Media posts

Noem's face tells us more than the New York Times lede.

What are the facts surrounding the Donald Trump rally last night outside Philadelphia?

• There were two medical emergencies in the crowd, the first 30 minutes into the Town Hall, the second shortly thereafter
• The Town Hall was suspended
• The gathering didn't disperse; instead, Trump called for music (“Hey Justin, how about a couple of really beauties, and we'll sit down and relax”) and stood on stage, listening and bobbing his head for 30 minutes

Here's how The New York Times described it. And let me highlight the areas about which I have questions:

Donald J. Trump was about 30 minutes into a town hall Monday night in suburban Philadelphia when a medical emergency in the crowd brought the questions and answers to a halt. Moments later, he tried to get back on track, when another medical incident seemed to derail things, this time for good.

And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned — and, it appeared, for himself — to just listen to music instead.

Mr. Trump had his staff fire up his campaign playlist, standing on the stage for about half an hour and swaying to songs as his crowd slowly dwindled.

He bobbed his head through the Village People's “Y.M.C.A.,” his usual closing song. He swayed soberly to Rufus Wainwright's version of “Hallelujah,” watched a Sinead O'Connor video, rocked along to Elvis, watched the crowd during “Rich Men North of Richmond” and then, finally, left the stage to shake hands on his way out during one last song.

This used to be called “sugarcoating,” and in 2016 we called it “normalizing.” For the kids, it's “sanewashing.” But no matter what you call it, the Times is going out of its way to make odd behavior, questionable behavior, seem normal. And they only seem to do it with Donald Trump and the GOP. It goes one way. With the Dems, they hold their feet to the fire for minor missteps. With Trump, he could take a dump on the stage and the one-time Paper of Record would tell us he's a political candidate know for his earthiness. 

To the questions about the highlighted:

• Why would this derail things for good? Even later in the article, writer Michael Gold mentions that medical emergencies at Trump rallies this summer stopped nothing. “But Mr. Trump generally returns to his planned remarks after medical issues at other events. On Monday, he seemed more uncertain how to proceed.” 
• “A political candidate known for improvisational departures” is the chef's kiss of normalizing Trump's batshit ramblings.
• “He seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned — and, it appeared, for himself — to just listen to music instead.” Too much “seemed” and “appeared” to be this high up in the article. But if you're going to include it, also include the later line: “he seemed more uncertain how to proceed.”

Here's the key to it all: Trump did something that confused everybody. Nobody knew how to proceed: the music guy, Gov. Kristin Noem of South Dakota, who was moderating, nor the audience. This is the third-to-last graf of the story. It should be near the top:

But after “Y.M.C.A.” ended, Mr. Trump seemed a little perplexed. “There's nobody leaving,” he said. “What's going on?” The audience cheered, and so the music kept going, as Ms. Noem stood awkwardly by, and many in the audience seemed unsure about whether the event was over.

Finally, no explanation why Gov. Noem of South Dakota was moderating an event near Philadelphia.

Saw this on social media over the weekend:

100%. Everything he says. The absolute dereliction of duty by our most respected news sources during the most dangerous time in my American lifetime is something that will not be forgiven. 

Here's the referenced NPR interview with Joe Kahn. Blather. Sure, the Times generally doesn't have to portray that “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our society,” but it should report what he says, without buffing it up, without dragging it toward the sensical; they should give it the same treatment and placement if Kamala or Biden had said something similar. Instead, it feels like there's a very low, almost nonexistent bar for Trump in Times coverage. On the stump, he could state the most atrocious things, and does, and is doing, and it rates nothing. 

This has been making the rounds as well. Kamala is called on ... what exactly? Bobbing and weaving? Because she's not as forthright as the Times demands? Because she focuses on what she wants to focus on? Meanwhile, Trump is not being called on ... what exactly? Overt racism? 

“Long-held fascination” is so awful there. “Yeah, it's just a hobby of his. Like stamp collecting.”

Margaret Sullivan has a SubStack post, “About Those New York Times Headlines,” and writes, of the “long-held fascination” headline:

The article itself got to the heart of the matter — but not until its 11th paragraph.

Trump, it noted, “has a pattern of using dehumanizing language to describe undocumented immigrants. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants who commit crimes as 'animals.'”

And later still, it noted that Trump's insistence that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” evokes “the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the United States.”

This is vile stuff. Cleaning it up so it sounds like an academic white paper is really not a responsible way to present what's happening.

