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The American Press Is Destroying Itself

• AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Thing is, when the New York Times was "the newspaper of record", everyone read it. When they only print what will pass muster with the howling mob, for fear of losing their jobs if they offend, then only the howling mob will read it. But the howling mob doesn't have enough members to support the New York Times. That is, catering to the most vocal segment of the Right Thinkers is a ticket to an ever-shrinking readership, because 1) everyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the Right Thinkers leaves, and 2) the Right Thinkers shrinks as the majority repeatedly throws out people for not being right thinking enough.
  • davesque 6y ago
    There's a flip side to that though which is that the other side of the aisle is also a howling mob. The discourse across the board has become so radically polarized that it's impossible to reconcile the competing world views. In the mean time, there's apparently a belief in the news room that centrists are rare enough that they need not be catered to.
    • phaus 6y ago
      Centrists would be somewhat rare it it hadn't become a slur for both extremes to label anyone that's not an extremist. Moderates are far more common than centrists. But these day's you're either completely toxic and insane or you get ridiculed as a centrist for not caring enough.
      • danaris 6y ago
        These days, to be a "centrist" is to try to take a position between "I think all human beings should be treated equally and granted basic rights and dignity" and "I think only white, cisgender, straight, abled, Christian men of upper middle class or better should be given full rights. Everyone else is a second-class citizen or worse." This is, in significant part, due to the enforced two-party system in the US ("enforced" by our first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all election system), which ensures that when a party takes any particular ideology or position into itself, as the Republican party has taken this white supremacy into itself, it is impossible to support anything the party champions without also de facto supporting its most extreme positions. Get rid of the literal Nazis on the right, make "people should be allowed to live their lives without fear of constant oppression for harmless aspects of themselves" a completely apolitical opinion, and then maybe "centrist" can become a term that's not worthy of derision again.
        • aspenmayer 6y ago
          Agreed on all points. Appeals to centrism are a negotiation tactic; not with the one considered too extreme who should be more moderate, but to the third party who is watching who is sympathetic to the one calling for moderation. It benefits the status quo, and therefore is innately conservative.
          • humanrebar 6y ago
            No, centrism is to also find areas of consensus and pursue them, however imperfect. For instance, criminal justice reform has made some progress recently. Gradual decriminalization of some recreational drugs as well.
            • aspenmayer 6y ago
              I don’t disagree. I view the two as mutually compatible rather than exclusive. Incrementalism is working within the Overton window to affect change within the system. Progress happens in fits and starts as well as by design and committee.
        • phaus 6y ago
          This is exactly what I was talking about. You make a bunch of assumptions about peoples' political opinions that are incorrectly portraying them as centrists and supporters of nazis if they don't adopt your world view. "Us or them" is killing America. Lack of nuance and intelligent discourse is destroying us. There's more to the extreme left than "Everyone deserves to be treated equally and with dignity." Politics in the US lacks nuance. You can be politically moderate and lean towards the left. It isn't simply conservative wolves in centrist clothing. I can vehemently disagree about many things that extreme leftists do and still vote for one over Donald Trump. But that doesn't mean voting for Donald Trump automatically makes someone a Nazi either.
          • CamperBob2 6y ago
            But that doesn't mean voting for Donald Trump automatically makes someone a Nazi either. Doesn't it make them a Nazi enabler, though? Is that really much better than carrying the card and wearing the pin? The Soviets had a couple of good terms that can be recycled to describe Trump Voters Who Aren't Nazis: one was "fellow travelers," and the other was... probably a bit too inflammatory to post here.
  • forgingahead 6y ago
    People also seem to be unaware that howling mobs move on...you just have to wait them out. Stand firm and they'll quickly find another target to bully.
    • ls612 6y ago
      Case in point: remember last year when the governor and the AG (I think?) of Virginia were caught in blackface 30 years ago and the lieutenant governor was revealed to have raped a woman in college 20 years ago? And they all refused to resign? Everyone forgot about that a month later.
      • titzer 6y ago
        > And they all refused to resign? Which is why a system based on policing corruption through public outrage is doomed to fail. You need to have a system that has actual mechanisms--investigations, prosecutions, and convictions--to keep a lid on corruption. Public shaming doesn't work because the public has only so much attention span, and there is soooo much corruption.
        • ls612 6y ago
          In this case two of them hadn’t committed crimes and the third had a statute of limitations that had passed so there wasn’t really corruption involved, just a refusal to listen to protests.
          • titzer 6y ago
            Like I said, mechanisms, not animus. Get laws on the books (or into the constitution of your state if necessary) that provide avenues for removal. Spell out standards of behavior and consequences for violating them and enforce those standards. The mob is not the solution.
      • silverlake 6y ago
        The only thing I admire about Trump is his megalomania and ignorance makes him impervious to politically correct McCarthyites. The Twitter mobs will move on, just wait a little while.
  • octodog 6y ago
    Do you have any evidence to support your theory? The NYT recently hit 6 million subscribers (print and digital) which is a record high. Margins on digital products are lower than on print products but that's not unique to the Times and it's largely outside of their control. Ad margins have collapsed since their astronomical highs of the 90s and early 2000s because of the divorce of classifieds and news, rather than a collapse in total circulation.
• JPKab 6y ago
  I love Taibbi. He is fearless and pays the price for pointing out groupthink.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    I find the proposition of lionizing someone because they fight the “groupthink”, however you define that, quite an odd thing to do. Thinking like that will occasionally result in you supporting absolute cranks, because the heuristic you’re using is unrelated to actual correctness or other useful characteristics. Seek out people who seek to be right and back up their arguments consistently with logic and data, not people who are disliked by people you dislike.
    • JPKab 6y ago
      Yeah I didn't say any of that in my comment. Thank you for inferring that and downvoting it. You made the assumption that the people that dislike him are people I dislike. And I doubt you read the article. Basically if I don't write a full paragraph describing in essay like detail, I have to deal with people like you sitting there inferring way too much from a single statement. Awesome. I wouldn't support somebody who is a crank. this guy isn't a crank he just points out the fact that a bunch of journalists have abandoned their professionalism in favor of in group approval. He's done it for years starting with the weapons of mass destruction argument for invading Iraq. Not that you are aware of that at all. Let's be honest you don't like this article do you?
      • ashtonkem 6y ago
        If you’re going to be outraged that someone inferred something about your post, you can’t turn around and make a series of wild assumptions about my actions and beliefs; it’s inconsistent. > And I doubt you read the article > Let’s be honest you don’t like this article do you? Correct the inference, don’t turn around and attack me for it.
      • dang 6y ago
        Hey, please don't take the thread further into flamewar. ashtonkem's comment may have been a bit patronizing but it didn't deserve escalation into personal attack. We've had to ask you about this kind of thing before, unfortunately. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? This thread, for example, is managing to stay barely on the ok side, and the last thing we need is more of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23510456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23510456.
• phpdragon 6y ago
  Parallels to McCarthyism anyone?
