Category: Hack Journalism

How Convenient

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It turns out that Uber and Lyft were paying community groups to act as AstroTurf in favor of the Gypsy cab companies.

Hoocoodanote?

At the end of February, an impassioned op-ed appeared in The Chicago Crusader, a well-established Black newspaper in the city. Titled “Why Independent Workers Want to Stay Independent,” the op-ed argued that gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft are a “lifeline” to communities of color by providing “a flexible way to work.”

One week later the exact same op-ed was published in the bilingual El Dia Newspaper. Two months later, a version of it appeared again in Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper.

Similar articles and op-eds riffing on the theme of “protecting” independent work have popped up in local publications all over the country, from Colorado to Massachusetts to New Jersey to New York.

In some of these states the articles have a common thread: Their authors represent organizations that serve communities of color and have received recent donations from Lyft, and in some cases Uber or DoorDash.

The op-eds are one facet of a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign aimed at fighting regulations that would require the companies to treat drivers and delivery workers as full-fledged employees. Over the past several months, news outlets have detailed political action committees set up by Uber and Lyft in New York and Illinois. The Markup found that the practice was even wider spread, occurring in other states and often involving alliances with local community groups.

It’s not an alliance, it’s prostitution.

Who Amongst Us Has Not Wanted to Punch a Nazi

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Particularly when the Nazi is Andy Ngo, who showed to a protest in a weak disguise, and was pursued and beaten by a small group of the protesters until he fled into a hotel. (Report confirmed by Ngo here.)

I’m not going to get into an argument as to whether or not Ngo is a legitimate journalist, I think that those arguments are useless mental masturbation.

That he is a hack journalist is clear though, with numerous accounts of deliberately deceptive reporting is completely irrelevant.  He qualifies as a journalist almost as much as I do.*

What is clear though is that Ngo is also a menace to public safety, doxxing protesters with a clear intent to invoke violence against them and their families:

People in a May 28 protest crowd in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center chased, tackled and punched someone they believed to be right-wing author Andy Ngo, pursuing him through the streets of Portland until he hid inside The Nines hotel.

The enraged group pulled on the hotel’s front doors and shouted, “You wanna kill us? You wanna kill us, Andy?” at The Nines staff while the hotel staff frantically tried to hold the entrance closed.

The person hiding in The Nines appeared to be Ngo to this reporter—who saw him in the light of an elevator as he entered it and faced the front before the doors closed. But Ngo has not responded to WW’s inquiries whether he was assaulted, and has released no public statements about the incident.

………

Friday’s march concluded around 11:30 pm without much fanfare. Word began to spread that Ngo was in the crowd—disguised and wearing a Black Lives Matter flag around his shoulders.

A group of five to 10 people in identity-obscuring clothing called “black bloc” followed the person they suspected of being Ngo for blocks, inquiring who he was. At one point, the person they pursued said his name was Jake. In front of the AC Marriott, the group tried to unmask the unknown man. He ran for blocks until someone in the pursuing group tackled him—at Southwest 4th Avenue and Morrison Street—and punched him several times after his head hit the brick sidewalk.

A nearby man holding a skateboard admonished the group, saying that their quarry looked like he’d “had enough.” However, when someone nearby shouted that the person they were assaulting was Ngo, the skateboard-carrying man changed his attitude, swearing and joining the group.

………

Ngo’s willingness to post the mug shots and other personal information of arrested protesters has caused many of the people in Portland’s leftist movement to see him as something like an existential threat. In his reporting—via Twitter, the conservative news site The Post Millennial, and guest appearances on Fox News—Ngo has been regularly accused of sensationalizing the danger presented by anti-fascists and other left-wing groups.

It’s more than a willingness to post this information, he encourages his readers with a nudge and a wink to threaten the people that he reports on.

Ngo is a stochastic terrorist, and a bully, and both of those are categories of people to be fought tooth and nail.

*Why, yes, I AM aware that this is an INCREDIBLY low bar. Sy Hersch I ain;t.

Today in Hack Journalism

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The New York Times has an article about how how some drivers are trying to form a cooperative to compete with Uber and Lyft.

There are a lot of obstacles that this effort faces, but this paragraph is full of fail:

………

The Drivers Cooperative, which opened for business in New York this week, is the most recent attempt. The group, founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver, began issuing ownership shares to drivers in early May and will start offering rides through its app on Sunday.