I'd call it an absolute dereliction of duty. I don't know if anyone in the Trump era has disappointed me as much as The New York Times. They should be better. And they are utterly failing us.

I found this piece via that SFGate piece on how self-satisfied The New York Times is its coverage of Donald Trump and the 2024 presidential race. And you could sub in the 2020 race, too, or the 2016 race, or go back to 1973 and the first time they covered him, via an article on his father, and how they bought the lie and printed the lie and didn't correct the lie, because just look at him, just look at that blue-eyed boy, Mister Death.

Anyway, in that SFGate piece, there's a reference to “sanewashing,” a new term for me, that was linked to a website called the defector, and an article by Tom Scocca entitled “Where Racism Goes to Become Rhetoric.” The “where” there, well, that, too, is The New York Times, or the mainstream media generally. It's about something Scocca heard Donald Trump say that he thought was the most racist thing he'd heard any major presidential candidate—including earlier incarnations of Donald Trump—ever say. He said it to a crowd on Long Island, N.Y., about how the U.S. is being overrun by immigrants released from prisons in other countries:

“They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from all over the world—Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia. And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

Scocca initially thought someone was simply exaggerating what Trump was saying, since no one was reporting on it; and when he found the speech verbatim on C-Span he dug further and discovered that Trump had been saying this exact thing for months. And no one was reporting on it simply because he'd been saying it for months. It wasn't news. When they wrote about it, they wrote to dismiss it:

The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March (“no such decline in Congo's prison population is shown in the data”); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a “Critic's Notebook” item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: “A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America's streets.”

Yet the Times hadn't ever directly reported on those remarks, and it still hasn't. In its story from Nassau Coliseum, the paper wrote that Trump had “continued to stoke fear around immigration,” and then quoted only the later part of the passage: “We're just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats' immigration policies. “And we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people.”

But the truly telling point, which I admit I missed on first glance, is the part I've highlighted, which isn't a quote from Trump but reportage from the Times, so supposedly a fact. But it's the opposite of a fact. It's the Times doing Trump's heavy lifting for him. “What Trump was referring to,” Scocca writes, “in the literal text of his speech, was some agenda by which the United States is importing convicted criminals released from other countries' prisons. The Biden administration has no policy that does anything like what Trump was talking about.”

That said, that Times article by Michael Gold on the Long Island rally isn't bad. I like the lede:

On the day that he was originally set to return to his hometown and receive the sentence for his 34 felony convictions, former President Donald J. Trump found himself a few miles east, basking in the raucous adulation of a packed arena on Long Island.

Standing in front of thousands at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., Mr. Trump received a local hero's reception, as he drew an exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline, made false claims and hammered Democrats over crime, inflation and immigration.

Even this, though, makes you wonder. An exaggerated depiction of a New York in decline? Meaning it's only slightly in decline? Or is it not at all in decline and Donald Trump is a big fat liar?

But again, the article isn't bad: “exaggerated attacks,” “exaggerated claims,” “exaggerated depiction,” “false claims,” “falsely maintain,” “exaggerated claims,” “debunked claim,” “debunked claims,” and “misleadingly claimed.” They're so close.

It seems everyone is as sick of Times/Post/NPR coverage, particularly RE: Donald Trump, as I am. This article came through the social media transom the other day via historian Kevin Kruse (who, not for nothing, has zero fucks to give): “The New York Times is washed: SFGATE columnist Drew Magary is done with caring about the Times, and you should be, too.”

(I love including author and source in the subhed but couldn't it have used a better hed? What's washed? As in brain-? Is it new slang from the kids I have to look up? Alright, I'll look it up. And it's ... apparently short for “washed up.” Got it. Way to go, kids.)

So Magary begins with the poll numbers, and this one says that or the other, and whatever. But he gets at the heart soon enough, calling the Times, “an institution that has never met a story it couldn't water down” with “its patented strain of prestige clickbait.” Then he gives a brutal example: HOW J.D. VANCE'S COMBATIVE CONSERVATISM IS SHAPING TRUMP 2.0. Good god, that's awful, but they've been doing it for years. Remember this Rick Perry hed from 2011?

Magary is a little too chummy for me, and assumes a little too much about his reader, but he's not wrong. He writes:

“[Readers] understand that the Times has so thoroughly isolated itself from the zeitgeist that it's written itself right out of it. ... In the process, they've left the New York Times alone on its bespoke soapbox, screaming centrist nonsense into the void. I'm done listening to any of it. I'm not going back, and neither are you. The Times doesn't matter anymore, and they're the last people on Earth to realize it.”

