Monday, August 19, 2024

The NYT will selectively edit and misrepresent quotes to support a narrative

 [I wrote this about a month ago. It fits nicely with our ogoing thread, but the fact that JD Vance was a far right extremist on abortion is not quite the breaking news it was a few weeks ago.]

The New York Times was one of the news organizations that committed themselves to the Dobbs-won't-matter narrative over two years ago and they've been pushing it ever since. This got more difficult when Trump named one of congress's most extreme anti-abortion members to be his running mate.

Here's Josh Marshall.

But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant. So if you live in Texas and you’re pregnant, can you go to your OB-GYN or will that be held against you if you’re found to have ceased being pregnant after a visit to Kansas? Does your OB have to report you to law enforcement if they believe there’s a real and present risk that you’ll go out of state to get an abortion or seek a prescription from an out of state doctor for mifepristone? And what about contraception, which some states are now also making moves to limit? Or how about IVF? This was the context of the HHS rule which was proposed in spring of 2023 and came into effect this spring. It applies to all of those questions.

Now when this rule was first proposed back in 2023, a group of 28 members of Congress wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding he withdraw the proposed rule “immediately.” (I was reminded of this letter when I saw this write up this morning.) They argued that the proposed rule “unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws” and “creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement, undermine the ability to report abuse, restrict the provision of public health information … erase the humanity of unborn children” and “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.”

Now, I said 28 members of Congress. That’s not very many. You’ll remember there are 535 of them, or which 100 are senators. Vance was one of only eight Republican senators willing to go this hard for menstrual surveillance by state law enforcement agencies. The other 20 signatories are members of the House and a quick review of the names shows they are mostly hardcore Freedom Caucus types.

But think about it: even in the House GOP caucus, they could only get 20 people to sign this thing. That’s how extreme it is. But JD Vance signed.


Of course, the NYT has a long history of using creative reporting to make Republicans sound more reasonable.


Sunday, April 8, 2012

Following up the follow-up

Following up on Joseph's latest, I actually think the problem here is more James Stewart than Paul Ryan. Ryan's budgets have been fairly obvious attempts to form a more Randian union. That's not surprising coming from an avowed follower of Ayn Rand. Ryan also comes from a Straussian tradition so I'm not exactly shocked that he would try to sell proposals that are likely to increase the deficit as a path to fiscal responsibility.

But that's OK. The Ryan plan is exactly the kind of bad idea that our national immune system ought to be able to handle. Liberals should savage its underlying values (Rand is always a hard sell); centrists and independents should spend their time pointing out the endless ways that the numbers don't add up and the evidence contradicts the basic arguments; respectable conservatives should damn it with faint praise or simply avoid the topic. The Republicans would then come back with a new budget, hopefully a proposal based on valid numbers and defensible assumptions, but at the very least one that obscures its flaws and makes a cosmetic effort at advancing its stated goals.

For Ryan's proposals to maintain their standing as serious and viable, the system has to have broken down in an extraordinary way. Specifically, the centrists such as James Stewart have had to go to amazing lengths to make the budget look reasonable, up to and including claiming that Ryan intends to take steps that Ryan explicitly rules out (from James Kwak):

Stewart is at least smart enough to realize that a 25 percent rate is only a tax increase if you eliminate preferences for investment income (capital gains and dividends, currently taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent):

“Despite Mr. Ryan’s reluctance to specify which tax preferences might have to be curtailed or eliminated, there’s no mystery as to what they would have to be. Looking only at the returns of the top 400 taxpayers, the biggest loophole they exploit by far is the preferential tax rate on capital gains, carried interest and dividend income.”

So give Stewart credit for knowing the basics of tax policy. But he is basically assuming that Ryan must be proposing to eliminate those preferences: “there’s no mystery as to what they would have to be.”

Only they aren’t. Stewart quotes directly from the FY 2012 budget resolution authored by Ryan’s Budget Committee. But apparently he didn’t notice this passage:

“Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy. Mainstream economics, not to mention common sense, teaches that raising taxes on any activity generally results in less of it. Economics and common sense also teach that the size of a nation’s capital stock – the pool of saved money available for investment and job creation – has an effect on employment, productivity, and wages. Tax reform should promote savings and investment because more savings and more investment mean a larger stock of capital available for job creation.”

