US Politics, June 2020 — You have to dominate.

It's almost like they decided to check the pulse of their readership, and of New Yorkers in general, and discovered that they all find Tom Cotton appalling, and the idea of giving him a national platform for his abhorrent ideas, instead of burnishing the reputation of the NYT for even-handedness, has seriously harmed the reputation of the NYT's editorial judgment and deeply undermined any trust that people had in it.

Should've thought of that sooner, imo.

Sulzberger should fucking resign too

this is like Trump firing Barr for being a fascist asshole.

I feel like "Oh, the Cotton thing? No, I didn't read it before we ran it - should I have, you think?" was the last nail in Bennet's coffin.

from a couple days ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/05/crisis-conviction-new-york-times/

Within hours, Editorial Page Editor James Bennet took a defensive stance on Twitter, writing, “I want to explain why we published the piece today by Senator Tom Cotton.” His defense begat more outrage. On Thursday morning, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger sent a memo to colleagues defending the decision. Bennet also wrote a more formal defense expanding on his tweets.

Yet, by late afternoon Thursday, the Times had bailed on the entire affair: “We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” the paper said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

One moment, Cotton’s op-ed upheld the “principle of openness to a range of opinions,” according to Sulzberger’s memo to staffers. The next moment, its publication fell beneath the newspaper’s lofty requirements.

What happened here?

A reading problem, for one. A staff meeting on Thursday afternoon produced the revelation that Bennet himself hadn’t read the op-ed before its publication, according to a report in the New York Times itself. The boss’s failure to inspect every piece of copy churning through the Opinion section is in itself no scandal, considering its voluminous output. The culprit in this case, however, was a collective, shared sense that Cotton’s proposal to invade urban America with U.S. troops was fit to proceed along the usual editorial glide path.

...And much of the attention has fallen on Bennet’s opinion pages. He recruited former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens in April 2017 and watched as his new hire’s first column — about climate change — got mauled on social media. The column itself still bears a scar from that set-to, a consequential correction about how Stephens characterized the impact of climate change.

Other gaffes stemmed from management and process flubs. A year ago, the Opinion section published an anti-Semitic cartoon, prompting the newspaper to acknowledge that the responsible editor was “working without adequate oversight” in a "faulty process.” The section hired journalist Quinn Norton in 2018 to write about technology, only to then realize that she had written about neo-Nazi friendships and other troublesome material. She was fired hours after her hiring was announced. Another 2018 hire, Sarah Jeong, had written derisive remarks about white people; she lasted about a year.

In June 2017, the New York Times published an editorial suggesting that Sarah Palin’s political action committee had incited the murderous 2011 rampage of Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona. Palin sued for defamation, a step that opened the editorial process to a blast of sunlight. As it turned out, Bennet had inserted problematic language in the editorial without having taken basic, essential steps to confirm the details.

Missteps notwithstanding, Bennet has long been regarded as a possible successor to Executive Editor Dean Baquet. As recently as last fall, Sulzberger said this about Bennet to The Post: “Under his leadership, Opinion has been vital, creative and unafraid to tackle big issues, from privacy to domestic abuse to the legacy of slavery. He’s not only a great editor, but a deeply honorable one. As much as any journalist I’ve worked with, he’s constantly pushing himself to make the right journalistic decision.”

...How the masthead of the New York Times looks back on all this is difficult to discern. In Friday’s staff meeting, Sulzberger said that the op-ed never should have been published and didn’t meet the newspaper’s standards — this, after writing on Thursday that it embodied the paper’s spirit. In explaining that contradiction to colleagues at the meeting, Sulzberger downplayed the memo as a “placeholder” while the newspaper looked into the matter, according to sources logged into the meeting.

This particular placeholder isn’t holding anything.

The New York Times is experiencing a crisis of leadership and conviction. In just two days, it has alienated staffers, readers, liberals, conservatives, free-expression absolutists of all political persuasions and Tom Cotton. There’s a saying in Washington that if you’re angering both sides, you must be doing something right. The Times’s recent actions prove that such “wisdom” is a crock.

i guess that belongs in a NYT thread, sorry

I can't tell the dead Sulzbergers from the living

"Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It's not chemical" -- AG Barr uses painstaking distinctions to defend the use of force against protesters near the White House last Monday pic.twitter.com/CQbtqLwfIk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2020

The boss’s failure to inspect every piece of copy churning through the Opinion section is in itself no scandal, considering its voluminous output.

merely looking at the headline should have caused ~someone~ to think twice, but apparently there were no editorial layers between a 25yo former weekly standard staffer and publication. apart from everything else, that's just shitty management

xpost

The boss’s failure to inspect every piece of copy churning through the Opinion section is in itself no scandal, considering its voluminous output.

WRONG. That's the bare minimum that should have been expected of him (or any editor).

(speaking as a former newspaper and magazine editor, here)

I might expect the Op-Ed editor to read the entire section before going to print. Feels like a good use of an hour of the workday.

'pepper spray has no molecules or atoms; it is purely theoretical and any adverse reactions to it are hallucinations'

Water is a chemical

Just sayin

I’m glad y’all latched on to the ridiculousness of implying he shouldn’t be responsible for reading every op-ed before it goes to print. It’s not like he was overseeing the whole paper, just one fucking section!

Considering they have a team of people to read the fucking *comments* under every single article, it does not seem much to ask the editor of the section to read the large print celebrity comments he assigns and solicits.