Yep. And what a shame. 

“I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he ... uh ... did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people—if not we had more. And they said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people. But if you look at the exact same picture, and everything's the same because the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to ... uh ... from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it, and you look at the picture, of his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.”

-- Donald Trump, two days ago, in a rare press conference. All of the above was cleaned up by the mainstream media for public consumption, of course. If a Democrat slips up, they're hounded for months. This kind of B.S. by a Republican, particularly this Republican, and the MSM polishes the turd until they can see their faces in it. They're cowards. They've been cowards with Republicans since Agnew, or maybe Reagan, but they're always looking for ways to not be “the liberal media,” which they haven't been for decades and decades. They're the opposite of that. Dems get held to tight standards, while Republicans (particularly this Republican) suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.

FURTHER READING/VIEWING:

• Tom Nichols, “The Truth About Trump's Press Conference: His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny,” in The Atlantic
• Lawrence O'onnell, “The Last Word,” MSNBC

Came across part of a speech he gave in Montana this past week and it's more of the same gibberish: 

“The numbers are much worse. They've let an invasion of our country happen. But I took a look. [Mimes taking a look.] And because I took that look, I mean, what are the chances of that? So I just want to thank everybody, cause, I tell you what, the level of love and compassion and all of the things that we all went through—that was a terrible thing—and we're going to be very careful. We have to be very careful.”

My kingdom for a serious media. 

“I guess we knew a lot of this, but it's jarring to hear it directly from a witness—that through all of these allegations Donald Trump has made about fake news, and about the media and lying and everything else, there was a whole system he had in place for literally the planting of fake news and the killing or the deep-sixing of correct and true news. I mean, at some point, Pecker testifies on the stand that Michael Cohen would call me and say, 'We would like you to run a negative article on a certain—let's say for argument sake—Ted Cruz. Then he, Michael Cohen, would send me information about Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the basis of our story. And then we would embellish it from there.'

”So I guess there's nothing necessarily unlawful about that. I guess there's a potential seed of a defamation or a libel claim there. But this whole machinery of the creation and dissemination of fake news against the backdrop of Donald Trump making those allegations against the mainstream media, it's a little jarring, isn't it?“

-- Preet Bharara, ”Trump Fined and Weinstein Overturned,“ The Cafe Insider Podcast. 

Completely agree. At the same time, I'm old enough to remember when ”fake news" became news. In the runup to the 2016 election, The New York Times ran several stories about how, particularly on social media sites, misleading information or fake news was being disseminated, and post-election, when we saw the real damage it had done, there was much national hand-wringing over fake news and (Mark Zuckerberg notwithstanding) a brief attempt to come to terms with it. And then Trump took ownership of the phrase. Any story that included negative inferences to him became fake news. He repeated it, over and over, and his acolytes repeated it, over and over, and that became the drumbeat, drowning out any real discussion. And now here we are. And it's a beautiful day.

But I'm glad Preet pulls back like this occasionally for a bigger picture. Not enough commentators do. 

The first time Donald Trump's name appeared in The New York Times, back in 1973, in an article about his father entitled “A Builder Looks Back—and Forward,” it was accompanied by a lie:

The Donald graduated first in his class at Wharton? Impressive!

Yeah, no. From The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper, in 2019, in article entitled: “Mary Trump says 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump cheated on SAT to get into Penn”:

The Times still hasn't corrected their 1973 story. But don't worry: There's way more where that came from.

“I think one of the failures of the media is that they've tried to explain Trump in the way you would explain a normal, healthy, or somewhat eccentric human being. But he is completely off his rocker. ... The problem we're going to have with Donald Trump—and I think the floodgates are going to open—is that people have tried to normalize him for too long. He is definitively, manifestly, unwell. He's a sick person.”

-- George Conway on CNN

Amen. The mainstream media, legit journalism—The New York Times, The Washington Post, WSJ and NPR—have had 10 years in which to figure out how to cover Donald Trump. They've failed. The Times in particular, particularly with their headlines or their focus, continue to soften his rough edges, normalize his abnormalities, or ignore his batshit craziness altogether. If Biden did 1/10 of what Trump did, it would be blaring headlines. With Trump, it's barely there. 