• roenxi 6y ago
  I think this piece rambles on against the far-left a bit to much to be useful. The political dialogue is currently in territory that is Important. Normal families are under significant financial pressures, the legitimacy of major institutions (police, presidential elections, government solvency) is open to questioning. Global conditions are tense, let alone America's internal problems. This is a time for sober discussion of the issues, not calling people "great reality-show villain" or "Twitter Robespierres". There is a real problem that the atmosphere on the left is stifling alternative ideas for one, ironically experimental, orthodoxy. That needs to be discussed. Lots of other issues also need to be discussed. And answering the headline; I fully expect all the narratives in all major US press outlets to be proven false at some point in the future. What passes for 'good journalism' these days is being vaguely correct about what the issues are. I wouldn't be surprised if not a single quote from a political figure has been presented in context in the last 2 years. I refuse to believe anything in the media about who said what without cross-referencing against a primary source. It is impossible to have an honest political discussion in that environment.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    The territory can be Important and the dialog toxic at the same time
  • mancerayder 6y ago
    > I think this piece rambles on against the far-left a bit to much to be useful. The NYT is far-left? Self-censorship in there is one of the core topics of the article. And many other mainstream left (and some not even political) journals are mentioned. It doesn't feel like you've read the article in any depth if that's your takeaway.
    • SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      NYT cannot be far-left, being a huge capitalist institution. It just an oxymoron. It clearly is a far-democratic, whatever the DP agency is, at a particular moment.
• claudeganon 6y ago
  This honestly just reads to me like more media-class self absorption. How you manage to use the phrase “Twitter Robspierre” and then pivot to defending Cotton’s editorial on populist grounds is beyond me. I’m sure the guy managing the Olive Garden in Upper Arlington, Ohio is up at night worrying that the Times Op-Ed page is going to be taken over by the reincarnation of Danton.
• ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Might as well listen to Rush Limbaugh - you'll get the same arguments, and the same lack of substance, as this article, but with far more entertainment. In any case, the point he was trying to make is all well and good - the media should ask the tough questions and sometimes society impacts the flow of free thought. But it seems to Mr Taibbi only the left has this problem.
  • mydongle 6y ago
    And you believe your response has substance to it? Where's your argument? Anything going through your head other than "Uoogh, he same as other guy I don't like!"
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • JPKab 6y ago
    Taibi has fought against the right wing for decades. some of us are old enough to remember when he was a voice of reason trying to counter the New York times supporting the invasion of Iraq on a phony weapons of mass destruction theory. This article is nothing like Rush Limbaugh and there's tons of substance and supporting links behind it. Just because he's attacking his own side doesn't mean he's wrong. Do you think the data scientist who tweeted work by a black statistician about violent riots hurting election chances for the Democratic party deserve to be fired? If you do then you won't like this article, because you are part of the problem.
    • loopz 6y ago
      If someone can be legally fired for any reason, that is the problem. Deserving or not is entirely subjective, and opinions will always differ. Making them consequential, like EOs are part of the problem. It's just about abuse of power because they can spite you. There's a disturbing faith in authority presently. That media reports on these events or provide opinion pieces is not core to the accountability issues.
    • 6y ago
• jgwil2 6y ago
  The Chait article[0] Taibbi cites may be a slightly more effective version of a similar argument, not least because he goes to a good deal of trouble to emphasize how much worse the problem is on the political right. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...
  • JPKab 6y ago
    Nobody is arguing that the right wing media is not a giant echo chamber. Of course it is. Watching Sean Hannity speak would be amusing if not for the fact that you know there's a bunch of people in their living rooms taking him seriously. But we on the left need to recognize how crazy this s* is getting. If anyone questions the insane dogma that has taken over the newsrooms pushed by the far left, then they are labeled a right-winger or worse. Never mind the fact that it causes the left to lose elections when we let our fringe elements take over. there are tens of thousands of people at any given moment talking about how crazy the right wing is, especially Fox news and Breitbart. But where are you when the New York times is completely going off the rails? You're just defending them as your tribal instincts take over. Also let's be honest here: Kneeling before people you've never met to atone for the sins of of other human beings who happen to share your skin color might be something that's normal to you. It is utterly alien to the vast majority of the American public. Defunding police might have nuance to it but it is lost to the American public. If we want to win this next presidential election and Congress in the Senate, we need to be aware of the fact that these ideas are insane to most of America. I can't think of anything that will push a Midwestern voter to pull the lever for Trump faster than watching Minneapolis disband its police department as a councilwoman interviewed on CNN states that calling the police on an intruder is an act of privilege. If Trump wins in 2020 this will be why. I don't want him to win in 2020. Do you?
    • downerending 6y ago
      This is kind of true. For decades I was an ardent leftist. These days I just can't stomach what they're doing. It's a measure of how far they've fallen that Donald Trump doesn't seem that bad (by comparison).
• infogulch 6y ago
  The US seems to have fallen into a game-theoretic local minimum where each party lets their crazy cousin go throw dumb rocks at the opposition because it seems to be the optimal way to drum up fanatic support for their side, all the while whistling as if in ignorance of what's going on. At least that's how it seemed to start, now it's just devolved to outright scat slinging that's co-opted our system of government into a soap opera. It would almost be funny if the poo slingers weren't the very people that make and enforce the laws that we all have to live by. Our political parties need to clean their damn houses. It's not the right's job to deal with the radical left, and it's not the left's job to deal with the radical right. Both sides need to take out their trash so we can actually get something done. We need a way to argue against a steelman opposing argument instead of always a strawman. We need to be capable of updating our opinions without risking career suicide. We need something that allows us to deal with the meta problems like fallacies and trolls and half-refutations paraded around as victories. We need to be able to hold arguments with depth and nuance.
  • JPKab 6y ago
    Extremely well said.
  • postpawl 6y ago
    That’s assuming both political parties actually want “something done”.
    • wmeredith 6y ago
      Correct. And they definitely do not. The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. They are just another flavor of The Party of oligarchy and cronyism in control of this country. There are some significant differences in the platforms, but it’s mostly around wedge issues by design.
      • stefantalpalaru 6y ago
        > The Democrats are not “left”. They’d barely pass for center across the pond. Centre-right to right: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020
• victorbstan 6y ago
  Sounds like right wing excuse making.
  • oddlyamused 6y ago
    Slap a label on it and ignore it! Why think critically?
  • mrosett 6y ago
    Taibbi is anything but right wing.
  • Enginerrrd 6y ago
    Did you read the article? If you gleaned that this was purely a "right wing" problem, try again. This issue is shared by both sides of the political spectrum and multiple different news organizations.
  • ReptileMan 6y ago
    If you move yourself to the south pole, everyone is northerner. I don't think that there are many people in the world that could pass all the litmus tests that qualify you as not being right wing according to twitter.
  • dang 6y ago
    Please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. You've done it repeatedly and we've had to warn you before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• scott_s 6y ago
  Counterpoint, from Ezra Klein of Vox (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/10/21284651/new-york-times-tom-cotton-media-liberal-conservative-black-lives-matter https://www.vox.com/2020/6/10/21284651/new-york-times-tom-co...): > There have always been boundaries around acceptable discourse, and the media has always been involved, in a complex and often unacknowledged way, in both enforcing and contesting them. In 1986, the media historian Daniel Hallin argued that journalists treat ideas as belonging to three spheres, each of which is governed by different rules of coverage. There’s the “sphere of consensus,” in which agreement is assumed. There’s the “sphere of deviance,” in which a view is considered universally repugnant, and it need not be entertained. And then, in the middle, is the “sphere of legitimate controversy,” wherein journalists are expected to cover all sides, and op-ed pages to represent all points of view.