The cooperative has recruited around 2,500 drivers so far and intends to take a smaller commission than Uber or Lyft and charge riders a lower fare. It is an ambitious plan to challenge the ride-hailing giants, and it faces the same hurdles that tend to block other emerging players in the industry: Few have the technical prowess, the venture capital dollars or the supply of readily available drivers to subvert an established company like Uber.

(emphasis mine)

Clearly there are network effects, Uber and Lyft have a pool of drivers as well as customers who use theri apps, and both of the gypsy cab company firms have sufficient VC money to operate for years at a loss.  (In fact neither appears to have a path to profitability)

However, the claim that operating a ride share firm requires any significant technical prowess is false, and does not withstand 5 minutes of examination.

The creation of apps with review capabilities has been old school for over a decade.

Claiming that there is a need for specialized “technical prowess”, is a humbug, and it pisses me off.

The innovation of Uber and Lyft were never technical, but regulatory.

Their innovation was that the two firms found a way to break the law and bulldoze authorities into acquiescence, not any technical innovation.

Not this Sh%$ Again

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France underwent a demographic transition in the late 1700s, with falling birthrates, and France is still here.

The Black Death in the 1300s killed off ½ of Europe’s population, and this was followed by an increase in productivity and standard of living that remains unparalleled to this day.* In fact, we know that the plague hit Poland only because of the skyrocketing wages, and the attempts of ruling elites throughout Europe to suppress those wage increases.

Japan has had falling working age populations for year, but the GDP per working age person has been growing faster than in the United States.  (Total GDP has been growing more slowly though.)

Falling populations are good for most of the population, but because of the laws of supply and demand, it means that the elites have less leverage to keep wages and other remuneration lower, so they do not do as well, so we periodically get hand wringing articles from journals of conventional thought, in this case from the New York Times, suggesting that the end of population growth world wide in the next 50 years or so is an oncoming disaster.

Using American Social Security numbers, if the demographic transition results in an increase in taxes from 7½% to (for example) 15%, but wages increases by 20% because dollars are chasing fewer workers (Supply and Demand, Econ 101), the most people are MUCH better off than they were before.

The only people who lose in this situation are people who employ low wage workers, because they will have to pay higher wages.

My heard bleeds for these ratf%$#s.

*Also, the increase in standard of living led to the adoption of underwear, which led to paper, which led to one of the first information revolutions, but that’s another story.

As Atrios Says

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“Time For Another Blogger Ethics Panel.”

It’s the thing that Mr. Black says whenever a prominent member of the mainstream media engages in actions so heinous that it buggers the mind.

In this case, he is referring to CNN host Chris “Fredo” Cuomo, who has avoided covering his brother’s problems with Covid mismanagement, sexual harassment, and general corruption.

However, while he has avoided covering his brother, which is what he is supposed to do, what he did do was, participate in strategy calls with Andrew Cuomo and his staff on how to best manipulate the media.

Not a thing for a prominent member of a journalistic enterprise to do, particularly considering the fact that Chris likely has inside information on things like which reporters are most likely to cover him favorably, etc.

If CNN were as serious about its Journalism as it was about its ratings, Cuomo would have been fired today:

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo advised his brother, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and senior members of the governor’s staff on how to respond to sexual harassment allegations made earlier this year by women who had worked with the governor, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Cuomo, one of the network’s top stars, joined a series of conference calls that included the Democratic governor, his top aide, his communications team, lawyers and a number of outside advisers, according to the people familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private sessions.

………

The behind-the-scenes strategy offered by Chris Cuomo, who anchors CNN’s 9 p.m. nightly newscast, cuts against the widely accepted norm in journalism that those reporting the news should not be involved in politics.

“If you are actively advising a politician in trouble while being an on-air host on a news network, that’s not okay,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a New Yorker staff writer.

“Not okay ,” is putting this mildly.

In a statement, CNN acknowledged that Chris Cuomo took part in the strategy sessions, saying his involvement was a mistake.

………

The network said Cuomo will not be disciplined.

He should be fired  ……… Out of a cannon ……… And into the sun.

CNN should have taken Fredo out for a ride on their boat.

Worst Headline Ever

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The good folks at the Gray Lady wrote a story on Marine Le Pen, the right wing nationalist running for French President.

It’s a rather soft article, highlighting things like her cat breeding, which is kind of classic New York Times, normalizing awful people, but whoever wrote the hed, and it’s probably an editor, and not the author, should be fired, because, “On the Scrappy Fringes of French Politics, Marine Le Pen Tries to Rebrand,” is a simply horrific exercise in editorial discretion.

