Seconded. And well said.
This On Point podcast discusses the sanewashing of Trump by various media outlets.
Basically, newsrooms aren’t equipped to deal with a meandering 1.5 hour speech by a politician, supposedly focused on, say, immigration, but covers everything from electrical boats to circles during press conferences(?), and maybe spends a few minutes on the actual topic. They, and initially everyone really, tries to pull out meaning and sense from what’s actually nonsense ramblings of an angry, demented old man. There isn’t enough time (in radio or TV) or space (in print) to cover all the insanity, so instead they pull out the part that the speech was ostensibly about.
This can come off as pro-Trump, since they are hiding all of his flaws (in a way they didn’t do for Biden), but a big part of it is that media still hasn’t adjusted to the firehose of BS and insanity that is constantly spewing forth.
Anyway, I’m not excusing this – the interviewee makes a good point that some evil and cruel policy may not be “new,” since Trump has, for example, talked about expelling 20 million immigrants many times over many months, but it should still be considered news every time he brings it up again.
It’s a good piece, but it’s 45 minutes long, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to listen.
I used to think this was the explanation, and it might be for some of the other outlets. Politicians are human, they sometimes misspeak and go off on tangents. For regular politicians it doesn’t serve the public good to focus on the odd occasion that happens and not the rest of the speech. But for Trump it’s not an odd occasion it’s many times in every speech so by ignoring it you are doing the public a disservice.
But the behavior of the NYT has gone well beyond that. It really has crossed the line into actively supporting Trump
Usually when newspapers support candidates they don’t endorse their opponent and call them unfit to lead. You are also not going to find any republicans who think the Times is on their side.
Times certainly has biases which impact their reporting. They like to be important, they want to perceived as impartial, and they want to be the explainers who make things make sense. And this isn’t just the Times. Establishment media has a real hard time covering Trump. But if you treat as a nefarious “there is a secret cabal controlling reporting”, vs the reality that, this is kind of a hard thing and they just aren’t very good at it, I think you are missing what the actual issue is.
Correct. This is unusual.
I never said anything about a secret canal. I mean whether or not they are pro Trump there obviously rich influential people who have a lot of influence at NYT. That’s how companies work, you or I cannot phone the editor of the NYT and ask them to follow some editorial line or other, but billionaire Carlos Slim the largest shareholder sure as hell can.
Yeah this. It may have escaped some people’s notice but we are living in unprecedented times. The regular rules do not apply.
Sure as hell the paper of record does not normally shill for a candidate they allegedly oppose. But also presidential candidates don’t normally have felony convictions, or have a history of attempted coups, or … Yet all these things have happened and continue to happen on a daily basis.
Pure and total sane washing.
Another example of major media seemingly currying favor with Trumpites can be found on CNN’s website today, where the following prominently displayed headline link takes you to this opinion piece:
Harris ditches the script as Democrats panic about Trump
The body of the article contains zero, zilch to back up the claim of Democratic “panic”, and is actually quite caustic about Trump and his fantasyland gyrations, while soberly noting that Harris is trying to shore up her support among black men.
So why intimate in the headline that Democrats are panicking/in disarray?
For the clicks.
Are you sure it’s “for the clicks”? From this thread, I learned that it’s far more likely that CNN is secretly pro-Trump.
Well that would be a reasonable thing to say if it was pro Trump, but it’s not. NYT has consistently public articles that are 100% definitely pro Trump ignoring his mental decline and attributing him with positive traits that have no basis in fact. That makes them pro Trump. Any other conclusion is ignoring the evidence
Assuming we ignore the evidence of them endorsing Harris and claiming that Trump is unfit for office, then I guess we can make the evidence show whatever we’d like.
If we don’t conveniently ignore evidence, though, then we have to concede that the paper that endorsed Trump’s opponent and called him “unfit for office” is not, in fact, pro Trump.
They claim that yes. But the evidence doesn’t support that claim. If I claim that I’m training to run a marathon but never put on my running shoes and sit on the couch all day eating junk food, then the evidence does not support the claim that I’m training to run a marathon no matter how often I repeat the claim between bites of Big Mac.
The blatantly pro Trump content produced by the NYT during the final phases of a general election does not support the assertion that the people running the NYT do not want Trump to be president
I’d argue that your sort of purity testing is far more destructive than the NYT’s bending over backwards to maintain the appearance of neutrality while, indeed, supporting Harris over Trump.
But if you disagree, we can get the circular firing squad set up.
Here’s the Times once again playing five-dimensional chess to benefit Trump. Sneaky!
(gift link)
Here’s the answer to the OP:
“Anyone who doesn’t meet my purity standards is equivalent to the worst of right wing propagandists.”
That willy Hannity! He’s so clever.
I buy the explanations provided upthread: NYT is mindlessly devoted to appearing neutral combined with the fact that they are really bad at this—i.e., dealing with a relentless barrage of chaotic, insane evil when their political coverage is simply not designed for this.
I think they are sincerely opposed to Trump from an editorial standpoint, but it’s fair to point out their coverage is pretty shitty overall if that’s the case. It is not putting your finger on the scale to point out objective insanity.
How is it ‘purity testing’ to note that the NYT has been ludicrously charitable with its characterizations of Trump’s incoherent ramblings, fascist statements, and increasingly prevalent senility? Especially when this ridiculously low bar they set for Trump is contrasted with the bar they set for Biden and Harris?
“Bending over backwards to maintain the appearance of neutrality” when the facts are anything but neutral is not actually a neutral position. I would tend to agree that the NYT is probably not intentionally supporting Trump, but outside of their explicit endorsement editorials they may as well be.
How is it purity testing to note that the NYT, which endorsed Harris and called Trump unsuitable to lead, doesn’t say exactly what you would say when it criticizes Trump and therefore dismiss it as pro Trump?
Dude, that’s literally the definition of purity testing. The NYT agrees with you on both Trump and Harris, but they don’t use the same sort of language you would in expressing that, so you declare them Trump supporters.