kcar wrote:

You could read the link I posted below.

Not too long to read, just off-topic.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 

"The NYT (as an institution—there a a few writers on staff who aren't completely comfortable with this, but it can't be long before they make the mob that seems to be running the place feel "unsafe") has no problem with concentration of power, it just wants it in the hands of people who think like they do."


I'm not even going to ask you to prove this because you love to make sweeping generalizations without backing them up. And then you *dodge* when asked to support your claims. 

If libertarian politicians had more common sense than I think people and voters would pay more attention to them. No, letting the American public determine which companies should get Covid-related financial support/relief from the federal government is not a good idea—sorry, Jo Jorgensen. And Jo, letting individuals determine whether to wear masks in public has not worked out well for the US. 

I do hope this wasn't too long for you to read, Lazy8.   

Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It.
Inside the White House’s secret, last-ditch effort to change the narrative, and the election — and the return of the media gatekeepers.

(...) Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.”

Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer.

Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.

And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon’s nightmare, and Mr. Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.

“SO USA TODAY DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News.

“This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.

The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Mr. Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.

We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant. (...)

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
Yes, they're so unfathomable and mysterious. Impossible to know where they stand. Who they like/dislike? Even their club magazine provides no clues.

Whatever the spectrum may look like, the bubbles will still be there too.

R_P wrote:

and

haresfur wrote:

This is the problem with one-dimensional political thinking: it's left or it's right. The rainbow is reduced to shades of gray.

There is more than one way to be a fan of entrenched power. Left and right don't define it. Venezuela has an authoritarian regime, so does the Philippines. The NYT (as an institution—there a a few writers on staff who aren't completely comfortable with this, but it can't be long before they make the mob that seems to be running the place feel "unsafe") has no problem with concentration of power, it just wants it in the hands of people who think like they do.

If you can't figure out where libertarians belong on your map it's because you map needs more dimensions. Defining one's political identity based on what other people think is like setting your thermostat based on the temperatures in Jakarta and Moose Jaw.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
Everyone on the political spectrum, in a climate of polarization, has their bubbles consisting of preferred (or trusted) news sources. And some bubbles are (way) smaller than others...

I don't think the NYT is particularly problematic or worrisome in that context. I can certainly see a centrist and establishmentarian streak as well.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 

It's pretty hard to consider the staff as left-leaning anymore when the tea party and trump have shifted the right wing so far to the extreme that pretty much anyone, including true libertarians could be classified as left-leaning.

R_P wrote:

Not worried about Tom Cotton finding a platform, I'm worried that the NYT media bubble so many people are in is getting bricked up.

Here's a little more on the topic.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
I don't think we need to worry too much about Mr. Cotton being deplatformed any time soon. I suspect he's a beloved regular on platforms that cater to the right.

As such, that makes it all a bit of a straw man, seeing how Mr. Cotton's screed still exists (now with NYT mea culpa) and how the criticism in the article is more nuanced than simply censoring a frothing law-and-order hawk. It could've used some editing...

R_P wrote:

No no we can't have that! Some voices must be silenced, some opinions are too dangerous.

Shame on the NYT! What if people read those words and formed their own opinions? We can't have that.

 R_P wrote: 
because squelching speech is en vogue?

sounds like something lindsey graham would say

In publishing Tom Cotton, the New York Times has made a terrible error of judgment

Because we care...

R_P wrote:

Greenwald is one of my journalistic heroes but he really needs an editor. This reads like he typed it into his phone, ran up against a deadline, closed his eyes and clicked "send".

Ben Smith’s NYT Critique of Ronan Farrow Describes a Toxic, Corrosive, and Still-Vibrant Trump-Era Pathology: “Resistance Journalism” (Greenwald)

Is Kim Dead? Your Guess Is as Good as Western Media’s

“Monitoring intelligence” is journalese for “aware of rumors”

Chris Matthews abruptly resigns from MSNBC following controversial comments

TV Executives Celebrate Unprecedented Flood of Bloomberg Campaign Spending

The tactics from No 10 echo those of Trump in the US, who has been known to try to exclude journalists from reporting on his activities, and represents an escalation of Johnson’s tensions with the media, which have been increasing in recent weeks.

What the El Mozote Massacre Can Teach Us About Trump’s War on the Press

The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide later recalled, Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as (the president) called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”

The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were “the opposition” that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.

The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.

What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization. Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.

Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”

Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him.