In other words, taxes on capital gains should not be increased, but if anything should be lowered.

These distortions aren't just journalistic laziness or rhetorically overkill on Stewart's part; it's essential to a narrative that writers like Stewart have built their careers on.

Here's Paul Krugman:
But the “centrists” who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.
The point about self-image and professional selling points is remarkably astute and when you combine those with the decline in fact-checking, diminishing penalties for errors, and a growing trend toward group-think, you get a journalistic system that loses much of its ability to evaluate policy ideas.

And for a democracy that's a hell of a loss.

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Friday, August 16, 2024

"The abortion issue is very much tempered down."



For at least a couple of years now, we've been talking about the politics of abortion and critiquing the narrative much of the establishment press, particularly Politico and the New York Times, have viewed the issue through. Though the framing and supporting arguments have evolved, the one constant has been the insistence that, while abortion may have been a big deal in previous elections, it won't be one going forward. I have always been skeptical of these arguments, partially because they felt like they were designed to avoid angry Republicans, but in more because, from the very beginning, they seemed overly static and constrained.

I've been trying to wrap my head around the bigger story, one with all sorts of related elements and moving parts and synergistic relationships involving reproductive rights, women's medical care, misogyny, violence against women, the gender gap, attitudes toward women in politics, and what it all means for this and upcoming elections. I'm still at the data gathering stage. With that in mind, your are some recent anecdotal and disorganized tweets. We won't even get into childless cat ladies.

We'll start with something trivial but telling.








Is the ad excessive? Perhaps, but Vance has supported the basic principle of menstrual surveillance, which is one of the reasons that 'weird' has gotten so much traction.




Robinson is the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina.



Along with the post-menopausal women quote, this also came to light recently.
Under his pseudonym, Murphy once stated in a now-deleted blog post — which has been quoted in multiple outlets — that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” and that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.”

 These embarrassing Vance clips are emerging every few days now. He may be the worst vetted VP I've seen, and, yes, that includes Palin.

Given Trump's history, you might expect him to shy away from this topic, but that's not the way he operates.

Vance is playing to an audience of one here, saying things that Trump wants to hear, not things that help the campaign.


Attacking sexual assault victims is not a great way to address the ticket's gender gap.

Side note: If you want to play the "no, you're weird" game, you have to do more than just stick the word in anywhere you're trying to be negative.






And the big issue.


Trump insists he isn't worried. (Maybe he's a NYT reader.)

















And while this last point is minor by comparison, it is certainly not going to help.


 



Cheryl Rofer's post is also worth checking out.
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Thursday, August 15, 2024

I'm sure there's a "You Can't Go Home Again" joke in there somewhere

I'm not going to talk about crowd sizes as an indicator of support or campaign momentum. Commentators and analysts have spent too much time on that already, but Donald Trump's recent North Carolina speech does nicely dovetail with a couple of at work ongoing threads.

As we observed earlier, the Trump campaign has been making some truly bizarre decisions given where we are in the election. From my post a couple of days ago:

Is there any precedent for a non-incumbent candidate, slightly behind in the polls and badly outfunded, deciding to scale back campaigning to a trickle? Trump's "explanation" was two transparent lies with a nonsensical statement in the middle. Assuming "letting their convention go through" means minimal campaign appearances, what strategic reason could he have in mind?
Yesterday's hastily called rally might have been an attempt to quell the controversy, but it may have ended up raising more questions.

Laura Hackett writing for Blue Ridge Public Radio:

The City of Asheville confirmed receipt of a $82,247.60 payment from the Trump campaign, ahead of the former president’s Wednesday campaign event in Asheville.

The deposit will cover a two-day rental of the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, a city-owned building that’s part of the Harrah’s Cherokee Center complex in downtown Asheville. The auditorium is the smaller of the complex’s two venues, with a maximum seating capacity of 2,431, according to the venue website.

...

The Trump campaign first contacted the venue on August 8, Miller said. The contract was drawn up the next day. Because of the “last minute” nature of the request, the venue required organizers to provide payment in full prior to the event, per the Harrah’s Cherokee Center’s booking policy.

Trump campaign officials did not respond immediately to multiple requests for comment.

...