It is simply, “Bad beyond all dimensions of of possible badness,” to quote Berkeley Breathed.

Today in Hack Journalism

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It’s the WSJ, so it’s no surprise that their article on a tax break primarily used by speculators is cast as a betrayal of the sacred obligation that we have to family farmers.

It’s also not true, but who needs truth if it’s dull, I guess

President Biden has said his tax proposals would make big business and wealthy investors pay their fair share.

His package would also likely deliver a blow to American farm owners by limiting a longstanding tax break. The provision allows landowners to defer paying capital-gains tax when they sell investment property and put the proceeds toward the purchase of other real estate.

Farmers for generations have used the tax break to cheaply and quickly relocate farm operations to lands with better soil, diversify the crops they grow and consolidate land holdings. Some have used it when exiting the farming business at retirement. Farm owners in 2012 held 915 million acres, about 40% of the land in the continental U.S.

No, this has been used as a subsidy that primarily benefits speculators, farmers do not change farm the same way that the rest of us change socks, but Wall Street banksters do.

Farmers were hit four years ago when the Trump administration narrowed the use of this tax deferment, known as a 1031 like-kind exchange. The provision, named for a section of the tax code, used to apply to many types of personal property, including farm equipment and livestock. Farmers exchanged their old tractors and upgraded to newer and better ones without having to pay tax on their trade-ins.

A subsidy to farm equipment makers more than it is a tax break to farmers.

Also, who trades in a car or a tractor for more than they paid for it?  There is no gain to tax.

………

Farmers and land brokers said the latest proposal, capping the profits from land sales that can be tax-deferred at $500,000, would add another burden on farming.

Mr. Biden’s proposal would also raise the top capital-gains tax rate that land sellers would have to pay to 43.4% from 23.8%. It would impose capital-gains taxes at death on appreciated asset gains, a change farmers worry will make it difficult to keep land in the family. However, the Agriculture Department has said the plan would exempt farmers from those taxes at death, if the farm remains both owned and operated by family members.

Family farmers are being pushed out of farming as a result of rents charged by seed and agricultural companies, equipment companies selling them equipment that they cannot maintain, and speculators  who drive up the price of land for would be new farmers.

This tax break enriches these who prey on the family farmer, not the family farmer.

Quote of the Day

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He’s a Hateful, Bigoted Rich Prick, Always Has Been and Always Will Be

—Scott Lemieux on the fact that in high school, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson declared himself a member of the “Dan White” society while in high school.

Perhaps this is the story that @TuckerCarlson was trying to get ahead of. In his college yearbook, he listed himself as a member of the “Dan White Society.”

Dan White was the man who murdered Harvey Milk. pic.twitter.com/TYklyfC8tS

— Travis Akers (@travisakers) April 21, 2021

Roll Tape!

For those of you who are not up on the history, Dan White was a homophobic politician who assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk, and then got a slap on the wrist because of Twinkies. (Not The Onion)

If you are inclined to think that he was “just” a collete school student at the time, understand that he spent much of his childhood in San Francisco, and knew exactly what he was saying.

Tucker Carlson is a complete f%$#ing tool.

Every Single Damn Obituary Relegates His Greatest Accomplishment to the 3rd Paragraph

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Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale died last night, and every single obituary downplays his role in passing the fair housing act. 

He sponsored the bill, and got it through the senate after years of effort.

The above link does not even mention the Fair Housing Act, relegating it to the throw away line describing him as a, “Champion of such liberal causes as open housing and anti-poverty programs.”

And his whole life is reduced to, “The guy wot got destroyed in the 1984 Presidential election.”

This is a disgrace.

Headline of the Day

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Political Reporters Are Hurting America, So How about Getting Rid Of Most Of Them?

—Dan Froomkin

He’s completely right.

The coverage of politics in isolation from actually doing stuff produces hack journalism focusing on, “The Game.”

Political reporters know nothing about anything BUT politics, and hold this as a badge of honor, and because their beat gives them license to write about everything, because politics is more often than not a triviality, it touches on everything.

Gee, Now There’s a Surprise

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It turns out that the evidence that Russia put bounties on American Troops was decidedly sketchy.

The technical term for this is, “low to moderate confidence.”  The layman’s term for this is, “Likely bullsh%$.”

