i love this image pic.twitter.com/Ssqpfpiip0— Mae is gae (@theepictheymer) April 11, 2020
This satire is a marvelous take-down of Fox News.
Tag: Hack Journalism
Some Observation on the NY Times Article About Joe Biden Sexual Assault Allegations
It is significant that the New York Times is finally publishing something about the Biden allegations, if just because it means that the story is now officially not beyond the pale.
While the Times article is marginally less dismissive than the ones found in WaPo or Salon, I would note that it has information that confirms Ms Reade’s account of events.
Of course, they wait to paragraph 25 to note the claim that:
The staff declined to take action, Ms. Reade said, after which she filed a written complaint with a Senate personnel office. She said office staff took away most of her duties, including supervising the interns; assigned her a windowless office; and made the work environment uncomfortable for her.
And then a few paragraphs later (paragraph 38) they note:
At the time of the alleged assault, Ms. Reade said she was responsible for coordinating the interns in the office. Two former interns who worked with her said they never heard her describe any inappropriate conduct by Mr. Biden or saw her directly interact with him in any capacity but recalled that she abruptly stopped supervising them in April, before the end of their internship. Others who worked in the office at the time said they remembered Ms. Reade but not any inappropriate behavior.
(emphasis mine)
I’m not sure that this information should have been in the first paragraph, but it should have been in the first 5 paragraphs, and the statement by the interns about her abrupt removal should have been noted immediately following.
Talk about burying the lede.
Also, note that Fox News, of all people, pointed out a stealth edit of the article: (Deletion in red)
No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
All the news that’s fit to print, huh?
Find out What What He’s Been Smoking, and Have a Few Ounces Sent to My Chamber
Over at The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim are suggesting that that there should be a Joe Biden/Bernie Sanders Presidential ticket.
Seriously, which ever person is at the top of the ticket, it is pretty likely that they will be succeeded by their VP, and their policies are diametrically opposed.
Additionally, the DemocraticParty establishment (there is no Democratic Party establishment) would would vociferously oppose Sanders as a running mate, (It would interfere with their keeping their phony baloney jobs) and Sanders supporters would oppose the selection of Biden with equal vigor given that they consider Biden to have been on the wrong side of every major issue throughout his career.
This isn’t journalism, it’s bad fan fiction.
Today in Hack Journalism
The New York Times has a particularly egregious article about Russian meddling in elections.
Most of the article is non specific threats related by, “American officials briefed on recent intelligence.”
It’s just that there are some people sowing dissent, and maybe some people saying nice things about American Nazis, (Maybe it’s those Nazis we should worry about) and possibly some bogus BLM groups.
They never give specific groups, or posts.
The ONLY specific actions mentioned in the article (actual quotes) wait until the last paragraph, and they are 1 story, and 2 OP/EDs from the Kremlin owned RT:
- “Last week, RT ran a story about a video of New York police arresting a black man that sparked outrage.” (New York Times covered the story as well)
- “Publishing an article in January accusing The New York Times of hating white people.”
- “Criticizing Hank Azaria for quitting as the voice of Apu on “The Simpsons.”
There is no reason that this editor should not have sent this back with a big red “BS” on the cover.
Bye Felicia Tweety
It appears that Chris Matthews has been fired from MSNBC. (Technically, it’s a retirement ……… with basically no advance notice ……… It’s a firing)
What took them so long? This guy has been an embarrassment for well over a decade.
Chris Matthews, the veteran political anchor and voluble host of the long-running MSNBC talk show “Hardball,” resigned on Monday night, an abrupt departure from a television perch that made him a fixture of politics and the news media over the past quarter-century.
Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.
On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.
Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.
“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”
His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”
Mr. Griffin, who is close with Mr. Matthews, traveled to Washington over the weekend to discuss his future in person, according to three people who requested anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.
