The 4th Estate Thread Has Surrendered

[malchior]

I do not necessarily think that is a fair assessment but I get that the online aspect could make it seem that way. This isn't screaming at the top of your lungs stuff.

It if helps, it's not the screaming at the top of your lungs that creates the impression, it's your selection of adjectives.

The arguments I am often making are fairly nuanced and that is tough to communicate.

Please don't ever say that out loud about yourself.

If things are tough for you to communicate, the notion that your arguments are too nuanced for others to understand is not at the top of the list of reasons why you find it so hard to communicate them (that reason is well behind your arguments being wrong, or you not understanding your arguments as well as you think).

In either case, if you ever find yourself about to say "My arguments are too nuanced for others to understand", please stop and re-evaluate things before you type something like that. We're not dummies, and we can generally understand nuanced arguments. I can assure you, that's not the problem here.

This is a case in point. It wasn't that my argument is too smart for you. It was that getting nuance done online without tone is pretty difficult. Sometimes people engage in unexpected ways and sometimes you have to iterate to get to understanding. Which I'm again doing here because IMO you took that entire response the wrong way.

[RunningMn9]

I didn't take your post any way. I am simply commenting on the almost certain folly of saying that the arguments you often make are fairly nuanced. That's something for others to observe about your arguments, not something for you to observe about your arguments.

In this specific case, I don't find your argument all that nuanced. I simply didn't agree with it. I don't think there was anything particularly objectionable about the NYT profile. And I don't think that it's the job of the NYT to just always scream NAZI in the face of people that believe Nazi things.

[malchior]

I didn't take your post any way. I am simply commenting on the almost certain folly of saying that the arguments you often make are fairly nuanced. That's something for others to observe about your arguments, not something for you to observe about your arguments.

I can sort of see what you are saying but I think it is an unfair distortion of what I was saying.

In this specific case, I don't find your argument all that nuanced. I simply didn't agree with it. I don't think there was anything particularly objectionable about the NYT profile. And I don't think that it's the job of the NYT to just always scream NAZI in the face of people that believe Nazi things.

Which is sort of amazing because you are totally misrepresenting the argument.

[malchior]

Yeah it's Fox but it is a neat observation.

[msteelers]

With few exceptions, Fox is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the GOP.

[Moliere]

Record number of journalists jailed as Turkey, China, Egypt pay scant price for repression

For the second year in a row, the number of journalists imprisoned for their work hit a historical high, as the U.S. and other Western powers failed to pressure the world’s worst jailers--Turkey, China, and Egypt--into improving the bleak climate for press freedom.

[Carpet_pissr]

With few exceptions, Fox is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the GOP.

I wonder how, if any, its level of propagandizing will change under Disney.

[pr0ner]

With few exceptions, Fox is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the GOP.

I wonder how, if any, its level of propagandizing will change under Disney.

Disney won't own Fox News.

[msteelers]

Yeah, Fox News was not part of the deal. I believe it was just the TV/Movie side.

[Max Peck]

Yeah, Fox News was not part of the deal. I believe it was just the TV/Movie side.

Yup.

[malchior]

[Defiant]

[GreenGoo]

Reality TV is one of humanity's greatest achievements, so it makes sense to implement it at the highest levels of leadership.

#MAGA

Another first for America. And you beat the Russians. Well done.

I can hardly wait to see who gets kicked off the island this week.

[Holman]

link

I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!

This is real.

[YellowKing]

Also if you write out 5:00 you don't have to put in the "o'clock" you illiterate dipshit.

[Carpet_pissr]

Also if you write out 5:00 you don't have to put in the "o'clock" you illiterate dipshit.

Typical liberal elitist comment. Why do you hate the stupid, YK?

[GreenGoo]

Also if you write out 5:00 you don't have to put in the "o'clock" you illiterate dipshit.

Lol. Too bad it wasn't 5:00pm o'clock. Also, does Drumpf understand his constituents are from multiple timezones?

[Remus West]

does Drumpf understand timezones?

Fixed that for the more pertinent question.

[malchior]

Very interesting story today about the battles James Risen fought at the NY Times specifically around 2 national security related stories.

