Really Don't Give Money To That Fucking Newspaper

I know I say that all the time, but that's my cranky version. My real point has been:

For some reason liberals think subscribing to the New York Times is some sort of civic duty and the NYT cynically profited off of this with a massive ad campaign following the Trump election suggesting they were vitally important to being a check on Trump, and then gave us Maggie Haberman and her deferential court gossip as the primary frame for their political coverage and much other news, which gets subsumed into politics these days. If you want to support journalism with a subscription, giving money to the New York Times is like donating money to Harvard to support higher ed. They don't need your money, and will be the last legacy print outlet standing. But, hey, sure, if you like the crosswords or just read it enough and don't want to fight the paywall, go ahead and pay the money. Your choice. Just don't think it's some sort of good deed you're doing by suPporTinG joUrnAlIsm.

But now, really, please don't give any money to that fucking newspaper. At least until they publish my op-ed "Why Even Linking To This Newspaper is Supporting Fascism."

Easy To Get Sucked Into A Thing

I know from years of blogging (both doing it and reading the blogs of others, back when there were other blogs) that it's easy to get a bit sucked into a thing. Decide, for example, that the Yew Nork Times is bad, and it almost becomes a schtick, and you (I) become a bit too into finding fault wherever you can.

Not going to claim to be immune to that type of thing, but I am sensitive to it. I try not to give into the temptation of finding patterns where there are none, or of finding any way possible to get mad at That Fucking Newspaper just because that's a thing I do here on atrios dot blogspot dot com. But, man, sometimes, that fucking newspaper..

Editorial Judgment

A good example of how reporting is always subject to profoundly important choices. Include this context or leave it out? That fucking newspaper* left it in this time.

*"That fucking newspaper, which in 2020 published an opinion piece by Tom Cotton that..."

Unsparing Criticism

Says man with big platform dedicated to ruining the lives of trans people. 

Fucking babies at that fucking newspaper.

"Transgender activists" 99% of the time are just trans people, who are labeled "activists" simply for existing by that fucking newspaper.

That Fucking Newspaper

I remember too well how the 2000 election/post-election was covered also, too, by that fucking newspaper.

This framing is weird. The situation the Times is describing is one in which a democratically elected leader rejects the results of a democratic election.

That isn't so much a doomsday scenario for a political party as an existential threat to the foundation of American gov. pic.twitter.com/Euwx0HHLcD

— Galen Druke (@galendruke) September 2, 2020

That Fucking Newspaper

The ideal rule is, of course, "never tweet," but having a Brand is how young journalists, especially people of color and others from nontraditional backgrounds such as "not having a Dad who worked at the New York Times," get these jobs in the first place, and they are expected to promote their work and their newspaper. And then there are social media guidelines, which of course just means some journalists tweet whatever the fuck they want and some can't. You see the most opinionated assholes (not all from the New York Times) waxing dumb about JOURNALISTIC OBJECTIVITY and then 5 minutes later doing a racism and never getting punished for it, because racism is just objectivity.

Of course expressing opinions like "JOURNALISTS SHOULD BE OBJECTIVE" is just good journalism, while expressing opinions like "don't write stories about black people being genetically inferior" is just ACTIVISM and BIAS because that black people are genetically inferior is just SCIENCE according to editors, apparently.

If your newsroom doesn’t like to be described as racist, it’s bad to publish stories that suggest “Black people are genetically inferior.”
When Kendra Pierre-Louis tweeted that newsrooms should not publish or uplift stories that do exactly that, she said the New York Times’ Standards Desk had a response, delivered to her by way of an editor:
“Don’t do it again.”

Pierre-Louis, a Black reporter who previously covered climate for the New York Times, said she was not asked to delete her tweet thread, which went on to critique American journalism’s failure to diversify and its failure to use the “R word.” But she was sanctioned for it, supposedly because it was not her job to cover race.

Ah, yes, that's covering race, which is absolutely not her job.

People get mad that I'm so harsh about the New York Times. I think there are a lot of very good reasons to be very critical of it. One is that, yes, I do hold the New York Times up to a higher standard, if for no other reason than they certainly claim to be of a higher standard. Times brain is a hell of a thing.

That Fucking Newspaper

I can't believe I have to explain to A VERY IMPORTANT JOURNALIST AT THE NEW YORK TIMES that a story sourced to Rudy and Bannon about a laptop from some random computer store guy which supposedly had some pictures of Hunter Biden and... Christ I'm not even going to bother.