  • hedora 6y ago
    At this point objective truth is buried deep inside the media’s “sphere of deviance” that the media has decided on. The article cites award-winning journalists being fired for running opinion pieces that a 58-80% of the population agree with (but that the fired editor disagrees with!), or for publishing error-free factual pieces. It’s not just the press. When people point out the facts don’t support the conclusion or the math doesn’t add up in a COVID story, there’s a 50-50 chance it gets downvoted to oblivion.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    But I think Klein is failing to engage with the core issue, that many of the positions now outside the bounds of acceptable discourse in newspapers are held by a majority of Americans and considered reasonable by a supermajority. If newspapers systematically refuse to represent views that most people hold, how can we trust their objectivity?
    • ReptileMan 6y ago
      It gets even worse. If you ignore the problem by not talking about it and only fringes discuss it - people will go to the fringes to hear what they have to say. And you may get big surprises at the voting booth.
• yellowbuilding 6y ago
  Taibbi is one of the best journalists in America. Very thankful to have people like him doing this.
  • wozniacki 6y ago
    Entirely removed from the merits and demerits of Taibbi's treatment of the topic at hand, I shudder at your unqualified praise of the man. Without so much as a single source to buttress your point or to qualify how you arrived at that conclusion. Thats like saying Judge Richard Posner is one of the best jurists in the country without adding anything else.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner
    • remote_phone 6y ago
      Have you even read any of the other articles he has written? He really is one of the best journalists of this current era, he is truth-seeking instead of motivated by dogma.
      • wozniacki 6y ago
        You just proved my point. You expect people to somehow know and lionize these left-wing hacks as if their eminence should be self-evident and known to all, despite their bent (which is revealed in the 2nd paragraph where the author calls a sitting President a 'clown'). That's the problem with unself-aware people like you, who expect everyone to read the same people you do. Left-leaning people have been accused of living in their own self-made bubbles of comfy self-reinforcing left-leaning talking points. Thats how you get to a point where a presidential candidate feels comfortable & self-assured in calling those who won't vote for her "a basket of deplorables" or a current 2020 presidential candidate saying "if you have a problem figuring out if you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black" to black voters[2]. You're not helping with this thinking of yours or your entitlement in feeling that a journalist of your liking will be liked by all or considered even-keeled by all. [1] Basket of deplorables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables [2] Biden tells voters 'you ain't black' if you're still deciding between him and Trump – video https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/22/joe-biden-charlamagne-you-aint-black-trump-video https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/may/22/joe-bi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lmdnm2vgmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lmdnm2vgmI https://i.imgur.com/nvFiIJi.png https://i.imgur.com/nvFiIJi.png
• whiddershins 6y ago
  The New Yorker depiction of this very site (or was it the Atlantic) was particularly egregious.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    The New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
    • the_af 6y ago
      Is it wrong though? I've been reading HN for years and a lot of that New Yorker article rings true to me. There are some exaggerations, and I didn't read all of it because it's too damn long, but from what I see it's mostly accurate.
      • remote_phone 6y ago
        “I didn’t read all of it because it’s too damn long” is precisely the problem with our country today.
        • the_af 6y ago
          Your country maybe. I don't live in your country. And I read plenty, I bet more than you and in more languages than you. PS: you're proving the New Yorker article accurate, by the way.
          • remote_phone 6y ago
            I think you’re proving the article perfectly. I read the entire thing. And you don’t read more than me.
            • the_af 6y ago
              Oh, I'm pretty sure I do read more than you. I also don't assume we live in the same country. Keep your condescending attitude to yourself.
• Tenoke 6y ago
  Great article but it's so depressing that it starts with disinformation by claiming Trump said it is a great day for Floyd due to unemployment numbers (actually discussed completely separately in that speech). He said it's a great day due to increasing equality. [0] Twisting someone's words to make them look worse in a piece that rightly blames others for doing so is just sad. So I am asking again - Why do even the sensible ones do this? Why can't we have some honesty and objectivity? 0. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-press-conference-transcript-on-jobs-report https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-press-conf...
  • JohnStrangeII 6y ago
    The article does have an ambiguous "and" in the relevant sentence but it's a bit of a far stretch to get from that to the paraphrase you provide. Here is the literal quote from the article: "Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war."
    • Tenoke 6y ago
      I'd believe it if there weren't so many inaccurate reports claiming exactly that. His wording: >"..ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers.." very much sounds like he thinks the same, and a majority of the readership familiar with the story are going to read it that way even if you can be extremely charitable and say that this isn't what he meant. I know he is familiar with the reporting on this, so if he didn't mean it I doubt he'd be so ambigous in that statement.
      • JohnStrangeII 6y ago
        I think you're missing the point. It's an opinion piece (aka editorial, or blog post in this case) and not a news article. Of course, you can disagree with his interpretation.
• gfodor 6y ago
  Taibbi at this point should start a new news co. He, and to some degree, Glenn Greenwald, have been the only two members of the press who seem to be unable to see the emperor’s new clothes in the parades of the last several years.
  • wozniacki 6y ago
    We've passed the point where people are willing to buy more tranches of gaslighting masquerading as journalism from existing and entrenched players, who have been part of the problem as far as the memory goes. That ship sailed a long time ago.
  • born_a_skeptic 6y ago
    Why not Tucker Carlson? Just for the record, I subscribe to The Intercept and am a fan of Glenn Greenwald.
    • 34679 6y ago
      Morally flexible.
      • born_a_skeptic 6y ago
        on what?
        • mushbino 6y ago
          Racism, xenophobia, healthcare, transphobia, authoritarianism, income inequality, workers rights. Just to name a few.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=tucker-carlson https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?speaker=tucker-c...
      • 6y ago
• dilap 6y ago
  Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23505400
  • falcolas 6y ago
    Which has been marked as [flagged] and has fewer comments than this one. IMO, the dupe flag should be removed from this one, or merge the two and boost them back up.
    • jtbayly 6y ago
      Yes, or at least be honest that the reason this was removed is because it is flagged, not because it was a dupe.
      • dang 6y ago
        83 points and dozens of comments is well over the threshold for considering a repost a dupe (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), whether or not it was flagged, and generally speaking that threshold should be tightened if an article was flagged, not loosened. Otherwise flagging doesn't mean very much. I made the call to take the flags off this one and merge the comments from the previous thread in here, because the discussion has been managing to stay (barely) on the ok side, and the article seems to me to be about an interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
        • jtbayly 6y ago
          Thank you for doing so. If you don’t mind some feedback for the way posts are marked, read on. :) There is no doubt that the post is technically a dupe. I realize now (from your comment) that a post can be flagged either for its content or the content of the conversation. I was only thinking of the former, and under that system it would make a lot more sense for things to get marked consistently (ie if a link is flagged, it is flagged if it gets reposted). That allows us to understand better what things are allowed here and what are not. A dupe flag tells me that there is nothing wrong with the link or the type of content it contains (or the conversation that took place under it, for that matter.) If somebody had not posted the link to the original, I would have never known that the article had been removed for its content (again or the conversation). I would have thought I simply missed the discussion. In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me. Since I was enjoying it, I clicked through to the older post, only to get whiplash as I discovered that it was a conversation that was apparently not allowed here. I hope that explains why I felt so frustrated and misled by the [dupe] flag, and that it t is a help to you in your moderation work. Edited to add: To be clear, my point was not to allow the conversation to continue (though I’m glad you did). My point was that the second removal should get marked the same way so it’s clear what is going on.
• IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  He touches on the symptoms but barely figures out the disease. The problem is that elites and institutions have been stripped naked. When the printing press was invented, no one could have foreseen that the tsunami of information could have undermined the catholic institutions to such an extent, that it would lead to a devastating conflict ( 30 years war) fought over the pretext of very minor religios diffferences. But to anyone paying attention, the underlying current was there: the general populace had been profoundly dissilutioned by the elites, with the information tide leaving the elites stripped naked at the beach. Fast forward to the 1980s and the internet. The tsunami of information has come again, and left every institution and elite exposed. From the top down, presidents ("wmd's in Iraq", hillary's "deplorables" and "tell 1 thing to bankers and something else to public" ), senators ("pocahontas" story), reporters ("under enemy fire while reporting", sex scandals) or NYTs "Fake but real" headline apology, institutions (FBIs "collusion"), academia like medicine (lancet "covid report"), or economics "2008 no one could have foreseen coming", all the way down to mayors and councilmen. We see failures and lack of respect in every corner of elites. The tide has left the lies and manipulation of every institution naked. We must hope that more people like taibbi realize this, and move quickly to descentralize power from old institutions because the other solution is to burn everything down and that usually turns out much worse.
• shiado 6y ago
  Looking back reading Manufacturing Consent at a young age was one of the most important things I did. It sets you up for a liberating life of zero expectations for media.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Q. Why do they call it a medium? A. Because it's neither rare nor well done. It was amusing to see Chinese tabs pull a tar-baby on Trump a few weeks ago, with regard to the trade treaty. When communists have tabloid journalism and hedge funds, it gets difficult to tell them apart from the capitalists. At least "having too few political parties" still seems a reasonable tell for repressive states. (to be fair, ad-supported journalism has had a much longer run than I'd thought it would) Edit: older than I'd thought: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/chinese-advisers-call-for-talks-on-new-trade-deal-with-u-s-global-times-idUSKBN22N1XC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/chinese-a... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-trade-trump/trump-not-interested-in-reopening-u-s-china-trade-deal-after-report-of-beijing-discontent-idUSKBN22N2UY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-trade-trump/tru...
    • vkou 6y ago
      China has been communist only in-name for the past 35 years.
• idownvoted 6y ago
  > It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind I add to that, that without that deviation from reality, a candidate like Trump would have never gotten his nomination, even less the presidency.
• ideals 6y ago
  Of the points the author is bringing up, all of them sound like comments that had they been made on here would be flagged and downvoted for 'flame bait' because they are purposefully incendiary. I don't disagree. Some of the reactions have been over the top but everyone is pretty wound up right now. I don't think the editor of nyt opinion should be fired for running the Tom Cotton piece, but some real reflection of intent and purpose needed to be checked. Same with the reporter in Oakland.
  • guerrilla 6y ago
    And the previous duplicate of this was flagged presumably for that exact reason.
• BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  I don't think they are. I think they are optimizing for survival. Serious news is expensive, and at this point, a niche market. Few people would consume it (or even be capable of doing so), even fewer are ready to pay the real price of it. So they did the next best thing: they changed to please the market in a way that makes money. Grabbing a lot of attention, as cheaply as possible, so that you can sell it to the highest bidder. You think it is self destroying, but only if you see it as from the point of view of a body that should inform people. But as a group that needs to survive, it's a working strategy. Certainly easier to implement than finding a novel way to survive doing the right thing. Infortunaly, this will lead to suffering for the entire society. But that's the way our economical system work. It assumes that the markets balances things out. Unfortunatly, the common good is not something most individuals prioritize, or even conceptualize, when buying things. Often, they actually can't, because their survival depend on more pressing day-to-day matters.
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    > But as a group that needs to survive, it's a working strategy. It's not working though. A lot of people canceled their NY Times subscriptions after the "Send in the troops" op-ed. Massively pissing off your customer base like that is not a winning move.
    • BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      Individually, each entity composing the group we call "press", may find itself in geopardy. But as a whole, it's working. They are just copying each others, because they can see what works and what doesn't. But because everything has a context, and luck is involved, they will be many dying anyway.
    • bryanlarsen 6y ago
      The newsroom revolted against the editor that published the "Send in the troops" article and got him fired. So for this anecdote it was the right strategy, it just didn't happen soon enough.
      • 6y ago
• CydeWeys 6y ago
  I agree with some of this, but I just personally can't bring myself to care about the firings of the editors responsible for "Send in the troops" and "Buildings matter, too". A lot of my friends unsubscribed from the NY Times for publishing Tom Cotton's pro-fascism op-ed. The NY Times had to respond to this. They are a business and their income matters. It's not so much an issue of freedom of thought in the newsroom, it's that they literally can't afford to continue publishing such pieces as it's causing them to massively bleed revenue. In other words, blame their customers. And frankly I'm perfectly happy if the NY Times never publishes a pro-fascism op-ed ever again. I'm glad the pressure worked. As for "Buildings matter, too", what a colossal fuck-up that was. If you're that tone-deaf, you legitimately are a liability, and shouldn't be in charge. The same issues were seen here too with revolts from the customer base, not just the newsroom.
  • hcayless 6y ago
    I’m interested that this is getting downvoted. It seems perfectly fair comment to me. Newspapers can not afford to massively alienate their readership, and both of these cases clearly did just that. That calls into question the editors’ fitness for their jobs.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      It just doesn't really address the substance of the issue. It may well be true that the NYT has no financial choice but pander to the readers who consider non-controversial majority views to be fascist. That doesn't change the problematic effects of such viewpoint narrowing.
      • iron0013 6y ago
        Tom Cotton’s views were in no way non-controversial or of the majority.
        • mellosouls 6y ago
          They hardly indicate he's a fascist.
• remote_phone 6y ago
  This is the most important story in the last 4 years. The press has gone wild. They think they have a moral duty to bring down Trump instead of reporting the news. Because of this they distort headlines and flat out lie in many instances. I no longer trust the media. I hate Trump as well, but you don’t do it through lies and distortion. You do it by presenting the truth. Reporters have crossed the line in the last several years and it shows. They are the worst propaganda machine in decades since the 80s and it truly is destroying itself, like Taibbi says.
  • VLM 6y ago
    Trump is merely the momentary target of the process. The process is dying organizations always go hard left on the way out. Something to do with ease of entryism when no one else wants in, or if there's no monetary or social reward left in an industry there's always the left wing rewards of boastful humility and self congratulatory echo chambers.
    • dcx 6y ago
      This is a process I’ve never heard described before, but sounds interesting. Do you have any examples or further reading?