[Kraken]

Everyone interested in this thread is urged to see The Post. If you can't bestir yourself to a theater to watch two hours without a single gun battle, explosion, or car chase, at least put it in your netflix queue. If this movie had come out two years ago it would have been of minor historical interest. In today's context, it's an important film.

[Chaz]

Since I don't get to go to the theater these days, I'm anxiously waiting for The Post to come out for home video.

[Kraken]

I might be a tad biased because I was a journalism student in the 1970s, just a few short years after the Pentagon Papers went down, so the very accurate newsroom depictions resonated with me. I'm concerned that those same aspects will alienate young audiences, who will miss the relevance to today's official hostility toward the media. The more you know about how journalism really works, the better this movie is.

[malchior]

ABC News made the dubious decision to hire Chris Christie. A Trump syncophant known to have absolutely no integrity. In his usual bombastic shitty way he aimed to make a big splash and argued on his first day that Trump shouldn't sit with Mueller. Ridiculous.

[msteelers]

ABC News made the dubious decision to hire Chris Christie. A Trump syncophant known to have absolutely no integrity. In his usual bombastic shitty way he aimed to make a big splash and argued on his first day that Trump shouldn't sit with Mueller. Ridiculous.

I'm genuinely surprised that it was ABC to hire Chris Christie. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was a 24-hour network to do it.

[malchior]

Same here. I thought it was insane and it paid off in dubious quality right off the bat. It is a race to the very bottom right now. I most "enjoy" the signal that there really is no bar anymore. Act anyway you want in office. There are no consequences.

[Chaz]

ABC News made the dubious decision to hire Chris Christie. A Trump syncophant known to have absolutely no integrity. In his usual bombastic shitty way he aimed to make a big splash and argued on his first day that Trump shouldn't sit with Mueller. Ridiculous.

I mean, he's basically right though, right? The best thing for Trump to do to protect himself is to not be deposed by Mueller. Trump is a pathological liar who may or may not be suffering mental degradation. The last thing he should do to protect himself is put himself in a situation where he has to tell the truth consistently, because for one thing, he's probably not capable of it, and for another, it's SUPER LIKELY that the truth is really damaging to himself. For the national interest, he should be forced to sit and be deposed under oath to get at the truth of what's going on, but that's diametrically opposed to Trump's self interest.

[malchior]

[malchior]

Great piece - too bad no one is listening.

Six years later, the self-styled anti-partisans Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, have reluctantly reached the same conclusion.

“The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy,” they argue in The Atlantic. “We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from [Donald] Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to…vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).”

Like Mann and Ornstein before them, Rauch and Wittes have put a finger on the cardinal fact of American politics. Unfortunately their prescription for a voting-booth boycott of Republican politicians is inadequate. There is more to politics than elections and nobody understands this better than the leaders of the Republican Party Rauch and Wittes would like to oust. Defeating Republicans at the polls is, of course, a precondition for ending the country’s slide into right-wing authoritarianism. But Republicans have been defeated before without being chastened. To reverse this alarming antidemocratic trend, the modern-Republican Party’s style of politics must be made anathema. That won’t happen without a large-scale civic censure of political actors and institutions, like the GOP, that reject empiricism and equality, attack mediating arbiters of authority, and embrace propaganda and bad-faith argument as ordinary brickbats of political war.

[Moliere]

When an Echo Chamber Gets Worked Up About Echo Chambers

In controlled experiments, people do prefer congenial information over uncongenial information—a tendency that is especially prevalent in the domain of politics. People also tend to self-report a filtered media diet.

But studies that actually track people's behavior tell a different story. On television, media outlets with a significant partisan or ideological slant simply do not reach most of the U.S. population. The audience of Fox News and MSNBC peaks at 2 million to 3 million for well-known shows by hosts like Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow in prime time. By comparison, about 24 million Americans tune into nightly network news broadcasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS and over 10 million viewers watch these networks' Sunday morning political talk shows. These audiences are in turn dwarfed by those for entertainment, where programs like The Big Bang Theory and Sunday Night Football attract as many as 20 million viewers.
...
The point here isn't that the network newscasts are themselves free of ideology (they aren't!) or that viewers are getting their news from The Big Bang Theory. It's that people aren't as politically self-segregated as the narrative has it, and that the most popular media-consumption tribes aren't organized around news or political commentary at all.

