Topics in the latest edition of my “Cornerstone of democracy” newsletter — a compendium of the best of political reporting/commentary (and more) — include:
— catharsis in Chicago
— what’s at stake
— voting rights
— capitalism at its worst
— crap fact-checking
I curate to save you time. Please subscribe (it’s free), and let me know about great work I’ve missed.
I have jury duty next week.
Covid is running rampant in the Bay Area, and I’m at higher risk.
I will wear a mask, and attempt to distance myself from others. (I wear a mask in all indoor settings.)
I revere jury duty (though I’ve never made it past voir dire). But it absolutely sucks that crowded jury rooms don’t have mask mandates.
Masks aren’t perfect (or close to perfect) protection. But they are vastly, vastly better than nothing.
Please wear a mask in crowded indoor settings.
Six years ago I begged journalists to “stop being loudspeakers for liars” — and I have to admit that my entreaties fell on deaf ears.
Last week’s lie-filled “press conference” at Trump’s home was a powerful demonstration of why journalists should at least try to deal with a situation they encounter again and again and again. But they’ve made it clear that they will never even acknowledge this fundamental flaw in what they do, much less do anything to repair the ongoing damage.
I guess it’s hopeless but I keep hoping that the craft will someday recognize what damage it’s doing to all of us.
“Cornerstone of democracy” topics today include Project 2025, Trump’s racism, the long history of right-wing extremism, and Musk’s election interference.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary last night is a reminder that our “mainstream” political journalists have learned exactly nothing from their ongoing failures over the years. It was “2016 all over again,” he said of the TV “news” channels’ live broadcast of the lie-filled “press conference” Trump hosted at his Florida resort. “To make a bad news coverage situation worse,” O’Donnell said, “none of the networks – none of them – carried Kamala Harris’ speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them.”
None of them did any fact checking during the Trump fiasco, either. There was some feeble after-the-fact checking. but as O’Donnell pointed out, how hard would it have been to use part of the screen during the lie fest to point out at least some of the lies? It would have been simple.
What accounts for this ongoing failure? Money. Trump gooses ratings and is pure clickbait. Our news organizations have stopped even pretending otherwise. Which means they’ve stopped pretending – not that they ever really did – to do journalism.
I feel an abiding contempt for Big Journalism these days, especially the TV news channels. The Murdoch family’s vile Fox “News” at least makes no pretense about its scumbaggery. The others do make a pretense of doing actual journalism, and it’s all just theater. Except this is theater that could help lead to dictatorship.
……rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.”
That’s a line from Thomas Jefferson, and it’s also the title of my new newsletter. Its purpose is to showcase the best political journalism I can find.
This means you won’t see horse-race or both-sides BS. No poll stories, either. Just the good stuff, the meaningful stuff.
It’s journalism that illuminates what’s at stake, what the candidates say they’ll do, and who they are beyond the superficial gloss.
Here’s yesterday’s edition:
https://cornerstone.ghost.io/essentials-august-7-2024/
Please help me make this work. Send me links to articles/videos etc. that you believe fulfill the mission I’ve set out.
And let me know how all this strikes you.
Today’s Washington Post has another reminder that it’s all corruption, all the time in Trump world.
For reasons I can’t fathom, however, Big Journalism treats his serial scandals as one-offs. This piece from the Washington Post is an example of brilliant reporting with insufficient context.
It’s baffling that journalists can’t be bothered to pull it all together — to show the staggering breadth and depth of the Trump world sleaze.
Our news media notice some of the brush fires. But they never notice (or tell the rest of us) that the entire forest is ablaze.
Big Journalism has all but ignored a staggeringly terrible Trump campaign “promise” — treating it as another “there he goes again” story that disappears quickly.
What’s it this time? Trump, who’s become more and more visibly anti-vax, upped the ante the other day. He said he’d block funding for public schools that require kids to have been vaccinated against common, deadly — and preventable — childhood diseases.
This isn’t merely a sop to the most radically ignorant part of the Trump voting base. It’s a promise to kill countless people. It’s utterly depraved.
Read this from Radley Balko to see just how depraved.
If Harris said something like this, our news media would hound her — properly — for such a reckless vow. With Trump, our journalists just move onto the next outrage.
I have to ask, again, what the hell is wrong with journalists that they handle such important stories so casually.
Most journalists have an admirable instinct to be fair to the people they cover. But it often emerges as the traditional “both-sides” approach, which has become discredited in an era when one side consistently lies.
It’s especially absurd when quoting both sides means giving deceitful people a forum to change the subject and launch yet more lies.
A case in point is this, from the Washington Post. In the screenshot below is a quote from the story (labeled “analysis” — the dodge journalism uses to insert opinion into what is allegedly straight news coverage).
It’s important to note that the Post’s instinct in this piece is good. It wants to not just debunk one of Trump’s often-repeated fairy tales, but to explain — with facts from people who know what they’re talking about — why what he says is nonsensical garbage.
But when it asks for comment from the campaign, the Trump apparatchik responds with an attack that doesn’t even attempt to address the question, as you can see from the screnshot above.
There is zero need to publish that response verbatim.
The appropriate way to handle the Trump campaign non-response would be something like this:
“A campaign spokesperson replied to the Post’s query with an attack on the news organization. She did not address the questions we asked.”
That’s it. Don’t do stenography for liars. No one benefits, except the liar.
(h/t https://mastodon.social/@waldoj — https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/112861853467127984)
The NY Times expanded on its institutional arrogance with Peter Baker’s “analysis” — a word used by journalists to avoid admitting that the work is opinion — of the Biden speech.
Baker is, IMO, among the worst of the worst in Big Journalism political coverage. No one has done more in recent years to normalize Trump world extremism. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Times gang, spanning the opinion and news pages, that campaigned for Biden to withdraw from the race.
His sour-grapes “analysis” tells you much more about Baker than Biden. What it tells you is that he and his publication are not only chest-thumping about Biden’s withdrawal, but have another bone to pick, namely that the president is insufficiently contrite.
Baker is apparently pissed off that Biden had the temerity not to confess to the American people the old-guy incompetence the Times made central to its case. Between Baker’s lines, Biden should also be apologizing to the Times.
Baker has been a crappy journalist for years. His piece demonstrates that he’s also a consummate jerk. Ditto for the editors who published and promoted it.