On the air on Monday, Mr. Matthews made clear that the timing of his exit was not entirely his choosing. “Obviously, it isn’t for a lack of interest in politics,” he said, going on to apologize for his past insensitive comments.
The Bloomberg Picture Gets Worse and Worse
Now we learn that the Sackler family attempted to enlist Michael Bloomberg and his media empire to rehabilitate their public image.
It should note that there is no evidence of any direct actions by Bloomberg on behalf of the notorious opioid pushing family, but it DOES present an image of a media organization whose culture is deliberately and aggressively shaped to provide positive coverage to the billionaire class.
As such, this is something which will not play well in either the primary or the general election:
Long celebrated as civic-minded philanthropists, the Sacklers were becoming pariahs. The billionaire family whose company created and pushed the addictive painkiller OxyContin had managed to escape connection with the opioid crisis for years, but now two magazine pieces were portraying them as pain profiteers. Museums that had sought their donations were being asked about giving the money back. Mortimer D.A. Sackler — son of a co-founder of the company, Purdue Pharma, and a member of its board — was openly furious.
And so he turned to a person he knew and admired in the media industry. A person known as a devoted public health crusader, widely recognized for banning smoking in public places and pushing soda taxes around the country: Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York City and founder of Bloomberg L.P.
“I am meeting with Michael Bloomberg tomorrow morning at 10 am to seek his help and guidance on the current issues we are facing,” Sackler wrote to Purdue’s top executives in December 2017. “I plan to discuss the following with him: 1. Current narrative vs the truth. 2. What advice does he have on how best to deal with it? 3. Does he have a journalist that he would recommend who could get the FULL story out there”?
………
Previously undisclosed emails, including some filed in lawsuits against Purdue and others provided by sources, reveal a little-known relationship, forged in part by mutual philanthropic interests, between the Sacklers and Michael Bloomberg. They show that when the Sacklers were facing critical media coverage, they looked to Bloomberg and his news and philanthropic organizations for help. Bloomberg advised Mortimer Sackler on how to handle negative coverage in 2017, and steered the family to a crisis communications specialist who had been his mayoral press secretary. In 2018, Bloomberg Philanthropies staff met with Sackler to discuss launching a joint initiative to combat the opioid crisis.
Now that Michael Bloomberg has joined the Democratic presidential campaign, his history in public life, his role as a news executive and his business history are being re-examined. As his rivals criticize his wealth and accuse him of trying to buy the nomination, his relationship with the Sacklers could prove problematic. Unlike some other candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Bloomberg has not publicly denounced the Sacklers for their role in fostering the opioid epidemic. While “it is not Mike’s usual practice to call out individual companies or company owners,” a spokesperson for Bloomberg Philanthropies said, he has “certainly called out” opioid manufacturers as a group.
………When it came to coverage of their family and its business, the Sacklers felt comfortable reaching out. In fall 2014, Theresa Sackler called then-Serpentine Galleries director Julia Peyton-Jones to express concern about a forthcoming Bloomberg Businessweek story.
“Theresa Sackler rang me about a reporter from Bloomberg who is tracking everyone in the Sackler family and is writing what she believes will be an unflattering article referring to Sackler ‘dirty drug money,’” Peyton-Jones emailed Jemma Read, the London-based head of Bloomberg Corporate Philanthropy. “Theresa thinks that MB’s name could be mentioned in the article. She has no wish to interfere editorially in any way, however, she does want to alert Mike to the situation, and I would be grateful if you could make him aware of it.”
Read then emailed Theresa Sackler, asking for the reporter’s name. Sackler responded by identifying David Armstrong, then a reporter on Bloomberg’s investigations team. “We REALLY don’t want to interfere in any journalist’s work,” she wrote. “Just would not wish MB to be embarrassed by his association with the Serpentine Sackler gallery.” Read followed up by emailing Armstrong (now a senior reporter at ProPublica), asking when the story was scheduled to appear.