The New York Post is a garabge outlet, of course, but it's a useful way to get things into more mainstream coverage and first thing this morning, Maggie Haberman was retweeting that shit as much as anything had been retweeted before.

“...both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.” https://t.co/VggHCJKKI9

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 14, 2020

Only a bit later did she pretend she was being very skeptical of the story she had not shown any skepticism about, because she thought happy days were finally here again.

I'm sorry that you can't see my questioning the idea that the FBI is involved as "amplifying' this. Or that you're ignoring subsequent tweets. But it is what happens on this website.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 14, 2020

Reader, there was no questioning.

An issue for years has been that almost any horseshit jumps from the right wing fever swamps to the more resecptable news outlets. It's actually been a bit better in recent years, now that Matt Drudge No Longer Rules their World, but there's Maggie eagerly awaiting anything that comes to her from her old newspaper.

THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE

Tom Friedman.

Tom Friedman, artist's conception.

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

In April 2003 Friedman said that Arab journalists who talked about the US ‘occupation’ of Iraq were guilty of ‘Saddamism’. In August 2003 Friedman wrote: ‘This is an occupation.’

In 2007 he surmised that Iraqis ‘hate each other more than they love their own kids’. In 2009 he hoped that they’d learned from America’s ‘million acts of kindness’ and ‘profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together’.

In 2005 Friedman argued: ‘We have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there.’ Earlier this year, he wrote: ‘For all of the murderous efforts by al-Qaida to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.’ Never mind that in 2006 he said: ‘It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.’

Tom Friedman is wrong about everything, and Tom Friedman don't care!

Friedman actually styled himself a critic of the war he so strongly advocated for, but the path of his criticism was as Greenwald described:

(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

If only the ungrateful wogs would have done what they should have done then everything would have been great.


If this blog has contributed one small thing to our discourse over the past decade it has been, thanks to a tip from a commenter, pointing out to the world Friedman's Suck On This moment. You might have thought you knew why we went to war in Iraq, but Friedman knew the real reason.

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.

...

We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

...


What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

That was then, and this was later.

To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never W.M.D. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above.

For years Friedman spent dithering about the war. Oh gee it wasn't going well, but the light at the end of the tunnel might be around the corner in another critical 6 months, leading me to coin the term Friedman Unit, or the F.U. It wasn't just Friedman of course. Basically every pro-stay in Iraq person would utter some version of "the next six months is critical" on a regular basis. For years I put these statements in my calendar, and six months later would remind the world that nothing had changed and we are still in Iraq and the stupid fucking fuckstick is still writing in your newspaper or on the teevee blathering about the next crucial six months.



The state of the world is what it is in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person. This hasn't actually been the Eschaton Decade, it's been the Tom Friedman Decade. And the next one probably will be too.

We're fucked.


Support This Site:

But Hunter's Laptop

This kind of corruption is so baked into DC at this point that reporters would have to seriously whittle down the invites to their kids' birthday parties if they ever noticed.

It doesn't just raise questions, it provides answers. But those answers are inconvenient for a foreign policy establishment that is rife with this sort of profiteering and corruption, so we'll just keep pretending to ask questions. https://t.co/FoSAnWU6qN

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) May 23, 2022

Yes I know that this is being reported as news in a major newspaper (that fucking newspaper, in fact). Lots of things are! And then no one on CNN talks about them the next day, and that newspaper's own political reporters have it erased from their memories.

Some things become scandals, some just get reported and disappear.

That Fucking Newspaper

Shot:

Let me ask about another subject that I suspect you might say has been distorted nationally: the Tenderloin, which the mayor declared an emergency zone. But whether anything actually new is happening there is almost beside the point. The point is that an open-air drug market is a bad thing for a city. What can you be doing to improve the situation?

The Tenderloin has been an ongoing public-health crisis and state of emergency for at least a decade. This is not a new problem. In fact, one of your colleagues [bretbug] at The New York Times wrote an Op-Ed in which he was highly critical of me. He linked to a video of the Tenderloin and the Civic Center BART station that adjoins it as an example of progressive prosecutors failing. But the video was from 2018. I hadn’t even run for office yet. I’m not saying that to be catty about your colleagues or the fact-checking at The New York Times. I’m making a broader point, which is that the right-wing media — I’m not saying this about The New York Times — has for years loved to point to the Tenderloin as an example of the failures of progressive policies. The reality is that every city in the United States has at least one neighborhood where, historically, through red-lining or policing or zoning, poverty has been consolidated. If you go to New York City, you can’t pretend that the South Bronx doesn’t exist, that deep east Brooklyn doesn’t exist. Those are parts of New York City, just like the Tenderloin is part of San Francisco.

