Monday, October 14, 2024

Protecting the narrative -- the NYT and Abortion

Michael Cieply writing in 2016. [Emphasis added.]

Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
 
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

Once "the narrative" has been established, the writers and editors of the NYT will go to great lengths to protect it both by promoting arguments and evidence that supported and by downplaying or suppressing arguments and evidence that undercut it. One preferred method of the latter is to include these undermining paragraphs, but make the readers go at least 20 or so paragraphs down to find them.

In the summer of 2022, one of the biggest narratives at the New York Times (and perhaps even more so at Politico) was that Dobbs wasn't going to have a major impact on upcoming elections. Ever since, the paper has waged a losing battle to keep it viable.

See here, here, here for examples.

As late as mid-October, the paper was still downplaying the role of abortion in the anticipated red wave.

By the second week of November, pretty much everyone had to admit that based on fundamentals and historical precedents, the Democrats had managed a very good midterm and the reaction against Dobbs was a major factor. As Lisa Lerer of the NYT put it:

Democrats and their allies spent more than $450 million on ads supporting abortion rights. Democrats promised to try to codify the Constitutional right embodied by the now-overturned Roe v. Wade decision — a feat that would require not only keeping control of Congress but also winning the necessary support to get around the Senate rules requiring 60 votes to pass most legislation. But other than that, they offered only limited plans in the face of an abrupt shift that affects more than 22 million women living in states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.

In the end, the Democratic strategy was largely to draw a contrast to a Republican majority that they cast as out of the mainstream on issues like abortion rights, protecting Medicare and Social Security and taxing corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

Abortion proved to be the motivator Democrats believed it would be, helping to boost a number of Democratic candidates who leaned into the issue, including Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro, who won the governor’s race in Pennsylvania, and Senator Patty Murray of Washington.

Voters in Michigan, Kentucky, California and Vermont were on track to preserve or expand abortion rights through votes on ballot measures.

This is a brief but well written summary. I have nothing against these four paragraphs other than the fact that there were twenty-two other paragraphs that came before them, and other than one brief mention in the sixth one, none of them said a word about abortion. 

Is this Lerer's fault? We can't say for certain, but given what we know about the paper's editing practices and culture, I'm sure that a lot of counter-narratives get pushed to the bottom after the reporters turn it their copy.

The NYT has since drifted back to minimizing the impact of Dobbs this November. That a lot easier to argue when so few readers got far enough below the fold to see the conflicting evidence last time.

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Friday, October 11, 2024

The best debate analysis I've seen so far

Josh Marshall tweeted a recommendation for Johnson's monologue about the debate and it does justify the build-up. Pound for pound, though, I might be more impressed with the one he did for This American Life about a would-be right wing media racist troll who failed for the most unexpected of reasons.

I find Johnson more thoughtful-funny than laugh out loud, but he's very good. He has that knack of either pointing out something you hadn't thought of that immediately strikes you as true, or taking something you had thought of and framing it in an unexpected but perfect way. Plus his political takes are really sharp.

Definitely a talent to keep an eye on.




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Thursday, October 10, 2024

Sane-wash, Repeat, Repeat -- The Procrustean Era of the New York Times


Today's [9/24/24] New York Times gave us an excellent case study on the multistep process where you repeatedly sane wash a Trump speech until it looks like the sort of thing the NYT would write a serious article about, chopping off the parts that you can't make fit then stretching and contorting what's left until you have something suitable for the paper of record. All the news that can be made to fit. 

First, you leave out as much context as possible. When talking about Trump's upcoming speech on economic policies, you leave out that he has proposed paying off part of the national debt with crypto currency and has threatened to end fed independence.

Then seek out the least crazy form of the thing you need to report on. You might think that when an actual speech deviates sharply from the prepared notes distributed in advance by the campaign, the more newsworthy version would be what the candidate said to the public. That's why it's notable that the NYT's big, detailed write up was on the notes. The speech itself was covered in more of a quick-hit live-blogging fashion. They may have a longer, more structured write-up somewhere but as of midnight following the speech, I can't find it.