The piece was dropped from the magazine’s lineup a day before the issue closed and later ran in a shortened version on Bloomberg’s website and terminal. Editors who worked on the story say that it was handled on its journalistic merits, and that such last-minute changes were common.
………
Aware that Bloomberg Businessweek was working on the Sackler story, Brendan Coffey, then a member of the billionaires team, started to build a model to evaluate their wealth. But he realized it wasn’t a priority for his editors, and didn’t finish the project. “After Mike came back, the wind shifted,” said Coffey, who has since left Bloomberg. “It was a culture of not wanting to upset billionaires.”
………
That same year, Bloomberg threatened to shutter Bloomberg View, part of the news organization’s opinion section, after getting a call from a friend, the billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson. Paulson was upset about a snarky column that suggested his record-breaking donation to Harvard should have gone to “literally any other charity.” Bloomberg cooled down over the weekend and decided that Bloomberg View could stay open, but the columnist was given a talking to, according to people familiar with the incident.
Adventures in Cowardice
ABC News, which has has been targeted by James O’Keefe’s Veritas Project, has responded by complete capitulation.
Why our media sucks wet farts from dead pigeons:
ABC News suspended one of its veteran correspondents late Tuesday for unguarded remarks he made in a video by operatives of Project Veritas, the conservative group that records “undercover” footage of mainstream journalists to bolster its accusations of media bias.
The network disciplined David Wright, who reports for ABC’s signature news programs, including “World News Tonight,” “Good Morning America” and “Nightline,” several people confirmed late Tuesday.
He was venting at a bar, and he was venting about how ABC was more interested about eyeballs and ratings than it was about actual news.
Oh, the horror.
WSJ Editorial Page Draws Blood
Unfortunately, the worst OP/ED page in the United States drawn blood from their own reporters, as reported by the Washington Post*:
The Wall Street Journal’s China staff is urging the newspaper to apologize for a headline that prompted the Chinese government to expel three of its journalists last week.
The email from the Journal’s China bureau to the top officers of the paper’s parent companies, in effect, sides with the Chinese, who have demanded an apology and retaliated with the expulsions last week.
The headline in question — “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia” — appeared on an opinion column written by academic and foreign affairs specialist Walter Russell Mead in the Journal on Feb. 3. The column was a commentary on the health of China’s financial markets, rather than a reference to the coronavirus outbreak there.
Chinese officials and ordinary citizens have protested that “sick man” is a racist phrase once used by Westerners to denigrate China during and immediately after the era in which colonial powers dominated and exploited the nation.
This was egregious enough that Mr. Mead disavowed the headline to his own article:
Mr. Mead, the writer of the op-ed, suggested in a Twitter post on Feb. 8 that he was opposed to the headline, writing, “Argue with the writer about the article content, with the editors about the headlines.” He declined to comment for this article.
I don’t think that the WSJ can fix this problem, though its editorials are routinely called out as false by the front page of the WSJ.
Unfortunately, dishonest, hypocritical, and (quite frankly) insane editorials from the Journal have been baked into its DNA since well before Rupert Murdoch took over the paper
*Ironically, the Washington Post OPO/ED page is the 2nd worst editorial page among the major papers.
Fredrick Samuel Hiatt, Would You Please Go Now?
Normally, I’d suggest that the most batsh%$ insane bit of punditry over the past week or so would be Chris Matthews likening Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi defeat of France in 1940.
This week, I’d be wrong, because Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt just penned an article stating that Bernie Sanders is the real climate change denier because he isn’t listening to the opinions of oil company executives:
………
Unfortunately, there is no magic wand to make such things happen, as Patrick Pouyanné told me last week. Pouyanné is one of those people whose hatred Sanders might welcome; he is chairman and chief executive of Paris-based Total, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.
As Dan Froomkin pithily notes,(Cleaned up from a Twitter post) “The author of this piece, Fred Hiatt, runs the Washington Post’s opinion side. And as I have long argued, he has done more damage to the Post brand than anyone since Janet Cooke.”
