By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
Is the riptide of both-sides bulls*** and soft-pedaling the insanity and danger of the Tangerine-Faced Weirdo beginning to subside at The New York Times?
Here are the lead stories on the Sunday New York Times A1:
A favorable story on VP Harris, albeit of the horse race variety, and a second lead describing in restrained but explicit detail DonOld's plan to mobilize the Army to round up immigrants, occupy Democratic-run cities, and crush dissent.
What a difference a week makes. Back then The Times was describing the TFW's demented rants as “economy-focused speeches”, and demanded that VP Harris essentially submit her budget to The Times for its approval because anything less was “light on detail.”
As recently as August 4, this esteemed publication was highly critical of The Times's aversion to correctly describing a demented racist.
So what's happened?
We can't escape the suspicion that the toll of withering criticism direct at the The Times's failure to cover objectively the stakes in this election and the character and cognitive ability of the Republican nominee has begun to hit home, or wherever it is that Times Editor Joe Kahn allowed himself to be photographed sitting on the floor in his one good suit.
Worse yet, for King Arthur XVI and his loyal minions, the criticism is coming from people who can't easily be dismissed as obscure Twitter trolls (like us)!
James Fallows has unloaded on the great and the good of American media in his Substack blog Breaking the News (btw, catchy title, Jim! Hope no one rips it off because that would suck!):
Over the past ten days, Donald Trump has had one grievance-and-fantasy- filled public appearance after another, in an ever more desperate attempt to reclaim the spotlight from Harris and Walz. He’s had rallies, and rallies packaged as press conferences. He has rambled with Elon Musk. He has told a conference of Black journalists that Kamala Harris was a phony who recently “happened to turn Black.” He has insulted Medal of Honor recipients and remembered events that never occurred. He has acted as if people might believe that his crowd on January 6 was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr’s for the “I have a dream!” address. He has invented statistics and bounced from topic to topic like a pachinko ball.
Nearly everything he has said in this time has been a fantasy or a lie.
And yet: No major news organization has yet run even one serious story about the state of Trump’s cognition and thus of his fitness for office. We saw dozens of these about Biden; so far, none about Trump.
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| Sorry, Joe Kahn, this isn't James Fallows... |
Just who is this Fallows guy and what makes him think he's got any right to criticize the brilliant, fearless, and utterly objective toadies of King Arthur XVI, who won the keys to the Times kingdom the old-fashioned way: inheritance?
James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and has worked for the magazine for more than 25 years. He has written for the magazine on a wide range of topics, including national security policy, American politics, the development and impact of technology, economic trends and patterns, and U.S. relations with the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world.
Fallows grew up in Redlands, California and then attended Harvard, where he was president of the newspaper The Crimson. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1970 and then studied economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has been an editor of The Washington Monthly and of Texas Monthly, and from 1977 to 1979 he served as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. His first book, National Defense, won the American Book Award in 1981; he has written seven others. He has worked as a software designer at Microsoft and from 1996 to 1998 he was the editor of U.S. News & World Report.
So wtf does he know about politics or journalism? (We admit the Crimson is a huge red flag, but he seemed to have gone on to bigger and better things.)
Nor is Fallows the only supposed Twitter troll to call out the media for its terrible coverage of the candidacy of a demented insurrectionist.
Another equally unseasoned extremist critic, Norm Ornstein, has said:
In the meantime, I watch with dismay as a press corps monomaniacally obsessed with Joe Biden’s mental condition almost completely ignoring the mental state of Donald Trump. His slurring, disjointed and embarrassing two hours with Elon Musk does not even get front page treatment.…
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) August 14, 2024
So who is this Ornstein guy? Some far-left rabble-rouser who rants in his mom's basement?