In other cities, including El Paso, Texas, Conway, South Carolina and several places in Montana, the Trump campaign has outstanding invoices. The City of El Paso has one of the largest outstanding invoices, alleging that the Trump campaign owes them more than $500,000 in public safety, maintenance and transit costs associated with a 2019 campaign visit, KTSM reported.


The issue here isn't crowd size itself. We'll never know how many people showed up since the event apparently sold out. The question this rally raises is why choose such a small venue, particularly in a reddish swing state where supporters should be easy to find? There is already plenty of speculation online – – I'm not going to add to it – – but it is definitely odd behavior and it is consistent with the curious scaled-back approach we've been talking about.




 

On a related note, why have most of JD Vance's speaking appearances been so small and badly organized? Vance is a historically unpopular vice presidential nominee, but he's not that unpopular. There is a significant slice of this country that is very much in agreement with his positions and which actually likes the man. Events like we have been seeing suggest there's something seriously wrong with this campaign.



Per year.



The North Carolina rally also fits in with our ongoing thread about how the establishment press in general and the New York Times in particular have been framing the Trump campaign. Even such sober and nonpartisan journalists as Kai Ryssdal have been rolling their eyes at these headlines.



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Wednesday, August 14, 2024

The New York Time's Point Shaving Scheme

  It all comes down to that 93%.


I wrote this (or at least the first draft of this) back in May with the intention of getting around to it one of these days. This seems to be an appropriate time.

Back in 2018 Amy Chozick wrote an essential article on the press's handling of the Clinton email leak. It was also, as far as I can tell, the only example of anyone from the New York Times taking any responsibility for what went wrong.

I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), [I'd say more real than imagined. -- MP] wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.

They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.

And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.

It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.

 ...

 Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.

...

A few weeks before Election Day, I was stuck in my cubicle poring over John Podesta’s emails. I wanted to be on the road. “I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I said. “But it’s over,” an editor replied, reminding me that the Times’s Upshot election model gave Mrs. Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning. The ominous “they” who would keep the glass ceiling intact didn’t look that powerful then.

In addition to Amy Chozick's article, I've read accounts of the NYT's handling of 2016 from the former executive editor, the current executive editor, the former opinion editor, and the publisher. Out of all of these it appears that Chozick was the only one who came out of this with the big takeaway that it was a mistake to knowingly help the Russian government influence a presidential election. All of the rest, sometimes in very much these words, came away with the conclusion that they looked bad for underestimating Trump, and that the most important thing going forward was to avoid the appearance of anti-Republican bias.

The essential background here is the relationship between Hillary Clinton and the national press corps in general and with the New York Times in particular. I was living in Arkansas for almost all of the 90s and had the opportunity to observe the whole ugly affair up close. Driven by class bigotry, regional prejudice, and a then still common desire to balance the scales by going after a major Democratic scandal the way the press had gone after Watergate and Iran contra (based on public comments and a private conversation I had with a journalist who was there, this was very much a thing in newsrooms and editorial meetings of the 90s and early 2000s).

The resulting coverage was uniformly ugly and often blatantly unprofessional and much of the press corps never got past the idea of poor white trash in the White House, but Bill Clinton's charm and popularity tended to blunt the criticism. (It didn't hurt that the man was fun to cover.) The real viciousness was saved for Al Gore and, thanks to a generous helping of misogyny, Hillary. To give you an idea of the tone, Spy magazine published issues with one mock-up photo of her as a dominatrix and another where she appeared to have a penis and it was all dismissed as good clean fun.

Hillary's response to this was, under the circumstances, amazingly civil and professional, but there was always an understandable element of distance and distrust. To their credit, an increasing number of these critics came to question their own roles in the bullying, but it wasn't until the advent of Donald Trump that the majority stepped back and took a hard look at their own biases.

The notable holdout was the New York Times.  While papers like the Washington Post loudly and publicly called for a re-examination of past practices, especially regarding Hillary Clinton, the NYT not only refused to admit the possibility that anything they'd done in the past had been wrong; they actually doubled down.

This is where the point shaving analogy comes into play. In sports and politics, the general public mainly cares about wins and losses. It is only a relatively small group that cares about the specific score. Throwing a game will make more people upset and will attract more scrutiny than will simply keeping the lead down a little. You can get away with missing a few shots if you know you are still going to win.