  • hedora 6y ago
    Trump is part of a long-term movement to dismantle the press. Remember when Dan Rather was fired? It was over a story that had been carefully researched, both with written evidence, and with multiple recorded interviews with corroborating eye witnesses. The excuse for firing him was that out of the 1000’s of documents they’d gathered, a few were forgeries. The reality was that he criticized W within a few years of 9/11, and the press decided that was off limits. We ended up fighting a useless war because no one was allowed to question the executive branch. That led to untold human suffering, and eventually the rise of ISIS, etc. Anyway, by converting to a propaganda engine dedicated to ousting Trump, the liberal press is actually helping dismantle our democracy. They may as well be endorsing him for a third term in office.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• blickentwapft 6y ago
  I’m getting to the point of just switching off. Whatever your opinion, there will be many others who deeply and vehemently disagree with you and do so with passionate, fiery, certain-to-be-correct righteous indignation. Carry your true opinions in your head and share them with no one.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • thisiszilff 6y ago
    Yet laying out your thoughts, your reasons for them, and your evidence and having someone else rummage through them is often the best way to deepen your views and come to a more accurate, nuanced understanding of the world. I'm afraid if our exteriors are not accurate reflections of the truths we believe in, our worldview may cease to develop and remain too simplistic. Maybe a necessary defense, but still, saddening.
  • DenisM 6y ago
    It’s all well and good until your colleagues start shaming you on Twitter that you failed to denounce xyz. And that’s one of the better situation, too.
    • chowderhead 6y ago
      So, is this a real thing that happens? Just curious. If someone shamed me for something like this, I would tell them to get a fucking life and to mind their own business. Maybe that's why I don't get pestered... I'm pretty blunt about not putting up with bullshit. I agree with the article, these left ideologies are absurd. Coming from an independent moderate. Obligatory wake up sheeple etc etc.
      • rootusrootus 6y ago
        > So, is this a real thing that happens? Just curious. It's a reference to a FB employee who got fired recently for doing exactly that. Publicly shaming a colleague who had elected not to become politically involved.
• Shivetya 6y ago
  What I find most reprehensible about this whole situation is that more and more members of the left regulate political discourse, no make that any discourse, by defining any opposing view as illegitimate, bigoted, and now violence. As in, they are taking the position that their moral superiority is without question and anyone who does not ascribe to this has no rights and we are nearing the point of the same having no protection from retribution of any sort. I seriously doubt people understand what is happening to their rights because if this type of moral superiority takes hold you will be on the receiving end more often than not. Welcome to 1984.
  • meroes 6y ago
    Or it's in response to and a reversal of the moral superiorirty Christians and conservatives have held over this country for several hundred years. Maybe it's an overcorection, but that's how these things always work.
    • remote_phone 6y ago
      Except it fails. Look at how and why Trump was elected. All the polls showed Clinton being elected, because everyone was afraid to espouse their opinions. And yet they voted the way they wanted and NO ONE KNEW because true conversation was squashed. And this will keep happening over and over again until the fascist left finally understands that real conversation is what educated people, not cancelling anyone who dares to question their moral authority.
      • ReptileMan 6y ago
        To be fair the whole election hanged on a stadium full of people flipping. If Trump wins in November (like Johnson this year) it will be a better sign that people are pissed off at idpol.
        • pantalaimon 6y ago
          > To be fair the whole election hanged on a stadium full of people flipping. That seems to be a surprisingly common occurrence.
• itchyjunk 6y ago
  Expression and suppression of ideas have been happening ever since the onset of language in human, as far as I can tell. Any explanation that is time dependent, i.e this is happening because of so and so happening currently seems a bit inadequate to me. Any type of "look how crazy the other side is" rhetoric also feels like cliche to me because who am I do decide what's insane and what not? As for the core of the problem itself, I have no idea what the core of the problem is. Vaguely, it seems that people take a side of issue that's phrased to have two side and they duke it out with the other side. It seem to be part of underlying mechanism of how humans behave because I see similar ideas played out in sports and such. Maybe the problem isn't any one specific idea but rather how ideas get parsed by our brain. Or maybe I am the one complicating things and it's a simpler idea. But this whole business of right or wrong ideas, sides, values etc seems exhaustive. I'll just wait for someone else to figure it out for me.
• orwin 6y ago
  This is a strategy to move politics acceptable lines: present extremely radical thinkers in the media, as editorialist, then the originally radical ones will seems moderate. To be fair, the conservative started this, at least in France. Now the liberals adopted this around 2017, helping first the regular right then the "center right" getting elected when the regular right got caught red-handed stealing money (i'm simplifying here). The communists use it now, it is only fair. And i hope anarchists will start too. That's why i'm sneering at "defund the police": it is not extreme enough. "Abolish the police" should have been the initial demands, with defunding an acceptable compromise. But anarchists are not organized enough to make good media strategies.
• remotists 6y ago
  I would highly recommend his 2019 book Hate Inc.
• rb808 6y ago
  The content of 'Buildings Matter Too' article is worth reading, if you haven't seen it you definitely should. To me the editor resigning is not good. https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/floyd-protest-center-city-philadelphia-lootings-52nd-street-walnut-chestnut-street-20200601.html https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/floyd-protest-center-cit...
  • relaxing 6y ago
    The content had nothing to do with the editor resigning. It was entirely about the headline.
  • codernyc16 6y ago
    Is this really so hard for feeble-minded drones to understand? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
• aww_dang 6y ago
  >I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix. Because the dominant media narrative has a fetishized view of violence, racism and victimhood. Combine this with their overarching savior complex. If they were genuinely concerned, they wouldn't silence this man. Logical consistency has no place in this emotionally charged environment. The loudest voices don't care about their hypocrisy. They want to score political points at any cost. Divisive identity politics, feel-good-guilt-projection, blame games, no price is too high when it comes to partisan politics. I expect this to continue and intensify as we approach the November elections.
  • mushbino 6y ago
    Ending centuries of systemic racism in the US is a divisive topic right now.
  • Woberto 6y ago
    I don't think I see the logical consistency you're talking about. In one case, there is a black man killing another black man. To me it seems highly unlikely that race was a motivating factor. In the other case, there is a white man killing a black man. Without further knowledge if the situation, we can't say whether race was involved here either - but in so many recent cases we have seen that race is near the root of such killings. Arbery is such an example, where the killers made racial slurs at him indicating their views towards black people. I don't think your quote is logically consistent; the man is talking about actions taking place in a vacuum where race isn't a factor, which doesn't apply to the current environment.
    • giardini 6y ago
      Woberto says>"there is a black man killing another black man. To me it seems highly unlikely that race was a motivating factor. < I dunno! Maybe that black man is statistics-savvy and reads the FBI's UCR [Uniform Crime Report} statistics each year: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-... (see the upper-left corner of the spreadsheet) So he knows that a black man is ~10 times more likely than a white man to kill him. When he encounters a white man in an alleyway at night he might give that white man a "pass" but if, under the same circumstances, he meets a black man...well, what are the odds? So possibly, even in the case of black on black murder, race can matter very much. Especially if blacks are more highly educated (and read crime statistics or grok them). BTW white men read the same stats.
• jtbayly 6y ago
  Moderators, it is disingenuous to mark this as [dupe] when in fact what you’ve done is [flag] silence the article—something that ironically enough proves its point.
  • dang 6y ago
    That was just standard moderation, which is a large part of what makes HN the way it is. If we did otherwise, HN would quickly become a completely different forum. That said, it's also standard to turn off flags sometimes, for example if an article is particulary interesting and able to support a substantive HN thread. I did that in this case. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512983, and if you still have a question that I haven't answered, let me know.