It is true that focusing on prepared material allowed the reporters more lead time, but it's not like they were fighting a deadline for the online edition. The other, I suspect more likely, explanation is that inevitably the versions of Trump's speeches handed out in advance are far saner, more coherent, more on-topic, with considerably fewer offensive comments. If you want to portray Donald Trump as, if not a viable candidate, then at least a halfway normal one, the prepared speech is a much better option.

When sane washing that advance version, and certainly the version he actually delivered, the first key is to keep your language dry and measured, choosing the most reasonable possible interpretation of everything that is said, and only quoting the less crazed, incomprehensible, and interesting sentences while making enough critical comments to seem tough though not nearly thorough enough to cover all of the comments that merit criticism.

For example:

Former President Donald J. Trump will give a speech on economic policy in Savannah, Ga., on Tuesday in which he is expected to promise to lure other countries’ factories to the United States, according to excerpts from his prepared remarks distributed by his campaign.

Mr. Trump and his campaign are eager to focus the race on the economy, an area where they believe he holds an advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, and he plans to promise an era of “new American industrialism,” according to the excerpts.

Mr. Trump, who often deviates from prepared remarks, is expected to repeat economic promises he made earlier this month, including to increase tariffs and to lower the corporate tax for businesses who make their products in the United States, as part of an effort to keep companies from moving operations overseas and to persuade manufacturers who left to return to the country.

Polls have consistently shown voters ranking inflation, the cost of living and the economy as top issues in the election. Ms. Harris is expected to focus on the economy when she travels to western Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised he would increase tariffs both as a way to discourage companies from moving jobs abroad and to promote American-made products. But many economists believe that his proposals might disproportionately burden lower-income Americans, since some goods would probably get more expensive.

If you follow the economic promises link, you will find an article (co-written – – God help me – – by the same reporter who wrote this one) that the reporters more or less comes right out and says that Trump doesn't really have any serious ideas about the economy. Most are trivial and bad. A couple are big and far worse. 

Based on this speech and what Trump and Vance have argued elsewhere, these amazing economic benefits are supposed to come primarily from the magic of tariffs and mass deportations (now including both undocumented and documented aliens). Notice the "economists believe" criticism in the last paragraph. This perfectly hits the bare minimum required to maintain credibility while continuing to sane wash. While technically true, it badly distorts by omission. An overwhelming majority of economists don't just believe that tariffs at this level "might disproportionately burden lower-income Americans, since some goods would probably get more expensive"; they are absolutely certain that these goods would get more expensive. Trade wars are also mentioned in the linked article. As far as I can tell, neither article mentioned Trump's constantly repeated lie that tariffs are paid for by other countries rather than by American consumers.


As much as most economists dislike Trump's positions on tariffs, they absolutely hate what he's claiming about immigration and the economy. The economic consensus is that immigration is good for growth and the overall economy while the mass deportation and extreme anti-immigration proposals coming from Trump and his advisors would be disastrous.

But even the most accurate and unflinching account can't fully capture what's going on a the Trump campaign because even if the reporters had the journalistic and the literary gifts to tell the story (Hunter S Thompson comes to mind), the readers would assume they must be exaggerating. The only way to understand is to see it for yourself.

First set the scene of an entertainer in decline playing to crowds a fraction of the size he used to draw.

Compare the way Trump talks about his policies to the neutral and sober language the NYT uses to describe his them.


But perhaps the most striking thing about Trump's "Economic Policy Speech" is how much of it has nothing to do with economics at all. Instead we get the inevitable attempts to stoke the racism that fuels his campaign. We get a listing of grievances (People are saying he lost the debate. Oprah betrayed him.) We get extended account of the assassination attempts that increasingly invoke divine intervention. We get bizarre moments that defy conventional categorization. 

In other word, we get a Trump speech.


Trump has steadily made up larger and larger numbers of Haitians in Springfield. He is now up to 32K.












If you're up for it, this video shows longer cuts of some of these clips. They do not benefit from the added context.