If I were allowing a nasty, vitriolic quasi-fascist to submit an op-ed to the editorial pages that I was officially responsible for, I'd want to read whatever he'd spewed forth before printing it.

The boss’s failure to inspect every piece of copy churning through the Opinion section is in itself no scandal, considering its voluminous output.

merely looking at the headline should have caused ~someone~ to think twice, but apparently there were no editorial layers between a 25yo former weekly standard staffer and publication. apart from everything else, that's just shitty management

― mookieproof

thing is, the tom cotton op-ed experience wasn't a result of the kinds of things that editorial revision would have fixed. it's the content of the whole thing that was the problem (and an obvious problem), which makes me think that anyone else who saw it at the NYT knew that their objections to it wouldn't be heeded

otm. it’s not as if Bennet would have canned the Cotton piece if only he’d read it. Sulzberger’s first letter makes it clear that neither of them didn’t understand the problem with it. which itself should disqualify both of them from having any editorial future at the paper.

lol “that neither of them understood”

where’s my editor

His complete ineptitude as an executive and manager is lucky in a way because otherwise I don’t think they’d have fired him.

just dropping in here for a second to express my appreciation for whoever came up with #babygate to describe the White House fence

also, it sure is nice to have 45 out of the news cycle for even a couple of days

lol babygate. Apparently people have been plastering over the makeshift White House fence with posters and protest signs.

Inside the room: Trump's top aides plot new theme

President Trump's top political advisers, in a private meeting last week, said their boss needs to add more hopeful, optimistic and unifying messages to balance his harsh law-and-order rhetoric.

Why it matters: They're deeply concerned about "brutal" internal polling for the president in the aftermath of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd's killing.

Behind the scenes: During a meeting of top political advisers at campaign headquarters on Thursday afternoon, the president's 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, raised a question that many close to the campaign have been asking themselves recently: "What's our message?"

...

Between the lines: Right now Trump is at a low point in his presidency and re-election campaign.

A source briefed on his internal polls called them "brutal," showing a significant drop-off in independent support.

• He has a "woman problem" in the words of another adviser.
• And Trump's more incendiary rhetoric and actions — "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" and his calls for the military to enter cities — trouble some of his top aides.

What they're saying: "There's a thought that we need to shift to be much more cohesive in terms of a message of healing, rebuilding, restoring, recovering ... a theme that goes with COVID and the economy and the race stuff," said a senior adviser to Trump.

• "The messaging that works for the red-MAGA-hat base doesn't resonate with independents."

"What's our message?"
"..."

remember when Bill Kristol had an op-ed column

We should workshop some new hopeful slogans for them

“Hopefully Trump will lose the election, and then fall down a well!”

Put that on a hat.

i kinda want joe b to start saying he wants to make american great again by beating donald trump. and then saying it again. and then he starts wearing the red hat.

Make America Grape Again

https://img.discogs.com/ES_5t26aapEd9NDeciGbAMNOCC4=/fit-in/600x597/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1123849-1588093682-3225.jpeg.jpg

I'm hearing the asshole is increasingly isolated

"Just one asshole in a room... getting back to basics."

xp I remember being assigned poster-making as a second grader and making a Moby Grape poster

President Trump's top political advisers, in a private meeting last week, said their boss needs to add more hopeful, optimistic and unifying messages

wait, you mean "best economy ever for people of color" isn't moving the needle for people of color?

Maybe the looting/shooting message could be softened a bit, like, "steal things and you'll feel stings"?

said a senior adviser to Trump

Being a senior adviser to Trump is like being an Admiral of the Bohemian Navy.

said the senior adviser to Donald Trump
do you smell what I smell?

How about
"We haven't killed you... yet."

White House is considering a Trump speech to the nation on race and unity - CNNPolitics https://t.co/wfXkf5nOVl

— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) June 8, 2020

This will absolutely work, because the American people have the memories of goldfish and watching Donald Trump mutter words off a teleprompter in a dazed monotone, like he's never seen these words before in any combination, will totally cancel out the previous two weeks of protests, and the three and a half years of his presidency before that, too. And then two days later, when he's retweeting a video of some guy screaming racial slurs at a black woman walking down the street with her five-year-old daughter, political journalists will make serious faces and talk about how he's "appealing to his base."

Two *days* later?

what, is it gonna be Trump singing "Different Drum"

wasn't that exactly what he did after Charlottesville

I can't imagine what the audience for that is. both sides know he doesn't mean it. oh wait, I forgot Chuck Todd

he already retweeted tweets by Candace Owens and Glenn Beck that bagged on George Floyd, have to imagine this message of "unity" might actually...not be!

A light in the darkness: the kind of galaxy-brained Democrat leadership thinking that will retake the Presidency in 2024 and the House in 2026.

A lot has been happening this week, to say the least. And we’re getting ready for a very big moment tomorrow as Phase One of the Re-Start begins. So I want to make life a little easier for all of us: Alternate Side Parking is cancelled tomorrow Mon June 8 thru Sun June 21.

— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) June 7, 2020

The fence outside the White House has been converted to a crowd-sourced memorial wall — almost like an art gallery — to black men and women who lost their lives at the hands of police.

Hundreds are strolling, looking, adding names and paintings and posters. pic.twitter.com/mXlZpfMAeX

— Hannah Natanson (@hannah_natanson) June 7, 2020

https://i.imgur.com/CFUs7ce.jpg

*squints* there he is on top tweeting "made it dad! top of the world!"

lol the White House put up its Halloween decorations early.

Speaking of which, do you think Trump will make trick or treating this year a stick it to the libs thing?