Chaser:

Disgraceful, @NYTimes. Just completely disgraceful. If Bret Stephens' intent was not to attribute the conditions in the video to Boudin, there would be no reason to mention Boudin at all. pic.twitter.com/nM7FWg7ey7

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 2, 2022

I Am A Failure

The election of Trump in 2016 was a bit of a disappointment, but so was the response by every liberally-leaning engaged person to throw all their money into New York Times subscriptions thinking they were going to save us. The Times ran an opportunistic ad campaign after the election feeding that idea and people responded by opening their wallets. Maggie Haberman thanks you!

I don't think there's one correct model of journalism. Opinion journalism is fine, ideological journalism fine, crusading issue journalism is fine. It can all be good, including the American "balanced" model of journalism that most mainstream publications/outlets claim they aspire to.

However, one problem (there are a few) with the "balanced" model is it's easy to smuggle in an agenda behind it and claim your critics are just mad you aren't supporting THEIR agenda (over 20 years of hearing this). And Dash Sulzberger, the latest failson in the long line of a failed inbreeding experiment, has clearly - more than his predecessor - embraced agenda journalism, pushing specific issues in a "flood the zone" coverage, with little balance in the coverage or concern for maintaining an illusion of appropriate proportionality.

The problem isn't that the paper is doing that, precisely, the problem is that they're doing that while hiding behind their reputation and claimed model of journalism. I mean, they're just lying to you and to critics daily, implicitly and explicitly, about what they are. That's a problem!

tl;dr fuck that fucking newspaper.

Historians

I've written this before, but after I started paying careful attention to news and politics, I gained new respect for what historians do.  It isn't that I thought all they did was read newspapers from 30 years ago and tell us what they said, but I realized how incomplete and misleading that approach would be even as a first pass.

Specifically, would reading the paper of record, that fucking newspaper, really convey any sense of what the Trump era was like to a future historian?  By implication, does it convey much sense of that now?

It is wrong to argue that this because journalists attempt conform to some norm of balance/objectivity.  Those bits - the "straight" news bits - in the New York Times are actually often fine.  

The political reporters and the podcast guys, the ones who narrate the daily story in the way so much of the actual news bits get filtered, are actually off the leash. That leash, at least. Obviously the editors tug one way or another on another leash.

They do a lot of opinion disguised as analysis, and of course the very nature of that kind of reporting does not lend itself to the "straight news" constraints.  They can describe things are they are, or obscure with emphasis and euphemism.  

The people whose job it is to convey the broader nature of things, and not just the facts, have largely manufactured an alternative reality. 

Trump does insane late night postings and racist rants regularly, and very little of that is conveyed.

America's Worst Newspaper

Still the fucking newspaper.

This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care. Like the premise that the Clintons had to have been guilty of something serious, or that Saddam Hussein must have had a weapons program worth invading Iraq over, the notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

Tom has written an important piece - read the whole thing, as the kids say.

(Oops had accidentally appended that sentence to the last post.  This one is Tom)

There Is A Natural Order To Things

Lots of things can be said about the "cancel culture" nonsense from the most privileged people with giant microphone sinecures, but one simple way to see it is as a contest between those who think normal people having some freedom to engage in "punching up" is the important part of any concept of "free speech" (very broadly defined, not just 1A), and those who think that, ACTUALLY, it's punching down (by them) that's important.   

Journalists who think their role is to hold the powerful to account versus those who see their role as holding the public to account.

That "the paper of record" (that fucking newspaper) puts itself in the latter category is not good! America's actual Finest News Source:

When The Onion’s editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness, tolerance, and debate; the other is built upon ignorance, fear, and the suppression of dissent. Today, the path forward could not be clearer.

Simply put, we need mass censorship now.

Our country was founded upon the admirable principles of a moneyed elite spoon-feeding its beliefs to the ignorant and unwashed masses, and yet today that legacy stands in tatters. For too long, our nation has tolerated the mewling and rambling of the confused public. For too long, we have watched the God-given right to suppress free speech slip away. That’s why The Onion now stands united in calling on all governments, domestic and foreign, to immediately muzzle protesters, dissidents, and citizens of all stripes who take part in the blighted pestilence on human affairs known as freedom of expression.