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024

If the really wanted to debunk Trump's lies about killing babies, they probably should have made a bigger deal of it when Carly Fiorina said them

If you're trying to understand how the anti-abortion movement got this extreme, one of the key parts of the story fell in place in 2015 with a series of political attacks on Planned Parenthood, suggesting it was mainly in the business of harvesting fetal tissue. Below are our three posts commenting on the events in real time. I remembered they were relevant, but it wasn't until I reread them today that I realized just how direct the through line was. 

This section stands out in particular: [Emphasis added]

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

Reading these, it's also important to remember that the press was bending over backwards to help Fiorina (bias is OK as long as it's not helping a Democrat), even if it meant turning a blind eye to some pretty ugly positions.

 

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

When the channeling of information goes awry

As a corporate statistician, I cut my teeth on targeted marketing and discriminatory pricing and I still tend to think in terms of different messages for different segments of the audience, particularly when I read something like this (from the New Republic). 
Conservatives have joined the fight with relish, under the not-insane assumption that Planned Parenthood’s allies would lose the ensuing public opinion battle, creating an opportunity for the right to advance pro-life causes, or (more feasibly) to punish Democrats. What they’ve done instead, using ghoulish propaganda, is convince myriad religious conservatives that Planned Parenthood is making a business of harvesting baby flesh, and that something must be done to stop them. Against the backdrop of the presidential primary, this is turning a public relations nightmare for Democrats into an intractably escalating political crisis for Republicans.

...

Anti-abortion zealots are now demanding that Republicans in Congress refuse to appropriate money for government operations unless Planned Parenthood’s funding is abolished—a new test of Republican pro-life bona fides. To force Congress’ hand, they’re admonishing Republican presidential candidates that the anti-abortion vote will only follow those who support the shutdown effort. The purpose of Erick Erickson’s above tweet, alerting the candidates to his question days in advance, is to eclipse the instinctual aversion many of them will have to promoting a government shutdown, and get as many of them on the same page as possible.


When working from a customer database, marketers frequently try to divide consumers into three basic groups:

Those will not buy your product no matter what kind of marketing you use;

Those who will always buy your product regardless of what kind of marketing you use;

And those who can be moved from the non-buying to the buying camps with the proper approach.

These distinctions become particularly important when talking about things like price cuts and coupons, but even with traditional marketing, you can see the disadvantage of spending money on either the first or second groups.

It looks like we have something similar here, albeit a bit more complex. I would argue that, in terms of political issues, a party would like its opponents to be a zero on the passion scale, but would prefer for its supporters to be an eight or nine out of ten. Eights and nines are maxed out in terms of showing up to vote and giving you money but they are less likely to demand extreme positions that cost serious political capital compared to the tens .

And obviously you want to persuade the persuadables.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election). 

_____________________________________________

 

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.
Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).
[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

 

_____________________________________

 

Friday, September 18, 2015

A natural experiment in journalistic objectivity (or at least a chance to draw a sharp comparison)

Discussions of objectivity in the mainstream (as opposed to partisan) press generally focus on the ideological and start with the assumption of a liberal bias. This assumption is usually backed by various studies of journalists' party affiliations and op-ed positions. As statisticians, our natural impulse at this point is to start examining these studies and trying to determine their validity, but while that might make for an interesting classroom conversation, it would miss the real question.

There's a big difference between holding a position and showing bias against those with different positions. Not only can we not assume that people in group A discriminate against not-A, it can often break the other way.  For instance, perceived biases can be over-corrected for. This is particularly true in fields like political reporting where the stakes are high and there's a serious potential for push-back. Another possibility is that the acknowledged factor correlates with another factor where the bias runs the other way. For example, the New York Times is, by many metrics, a liberal paper, but it tends to identify strongly with the one-percent, which can sometimes produce a de facto liberal bias

This week's GOP debate has given us an excellent opportunity to test some of the assumptions about the way the press does or doesn't favor liberals over conservatives.

From Talking Points Memo:
Carly Fiorina on Thursday morning defended claims she made during the CNN Republican presidential debate that the Planned Parenthood sting videos showed a kicking fetus as employees discussed harvesting its organs. However, reports indicate that the videos recently released by the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress did not include the scene Fiorina described.