Guess & co. suggest that one reason the filter-bubble narrative is so popular in the press is because it's much more likely to be true of political writers and the people they cover. In the authors' words, "polarized media consumption is much more common among an important segment of the public—the most politically active, knowledgeable, and engaged. This group is disproportionately visible online and in public life." As a result, the idea that echo chambers are growing more common "has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect."

[noxiousdog]

It's also distorted by the fact that the more you care the more you're likely to enjoy a viewpoint that agrees with yours and these are the likeliest voters.

So while nominally, it's not as bad as it appears, relatively it still is.

[Freyland]

The "echo chamber" research doesn't account for echo chambers' being made up of other forms of media, including talk radio, blogs's, forums and what online newsources you read. I think there is plenty of room for tribalism to be as bad as we perceive it to be.

[El Guapo]

I would literally pay $100 for the privilege of kicking Chris Cillizza in the nuts. He is the avatar of the kind of vapid political horserace coverage that vastly misled the public on the nature and stakes of the 2016 election. And he's pretty dumb as well.

[malchior]

I'm not a huge fan of huge twitter threads but this one got a lot of attention for pointing out how terrible the NY Times Editorial Board slant on "Conservative" "inclusiveness" has gotten and pretty much exists to stick its head in the sand about how off the rails the GOP has gone.

All right, this controversy over conservative columnists in @nytopinion is bugging me. Everyone is dancing around the central point! (The same central point everyone dances around in *numerous* contemporary controversies.) So I'ma lay it out.

Here's the main point: the contemporary right-wing in the US has become, in Lionel Trilling's immortal words, a bundle of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." It's just a tangle of resentments & bigotries, driven by the erosion of white privilege.

There's always been that element, but for decades it was overlain by a class of DC conservatives who code switched, spoke the Very Serious language of ideas & policies. This is the conservatism that white moderate libs still imagine: an actual ideology, with arguments.

Trump's rise has shown that purported principles of conservative ideology meant virtually NOTHING to the conservative masses. Trump abandoned the Very Serious script & the RW base didn't care, at all. He voiced their anger & resentments. That's all the RW base is any more.

Trump has swerved this way and that on immigration, taxes, healthcare, guns ... and the base doesn't care. They follow him this way, they follow him that way. It is the resentment, the aggrieved sense of persecution, that they respond to. That's what US conservatism IS now.

So @nytopinion faces a dilemma. It claims to want to expose its readers to the perspectives of the conservative masses. It claims to want to connect liberals to the heartland. But there's a problem.

If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today's conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.

The people who work at NYT & the vast majority of its readers would find those sentiments ... what's the word? oh, yes ... deplorable. They would recoil. The truth of what's going on on the right today is worse than virtually anyone in the political mainstream acknowledges.

The NYT's commitment to "intellectual diversity" doesn't go THAT far -- not far enough to expose its readers to that reality. It is too invested in America's own Noble Savage myth, the idea that conservative Heartland Americans are more authentic & in touch w/ simple virtues.

So NYT needs "a voice from the right," but not a voice from the ACTUAL right (which is oriented around white resentment, not any discernible governing philosophy). They need a voice from the Conservatism of the Mind, the noble, principles-base conservatism they imagine.

That's what conservative columnists on mainstream opinion pages have been for years now: voices who will present conservatism as a coherent intellectual argument, what liberals desperately want it to be.

It is no coincidence that these guys - Gerson, Douthat, Brooks, Stephens - have little voice or influence inside actual conservatism, or that they're all anti-Trump (unlike 95+% of Republicans). They are anomalies, idiosyncrasies, not representative of anything broader.

And notice, even those invested in pretending that contemporary conservatism is a governing philosophy have thrown up their hands lately. Claim something for conservatism today & Trump could disavow it in a tweet tomorrow. It's become impossible to even maintain the pretense.