...

Critics may question where the globe’s citizens will find the information they need if not through traditional news sources. Of course, The Onion stands at the ready to act as a mouthpiece of the world’s elite, using its distinguished reportage to parrot whatever the party line happens to be. Genocide, eugenics, incest—no topic is too taboo to find support in our paper so long as it has been approved by a trustworthy establishment. What, indeed, is the purpose of the Fourth Estate if not to shepherd the simple-minded throng into blindly following a single unquestionable narrative? To this ideal, we remain dedicated.

That Fucking Bitch

The people who work at the New York Times are deeply broken people.

WASHINGTON — Ever since Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to Congress as the youngest woman elected to the House, she has upended traditions, harnessing the power of social media and challenging leaders, including President Trump, who are 50 years her senior.
On Thursday, she had her most norm-shattering moment yet when she took to the House floor to read into the Congressional Record a sexist vulgarity that Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, had used to refer to her.
“In front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote: ‘A fucking bitch,’” she said, punching each syllable in the vulgarity. “These are the words Representative Yoho levied against a congresswoman.”
Then Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand, invited a group of Democratic women in the House to come forward to express solidarity with her. One by one, they shared their own stories of harassment and mistreatment by men, including in Congress. More even than the profanity uttered on the House floor, where language is carefully regulated, what unfolded over the next hour was a remarkable moment of cultural upheaval on Capitol Hill.

Sure she was called a fucking bitch, but she used it to tik-tok her way into the hearts of the snapchat generation by elevating her brand!!!

As for "fucking bitch," here's the article about Yoho calling her that.

After a brief and tense exchange, the newspaper said, Mr. Yoho walked away from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, uttering a pair of expletives.

They didn't even quote Yoho using the naughty words, but they quoted AOC quoting him using the naughty words, because it UPENDED TRADITIONS, and was NORM-SHATTERING. You might say, UPPITY!

These fucking people.

Wanker of the Day

Brian Conley.

Apparently the owner of Knoxville's Metro Pulse alt-weekly is the thinnest skinned man in the universe, responding to mild criticism on South Knox Bubba's blog by writing this rather intimidating (and illuminating) email to him, leading SKB to out himself.

Anonymity allows people the freedom to speak without fear of reprisals in other elements of your life. On the internet, where every little comment can potentially hang around forever, it allows people to communicate views without worrying about what current/future employers or customers may think of them. People do get fired/not hired for this kind of stuff. Without anonymity many people would not be able to talk politics on the internets. It allows people to separate their personal political/religious/whatever views from their personal/professional lives otherwise. It's truly a gift.

I was fortunate that I was able to be anonymous for as long as I was without ever being outed. There is certainly no right to anonymity, and I revealed enough personal information over time that one person was able to figure it out (they were kind enough to keep that particular scoop to themselves).

The accusation here is that SKB "abused" his anonymity. Anonymity can be abused if it's being used as a cover for illegal activities or actionable speech (libel). In both cases anonymity provides little cover - one subpoena to your ISP or web hosting company and it's all over. Anonymity could also be abused by posing as an "outsider" of some sort when you're actually an insider, or if you use it to mask some sort of hidden personal agenda or financial interest. To the extent that anonymity prevents knowing if those apply it can be criticized.


People divide their lives all of the time. Sally the business owner can to some degree separate herself from Sally the parent and Sally the activist. The ability to keep aspects separate is generally respected by people who are not assholes. On the internet, anonymity, while not strictly necessary, is close to being required to maintain that in the age of Google (not all people feel the need). Non-internet personal activities can be separated from your professional life simply by not socializing with colleagues. But, internet activities are always google-able.

Andrew Sullivan once said it wasn't fair that I was anonymous because it meant he couldn't go after me personally. Strange comment, I thought. I suppose being anonymous protected me from being accused of personal hypocrisy - say, if I were criticizing adultery while engaging in it myself or some other form of gross personal hypocrisy.

But, on the internet I was "Atrios" as SKB was "South Knox Bubba." Additional details about my personal life are almost entirely irrelevant, which is all knowing my real name would give you. And, once this blog had a certain prominence my reputation could rise and fall as "Atrios" separate from other aspects of my life. Being anonymous certainly didn't protect me from criticism.