During the debate, Fiorina told her Democratic opponents to look at the videos and "watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain."

During a Thursday morning interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," host George Stephanopoulos asked Fiorina if she incorrectly characterized the videos.

"Analysts who have watched all 12 plus hours say the scene you describe - that harrowing scene you described -- actually isn't in those tapes. Did you misspeak?" he asked.

"No, I didn't misspeak, and I don't know who you're speaking about in terms of watching the tapes, but I have seen those images," Fiorina responded. "I don't know whether you've watched the tapes, George. Most people haven't. Certainly none of the Democrats who are still defending Planned Parenthood have watched those tapes."

Stephanopoulos then referenced a report by Vox's Sarah Kliff, who said that she watched all of the videos released and that she did not see the scene Fiorina described.
Here's the operative quote from Kliff's piece.

Either Fiorina hasn't watched the Planned Parenthood videos or she is knowingly misrepresenting the footage. Because what she says happens in the Planned Parenthood videos simply does not exist.

A few years ago, Al Gore received a flood of negative coverage for false statements about his personal and legislative record. (All of these turned out to be the result of misreporting but let's put that aside for the moment.) We know that Gore was generally disliked by the Washington press corps -- Many of the reporters actually commented on this at the time – even though most members were in general agreement with his center-left positions. 

By comparison, Fiorina doesn't seem to have staked out any notably moderate, let alone liberal, positions, even by the current GOP standards. Not on taxes, not on foreign policy and certainly not on abortion. Ideologically, there doesn't appear to be any common ground between those positions and those of the editorial board of a paper like the NYT. In terms of style and personality, however, the paper (and the press in general) has been very friendly to wealthy ex-CEOs.

If the press really does have a strong pro-liberal/anti-conservative bias, we should hear a lot more about Fiorina imagining organ-harvesting than we did about Gore inventing the internet (and more about her campaign financing violations than about Hillary's emails).

Anyone care to wager which way the results will break?

 

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Tuesday, October 8, 2024

By the very definition of the word, disinformation is not something that just happens. Someone has to deliberately lie to create it.


The typical reader never makes it past the front page for most stories. Words those readers will  miss regarding this article: Trump; Vance; MAGA; Greene; QAnon; Loomer; far-right.



To its credit, the New York Times ran a hard-hitting story about Donald Trump's cognitive decline, but it's not like there's a daily limit of one and Trump is capable of doing multiple bad and newsworthy things over a weekend. The attempt to spread disinformation and undercut the federal government's efforts to aid victims of not one, but two major hurricanes certainly qualifies based on both criteria.

This is not just an extraordinary situation but an unprecedented one and we need honest and unflinching accounts of what's going on. (And, yes, I did split that infinitive.)












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Monday, October 7, 2024

Keeping the pair or going for the inside straight

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Friday, October 4, 2024

The New York Times' revealed preference

The publisher and editors of the paper record have told us ad nauseam how seriously they take the threat of a second Trump presidency and how conscientious they are about doing their job, but if you want to know what's really important to them, you should probably consider what economists might call revealed preference.

Thanks to an unusually frank piece by reporter Amy Chozick discussed here, we know that the staff and leadership of the New York Times were aware of what they were doing, that they were helping a hostile foreign power influence election. They just thought they could get away with it.

Stephen Colbert normally hits three or four topics in his monologue. Last night, he did the entire 10 minutes on the Jack Smith January 6 filing. This isn't the first time we've gotten better and/or more timely coverage of a Trump story from the Late Show than from the New York Times. Just this week, we saw Colbert talking about  the disturbing violent imagery and fascist elements of Trump's weekend speeches of full day before the New York Times mentioned them, and doing so in a more direct and informative way.

I could say something similar about the Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyer, and a number of others. This is partly a comment quality of political humor at the moment – – lots of these people have stepped up to the plate – – but it's mainly a reflection on how so many in the establishment press have failed to live up to the moment.