And so what do the mainstream "voices of conservatism" have left? Wan, half-ass whataboutism. "Sure Trump & the GOP are terrible but whatabout that time that one person on the left said that one bad thing?"

That explains why everyone on the right has suddenly fixated on Farrakhan. It explains why every conservative columnist is writing (again and again) about campus speech intolerance. It's not much, but it's *all they have left*. There's nowhere left to go, intellectually.

Stephens et al are just playing their role in a very old parlor game, where Serious Conservatives tell liberals they are bad and wrong (that's what "intellectual diversity" means to elite center-lefties) and liberals proceed to engage in self-loathing hand-wringing about it.

It's got very little to do with real intellectual diversity (has Stephens expressed a single surprising opinion?) and it's got NOTHING to do with exposing NYT readers to the real state of thinking on the right. It's a Village game, by and for Villagers.

In the name of "exposing readers to diverse viewpoints," NYT is, in practice, obscuring the true nature of today's right. Virtually the entire political elite & most NYT readers are in denial about what the right has become & that denial is increasingly dangerous.

Forget the self-regarding onanism of Stephens types. If NYT really wants to expose its readers to the right, it should give Dinesh D'Souza, Dana Loesch, or Ben Shapiro a column. Let readers see, up close & personal, the crude tribalism & resentment that animate the RW base.

In conclusion, yes, everyone in mainstream politics, everyone who lives outside the Fox/Breitbart bubble, NEEDS exposure to the actually existing US conservative movement. @NYTopinion isn't helping. </fin>

[pr0ner]

One of the few reasonable voices on Fox News, Shep Smith, re-signed with the network yesterday. Of course, he had some interesting things to say about the network.

Smith has been with the network since it was founded in 1996 — and he staunchly defends its news coverage.

“I am incredibly proud to be part of a group of journalists who helped build the FOX news division from scratch 22 years ago and extremely thankful for the opportunity to continue to lead our breaking news coverage for years to come,” he said in a news release. “Our team’s commitment to delivering facts to our loyal viewers in context and with perspective, without fear or favor, is unwavering.”

But he’s not blind to the image of Fox as biased, a reputation he claims is earned not through its handling of the news but through its commentators, such as Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and, until recently, Bill O’Reilly.

...

Smith has been beating this particular drum for years, both defending and complaining about the network.

“Everybody’s got a job to do,” he told HuffPost in October 2016, as he again defended the network’s news coverage.

“Hannity is trying to get conservatives elected. And he wants you to listen to him and believe what he believes,” Smith continued. “And I’m disseminating facts. It’s really apples and teaspoons. What we do is so different. He’s an entertaining guy who has an audience that he serves, and I deliver the news.”

Hannity’s job “is probably easier ― he knows what he thinks and just sticks with it,” Smith added. “This stuff changes all the time.”

That hasn’t stopped the network’s viewers from pushing against the anchor. As The Post’s Paul Farhi wrote, “Smith’s persistent fact-mongering has made him persona non grata among some parts of the Fox News faithful.”

Of course, Hannity didn't like this news coming out, no sir.



But, Hannity, didn't you say you're not a journalist?



Good grief.

[Isgrimnur]

Fact-monger. I like it.

[Moliere]

Malaysia outlaws 'fake news'; sets jail of up to six years

Unintended consequences: label anti-government sentiment as "fake news".

[em2nought]

Makes that whole Malaysia my 2nd home pitch sound a bit less appealing http://www.mm2h.gov.my/index.php/en/

[hepcat]

You wanted it here, why wouldn't you want it there?

[Enough]

I guess that's one way to deal with the negative press:

The Tampa Bay Times announced that it would cut about 50 jobs after new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration dramatically increased the cost of newsprint.

More details here.

[AWS260]

I don't know if it quite fits in this thread, but I really liked this essay by a journalist in Afghanistan about her work and what motivates her.

They’re looking for someone to blame, and we’re right there; the terrorists are not.

But I want them to know that first of all I’m a reporter and I should do my job. I want to see what is happening, see how people are dealing with it. And most of all, I want the world to know about Afghanistan, about how they are killing my people. I also want them to know that I have not forgotten the face of a single one of those victims I’ve seen and I probably never will.