“America is entering its most important, pivotal year since 1860, and the U.S. media is doing a terrible job explaining what is actually happening. ... What we are building toward on Nov. 5, 2024, might have the outward trappings of an election, but it is really a show of force. What we call the Republican Party is barely a political party in any sense of the word, but a dangerous antisocial movement that has embraced many of the tenets of fascism, from calls for violence to its dehumanizing of ”others“...

”This weekend, the New York Times' Peter Baker, an influential news analyst, noted on Twitter/X that in 1994 some 21% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats viewed the other party negatively, which has risen to 62% (GOP) and 54% (Dems). Baker was recommending a story condemning 'tribalism,' when what we are really seeing here is the vitriol of an authoritarian movement and the increasing condemnation from those who are appalled by it.“

-- Will Bunch, ”Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America," The Philadelphia Inquirer. Amen, amen, amen. I feel this every day listening to NPR and reading The New York Times. That disconnect. They didn't get it in 2016, they didn't get it in 2018 and 2020, and they still don't get it. Love the takedown not only of the Times' Baker but the Post's Kathleen Parker. Now do Steve Inskeep. 

Here's some of the attempts:

• Trump, Fox's Bret Baier spar over former president's 2020 election claims --The Hill
• Trump went on Fox News to defend himself. It didn't go well. --Vox
• Trump All But Confesses to Mishandling Classified Docs on Fox News --Rolling Stone
• Trump reacts angrily as Fox News anchor directly tells him he lost the 2020 election --The Independent
• 'I was very busy.' Trump gives new reason he didn't hand over classified documents --USA Today

This is what The New York Times, our paper of record, went with:

You lead with the lie?

On the plus side, they get rather quickly to what the record currently states:

The July 2021 meeting — at Mr. Trump's golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — was recorded by at least two people in attendance, and a transcript describes the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then saying of Gen. Mark A. Milley, whom he had been criticizing: “Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record, but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.” ...

According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley's desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret.”

If it was news clippings, why would he say Milley “presented me this”? Why would he describe news clippings as “highly confidential” and “still a secret”? All of that is damning. And none of it is in the headline. In the headline is the excuse. It's a lie. And I'm tired of lies that we all know are lies becoming stand-alone headlines. 

Of course, the Times' headline beats National Review's:

• Trump's Home Run with Bret Baier

Yes, editor Rich Lowry says, Trump probably didn't help his legal case with the interview; but since his best way of getting off is getting elected, Lowry feels he did help his case by being “a dominant presence.” What a sad statement that is—about Fox's viewers, Lowry's readers, the modern GOP, and the fragile state of American democracy and the rule of law.

When I heard Chuck Todd was leaving NBC's “Meet the Press” after nine years as its host, my first thought was “Good riddance.” But I wasn't seeing that sentiment in much mainstream media coverage. (I'm off Twitter, where, I'm sure, that sentiment was widespread.)

So thank you, Jeff Tiedrich, for your post “Good fucking riddance to Chuck Fucking Todd.” 

Tiedrich begins his piece with this Journalism 101 lesson, attributed to many: “If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.” Tiedrich adds: “Chuck Todd never looked out the fucking window. Not once.” 

Then he gives numerous examples of Todd's no-look reporting style. He also quotes Todd bragging about this tendency way back in 2013. It was in reference to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which, Todd said, Republicans “have successfully messaged against.” And it wasn't journalism's job to expose misinformation? “What I always love is people say, 'Well, it's you folks' fault in the media,'” Todd responded. “No, it's the president of the United States' fault for not selling it.”

On some level, yes, Dems should be pushing back harder against this shit, particularly when they see dipshits like Todd doing nothing. But people like Todd helped pave the way for Trump and possibly the undermining of American democracy. He'll never see it that way but he did. That's his legacy. Bye.

In his SubStack, Judd Legum runs through some reasons why Fox News might have fired their biggest ratings draw, Tucker Carlson, unceremoniously by loudly, earlier this week. Was it Ray Epps (whom Tucker alleged was responsible for Jan. 6) airing dirty linen on “60 Minutes” Sunday night? Was it the lawsuit from Abby Grossman (who alleges a hostile and offensive work environment on Tucker's show)? Was it fallout from the Dominion lawsuit (where, during disovery, it was revealed that Tucker sent disparaging texts about Trump and others in the right-wing biosphere)? Was it D) All of the above? Right now, Fox isn't talking. The one time we want them to say something, they've zipped their pieholes. Would that they kept it up. 

