US Politics, September 2024 -- “I’m Not Going to Apologize For Posting a Joke”

The creativity of the species at work.

how is Kandi Cox not a porn name

It’s hard to know how much of the “media needs to talk about Trump’s incoherence more” talk is reacting to a real thing and how much is just an expression of frustration at how little any negative framing of what Trump does seem to matter. And then how much of the issue is a feedback-loop mixture of the two: we’re perceiving the media not bothering to focus on the issue much because they don’t feel like their attempts will be received as newsworthy.

It’s useful to compare with the media coverage of Vance, which feels more relentlessly negative. I wonder if it actually is, or it’s just that we and the media implicitly acknowledge that by them writing and us reading these takedowns we are joining hands in a project of defining who this person “is” for political purposes - so what feels like a harsher tone is really just an awareness of potential real world impact. I think if Vance had said the exact same thing about gender affirmation surgery in schools it would have been a much bigger story.

Regardless of tone, coverage of Trump’s awfulness always has a world-weary feel to it. “Trump said this awful thing, if you even care.”

at some point we need to accept that the simplest explanation is that the NYT (institutionally and at the individual reporter level) wants trump to win. i don't know why people tie themselves in knots to avoid that when they're happy to assume it about CNN or Fox News or the WSJ or whatever.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, September 6, 2024 2:30 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is not true and I can’t figure out why someone would think it was true.

Which part seems untrue to you? The Times has a ton to gain from another Trump term: chaos sells subscriptions, Trump has a weird parasocial bond with Maggie Haberman which ensures them a steady flow of interviews (unlike Biden and Harris, who have frozen them out), the owners are rich and will benefit from Trump's presumed tax policies...

yeah I totally believe the NYT publishers are looking forward to another Trump term, it's pretty fucking obvious

Maybe the money people but the statement was that the reporters want Trump too, which is just bullshit

Dunno how good it is for Harris that the most evil VP in recent US history is supporting her over Trump but maybe it will convince some conservative fence sitters to not vote for Trump

yeah, was thinking the same.. maybe it'll give permission for more of the old guard to follow suit

I was more surprised that Liz Cheney endorsed Colin Allred over Ted Cruz.

no one fucking likes Ted Cruz

She'd endorse Bernie Sanders over that toad

Well, yeah.

Cruz also a huge J6 guy who talked a ton of shit about her & Kinzinger.

Maybe the money people but the statement was that the reporters want Trump too, which is just bullshit

i talked about that on one of these monthly threads. how they just shrugged their shoulders at trump's "wacky" "hyperbole" from day one. any other candidate would have been taken 100% seriously. he was a cartoon. and treated like one. that was the fatal mistake.

anyone else would have immediately been asked "where do you get these numbers that 20 million murderers and rapists are coming into the country illegally. can you show us where you get this information." but trump just gets to repeat this shit for 9 years.

yeah he lost three billion dollars because of Kamala in San Francisco, but he didn't care, didn't care

he was a cartoon. and treated like one. that was the fatal mistake.

yeah tbh the libs ate that heel act up as well

It’s hard to know how much of the “media needs to talk about Trump’s incoherence more” talk is reacting to a real thing and how much is just an expression of frustration at how little any negative framing of what Trump does seem to matter. And then how much of the issue is a feedback-loop mixture of the two: we’re perceiving the media not bothering to focus on the issue much because they don’t feel like their attempts will be received as newsworthy.

we know that Trump is corrupt, evil, racist, etc., we know conservatives don't give a shit because they believe their kind should be able to get away with everything, none of that is new. but there's another story that the media just seems to launder, that he's genuinely saying the kind of shit that would get you to put your parents in a home, he cannot answer a single question, there probably is not a single job on the planet he's qualified to do right now, much less the goddamn President of the United States. instead of reporting on this the media writes shit like "Trump delivers contentious remarks on the economy"

we know that Trump is corrupt, evil, racist, etc., we know conservatives don't give a shit because they believe their kind should be able to get away with everything, none of that is new. but there's another story that the media just seems to launder, that he's genuinely saying the kind of shit that would get you to put your parents in a home, he cannot answer a single question, there probably is not a single job on the planet he's qualified to do right now, much less the goddamn President of the United States. instead of reporting on this the media writes shit like "Trump delivers contentious remarks on the economy"