• aSplash0fDerp 6y ago
  This is another clear example of 20th century scale. They made everything "so big", that they have to fill the pipeline with inferior products/drivel just to keep it at capacity. 21st century scale doesn't suffer from the same weakness, but that should come as no surprise.
• TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  For those in the comments that haven't read the article, I highly recommend you check it out. While the comments are talking about the survival of news media and "tone-deaf" titles, the bulk of the article is about the Overton window[1] shifting to the point where rigerous journalism questioning outrages of the time is becoming untenable, weakening the news overall. It's a very good read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window?wprov=sfla1
  • pm90 6y ago
    I would advise care when reading it. It’s not immediately clear but it uses very hand picked facts to paint a very different picture of what’s actually going on. I call these kinds of articles disinformation-lite; not outright lies but selectively picking events to portray a hypothetical scenario that doesn’t really hold true. I’ll cite a specific example to make this case. See this paragraph: > Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history. What Cotton actually said: > One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. (Emphasis mine) It’s very clear to anyone reading Cottons article that the call is to deploy troops to subdue he largely peaceful protests, which are painted as overwhelmingly violent in the beginning of the article. The author of the current article is simply using selective words to further his argument. The other arguments are similar in nature. So while it appears to be a good read, it actually is not.
    • monadic2 6y ago
      Do you have any examples of high-quality qualitative reporting? I can somewhat see your point but it seems endemic and hardly specific to this post, to Matt Taibbi, or journalism/punditry in any given time and place.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• xg15 6y ago
  > I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... I mean, Lacy does have a point that this kind of question in the context of the protests is nothing more than distracting. The protests are about systematic discrimination of black people. No one questioned that black people can also be perpetrators - it's just irrelevant to the topic at hand. Would nazis running concentration camps be absolved by finding that "well but some inmates commit violence too"?
  • flyinglizard 6y ago
    Do you feel like there are many parallels between being a Jew in 1939 Germany and being a black person in 2020 USA?
    • csallen 6y ago
      That's not how analogies work, so this is completely missing the point. For example, if you say the Colosseum is to Rome what a roller coaster is to an amusement part, you are not saying that the Colosseum is similar to a roller coaster. No, what you're comparing is the Colosseum's relationship to Rome and the rollercoaster's relationship to the amusement park. xg15's analogy isn't meant to equate Black people in America in 2020 to Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps. Rather, it's meant to compare the irrelevance of intra-Jewish violence in the face of Nazi violence to the irrelevance of intra-Black violence in the face of police violence. Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood.
      • arkades 6y ago
        > Always surprising to me how the basic structure of analogy is so commonly misunderstood. It's what happens when people don't have a rebuttal to the point being raised. It's generally a good sign that they're no longer engaging in good faith.
        • naveen99 6y ago
          The analogy might be stronger if intra Jewish violence killed 10x more than nazis.
• braindead_in 6y ago
  First, they came for the journalists and nobody knows what happened next.
• peter303 6y ago
  Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was separated from New York Magazine. He quickly found a platform in other magazine. While I disagree with Andrew a lot, I dont think he should have been censored.
  • tptacek 6y ago
    Where are you seeing that Sullivan has left New York Magazine? (Sullivan should shut up about this particular controversy; he has not covered himself in glory on this issue in the past, and has no extra credibility here to burn).
    • DanielBMarkham 6y ago
      Sullivan is on some kind of weird double secret probation and quite unhappy about it. I do not understand the comment about his not having credibility to burn. Opinion columnists aren't jockeying to run for class president. They're supposed to take various opinions in order for ideas to be more fully fleshed out. If the only purpose of the opinion section is to say things that reflect well on you or cover you in glory, we can pretty much skip the entire exercise and just lay-off all these people right now. It's odd, and I don't direct this at you, but for some crazy reason people think that they should like all of the opinions that various press outlets run. I wonder if they have any idea the various opinions places like the NYTs have allowed folks to express, and quite rightly, too. When I have to like or agree with an opinion columnist, I'm missing something about where the value in the transaction is. I already know what I like and believe in. I don't need to read it over and over again.
      • tptacek 6y ago
        He can say whatever he wants, of course, but should not be surprised when he takes comparatively more flak for venturing forth on issues involving race. New York Magazine is a business, and can make their own decisions about whether that flak is worth absorbing. Certainly, his ideas on these topics don't seem to be worth much on their own merits.
• tptacek 6y ago
  It's a little rich seeing Matt Taibbi, of all people, raising the alarm about "moral manias".
  • fzeroracer 6y ago
    Considering Taibbi's journalistic history and remarks in the past, it is incredibly hypocritical to say the least. He's directly contributed to the reason why American Press is the way it is today so I can't tell if he honestly thinks he's somehow above it all or not.
    • rdtsc 6y ago
      Conversely, we could say that if even Taibbi is worried about moral outrages, things have gotten really bad.
      • tptacek 6y ago
        We could, or we could just say that Taibbi has very little credibility when it comes to declaring moral panics. Reasonable people can, I guess, disagree on this.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • baggy_trough 6y ago
    What are you referring to?
    • tptacek 6y ago
      Matt Taibbi's hyperbolic demagoguery is so notorious CJR actually published a piece asking people to stop dunking on him so much.
• spicyramen 6y ago
  What i found today in Academia, News and even Tech companies that question the left has resulted in banning but never in a civil discussion. Movements like Antifa, BLM won't sit and have a talk because in principle they believe that speech and civil discussion hasnt led to any advancements in their political requests. While some of them apply to past times, today is important to have discussion and freedom of speech A good case is Cadence Owens, she is person that represents the right and when invited to Joe Rogan it was a joke that all her claims were not backed up with science, other example was Milo too. They were put in front of a very smart person and lose credibility on the spot. Is important to keep freedom of speech in all areas and with both left and right
• rdxm 6y ago
  This ship sailed years ago....
• maps7 6y ago
  On a side note, does anyone subscribe to any good news/information site? I would like to subscribe to something good and know I'm supporting it.
  • desertrider12 6y ago
    The Economist has high quality news. It has a slight free market/neoliberal bias on economic issues, but for politics it's just the facts. Wikipedia is actually a decent free news source too, since articles about current events get updated and reviewed frequently.
    • maps7 6y ago
      Thanks! I actually already donate to Wikipedia but I don't use it as news. Do you specifically mean Wikinews [1]? [1] https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
      • desertrider12 6y ago
        I've never been to wikinews before, but it looks like exactly what I was talking about. They have a prioritized list of articles that need to be reviewed for bias and accuracy, so that's really good.
    • pnako 6y ago
      The Economist is completely biased, they just have a way to write that somehow tones it down. You could probably write a National-Socialist or Marxist-Leninist publication in the style of the Economist.
      • thisiszilff 6y ago
        My impression of the economist is that they are unashamed and forward with their perspective. You read it and you get "this is a neoliberal perspective and these are the arguments of of neoliberales." So yes, they write from a very clear perspective, but it doesn't feel like bias creeping in. Instead it feels like "this is what this situation looks like from this perspective." Bias is trickiest when it's hard to tell where someone is coming from, and with them I never have a problem.