After achieving enough prominence I couldn't have really complained if, say, Salon had outed me. It would have been a legitimate story I suppose, although it would still be poor editorial judgment. Now, if I really was Sidney Blumenthal or something like that then it would truly be a story - again the insider posing as outsider issue - but a story which is "who is Atrios? Oh, just some guy" isn't really much of a story.

Certainly at some point anonymity is unsustainable - towards the end I went to a few public events and did radio appearances and I certainly could no longer have any expectation of maintaining it, though I hoped that people would keep quiet until my professional situation changed.

But, this situation isn't about the right or expectations of anonymity, it's about a power imbalance between the owner of a local newspaper and some guy with a blog, and that newspaper owner using anonymity as means of intimidation. What a fucking wanker.

Nobody Who Went To Yale Could Be Bad

I am rather hung up on the degree to which elites do not think other elites can be bad, or at least believe that, well, sure, elites are bad, but imagine what garbage people everyone who doesn't have a Harvard degree must be!

Yglesias:

  Dylan Matthews:

SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment when that hedge fund grew into something enormous — failures that can be laid in part at the feet of EA.

A failure in judgment is when I buy the cheap brand of toilet paper! HE'S A FUCKING CROOK!!!

New FTX head John Ray III is asked to compare FTX to Enron. “[Enron crimes] were highly orchestrated financial machinations by highly sophisticated people to keep transactions off balance sheets. This (FTX)... isn't sophisticated whatsoever, this is just plain old embezzlement."

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) December 13, 2022

That fucking newspaper:

No it’s not.—————
“It’s like a Greek tragedy,” said John Donohue, a colleague who has attended Sunday dinners at the Bankman-Fried home. “The story of flying too close to the sun, and having your wings singed.”https://t.co/xzobPPMsLB

— Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) December 13, 2022

Obama People Are Big Hypocrites So Checkmate Libs

The first rule of the New York Times is that you cannot criticize the New York Times.

Much of the criticism of us yesterday came from Obama administration folks. Here are their stats and their legacy on this issue: https://t.co/DQncy536Bh https://t.co/892PyH49ZV

— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) September 27, 2019

So the federal government did one thing which was maybe bad (going after illegal leakers to the press), and a newspaper, which is not the federal government, did a totally different thing (potentially outing a whistleblower who tried to do things through legal means and was prevented by illegal acts of his superiors) WHICH WAS NOT BAD SO STOP SAYING THAT, and all of our critics worked for the Obama administration (you guys did not know this, but I did! I think), so checkmate libs!

Often with this fucking newspaper their particular misdeeds don't even matter that much, it's that you frequently get windows into their totally broken fucking brains and realize "these are not the people who should be ruling our discourse."

One Of The Lads

That fucking newspaper has an editorial board piece that not-quite-endorses Cuomo because they are scared shitless that Mamdani will be the next mayor.

The real issue here isn't even ideology, and given Cuomo's record it certainly isn't perceived competence or ethics.

It is that Mamdani isn't one of the lads and Cuomo is. Mamdani becoming mayor won't lead to full communism or even a tax rate bump.  It might lead to a small reordering of the power structure, with some people seeing their influence wane and their friends and family career plans being slightly curtailed. The seating chart will be altered.

It is mostly about that.  

Misson Accomplished

That fucking newspaper. (paywalled, everything is paywalled).

Once you have decided that there are too many people identifying as trans, you have opened a negotiation with the right wing about how many of them to get rid of, and by what means. The polite, liberal Times position is "get rid of enough of them that I don't have to worry about my child being one" and "by discouraging transitioning." The Trump position is "get rid of all of them" and "by making them illegal." And the Trump position effectively includes the liberal position, though anti-trans liberals don't like to see it that way.

...

On the question of sports participation, the Editorial Board immediately contradicted itself:

The fearmongering is all the more disproportionate, given how few people identify as transgender. They are a minuscule less than 1 percent of the American population. And they are 0.002 percent of college athletes—a population that’s been especially incendiary in the culture wars.

Why should there be room for fierce debate, or conversation, about the participation of 0.002 percent of college athletes in sports? Why should there be room for a 3,000-word front-page New York Times story on the topic? If you call as much attention as you can to how you think there might be a stray nail sticking up somewhere, why would you be shocked when someone shows up swinging a hammer?