I just watched the pundits-go-back-and-forth segment on PBS NewsHour, where David Brooks and a "liberal" (usually Jonathan Capehart, but tonight it was Kimberley Atkins Storr of the Boston Globe) talk about the issues, and Storr hammered on the idea that Trump's brain is broken, that he can't finish a sentence, that he can't answer the simplest questions — she said "child care is a gimme question, everyone on the campaign trail gets asked about it" — without rambling out some bullshit. She said that if the Democrats had to have a family sit-down after Biden made one or two low-level mistakes, that it's long past time for the Republicans to talk about their candidate's mental state. Brooks completely sidestepped the question.

Do you have some other source of information for what they believe in their hearts than the endless articles they write that excuse or normalize trump, or grade him on a curve?

Maybe the fact that about 90% of the people who work in the news media are Democrats, which is why it’s so ridiculously easy to get them to treat Republicans with kid gloves so they won’t be accused of bias.

Not talking about the news media. Talking specifically about the politics desk at the New York Times.

I'm not going to harp on this point, but I know or have known several NYT Beltway reporters, all Dems, some with gay or trans kids -- but who cannot, will not, get away from how J-school taught them that Both Sides Matter. It's as simple as that.

They are true believers in on one hand/on the other hand because this is Fair Journalism.

If that’s what they’re doing then they’re going go too far. So far in fact that it’s easier to explain with the assumption that they support him and want him to win.

Certainly their observable behavior is indistinguishable from that.

They are hideously wrong and I have told them so and will be as relentless in critiquing Trump over drinks one on one, but in print will go with the "divisive language" bullshit

I'm telling y'all: I face this problem with my own student newspaper kids. Their training won't allow them to call out evil as evil -- it's Both Sides, Man.

I think Occam’s razor favors Alfred’s explanation rather than the idea that a bunch of Ivy League journalists from one of the most Dem-heavy professions are secret MAGA chuds.

that doesn't explain all the "and that's why that could be bad for Biden" headlines that aren't op/ed.

I remember during the (first) Trump Presidency the MSM really wrestled with e.g. openly calling out (including in headlines) the fact that Trump was outright lying etc, but eventually most of them got there, despite their training making them instinctively reluctant. It was like watching right handed people being forced to write with their left hands.

The ongoing debate over how to frame Trump’s incoherence reminds me of that period and process.

they can frame trump stuff in a way that is just the facts that makes trump look insane if they wanted to. they could have a headline that simply says "TRUMP CLAIMS THAT 20 MILLION MURDERERS ARE FLOODING THE BORDER. AND HERE IS WHY THAT IS BAD FOR BIDEN."

but then at least explain that its all made up shit from a shitmaker. but they never ever do that.

which has always driven me crazy.

and yeah 45 minutes of demented garbage and 10 minutes of barely coherent policy is "TRUMP COMBATIVE DURING ECONOMIC ADDRESS."

which is, as tim heidecker would say, bullshit.

I dunno, the first headline on the WP website re Trump’s recent behaviour is:

“ Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes

The Republican nominee spoke in an appearance billed as a ‘press conference’ that sometimes verged into a stream of consciousness that was hard to follow. He took no questions.”

Is this “laundering”? I think only in the sense that it is expressed in polite language,

Alexandra Petri gets it.

The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine

I found it! The machine! The wonderful machine that they have at all news production headquarters. Its input is Donald Trump’s remarks; its output is headlines. Everything makes sense now.

It functions somewhat like a juicer. You insert Trump’s remarks at one end, turn a crank (you have to turn it pretty hard; the machine does a lot of heavy lifting and twisting) and then — Presto! — out comes the headline or chyron produced by those remarks. I had long been wondering where we were getting these headlines and chyrons. You glance up idly at a muted television and see “DONALD TRUMP DELIVERS REMARKS ON ECONOMY,” and you think, “Ah, presidential at last!” And as long as you do not make the mistake of unmuting your television, the machine’s work is complete. If you are silly enough to unmute your television, you find yourself thinking, “I don’t know what those are, but I would not describe them as remarks about the economy.”