• golemiprague 6y ago
  Who cares, for me it is clear, there is a war against the non black blue collar class and the lower middle class by the elites and the blacks. They just decided that the non black lower classes are racist and therefore it is open season to loot them and kill them. It is just weird to me that in most racist societies, whether it is the US in the past or Nazi Germany or whatever else, every class was racist but now it is only very specific class. So if a police person kills a black guy during duty he is doing it because of racism, but if a doctor doing it during an operation it is just a mistake. The media just know who is racist by their colour and class. I am not the elite and not black but at least now I know who are my enemies and who want to destroy my life. I will vote against those people and hopefully there is enough silent majority who will also vote like me. Luckily I got other citizenships to escape to if things don't work out and the mob takes over.
• orsenthil 6y ago
  As humans, we love to create and live in a humanistic world. The newspaper stances, which this article criticizes were trying to be human (for well-being of human in their best judgement, and with open motivation) at different points in time. This article has serve as great whataboutism if you don't the humanistic philosophy, while you are pursuing the truth.
• rickyplouis 6y ago
  Before reading this I had a feeling it was related to the James Bennet situation at the Times. I've been following the narratives unfolding around news rooms and I would offer this article as a counter narrative to the one being portrayed in this piece. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-t... If you look at the James Bennet situation specifically, he willingly published a piece that he said could be dangerous. He tweeted the following "We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton's argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate." While this sounds like a noble undertaking of the advancement of public discourse, black journalists have publicly condemned this act because it will put their lives in danger. The problem is that Bennet and many other journalists believe it is ok to push dangerous, even racist narratives in pursuit of "objectivity". For many non-black journalists these debates are exciting and stimulating, but for black people these debates are validating toxic ideologies by giving them a platform to spread.
  • DenisM 6y ago
    > he willingly published a piece that he said could be dangerous. That’s rich. No, he did not say that. He said some readers may find it dangerous. It does not mean he himself finds it dangerous.
    • rickyplouis 6y ago
      I agree, he does not believe it to be dangerous. That's kind of my point. He does not believe it to be dangerous, but many of his readers and even black journalists have acknowledged it is. At this point you either accept that black journalists are saying this piece is dangerous or you reject it, you can't pretend it to be indifferent.
      • DenisM 6y ago
        Oh dear. You have falsely ascribed words to the guy and did not even acknowledge it when I brought it to your attention. To the contrary you doubled down: this time you are saying that the editor was indifferent to raised concerns, despite the fact the he actually did acknowledge them and communicated that in his opinion other considerations overrule. That’s not indifference, that’s disagreement.
• Bud 6y ago
  "The American press is destroying itself." ...says Matt Taibbi, who has actually been destroying himself and his reputation continuously for about 10 years now. In this piece, Taibbi straight-up lies about the fascist op-ed from Tom Cotton in the NYT. I guess he thinks we're all too stupid to notice when he completely skips over everything that made Cotton's piece so offensive, including Sen. Cotton calling for "no quarter" against protestors, which is effectively state-sanctioned murder. Taibbi also skips over the key problem with the now-fired NYT editor's conduct: the fact that he admittedly did not even read Cotton's op-ed before approving it." There is a reasonable debate to be had over whether the Cotton op-ed should have been run or not, with many reasonable folks on both sides, but Taibbi's take is one of the worst I've seen and does not honestly portray the issues involved.
• sadsadsadsad 6y ago
  the hard left is just mentally ill at this point. sad.
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I read this yesterday, superb analysis. I pay $5/month to Taibbi to get email updates. This one had a note that it could be shared. Press is now just a business to make money and to occasionally push agendas on the owners’ wishes.
• williamsmj 6y ago
  If this is your introduction to Matt Taibbi, it's worth knowing he has a dog in the race when it comes to "cancel culture": https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh....
  • platz 6y ago
    Have you always followed russian tabloids, or is this more of recent phenomenon?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• MrZongle2 6y ago
  I knew to take the entire article with a grain of salt with the first sentence: "Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country." Yes, there are astonishingly brash, illegal actions being taken by police departments. Yes, we're still in the middle of a pandemic. But that statement is absurd, and childish.
• zarkov99 6y ago
  And it is destroying the country. The death of Floyd was no doubt a hideous crime, which should be punished harshly but the narrative of systemic and widespread police racism is unsupported by data and incredibly, irresponsibly manufactured by the media. We are close to a civil war, in the middle of a pandemic, we are all out of our minds with rage and indignation and, for the most part things were better than ever, including the level of police brutality. I beg all of you, do not let yourself be manipulated, no matter how righteous it might feel. Check the actual facts. More whites are killed by police than blacks, in absolute terms as well as per crime committed [1]. Sam Harris discusses all of this in his latest podcast, just hear him out [2]. America is not perfect, for sure, there is still racism, for sure, and the police could do far better, for sure, but we are burning the country down in a middle of a plague, when we should be working together to solve all of this. And its largely the fault of the media. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... [2] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw/episode/MWNhMjQ1MjItOWRmMS00ODMyLWIwMDMtMGFmODAzOTY2MTEy?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwjezI27iIDqAhW-TDABHf58DnMQieUEegQIAxAE&ep=6 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saWJ...
• Bud 6y ago
  In addition to the lies I listed in my other comment, Taibbi also lies about what he calls the "now-discredited Steele dossier" in this piece. Here are the facts: not a single significant conclusion in the Steele dossier has ever been discredited or proven false to date. Not one. Anyone who read Taibbi during the W Administration, and who reads him again now, can readily discern that someone got to him. It's not the same guy. He's flown off the handle and spouts readily-falsifiable information at a truly alarming rate. You can Google for 30 seconds and find lie after lie. It's the same with Glenn Greenwald, who Taibbi is now allied with.
  • imgabe 6y ago
    You can Google for 30 seconds and find a source that supports anything you want to believe. I'm not saying you're wrong, but simply saying you can find contradictory information on Google isn't sufficient.
  • uxp100 6y ago
    I’m not sure how it could be “proven” false. This is always the problem with accusations of conspiracy. A particular man is accused of being involved in a conspiracy. There is no way to prove you weren’t at a secret meeting in a secret location at some time. You can’t prove non existence of a pee tape. There always could be a pee tape. You could provide evidence that the information was fabricated, but it probably wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely accurate. The FBI doesn’t seem to think it is that credible, but I’m really not sure how much that is worth.
  • gameswithgo 6y ago
    people seem to just get that way as they approach/enter their 50s, nobody has to get to them.
  • ethagnawl 6y ago
    > It's the same with Glenn Greenwald, who Taibbi is now allied with. Greenwald equated Michael Flynn's plea deal with the plight of poor folks being forced into bad deals by disinterested public defenders/overextended court systems on a recent episode of The Intercepted podcast. I no longer recognize the person I used to look forward to seeing as a guest on Democracy Now.
• krofoo9nn 6y ago
  Former hero of mainstream journalism no longer fits in with mainstream journalism so of course it’s destroying itself. Perhaps Matt Taibbi is used to being a visibly elite journalist who isn’t on board with a new status quo that won’t benefit him the same. People are sick of yesterday’s politics and looking to remake things. The media is always going on about it’s important role in our political system. It needs a good kick in the ass. Post post modernism has us deconstructing post modernism. No more believing we’re just detached observers living on rails. We aren’t feeling obligated to saying grandpa and grandma and are searching for a new normal from bottom up, as too many are facing existential entropy given the status quo. Taibbi is ‘fraid that what was familiar is no more. Good. That means journalism is being disrupted in a real way. It’s not if it’s just feeling normal to the old experts. Our social institutions may really be changing.