The New York Times had an opportunity to indulge its worst impulses because everyone knew Hillary  was going to win. (Well, not everybody. Nate Silver actually predicted a real possibility of a Trump victory, but unfortunately the editors of the NYT were listening to the wrong Nate.) The paper could pay back longtime personal grudges and give its institutional misogyny free reign and no one would care. It could bury two out of every three Trump scandals, run ominous non-stories about Hillary, even knowingly play along with an obvious Russian scheme to influence the election, and as long as their own forecasts were correct, they would not only avoid any consequences; they would be able to puff out their chest and brag about speaking truth to power.

They thought they had a 93% chance of getting away clean. They were wrong. We can debate whether it would have made a difference. If the New York Times had vigorously investigated Trump, given proportional treatment to negative stories about Clinton without the ominous clouds and shadows framing, not published dubious Steve Bannon funded "research," or given heavy coverage to what they knew at the time to be a Russian effort to influence the election, would the outcome have been different? We can never know for certain. All we can say is that the paper of record put us at risk and something bad did happen and as long as they continue to do so, we need to hold them responsible.

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024

The New York Times goes to its happy (Trumpless) place

Looks like I was a bit premature suggesting that the Overton window was moving at the New York Times.

We've already established that New York Times and the considerable segment of the establishment press that follows its lead would rather not talk about Donald Trump at all, so it's not that surprising to see his name omitted from the front page of Monday's paper and largely absent from the website.



Instead, the big stories are a deep dive into Tim Walz's relationship with China and a borderline nonstory about African-American men supporting Kamala Harris. Both are the sort of articles you would expect to see on the proverbial slow news day, which is strange since the weekend was rather eventful on the political front.

There is certainly more say about Trump's press conference and its aftermath, including the fact that he threatened to sue the New York Times for pointing out one of his fabrications. Surely the GOP nominee for president averaging over two and a half misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies per minute is newsworthy.


 

Then there are radical, offensive, and just plain crazy statements Trump made over the weekend. Normally, a candidate suggesting that he would abolish Fed independence would make the front page.




Of course, in terms of shock value, that pails next to the accusation that the Harris campaign with the apparent cooperation of dozens in the press mounted a massive conspiracy to fake a rally attended by thousands of supporters. This one was so unhinged that even Nicholas Kristof suggested it was time to start discussing Trump's mental health.





The weekend also saw major breaking news about project 2025. How was that not more important than the mystery of black men supporting Harris?



And there was a hacking scandal:








Perhaps the biggest news of the campaign was Trump's "quiet quitting."

And remember, that appearance was in Montana. You'd have to go all the way back to Atlanta to find him campaigning in a swing state.




Is there any precedent for a non-incumbent candidate, slightly behind in the polls and badly outfunded, deciding to scale back campaigning to a trickle? Trump's "explanation" was two transparent lies with a nonsensical statement in the middle. Assuming "letting their convention go through" means minimal campaign appearances, what strategic reason could he have in mind? 

Even the far right cable channel the Blaze was talking about this.

 

Not, however, the New York Times.

The NYT has never shown any reluctance to speculate in the absence of facts, and all too often present those speculations as facts. This continues to make up a large part of discussion of Biden and Harris. How can they not do the same when faced with far more bizarre behaviors and credibility-straining explanations of this suspension of conventional campaigning? Is he not physically up to the strain of more than one appearance a week? Is he afraid of dwindling crowds and embarrassing comparisons to Harris? Are his handlers trying to keep him from doing damage? Is his history of stiffing cities for the bill catching up with him? Does anyone have any other ideas?

If would be great if the paper of record did some actual reporting on this (something even I will admit is still their real strength), but simply acknowledging something strange was going on would be a step forward.

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Monday, August 12, 2024

I got really annoyed at Ross Douthat this weekend and things got a little heated (and went a bit viral)

There are subtle but definite signs that the internal Overton window at the New York Times may be shifting. A news piece over the weekend almost addressed some of Donald Trump's more erratic behavior and Nicholas Kristof (one of the well-established old guard), in reaction to a particularly unhinged statement, actually suggested it was time to start discussing Donald Trump's cognitive fitness.