A similar process occurs in print. If it were not for the machine, we would have headlines every day like “Would-Be President Rambles Unintelligibly For Eighty Minutes After Promising He Would Speak About The Economy; At Intervals We Glimpsed Something In The Torrent Of Words That If Pulled Out And Dried Off Might Become A Policy Idea, So We Sent Several Guys In After It, But None Of Them Returned Alive, Except For One Guy Who Just Said ‘The Horror, The Horror’ After We Retrieved Him And He’s Now Staring Off Silently Into The Void. Is Donald Trump Entirely Well? Harris Also Delivered Remarks But Not As Many As We Wanted.” Maybe we should have those headlines, but, thanks to the machine, we don’t.

Just for fun, I started putting other strange, incoherent things into the machine — bits of old horror movies, certain reader emails — to see what headlines it would spit out. “The Silence of the Lambs” gave me “In Impromptu Remarks, Buffalo Bill Stresses Importance of Moisturizing.”

I put in Jack Torrance in his isolated hotel in “The Shining,” typing “ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY” over and over again and emerged with: “Writer Produces Lots of New Pages At Winter Retreat.” Something I can’t print here produced: “With Reference To Female Anatomy, Reader Expresses Disapproval of Column.”

This view is really stupid:

Dana Bash has hit back at critics of her interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying she knows it was “just right” because it “p**sed off” both the left and the right.

...

"The fact that nobody in their entrenched camps was happy makes me think that I probably was in just about the right place,” Bash told The Daily Beast.

...

“The right wing was super p**sed off at me because they said I was too soft on her, and the left wing was super p**sed off because they thought I was too hard on her, or used Trump talking points, which I don't even really understand, because the questions to ask her are the questions to ask her. Whether or not Trump uses them or not—they are what they are."

haha, there you go. she's a gem.

x-post

"The fact that nobody in their entrenched camps was happy makes me think that I probably was in just about the right place,” Bash told The Daily Beast.

This idea persists.

Completely unmoored thinking that leads you to think the right number of people to kill is 3m, because one side wanted 0 and one side wanted 6m.

There was an article a while back (maybe in the Atlantic) about the MSM’s “bias towards coherence” being a key factor in their normalisation of Trump.

When you think about Trump, the incoherence is at (at least) two levels: his explanation of how tariffs will enable better funding for childcare was both incoherent in the sense of being actual gibberish and also in the sense that whatever point he was trying to make also wouldn’t make sense even if delivered clearly.

I think one reason that the coverage of Biden’s declining coherence felt so oppressively omnipresent is that it’s a lot easier to calibrate and emphasise the incoherence of a phrase like “we finally beat Medicare” when you know what he was trying to say and also think that the underlying concept basically makes sense a positive policy achievement.

It’s almost like a reporting equivalent of the narcissism of small differences.

Also: when a party positions itself -- rightly -- as the only opposition to ethnofascism it's going to be treated as if it were normal times.

people with brains do tend to get held to a higher standard. nobody called trump on his shit for so long because everyone thought his base was so dumb it didn't matter to them what trump said. people still say this now on the news! and, again, that was their fatal mistake. there were a lot of fatal mistakes. what if you just decided to treat trump supporters like they had brains and held trump to the same standard as every other person running for high office. it might have made a difference. maybe not though.

does that even make sense? it might not. my brain is turning into trump mush.

it was partly snootiness too. "ah, trumpers are rabid dogs. you can't tell them anything." but what if every trump lie was explained in detail for nine years instead of hand-waved away as hyperbole...and trump was called on them everywhere he went...

(then again, the news likes to make money. so, there is that gain for them in just letting the dark juggalo circus play out...)

I mean, there was a tremendous amount of fact-checking of Trump while he was in office. It was a whole industry. It produced equally tremendous blowback from the right, which I think was sadly effective. Now I think a lot of places are kind of cautious about it. They shouldn’t be, obviously, they should just do it. I think this little wave of pressure on them is good.

sometimes i think dems should just hit trump hard on the tariffs non-stop, really drive it in that they're going to lead to a new massive wave of cost-push inflation. trump is very committed to the tariffs; his policy team have signalled that they're very serious about doing it, and he can easily implement it all by executive order. it would put trump on the defensive on the dem's weakest issue

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/07/us/politics/harris-trump-rally-crowds-size.html

NYT wants Trump to win so much that they did an article showing that Harris has bigger crowds

at least his hands are bigger than hers, right?