call hard, besides a foreign language.
Another Scott
Made me look, … Existential Comics on Thomas Kuhn. No sacred cow goes ungored there. ;-)
(A reminder that Politico probably deserves a Warning caption for most cites, even before they recently got new ownership (FP story on Archive.IS).)
We’ve got good reporters posting here, and we know of good sites that are doing the work to inform the public. It’s not the profession so much as the corporate sites. Politico, TheHill, RollCall, and the like, are not built to inform the public. They’re for insidery wonks who too often love the game of politics and have little respect any more for it’s importance in self-government. The theater of Capitol Hill gets much, much more attention than the substance.
Grr…
Dan Froomkin’s PressWatchers.org (yes, on substack) is a much more reality-based take on political reporting.
https://bsky.app/profile/froomkin.bsky.social seems pretty active (I don’t see anything on McConnell’s vote, though).
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@tam1MI: Yeah, funny ain’t it? It is to laugh. Ha. Ha. Huh. :(
different-church-lady
Yes, there’s been a change in society. But there has also been a change in news media — the goal is now entertainment instead of truth. It’s more like an older doctor walks into the operating room talking about saving the patient with sound medicine and everyone else is saying, “Hey, watch Jerry make the blood hit this target on the other side of the room!”
different-church-lady
@VFX Lurker: Well, that and they got jollies from kicking the old feeble man.
A Ghost to Most
This requires a really pointless and futile gesture. Wolverines!
jackmac
@trollhattan: As a journo for a number of years (staffer at smaller papers, freelancer for major metros) I’ve also noted the increased prominence of “best burger, pizza, coffee, etc. stories while real news is ignored. More often than not that’s the big news in smaller dailies in my home state and it’s a easy story to do with limited or nonexistent staff instead of more useful watchdog reporting. And that approach is not confined to smaller papers. The once mighty Chicago Tribune increasingly plays up breathless real estate gossip-type stories when a prominent citizen, sports figure or notable sells a property and for how much. What a waste of dwindling resources.
Steve Crickmore
I think we are into a paradigm shift that may even surprised a slightly diffident Kuhn. I also studied that book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a undergraduate. In fact, I did a major thesis on it and personally inteviewed Thomas Kuhn in 1970 at Princeton and Noam Chomsky at MIT, the same year for some of the book’s wider societal implications. The disturbing thing is we have already faced down two anomaly crisises which should have been an important part of a lasting rejection of the Trump/ Faschist revolt of the illiterate, new anti modernist, anti- scientist paradigm, the covid crisis and the inability of Trump to recognize it or handle it at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives needlessly lost, and the Janaury 6th insurrection debacle. What more does it take? Kuhn would said that the scientific predictions, such as the 1919 solar eclipse that proved Einstein’s General Theory of Gravity correct from the competing world -view /paradigm would be the decisive factor…but if one side is always acting in bad faith and is corrupted, it makes the task almost Sisyphean.
TBone
@prostratedragon: your commentary is always appreciated, you’re holding your candle high!
Glory b
@JPL: I know Biden was perceived as slowing down, but what was wrong with Pelosi?
She is the most successful speaker in US history.
hitchhiker
@Steve Crickmore:
Well, I was in high school during the Vietnam years, so there might be a parallel there. People think these days that the public turned against that war because of the Pentagon Papers, or because of Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, or because of the protests.
But my family was very working class, and I had three older brothers in the military, all of them because they would have been drafted anyway. No college deferments for us! (Two of them went to Vietnam. All of them came home changed.)
The public turned against the war when the lottery made it harder to get those deferments. Suddenly middle class and even upper class kids were going to be on planes headed for a war zone, and that’s when the parents of those kids started to care.
So … what it’s going to take is consequences that are unmistakably tied to the insanity of this thug as president, and which touch majorities of Americans in some close and recognizable way.
Glory b
@Starfish (she/her): Oh, no!
My uncle was a Tuskegee Airman, he had an engineering degree from Pitt. After the war he worked for GE.
An interesting fact, the University of Pittsburgh was somewhat over represented in the group because it’s administration was welcoming to black students. A good number of doctors, dentists and engineers from that era who didn’t go to HBCUs went to Pitt.
This has been your black history moment of the day lol.
Glory b
@prostratedragon: Well, no, of course not. Heaven forbid that they learn the majority of a large group of black pilots were as good as, if not better than, most white pilots.
What would become of their feelings?
Dan B
@Glory b: Wow, something to be very proud of. I hope your uncle told great stories.
John Cole
@Jon D. Rudd: great example- I’m just thrilled my memory of the book was good enough to not make an ass out of myself talking about it.
Johnnybuck
God, they don’t fucking care, Daddy’s home. Turn off the media or spread your legs.
this shit is going to hurt a lot of people for a long time. I get so fucking tired of litigating what the Democratic did, or didn’t do to the point I can’t actually believe the criticism anymore. Pretty sure they are getting paid by… whothefuckever, or are useful idiots.
Turn it off. Republicans don’t read trad media, we do. Why?
Jon D. Rudd
@Steve Crickmore: Interviewing Kuhn was a pretty rare privilege and I’m glad you did something with it. Any publications I can look up?
As for the media, it was more a matter of deadline and narrative-driven/access journalism, rather than bad faith and corruptibility, which created this inability to grasp political changes. And paradigm shifts could be a matter of decades. Galileo’s telescope provided empirical proof of heliocentrism by discovering the phases of Venus. Twenty years later he’s still in hot water with the Church.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jon D. Rudd: Galileo wasn’t officially pardoned by the Catholic Church until the late twentieth century if I recall correctly (about 400 years); hopefully the MSM will wake up sooner than that.
Steve Crickmore
@Jon D. Rudd: Yes, it was a privilege. I recall I got a very high mark for my paper which made up my overall mark in my Philosphy of Science course and my Scottish professor, Henry Laycock at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario was impressed. I no longer have the paper. It also gave me the extraordinary opportunity do interview Noam Chomsky on his reply to B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, (he didn’t care for it) whom I also interviewed. Chomsky talked to me about the war in Vietnam animately for about an hour, which was more his abiding interest than universal grammar and Skinner I got to know over a few gin and tonics at a New Year’s eve party in Cambridge. I was the student bartender. He had a behaviourist approch to everything. I asked him his definition of romantic love and he said without blinking an eye, “the mutual reinforcement of two people’s needs.” I got the impression from Kuhn that Cole and I might have been stretching our use of his scientfic paradigm as an analogue, for social sciences and journalism, but so be it. It is useful.