I feel a bit sorry for Ross Douthat, who appears to have been a bit slow to pick up on the shift in the wind coming from the editorial offices. When this hit me, I thought about John Kerry's line about being the last casualty of a mistake. Fortunately, in this case, it's a failed narrative and not a failed war, and the wounds are all reputational.



For an example of Douthat making an ass of himself on this, here's a case in point we discussed previously.

[Emphasis added]

Ross Douthat: It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. [Anyone who thinks Ross Douthat has special insights into these decision making processes please raise your hand and slap yourself with it. -- MP] Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.

[Side note:Despite the impressions of Nate Silver the the NYT editorial board, Harris overperformed in all of her California races and won all but one Republican districts in her senate run, including those held by Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes which gives you some idea of the research Douthat puts into his work.]



I'm not going to get down in the weeds of the piece, but I do want to throw in a little context here.

Learning after the fact of some kind of diminished capacity of a president is not unusual at all. You have FDR and LBJ's health issues, JFK's pain pills, Nixon's drinking, Reagan's cognitive decline, George W. Bush's issues with focus, and Donald Trump's... Hell, we don't have that much time.

Also remember that Washington is a gossipy and petty town, particularly when the first thing you do is to piss off a powerful faction in the government and in some cases in your own party by making the painful but necessary decision of following through with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Never underestimate the blob.






The New York Times still employs some excellent reporters, but it has been losing relevance for the last 30 years. On some level I think the people at the paper know this and it's driving them a little crazy. For someone like Douthat whose reputation relies almost entirely on his association with the NYT this has to suck.


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Friday, August 9, 2024

1964, 1968, 1980, and now apparently 2004 – – the ever-growing list of historical analogies for this election

From Josh Marshall.

The Post’s and the Times‘ pieces on Tim Walz service record are more egregious and spurious than you’re probably able to imagine. The accusations come from two members of his unit who are clearly MAGA partisans and who floated them during his 2022 reelection campaign for Minnesota governor in coordination with Walz’s Republican opponent. The attacks aren’t just “like” the Swift Boat attacks from 2004. They’re literally the work of the same guy. Chris LaCivita was the strategist who ran the Swift Boat attacks in 2004 and cut the commercials. He’s now the co-manager of the Trump campaign. He started this and then handed it off to Vance. As David noted, even Politico headlined it as a “Swift Boat” attack. Politico!

The accusation, such as it is, is that Walz retired from service just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

The first thing to note here is that career military people can retire. (Walz served for 24 years.) That’s how it works. If you’re needed, there’s something called stop-loss orders, which the Pentagon issues during periods of acute need; they not only prevent retirements but can involuntarily extend people’s period of enlistment. These were issued repeatedly during the Iraq War and in the years of active U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But the accusations break a lot further than this narrow point on any close inspection.

Walz served for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard. He was never in combat but had multiple overseas deployments. He actually retired at 20 years but returned to service after 9/11 when he re-enlisted for an additional four years. (Presumably, if he were looking to get out of foreign or war zone deployments, he wouldn’t have done that.) The Trump campaign and the two accusers from Minnesota make it like Walz put in his papers just in advance of deployment. That’s not true. Walz successfully ran for Congress in 2006 and there’s abundant evidence that at least from early 2005 he was discussing with confidants in his unit whether or not to retire to run for Congress. His newly announced campaign put out a press release in March 2005 which said that it was possible that “all or a portion of Walz’s battalion could be mobilized to serve in Iraq within the next two years.” Walz officially retired in May 2005 and his unit got initial call up orders in July 2005. They were eventually deployed to Iraq in March 2006.

The similarities are striking – – the same game plan executed by the same operative and probably partially financed by the same cartoonishly evil billionaire – – but the differences may be more substantial. The big three are this is not 2004, the object of the smear is not at the top of the ticket, and Walz is not Kerry.

It would be wrong to say the press definitely won't fall for this again, but it might do a better job this time. Memories of the original Swiftboating are still fairly fresh in the minds of most political journalists and while the New York Times and the Washington Post may have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing," a number of prominent voices and publications seem to have a firmer grasp on history. It is too early to protect how this will play out, but there is reason for optimism.


[This is a tweet that the Trump campaign put out, but if you listen to the audio, it actually works better as a Harris ad. These guys aren't very good at this.]