Legum adds the following:

More importantly, we know what was not a firing offense for Carlson. He spent years promoting racist, white nationalist conspiracy theories. Not only was Carlson not fired, but top Fox News executives defended his conduct.

Exactamundo.

Upon finding out the good news, on the two newbie social media sites I'm on, I talked about Tucker as basically a street corner kid: eminently replaceable and there to draw your fire—not to mention ire—as he has done so well. And even though he's gone, someone else will take over that 8 PM slot and they'll be awful, too. That's the role of the 8 PM slot: to be awful. I said it's not O'Reilly or Hannity or Megyn or Tucker, it's the Murdochs. Follow the money.

It was a bit of a downer post, to be honest. I should've reveled more.  

“Whatever the reason Fox News cut ties with Tucker Carlson,” Legum writes at the end of his post, “it was not a moral stance. That ship sailed long ago.” Exactamundo.

I meant to post this last week, but then I went to Ohio to see the play my nephew wrote and directed (this nephew, btw), and when I returned there was a lot of catch-up at work, and, well, here it is more than a week since I took these screen shots from The New York Times website and I'm only posting them now. The nice thing? They're still relevant. Fuck, they're evergeen. This will always look bad, Times.

Huh. And why does Donald Trump have center stage?

This:

Going forward, that'll be my euphemism for being charged, indicted, imprisoned. Al Capone has center stage. I hear author Michael Lewis had front-row seats when Sam Bankman-Fried was pulled onto center stage. Hey, anyone know if anyone has center stage on [latest mass shooting]?

One thing seems certain: It's not the last time this year Trump will have center stage. And the Times will be there with a shitty clickbait take on it. 

Here are the ledes that appeared last night from our various national publications when news leaked that Donald Trump had been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Can you guess which goes with which pub? Also, who nailed it? It's not like it was truly breaking news, after all. It was anticipated. 

1. “Donald J. Trump was indicted in Manhattan on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation's first former president to face criminal charges.”
2. “NEW YORK — A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former president Donald Trump, making him the first person in U.S. history to serve as commander in chief and then be charged with a crime, and setting the stage for a 2024 presidential contest unlike any other.”
3. “NEW YORK — Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, prosecutors and defense lawyers said Thursday, making him the first former U.S. president to face a criminal charge and jolting his bid to retake the White House next year.”
4. “Donald Trump is one step closer to being criminally charged, and potentially serving time in prison, after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him for his role in the 2016 hush money payout to porn star Stephanie Clifford a.k.a. Stormy Daniels. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney's office said: 'This evening we contacted Mr. Trump's attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.'s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.'”
5. “NEW YORK, March 30 - Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury after a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges even as he makes another run for the White House.”
6. “In America, the freedom of the press is often exercised as the freedom to congregate in exactly the same place at the same time, not doing much. Two Saturday mornings ago, former President Donald Trump posted on his proprietary social-media platform, Truth Social, declaring that he would be indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney three days later—'on Tuesday.' That Monday, reporters from multiple continents and every major news network set up camp outside the seventeen-story Art Deco courthouse in lower Manhattan, where criminal defendants in the borough are taken for arraignment. Television cameras were planted...”

Answers:

1. The New York Times (I like that NYT doesn't use the NEW YORK dateline. Because New York.)
2. The Washington Post
3. Associated Press
4. Vanity Fair
5. Reuters
6. The New Yorker, of course

I'm teasing The New Yorker but any preference among the others? The Post and AP didn't mention the charges, just the fact that he was charged, and the historical nature of that fact. The Times mentioned why he was indicted with the proviso “according to five people with knowledge of the matter,” while Reuters was adept at mentioning the indictment after the probe into the hush money scandal. So it got that in there. Anyway we'll know more soon. 

Later in the evening, The New Yorker also gave us this stellar lede by David Remnick:

“Former President Donald Trump, twice impeached, yet impervious to shame, was indicted Thursday on criminal charges related to the payment of hush money to a porn star. There was a time in American history, almost impossible to recollect now, when such a sentence, such a plot point, would have been beyond our imagining. That has not been the case for a very long time.”

I think about that a lot. I imagine 2003 me reading 2017-2023 headlines and thinking, “What bullshit dystopian fiction did that come out of?” Sadly, the one we're living in. 

Again, yesterday was a good day for rule of law. I hope to celebrate March 30 until the day I die.