  • chottocharaii 6y ago
    Tying all reporting of facts to a need to push virtuous political narratives is braindead. By the way, Taibbi is doing fine, financially. So I hardly think this is a grudge article.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > By the way, Taibbi is doing fine, financially. So I hardly think this is a grudge article. Just because he's doing fine financially doesn't mean he hasn't lost status, and he’s well into the financial range where more or less of that unlessnit radically changes station is essentially meaningless, but status and acclaim often remain quite meaningful.
  • sinker 6y ago
    Who's "we" in this case? Not everyone is on board with the new left who condemn at whim well meaning people who don't follow the temperamental and shallow whims of "wokeness." Free speech and thought are oppressed and people who don't follow the line have their names plastered online and their jobs taken away. Taking offense has somehow become a form of coherent argument. Social media has become a tool to foremost ridicule and destroy people's reputation. Not everyone on the "left" is on board with this. There's still a large number of us who respect reason, intelligence, civil discourse, liberty. We just don't appear to have a candidate who represents us, or a late night talk show that represents us, because our stances are not principally rooted as being in opposition to other entities. There are a few journalists and voices that still speak and write foremost with respect to reason and in accordance to reality, but the current social and political climate is so inflammatory that this becomes difficult. People like us exist, our existence is just not expressed majorly in media or social media.
• gameswithgo 6y ago
  Is the left losing their minds of their own accord? Or are people becoming more reactionary due to the unprecedented level of insanity that the right has displayed and wielded with actual political power of late? Calls for liberals to be be rational when a trump administration rules the country is a bit odd, since reasoned debate does no good there, or with the current GOP senate. what is left? throw a fit is about all that is left.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    Honestly I think this is it. Being told to chill out on your own camp when you have deranged lunatics running the show who, by all accounts, are an order of magnitude more dangerous, leads to anything but chilling out. The aggresiveness and disdain for dialogue of the fringe extremists running the executive in the US is basically leading to a more militant left wing, tired of being demanded nuance in the face of truly abhorrent adversaries.
  • WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
    Unfortunately, throw a fit is the tip of the iceberg. You see, instead of watching the news, I've been speaking with people, and not online. Some people are starving. Some people are afraid of starving shortly. Some people are being evicted. Some people are about to be evicted. There is currently an international once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) plague. Some people didn't receive their stimulus checks. Some people didn't get unemployment when they got fired. Some people live in states where max unemployment is $365/week, but like ~$60/week if you were minimum wage. This some people number is approaching a critical mass. Then cops are killing people. Are people meant to keep their minds? If ethical behavior is material, then are we not incentivizing unethical behavior by not providing the means to basic material when it is well within our own means to do so? And what king-of-kings thrives clad in white, righteous anger against the unethical? If we chastise those in pain, we will all know despair.
• komali2 6y ago
  American Television has been been held hostage since the 70s by the "American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property," it's not like this is new or unique to leftists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_the_Defense_of_Tradition,_Family_and_Property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_for_the_Defen...
• barkingcat 6y ago
  I think the real idea is that America is destroying itself. Not just on the surface, but it's like looking at a democratic will to self-un-democratize.
• mudlus 6y ago
  This wouldn't be a problem if Section 230 was repealed https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/internet-speech/communications-decency-act-section-230 https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/internet-speech/comm...
  • blitmap 6y ago
    I understand how dangerous it is to have news organizations operating in bad faith. Even if I recognize it and avoid their venue, my neighbors may not. In 2020, these online platforms can reach a billion+ people. Misleading statements, or flat-out lies can create a mob very quickly. I'd still rather have the ability to dissent online, rather than losing the platforms that may be held liable for what I post. Section 230 is a good thing. Removing it would (in my opinion) only lead to de-platforming people the state disagrees with. "Think of the children!"
• sqldba 6y ago
  This looks a lot like a racist piece to me.
• ssalazar 6y ago
  I have read many of Taibbi's past articles with enthusiasm and he makes some interesting arguments in the present article, but to be clear, he has an axe to grind on this very issue. He himself was essentially cancelled for some pretty indefensible and egregious "journalism" early in his career. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-wh... Furthermore, hes engaged here in some light cherry-picking. For instance, Taibbi references a called-out UCLA professor, who is white, and whose primary offense seems to not be reading MLK's treatise but using the n-word in the process- that seems like a detail worth mentioning?
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  > The American left has lost its mind That quote stands out. For all the talk about demanding inclusiveness, American leftwings seem to be quite an exclusive group. They demand some conflicting moral standards and drown out debate by shouting down different opinions. It's quite disconcerting to see this jump over to Europe and spread in the fashion it has. Identity and group belonging are becoming more important than reason.
• SZJX 6y ago
  From an outsider's (not living in the US) perspective, the adherence to identity politics there has really gone to the extremes. It is a paradox in itself: if every group emphasizes its uniqueness, its needs to be viewed, heard and treated differently from the status quo, then how would it be possible to arrive at an endgame of "everybody being treated equally"? From an European perspective, identity politics is quite puzzling. In France for example, there is simply no item called "ethnicity" in the population census. As long as you're "French", you're supposed to enjoy the same rights and have the same duties, and should be able to communicate with each other based on a fundamental set of values and cultural understanding. The idea of "skin color" is very much de-emphasized instead of strengthened, which IMO makes sense if you want to reach a true state of "equality for all". In a sense it is similar to the idea of "let us ignore the 'sex' of a person when evaluating their abilities and agreeing on their duties, just treat all sexes as the same and equal, instead of arguing about which sex should enjoy more privileges on which fronts". Of course, I understand that everything has historical and societal roots. The US society has always been divided along ethnic lines. After all, the vast amount of African Americans' sole purpose of existence, until less than 2 centuries ago, was to be slaves to a superior master class, not to mention the various comparisons between the US and Rome, even up to the present. Even after the liberation, the social-economic organizational structure hasn't really changed. Of course, this is not to say that similar problems don't exist in Europe. France also had a long history of colonization, and the group identity of Northern Africans is always a tricky issue in their society. However, in general, and especially in Northern European countries which didn't get to partake in much colonization, for example, most migrants are relatively recent economic migrants. This makes it much harder for a historically discriminatory social-economic structure to form against them, and makes it quite easier for the society to de-emphasize the skin color and regard everybody equally as much as possible. Of course, there is still a long way to go before any form of racism truly doesn't exist even in those countries, that's for sure. I just feel that the current situation in the US is incredibly polarized, nobody is listening to what the others are talking about, and only insists on pushing their own narratives, which is just not conducive to eventually solving the problems. No matter whether you're on the left or on the right, a dogmatic adherence to ideology and the need to bash anybody who in your eyes dares to think slightly differently is an extremely dangerous thing to do.
• intended 6y ago
  No shit. The American right showed the way. The left is finally optimizing to match the working model.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• incangold 6y ago
  A further discussion of some of the details. If true Taibbi's piece loses some of its sting: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/has-the-american-left-lost-its-mind https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/has-the-american-left... I don't agree with all the opinions in this article. But it would be good to understand better what the actual facts are. Too tired to dig further myself, and that's the problem, isn't it? But maybe someone else can already set things straight?
• whearyou 6y ago
  This was amazing. The fourth estate, news media is so important...