The point in mentioning them, and the LA Times, and the Washington Post, in this thread, is to draw a contrast to the New York Times. IMHO the progressive meltdown over New York Times principled multisided coverage is out of hand. I know some here disagree with some of those principles, but the fact that NYT’s family-led ownership cares about these principles is why the New York Times is much more likely to remain critical of the administration, in event Trump wins a second term, than the flagships of other news gathering organizations:
I don’t see much overtly pro-Trump content in the Times, but I do see Trump-voter apologetics, as professedly non-Trumpist opinion writers explain what drives his followers. It would be all right they stayed factually accurate, but they don’t.
For instance, yesterday there was this guest opinion piece by one Adam Seessel:
But here’s the thing. The author writes unequivocally that eggs cost nearly three times as much as they did four years ago, but, well, I bought these yesterday:
And I’m damn sure I wasn’t buying 18-count large cage-free eggs for $2.10 in 2020. They were probably cheaper then, but nowhere near as cheap as that. When the price of a basic food almost triples in four years, sure it’s scary. But when a guest opinion writer makes that claim, and the host newspaper doesn’t fact check that claim, that’s plain negligence.
If Trump wins it will be just as much because the things we fail to do as it will be because people actually voted for him. And fact-checking at the American newspaper of record is another one of those things.
I recall repeatedly getting a dozen large eggs for under 75 cents back then, not on a promotional sale, at Lidl, the discount market we use. Was Walmart higher? Yes, which is one reason why we go to Lidl. Aldi? We do not go there. But that’s a bigger chain and their prices are usually close to Lidl.
Those who have to watch every dollar will remember the lowest price.
Yeah, cheap eggs were cheaper, and also more subject to price swings.
I’ve been canvassing for the past week, and yes, inflation is the number one reason people cite why they want trump back. I argue that if he gets his tarrifs, inflation is going to be far worse. But people feel they were better off under Trump, and are struggling now.
Number two reason is concerns around immigration. The weirdest was a woman who likes trump because “he’s strong, and we need someone strong to stand up to Russia.”
They are in my state, because under a new law that went into effect in Jamuary all eggs sold to consumers are required to be cage-free. It caused a price spike earlier this year when it went into effect ($5/dozen was the going rate for awhile) but it’s come back down significantly since then.
Nothing’s written in stone, but if you mean the way the EC can flip the popular vote, the advantage was almost 4.5% in 2020. That was Joe Biden’s edge in the popular vote, but his edge in the six key battleground states that put him over the top was ~315K. In just those states, that amounted to ~1.2 percent of the total votes cast. Measured against the national popular vote of ~156M, 315K works out to 0.2 percent; hardly more than a rounding error.
Thanks to the EC, Biden just barely won despite his decisive margin in the popular vote. Had he lost some of those six states, Trump would be wrapping up his second term now and we would have spent the last three and a half years lamenting the fact that he won another election despite a negative popular vote margin of ~6.5M, more than twice what he lost the popular vote by in 2016.
I can’t remember ever seeing eggs for 75 cents. Were they small or medium? It’s possible that they just don’t sell the smaller sizes in my region, plus additional regulations on how the eggs are produced, that accounts for it.
Seessel actually provides a link about the eggs issue, where you read that much of the price hike was due to covid-related issues, plus an avian flu outbreak which I’d totally forgotten about. Of course these things are hardly the fault of any administration, but it would have been far more responsible if the author had mentioned this in his own article. Anyone reading the article in hard copy wouldn’t have access to the link.
A growing number of current and former journalists at The Washington Post are criticizing the legacy newspaper after owner Jeff Bezos decided to withhold a planned editorial endorsement for president for the first time in 36 years.
…
Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan also announced his resignation on Friday following the non-endorsement. In an interview with CNN, Kagan said the move indicated Bezos’ concerning relationship with Trump. “This is clearly an effort by Bezos to try to get on Trump’s good side in advance of his presidency,” he said.
A NY Times article today (gift link below) I find subtly but effectively pro-Trump, because it almost never mentions that ONE SIDE is terrorizing the local protectors of democracy. Reading the article, one would have almost no idea WHO is perpetrating these abominable threats. Every paragraph, and the headline, should include some mention of Republicans/Trumpists/MAGA cultists.
Political violence doesn’t just “loom.” SPECIFIC PEOPLE, operating on behalf of a SPECIFIC CAUSE, perpetrate it.
A good chunk of the remainder of the article centers around the travails of a local official working on election security, who has faced lurid death threats. She’s identified as a Democrat, which makes it prettty easy to connect the dots to who’s threatening her.
All in all a fair and factual article. An accompanying, more explicit editorial would have been nice.
Again, it’s probably too late to move the needle, but all of this NY Times bashing about sane-washing may have made a difference there (not the bashing in this thread – it’s all over various media outlets).
Not at all! But, their headline writers have really changed their tune in the last week or two, and they have dialed back the sane-washing in a big way.
Oh, and calling something that’s insane “insane” is not one-sided coverage. It’s just coverage. Or, substitute “racist” or “unhinged” or “dangerous”, etc.