Color me not surprised. This allegation has been made against the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

It’s bullsh%$.  It’s always been bullsh%$.

When you invade someone’s country, the occupied citizenry will try to kill you for free:

It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

………

“We have noted our conclusion of the review that we conducted on the bounties issue and we have conveyed through diplomatic, intelligence, and military channels strong, direct messages on this issue, but we are not specifically tying the actions we are taking today to that matter,” a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.

According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting”–raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.

Given the rather dubious history regarding intelligence reports from tortured prisoners, I think that it’s safe to call bullshit, particularly since any halfway competent intelligence agency would be using cut-outs if they were making payments.

Also, there never was a justification for the Russians to do this.

Also, with 2,312 deaths in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, if the Russians wanted to kill Americans, they would have done a better job.

Always Read the Footnotes

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holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR

— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021

The Tweet that led me to the footnote

A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.

I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.

They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly.  (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.

After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:

*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.

They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).

I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.

It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.

Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:

  • Publishing articles suggesting from racist eugenicist (and one time cross-burner) Charles Murray  that Black people were genetically inferior.
  • Published articles on public health paid for by the tobacco industry.
  • Brought in serial fabulist Stephen Glass to TNR, and published serial plagiarist and fabulist Ruth Shalit.

And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR. 

H/T Atrios.

Headline of the Day

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This Is the Most Embarrassing News Clip in American Transportation History

—Vice Magazine on Elon Musk’s recent video of how its Vegas tunnel “works”.

Seriously, this is literally the Disney ride “Autopia” at about twice the speed of the original.

This is not transportation, it’s not even a demonstrator of the technology.  This is a rip-off of a Disney ride by the greatest humbug of our generation.

But The Boring Company’s cost per mile isn’t as impressive as it sounds. This project avoided all the expensive parts of a mass transportation tunnelling project. The station is a big hole in the ground with a flat parking lot and doesn’t have pedestrian entrances, walkways, platforms, mezzanines, etc. The tunnel itself is also very skinny. But most importantly, tunnelling itself is never the part of American mass transit projects that create the cost overruns, which is why on-street and elevated rail projects also cost way more in the United States than elsewhere. In other words, The Boring Company avoided the most complex and costly aspects of transportation projects, shrunk it in both scale and the number of people it will supposedly serve, then bragged about how little it cost to build.

As Atrios Says

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“Time for another blogger ethics panel.”

It’s a catch phrase of his dating back to the early aughts, that he used, and still uses, whenever a reporter or columnist at one of the major news outlets is caught profiting off of an undisclosed conflict of interest.

This time, it’s David Brooks, who was caught taking a full time salary from the Aspen Institute as well as running the Weave Project,  both of which have taken money from Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the Walton (Walmart) family, and a plethora of corporate sources that he routinely shills for.

Brooks has resigned from the Aspen institute, the status of the rest of his affairs is unclear:

David Brooks has resigned from his position at the Aspen Institute following reporting by BuzzFeed News about conflicts of interest between the star New York Times columnist and funders of a program he led for the think tank.

Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that editors approved Brooks’s involvement with Aspen in 2018, when he launched a project called Weave. But current editors weren’t aware he was receiving a salary for Weave.

Spoiler, he is receiving a salary for Weave.

………

Brooks’s resignation comes after BuzzFeed News discovered further evidence of conflicts of interest and entanglements with corporate and billionaire donors to Weave.

Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.

………

If you know someone who lives alone ask them to join NextDoor, which is Facebook for neighborhoods. It helps them stay in touch with those right around them. Vital in a crisis.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 14, 2020

Over the past 24 hours, BuzzFeed News discovered new evidence of potential conflicts. On March 15 of last year, as Americans faced a deadly pandemic, Brooks appeared on “Meet The Press”and offered some advice.

“We need to take moral steps to make ourselves decent neighbors to each other as we go through this thing. I think people should get on Nextdoor, this sort of ‘Facebook for neighbors,’” he said.

Left unsaid by Brooks was that Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, had donated $25,000 to Weave. A day before his appearance on the nationally televised NBC program, Brooks also tweetedto his nearly 250,000 followers, “If you know someone who lives alone, ask them to join NextDoor.”

Another new revelation: Last month, Brooks appeared in a Walton Family Foundation video and did not disclose that the organization, run by the billionaire family that founded Walmart, also funds his project.

Brooks’s failure to disclose these conflicts of interest added to the string of ethically questionable actions by the columnist and author related to his work on Weave.