Um, no:
Norman J. Ornstein is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he has been studying politics, elections, and the US Congress for more than four decades. ...Dr. Ornstein previously served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. He has been involved in political reform for decades, particularly campaign finance, election reform, and House and Senate reform. He has also played a part in creating the Congressional Office of Compliance and the House Office of Congressional Ethics. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
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| ...and that's not Norm Ornstein |
He often appears on C-SPAN, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NPR, and “PBS NewsHour,” among other outlets. He served as an election analyst for CBS News for thirty years, and also was an on-air election analyst for BBC News....Dr. Ornstein’s articles and opinion pieces have been published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Politico, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today. He is also a contributing editor and columnist for The Atlantic.
Dr. Ornstein’s books include...“One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)...and “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism” (Basic Books, 2012)....
Dr. Ornstein has a PhD and a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Minnesota.
Oh. That's different then.
But perhaps the unkindest cut of all comes from a source that is hard to dismiss on the grounds that it knows nothing about the complexities of daily journalism: the editorial page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Boston-area readers will be interested to learn that Philadelphia is a large city south of here and The Inquirer is its highly-regarded independent daily newspaper.
Last week its Editorial Page served up this untutored rant:
Normalizing Trump’s unhinged musings is dangerous, and the kid-glove treatment stands in stark contrast to the onslaught Biden endured from the media, Democratic officials, and donors following his lousy debate performance....
Trump...struggles to form coherent sentences, mispronounces words, and goes off on nonsensical tangents that are detached from reality. His incessant lies border on pathological. He also exhibits a grandiose sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a constant need for attention and admiration that can impair leaders who are so deeply focused on themselves.
Of course, as noted earlier, The Inquirer is not published in New York or Washington and thus in the minds of media titans located in either can be safely ignored.
Even Joe Scarborough, former Republican hack and Clinton impeachment hellhound has had enough. Normally we ignore him and his unwatchable daily gabfest on MSNBC, but lots of journalists and other movers and shakers tune in daily, so his critique may carry the most weight.
After his co-host and spouse put up this graphic,
Scarborough let loose:
"Yesterday, Jonathan Chait wrote a column in New York Magazine and talked about the real media bias, and it's not on the left against the right, against Donald Trump. That in fact it is the mainstream media desperate to just keep — keep this narrative going that this is an election just like any other, that, you know, acting like it's [Bill] Clinton versus [Bob] Dole in 1996, ignoring those extraordinarily bizarre claims that would be disqualifying."
"I've seen it time and again. A lot of people that sit around and, you know, 'Oh, my god, the media, it's so biased. It's so biased against Donald Trump,' and then Donald Trump will go out and say that a crowd of 10,000, 15,000 doesn't exist and it's A.I. generated and they will just kind of sit there and then go, you know, 'When is Kamala Harris going to have her first sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos?'" he complained.
"You're sitting there going, wait, don't we stop the presses on that," he continued. "Don't we stop the presses when he makes up stories about Willie Brown in a helicopter crash? Don't we stop the presses — you can you go down this list of ten that Joe Biden is going — there's going to be a coup in Chicago and Joe Biden is going to be riding in on a white stallion," he laughed .
"I mean, there's just, I exaggerate a bit on that one, but all of these things are just crazy, and yet the press will just take it in because they are so numb to it," he accused. "'What do you expect her economic theory is going to be on quantitative easing and when is she going to reveal it?' it's just madness."
When the alpha rooster of conventional wisdom gobblers calls media coverage “madness,” even King Arthur XVI is not likely to be amused.
All we can say to Fallows, Ornstein, the Inquirer and even Morning Joe and Jane is: keep it coming. The drumbeat of unanswerable criticism is having an effect.
No matter how much hacks from the New York Times and Washington Post claim they ignore the carping of Twitter trolls, when heavyweights like these weigh in, they can't pretend they don't exist. After all, when they are invited by their rich friends to a weekend on the Vineyard or in Rehoboth, they don't want to be confronted by trenchant criticism from their buddies over their g-and-t's and chevre when they'd rather be admiring the sunset over Aquinnah.
We're keeping count of how many stories the Times has published on DonOld's cognitive collapse and unfitness for the Presidency. When they publish as many stories on Don too old as they did on Biden too old, we'll cease and desist.
As of today though the score stands at Biden 152, Tangerine-Faced Weirdo, 0.
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