Indeed.
Bernie Crushes it in Nevada
Sanders has been declared the decisive winner of the Nevada caucus, getting nearly half of the caucus votes, and scoring more than double of his nearest competitor, Joe Biden.
Needless to say, someone at MSNBC will call this a potential disaster.
(Performs quick Google)
Yep, Tweety delivers.
Chris Matthews compares the Sanders victory to the Nazi invasion of France.
What the f%$# is wrong with these people?
Not Just Brooklyn, the Bronx Too
The latest diss of Bernie Sanders is that he shouts too much.
This is complete bullsh%$.
He is just talking like a New York Jew:
Sen. Bernie Sanders opened Tuesday night’s debate with an impassioned response to a question about one of his signature policy planks: Medicare for all.
“Right now we have a dysfunctional healthcare system [with] 500,000 Americans every year going bankrupt,” he said, his voice growing louder with each word. Sanders spoke emphatically of the injustice in forcing patients to face both their health issues and outrageous hospital bills.
After the debate, a pattern emerged: The Brooklyn-born candidate was too angry, too loud, too passionate. CNN’s S.E. Cupp tweeted, “How is Bernie Sanders already this angry, and it’s just his opening statement.” Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney also mocked Sanders for being “angry.” And, shortly after the debate—during which Democratic candidate Rep. Tim Ryan quipped to Sanders, “You don’t have to yell” during a fossil fuel debate—his campaign started selling stickers that read, “You don’t have to yell. Tim Ryan 2020.”
As the pundits weighed in, some Jewish Americans pointed out that the way Sanders speaks is just how a lot of Jewish people, particularly those from Brooklyn, speak. Some said that perceiving his speech patterns as inherently angry or abrasive was ignorant at best and anti-Semitic at worst. Following the debate, many American Jews voiced their disappointment over critiques against Sanders’s speech patterns:
Yeah pretty much.
On my mom’s side, from the Bronx, a lot of them talk like Bernie.
On my dad’s side, Los Angeles and San Francisco, not so much.
America’s Finest News Source
Poll Finds Bloomberg Trailing among Young Black Males He’s Already Thrown in Prison
It is really depressing that a parody news site has more journalistic integrity than most of the main stream media.
They Really Hate Bernie
Just got back from picking up Nat from rehearsal, and I was listening to NPR talk about the elections results.
They really, really HATE Bernie Sanders with a white hot passion.
The rhetorical back-flips that are being invoked by the NPR reporting team to avoid calling New Hampshire a Sanders win are a complete mind-f%$#.
Remember this at pledge time.
Gonna Leave a Mark
When the Columbia Journalism Review writes an article about your paper, it can frequently be uncomfortable.
When the CJR title is, The Post’s Masthead Will Have to Accept That It Is Not God, you know it is going to be an unpleasant read for the WaPo editorial staff.
The problem here is not one of technology. It is one of politics. The attempt of prestige newspapers like the Post to cast themselves as perfect sentinels of objectivity standing outside the tawdry world of political judgment is, as honest journalists have long realized, absurd. And impossible. The Post’s current social media policy forbids posting anything “that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism.”
Consider the assumptions inherent in such a standard. It posits, first, the existence of someone capable of telling hundreds of journalists with hundreds of different sets of life experiences covering a complex nation of 330 million citizens what “objectively” is political or racial bias. (Maybe God is up to that job, but Marty Baron is not.) We see in practice that what is ruled to violate this standard is a reporter noting a history of sexual assault in a recently deceased celebrity, or a reporter saying that the Tea Party was motivated by racism. Are these observations “objectively” evidence of some sort of “bias?” No. They are, instead, evidence that it is a fool’s errand for the management of the Post to act as though they alone have insight into objective truth.
Oh, snap!
This May be the Stupidest Thing Ever
Seriously, posting your personal details on 4chan boards is not smart.
