Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Having Read The Considered Opinion of This New York Times' Political Reporter...

...I am moved to wonder (and not for the first time) whether the Sulzberger family requires that a tiny, explosive device be installed in every Times' political reporter's skull that will go BOOM if ever they dare to write, in plan, clear language, that the Republican Party is the problem...

Increasingly, our politics are defined by two hostile identity groups who see the other not only as political opponents but as threatening and immoral. In Washington, bipartisan compromise feels nearly unimaginable. And beyond the Capitol, the two parties aren’t even having the same conversation, never mind speaking to each other. One survey in March found that Republicans had heard more about the “cancelling” of Dr. Seuss than the $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Hatred between Republicans and Democrats, according to an analysis by some prominent political scientists, now “exceeds long standing antipathies around race and religion.”

...or whether they get 'em fresh off the journalism farm where, like the creche-raise gammas in Brave New World,  they've been so deeply conditioned to accept Beltway norms as gospel that, unless they are momentarily bent out of true by being simultaneously punched in the smug by a pandemic and an economic collapse and an armed Republican insurrection and a police murder trial and an openly deranged Republican president cackling with delight as his party tries to annihilate democracy in America it is literally impossible for them to think any other way.

I will believe things have changes once prominent Beltway journalists start using their privileged positions to call out the malefactors in their midst.  Until then, for those of us who have been around for more than a minute, this is not out first rodeo.  Or our second.  Or our third.  We know perfectly well that the history of modern American political journalism has been the history of its truly spectacular failure to learn a damn thing from all of its spectacular failures. 



Burn The Lifeboats


7 comments:

dave said...

if journalism were anything then a desire to get your attention to sell you something then things would be different. it isn't so it isn't....

Cheez Whiz said...

They've got Who, What, Where, and When down cold but who killed Why?

And even ignoring them corps of Why lying on the newsroom floor, they could mention that the hate of one side is driven by an attempt to overthrow the government, and the hate on the other side driven by an imaginary attempt to ban hamburgers.

Robt said...

I think the wealthy for the most learned a hard lesson after president Hoover ran America into the ground and all of them were down with it.
It enhanced their oower of wealth. Cheapening human life, abiliity to own people, causing the willingness of their employed to perform the worst egregous things for their wealth enhancing, power frowth and control over a countries Constitution that reads < We the People".
FDR confronted their campaign of propagandizing of hatred. Embraced and "welcomed their hatred".
for me, I ask where is the NYT front page article asking and pointing loudly to.

What is the business of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby in opposition to HR 1 that is now SR 1 in the senate, (voting rights bill. providing a floor to every American in every state to a level of access to voting. voting on Federal office elections.

The Chamber is Lobbying (bribing) congress to oppose voting rights. To oppose their own constituents right to vote without being exposed to any hampering of voting they cn conceive and force on voters in the name of wht?

Isn't bad enough the Chamber of Commerce over rules voters representative via money (bribes/donations)? On issues that favor all business at the expense of those who perform labor to these companies/businesses? provide elite tax immunities that the companies funnel into their offshore accounts. Taken out of our economy forever?

I don't know about a blasting cap placed in the base of the shuls of reporters in case they breach the Hooverville shanty town media envelopes.

We know people like Chuck Todd uses the excuse Newt won't come on his show and lie to Americans who watch his show if he confronts the lies and having Newt on is mre imprtant thaninforming his viewwers with knowledge they can use.

It is like the lie that GOP are scared of Trump and submit to their knees ( like a football player)to him, when the GOP actually believe the same things of Trump and they are really afraid of what their constituents will do if they come out of the Bigoted, Putin closet like Trump.

It is why you see the egotistical false pride and insane bravery of the recently elected QANON congress people from the created hardest extreme districts. Many of these districts created out of Gerrymandering.
We are now seeing a few Senators that have to run state wide coming out of the extremist American Taliban closet. For example, Sen. Ron Johnson. We will see if that sells state wide in Wisconsin the next election.

pagan in repose said...

The conservatives are tearing reality apart, in their heads. They are now lying every day and the newspapers are still using language like misinformed, misspoke..., ad nauseam. What's his face telling the public that they should call the police if they see a child wearing a mask. They are screaming out the lunacy that President Biden was outlawing the consumption of meat. All of this being screamed out everyday is destroying our Democracy chunk by chunk.

The conservatives have been telling the a world a different definition of the word liberal forever, and that's a long time...


I am at a loss. This is bigger than just our country, but our time is here and now...


GrafZeppelin127 said...

One side uses shovels to plant trees. One side uses shovels to bash people's brains in. The tree-planters hate the brain-bashers, and the brain-bashers hate the tree-planters, each seeing the other as threatening and immoral.

The problem, then, obviously, is that there is way too much shovel-using on both sides.

John said...

I know little of broadcast journalism, so my views may be quaintly out of date. But I spent my career in newspapers. At the decent ones, at least, there was what Jefferson would have called a wall of separation between the newsroom and the advertising office. We were poorly paid, and only a popular columnist or two was by any standard famous. What we DID want to sell was newspapers, but to criticize that is to criticize General Motors for wanting to sell cars. You are simply repeating a cliché without giving it any thought.

Meremark said...

WayneMadsenReport.com used to motto a quote by Mencken, I think, maybe Sinclair Lewis:

Journalism is publishing something that someone doesn't want published. Everything else is p.r. Or propaganda, I add.