Brooks will survive this, he fits the NYT narrative for a, “Reasonable Conservative,” but in a less toxic workplace than the Times newsroom, he would be gone.

It’s Unemployment Claim Thursday

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And in a REMARKABLY circuitous headline, the Wall Street Journal announces that, “U.S. Jobless Claims Hold Nearly Steady,” because they rose only 9,000 from the (revised upward from 730,000 to 736,000) jobless claims of the week before.

It is a remarkably awful headline, and you know that if claims had fallen by 9,000 it would have been called a drop:

Filings for unemployment benefits in the latter half of February reached their lowest level in nearly three months amid signs of slow labor-market improvement.

The Labor Department said jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose slightly to 745,000 for the week ended Feb. 27, from a revised 736,000 the prior week. The four week moving-average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility in claims numbers, was just under 800,000, its lowest level since early December.

So the numbers went up, and are still higher than they were in early December.

Screwing with headlines to minimize this is not a good look.

Tomorrow’s job numbers should be interesting.

FWIW, I don’t think that the Texas energy f%$#-up had much to do with this number, while there were certainly many people in Texas unable to work because of their delusional free-market energy dystopia, it is abundantly clear that none of them could file, because there was no power to run the unemployment offices.

Once Again, It’s Called Money

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Once again, we have someone writing about a skills shortage, and suggesting that the solution is to sex it up:

Because hiring manager Jim McKeown was talking to an audience, he wasn’t sitting at a desk, his head in hands, but he may as well have been.

 “I don’t know where we are heading with manufacturing,” he said, clearly discouraged. “The last 10 years have been difficult.”

 McKeown wasn’t talking about sales, or business, or the supply chain, or the cost of raw materials – all important to such companies as Kingsbury Inc., which manufactures bearings in Philadelphia and Hatboro.

 For him, and about 30 area manufacturers attending Tuesday’s meeting of the Manufacturing Alliance of Bucks and Montgomery Counties, the issue is manpower.
There’s not enough of it – and what there is is not young.

 ………

 But, he said, manufacturers need to romance them – to show them how their work on a product makes a difference, maybe keeping a jetliner aloft or a heart beating.

 ………

 When interviewing millennials, make sure there is someone close to their age on the interviewing panel, suggested audience member John Trainor, staffing manager at Javan Engineering Inc. in Fort Washington

 ………

 For a quick fix, update a stodgy website so its text and photos tell a compelling story about the company, its products and people, said audience member Clara Console, a human-resources consultant.

 ………

 “Millennials want to see their future,” which does not include working on tools “their grandfathers might have used.”

(emphasis mine)

The word for this self absorbed delusional cluelessness is “bullsh%$”.

One only need look at history:  Until auto workers pay was essentially doubled in 1914, they had trouble recruiting and keeping workers:

At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford’s turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.

Henry Ford had a 371% turn over rate.

He solved it with money.

If you cannot find skilled machinists, or tool makers, or bull semen collectors, Econ 101 gives you the answer: pay them more.

If the author of this article were a journalist, instead of a stenographer, they would have known that.

H/t Atrios.

Sh%$ I Don’t Care About

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Musical chairs amongst the hired guns at political campaigns.

I get it: Paul Manafort, Trump’s now-former campaign manager has resigned.

This is definitely news, and it should be covered by normal news sources.  (I am not a news source, I am an essayist whose writing is driven by lazy thinking, dubious sourcing sourcing, and the worst writing on the internet™.)

I just don’t think that it should be page 1 news, even below the fold on a slow news day:  It’s just inside baseball.

Read Matt Taibbi

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His essay on the hacktacular nature of today’s press. Here is the start:

Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news.

“For news about Russia, Radio Liberty,” he said. “For news about America, Soviet newspapers.” He smiled. “Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others.”

American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none – this basically means we have no credible news media left. Apart from a few brave islands of resistance, virtually all the major news organizations are now fully in the tank for one side or the other.

Go read the rest.

Adding to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named

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I’ve always though that the Olympics was a Petri dish for corruption, violent nationalist tendencies, and egregiously bad “journalism”.

This year, it appears that NBC has outdone itself in its coverage.

It’s bad.

It’s really bad.

It’s really, really, really bad.

Seriously, it ain’t good.

I’m adding the Olympics, and discussions of Olympic coverage to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, absent something of Munich level catastrophe.