If you want to do a story on 4chan, or 8chan, take the following:
- Don’t piss them off.
Get a burner phone, a dumb one, bought with cash that ties to none of financial information.- Get a burner email account, and read it only at the library.
- Use an assumed name or code name.
- Don’t piss them off.
You might also want to don CBW protective gear.
Finally, and I mean this with sincere respect, and no small amount of fear, do NOT f%$# with the chan.
Posting personal details on chan boards was a bad idea BEFORE everyone on them turned into literal Nazis. It is an even worse idea now.— Sara Luterman (@slooterman) February 6, 2020
Tweet of the Day
I frankly don't believe Third Way's great fear is that Bernie will lose to Trump; it's that he will win. https://t.co/K1b1wvsPvR
— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) January 28, 2020
Tru dat.
If Bernie had no chance, the stories would be about his quirky supporters quixotic quest.
A New Frontier in Editorial Incoherence
The New York Times editorial board REALLY wanted to endorse Amy Klobuchar, despite the fact that she has never been able to break 3%.
My theory is that they are impressed that she is a complete and utter turd to her staff, and they want a kiss-up/kick-down kind of person.
So, instead, they endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, to avoid mockery. (No link, they don’t deserve my minuscule traffic)
If you find the OP/ED, it’s just a Google away, you will note that their endorsement of Warren is an exercise in negging. (“Gifted Storyteller”, etc.)
The editorial board of the Times is more than comfortable with the status quo, which does pretty well for people like them, so they want more of the same, just without Trump.
The Bedbug at “All the News That’s Fit to Print” Endorses Eugenics
I am referring, of course, to Brett Stephens, who is now claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent, at least a bit:
Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.
Seriously, between Brett Stephens and Bari Weiss, I’m beginning to wonder if the Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is literally trying to find the most contemptible Jews possible to become regular columnists.
Seriously, as a human being and an American, I find Stephens an embarrassment, and as a Jew, I find him a Shanda fur die Goyim.*
*Yiddish for a, “Shame before the nations,” meaning that this person is an embarrassment to the whole Jewish people.
Today in Hack Journalism
The New York Times uncritically reports on a study that shows that a wealth tax would slow down the economy.
The study assumes that none of the money collected will be spent on other programs, so this tax, like ANY tax will have a contractionary effect.
It’s only a few paragraphs down that they mention this.
It’s called burying the lede:
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would slow the United States economy, reducing growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points a year over the course of a decade, an outside analysis of the plan estimates.
The preliminary projection from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which was unveiled on Thursday in Philadelphia, is the first attempt by an independent budget group to forecast the economic effects of the tax that has become a centerpiece of Ms. Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The assessment found that if the tax raised as much new federal revenue as Ms. Warren intends, and if the proceeds went toward reducing the federal debt, annual economic growth would slow from an average of 1.5 percent to an average of just over 1.3 percent over a decade.
The model did not assess growth effects from Ms. Warren’s spending plans, which critics said undercut its findings. Economists who favor Ms. Warren’s plan said the analysis did not accurately account for the economic boost from programs she would fund with the tax revenue, including universal child care, increased education funding and student loan forgiveness.
Instead, it assumed that the tax revenue would be used to reduce the national debt, a move that encourages growth in the Penn Wharton simulation. Had the Penn Wharton model factored in the money’s going into programs rather than paying down debt, it most likely would have produced an even larger drag on growth from the wealth tax.
So, their model calls upon the austerity fairy in order to make their numbers.
This analysis is complete bullsh%$, and the report is even more cow excrement.
The Onion Abides
There are times that it appears to be the only real news source in America, as evidenced by this headline:
Washington Post’ Impeachment Critic Gives Insipid Day One Inquiry 2 Out Of 5 Andrew Johnsons
I would note that The Onion‘s article is really not that different from some press coverage calling the impeachment hearings a “snoozer”.
Seriously, what the f%$# is wrong with the journalism schools?