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> So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain

by pg314 9y ago

> So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump? You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.

panzer_wyrm 9y ago
In the last election people reporting on the KKK outnumbered the clan 10 to 1.
bitwize 9y ago
No one is expecting liberal journalists to turn conservative. What we need is for liberal journalists to take conservatives seriously. If the liberals really are right (and I think they're righter than the right) then they should be able to address conservative grievances within their own framework. But in recent years, they haven't been. Encouraged by Obama's success, the liberal establishment has determined that conservatives are all racist sexist homophobic rubes and can be freely ignored. That's how you end up with Connecticut, currently a wasteland where the taxes are unusually high even for a New England state, but public satisfaction in public infrastructure and services is low. If there are ZERO Trump voters among staff at the Times, that is a strong indicator that the Times reporters are spending a lot of time in a bubble, and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes).
- mtberatwork 9y ago
  > and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate They do hire conservatives (Brooks, Douthat, Kristol, etc) and they just hired Bret Stephens. > (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes) You make it sound as if Alan Colmes, during his time at Fox, was there to give an equal voice to the liberal side of an issue, but in reality he was just marginalized to be the token "lefty" punching bag for Hannity.
  - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
    I don't follow the Times that closely any more, but from what I can see David Brooks is their analog to what Alan Colmes was to Fox. Somewhat like a court jester. But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did.
    - mtberatwork 9y ago
      > I don't follow the Times that closely any more, but from what I can see David Brooks is their analog to what Alan Colmes was to Fox. Somewhat like a court jester. Then I'm not sure why you have such a strong opinion of the NY Times? Also, no one at the paper is using Brooks as a token conservative in the same manner as what Colmes was for Hannity. Brooks even appears weekly on PBS. > But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did. Political views aren't binary. Brooks can have differing views from Trump and Clinton. I don't understand the underlying need to declare blind allegiance to Trump just because one is a conservative.
      - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
        Political views aren't binary. Not that Trump is a true conservative, but ... Our current political system more or less forces binary choices. E.g. take the case of the Supreme Court. Unequivocally Gorsuch is a much more conservative appointee than Garland would have been. Were Trump's negatives so high (in Brooks' eyes) that Brooks was willing to accept perhaps two or three liberal court appointees from Hillary rather than live with Trump's baggage? Apparently so!
  - rhino369 9y ago
    One issue is that the token conservatives brought on for intellectual diversity are almost always the same sort of conservative. The elitist think thank crowd that formed the Never Trump movement. It's pretty clear that outside of Northern Virginia, those guys don't represent mainstream conservative thought. But even putting someone like Douthat on the editorial side doesn't impact the news side of the Times. I think the NYTimes does a pretty decent job, but there is no question they missed the story of 2016 because their news reporters are all inside the bubble. Agree that Colmes was an unglorified punching bag. Fox is the wrong entity to imitate.
PhantomGremlin 9y ago
you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill That's because reporters don't generally despise the terminally ill. But if you want to honestly report about politics, then you can't think of people as deplorables. You can't automatically ascribe all sorts of negatives to 46% of the country because they didn't vote for "your" candidate. If you despise what you're reporting on you will never, can never, report honestly. Your biases will overwhelm your coverage. You will not be able to understand what you're writing about. And in the case of the Times, they don't even make an attempt at impartiality. They don't need to. Their target audience exists in the same bubble.
Karunamon 9y ago
You do when that group is half of the population give or take a few percent, and you want to pretend to be anything resembling objective. Stances on terminal illness and the KKK are easy to take and uncontroversial - especially when both of those groups are tiny. (And let's not even get into how loaded of a comparison you just made...)

by pg314 9y ago

panzer_wyrm 9y ago

In the last election people reporting on the KKK outnumbered the clan 10 to 1.

bitwize 9y ago

No one is expecting liberal journalists to turn conservative. What we need is for liberal journalists to take conservatives seriously. If the liberals really are right (and I think they're righter than the right) then they should be able to address conservative grievances within their own framework. But in recent years, they haven't been. Encouraged by Obama's success, the liberal establishment has determined that conservatives are all racist sexist homophobic rubes and can be freely ignored. That's how you end up with Connecticut, currently a wasteland where the taxes are unusually high even for a New England state, but public satisfaction in public infrastructure and services is low. If there are ZERO Trump voters among staff at the Times, that is a strong indicator that the Times reporters are spending a lot of time in a bubble, and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes).

mtberatwork 9y ago
> and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate They do hire conservatives (Brooks, Douthat, Kristol, etc) and they just hired Bret Stephens. > (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes) You make it sound as if Alan Colmes, during his time at Fox, was there to give an equal voice to the liberal side of an issue, but in reality he was just marginalized to be the token "lefty" punching bag for Hannity.
- PhantomGremlin 9y ago
  I don't follow the Times that closely any more, but from what I can see David Brooks is their analog to what Alan Colmes was to Fox. Somewhat like a court jester. But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did.
  - mtberatwork 9y ago
    > I don't follow the Times that closely any more, but from what I can see David Brooks is their analog to what Alan Colmes was to Fox. Somewhat like a court jester. Then I'm not sure why you have such a strong opinion of the NY Times? Also, no one at the paper is using Brooks as a token conservative in the same manner as what Colmes was for Hannity. Brooks even appears weekly on PBS. > But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did. Political views aren't binary. Brooks can have differing views from Trump and Clinton. I don't understand the underlying need to declare blind allegiance to Trump just because one is a conservative.
    - PhantomGremlin 9y ago
      Political views aren't binary. Not that Trump is a true conservative, but ... Our current political system more or less forces binary choices. E.g. take the case of the Supreme Court. Unequivocally Gorsuch is a much more conservative appointee than Garland would have been. Were Trump's negatives so high (in Brooks' eyes) that Brooks was willing to accept perhaps two or three liberal court appointees from Hillary rather than live with Trump's baggage? Apparently so!
- rhino369 9y ago
  One issue is that the token conservatives brought on for intellectual diversity are almost always the same sort of conservative. The elitist think thank crowd that formed the Never Trump movement. It's pretty clear that outside of Northern Virginia, those guys don't represent mainstream conservative thought. But even putting someone like Douthat on the editorial side doesn't impact the news side of the Times. I think the NYTimes does a pretty decent job, but there is no question they missed the story of 2016 because their news reporters are all inside the bubble. Agree that Colmes was an unglorified punching bag. Fox is the wrong entity to imitate.

PhantomGremlin 9y ago

you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill That's because reporters don't generally despise the terminally ill. But if you want to honestly report about politics, then you can't think of people as deplorables. You can't automatically ascribe all sorts of negatives to 46% of the country because they didn't vote for "your" candidate. If you despise what you're reporting on you will never, can never, report honestly. Your biases will overwhelm your coverage. You will not be able to understand what you're writing about. And in the case of the Times, they don't even make an attempt at impartiality. They don't need to. Their target audience exists in the same bubble.

Karunamon 9y ago

You do when that group is half of the population give or take a few percent, and you want to pretend to be anything resembling objective. Stances on terminal illness and the KKK are easy to take and uncontroversial - especially when both of those groups are tiny. (And let's not even get into how loaded of a comparison you just made...)