More importantly, the NYT and WP don't have the control over the narrative that they did 20 years ago. The Harris phenomenon (and I think we reach the point where we can safely use that word without hyperbole) happened almost entirely in spite of the narrative laid down by the New York Times and Associates. According to the version we were reading in the paper of record, Kamala Harris was a terrible politician and going directly with her without any kind of mini-primary or open convention would lead to disaster. Everything that has happened since Joe Biden stepped down suggests that these once respected institutions have lost their relevancy.


There will no doubt be stumbles over the next 90 days, but at the moment, Harris momentum is remarkably strong and for a scandal involving not her but her VP pick to be substantial enough to derail the campaign, it would have to be nothing short of a career ending. Vance has been implying that Walz would soon drop out, but unless there is another heavily weighted shoe yet to drop, that would seem to be nothing but wishful thinking on the part of the Trump camp.

The attack itself is far less suited for its target this time around. When you list what people associate with Walz, military man maybe breaks the top four after dad, high school coach/teacher, and cheerful but aggressive campaigner. I think I've seen as many pictures of him bird hunting as I have of him in uniform, so soldier might come in at number five. By comparison, John Kerry was the war hero turned war protester. That was his story, that was his persona, and that was the argument for making him the Democratic nominee in 2004. He even showed up in multiple early Doonesbury when the strip talked about the antiwar movement.

He had a great number of other impressive accomplishments, but it was the biography that people remembered. The argument for nominating the man was that his unique experiences made him the perfect candidate to take on George W. Bush while the country was still dealing with the shock of 9/11. If these attacks made people question his standing as a war hero or, as Josh Marshall often points out, simply made him look weak for not being able to defend himself, the case for John Kerry as president took a serious blow.

There's one other key difference between 20 years ago and today, one that could make the attacks more effective but which also greatly increase their risks to the Trump campaign. In 2004 the Bush campaign kept the Swiftboaters at arm's length. They got the benefit but none of the blowback. This time is different. Vance is the face of Swiftboating 2024. Having the VP pick actually making these charges gives papers like the NYT and the WP an excuse to play the story up, but if there's a backlash, it won't be directed at a third party.





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Thursday, August 8, 2024

With Procrustean editing, the headline always fits the narrative

The only way I'm going to get free of this thread is to stop looking at the New York Times.


Remember a few days ago when the New York Times was called out for a grossly misleading headline about the election? Well, here we go again. This example is quite as egregious and it has prompted nowhere near the response, but in some ways it is just as distorted and factually inaccurate.


 There are big political stories coming out of the Midwest this week, but the picture you get from this headline and its martial language is completely at odds with what's actually happening, and the subtitle is just plain wrong, period. Harris and Walz are not set to appear in the same cities as Trump and Vance because Donald Trump will not be anywhere in the Midwest this week.

In a week when the other side is barnstorming their way through multiple swing states, Trump has only one appearance scheduled, in Montana of all places. Having a candidate in a hotly contested race essentially stop making public appearances for a week without any explanation would normally be newsworthy. Especially if the statements the candidate was releasing were erratic bordering on delusional.

Other organizations such as CNN apparently felt Trump's absence was worth noting..


 

 

 

The main point of the headline about the battle for the Midwest, while perhaps not demonstrably incorrect, was arguably even more misleading. The dramatic talk of battles and especially dueling events suggests, if not evenly matched forces, then at least both sides playing roughly the same game. If Harris was having rallies and Vance was having rallies even if they were much smaller, you might then talk about dueling events, but while the Democrats were having massive gatherings...



From Josh Marshall:

Last Thursday the Harris campaign began offering tickets for a campaign rally in Detroit the following Wednesday (tomorrow, August 7th). Over the first 24 hours they received 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000. That spurred a multi-day search for a Detroit area venue that could handle the demand to see the Vice President. As Donald Trump never grasped, there’s no straight-line connection between rally attendance and votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy that neither campaign (Trump or Biden) has seen at any time in this cycle. They demonstrate a purchase into the larger popular culture that President Biden never had and Donald Trump, for all his greater currency on social media, doesn’t either.


By comparison, Vance is holding what could best be described as press appearances.




And though it's a bit off topic, this one needs to be shared. "What makes you smile? What makes you happy?" may be the ultimate softball question. It's almost impossible for a politician to screw it up.


Almost...

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