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Thursday, October 3, 2024

What if the standard narrative on abortion isn't just wrong but directionally wrong?

Quick recap.

Almost immediately after the Dobbs ruling, a standard narrative formed pushed heavily by Politico and the New York Times which argued that the Supreme Court's decision would have very limited impact on the upcoming midterms and diminishing influence going forward. When the results of the midterms did commit, these same pundits and data journalists conceded that ballot initiatives about abortion had done very well and the issue had substantially influenced the election, but they very quickly started coming up with reasons why the same thing wouldn't happen in 2024. These included:

.
Emotions over the issue will tend to fade with time.

Voters who skip midterms but show up for general elections tend to be less engaged (and younger, but we'll get to that later). These voters are less likely to be motivated by the issue.

Lots of Republican women who support ballot initiatives will still vote the straight party ticket in terms of candidates.

Surveys showed that most people did not associate Trump and the Republicans that strongly with unpopular anti-abortion laws.

Trump and the Republicans had effectively contained the issue.

Trump and the Republicans had moderated their stance on the issue.

There were other arguments being made but I think I have hit the main ones. Now let's look at the political landscape in autumn of 2024 compared to 2022.

We have seen more laws and they've become increasingly draconian with disturbing, often horrifying primary, secondary, and tertiary effects. The risks associated with pregnancy whether planned or unplanned have greatly increased. Healthcare for all women in anti-abortion states has been negatively affected. Basic rights like privacy and freedom to travel are being restricted. And every day a new heartbreaking story emerges, be it a child forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or a young couple losing the chance to ever start a family, or a woman bleeding out after being turned away from an emergency room. What were once easily dismissed hypotheticals have become tragically real horror stories and martyrs.

Even the term "abortion" is no longer descriptive of the issue. With the rise of the fetal personhood movement, we are now talking about reproductive rights in the broadest possible sense. Though Republicans are doing their damnedest to downplay the issue, the debate over in vitro fertilization is raging and Republicans are very much on the wrong side of it if you've been following the story closely, you also know that a number of conservatives have been talking about going after the right to contraception. The polling on these Republican positions is beyond terrible.

Abortion and other reproductive rights are effectively on the ballot everywhere this election. Though Trump's position, being unmoored from any sense of principle, has swung from one extreme to the other, when given the biggest audience he is likely to have during this campaign, he refused to rule out signing a national abortion ban. The specter of a national ban hangs over not only the presidential race, but every Republican running for Congress as well.

In addition to being implicitly on the ballot in every state, abortion is explicitly on the ballot in a large number of them. It is possible that a lot of voters will vote yes on these initiatives then turn around and vote for the same Republican candidates who are pushing these restrictive laws, but that's unsupported by convincing data and is wildly contrary to common sense, particularly when you take into account...

The Republicans have a huge misogyny problem starting with the adjudicated rapist at the head of the party. JD Vance has been a nightmare on this issue. An especially memorable aspect of Mark Robinson's porn and Nazis scandal has been the numerous clips of him equating the right to abortion with female promiscuity. Robinson and other prominent Republicans such as Peter Thiel are also on the record saying disparaging things about women's suffrage, an issue which is not likely to help close their gender gap.

On the other side we have Kamala Harris. While the Democratic message on reproductive rights is essentially the same as it was under Joe Biden, the change in messenger is tremendously significant. Even before Biden stepped down, Harris was the campaign's point person on abortion. The arguments were always more effective coming from her and this is even more true now that she is the nominee.

We are in uncharted territory in terms of post Dobbs presidential elections. N=0. We can't say how any of these things will play out or interact with each other. The best we can do is try to make reasonable directional assumptions and possibly, with great trepidation, think about possible ranges of magnitude. That being said, it is entirely reasonable and possibly even likely, that the combined impact of everything listed above will mean that reproductive rights will have a considerably greater impact in the upcoming election than it did in the previous one. With the standard exception of Josh Marshall (and even there a very cautious Josh Marshall),

Nothing I've said so far is intended as a prediction. I'm not even talking about probabilities at this stage, just thinking through some possibilities in their implications, but I will close with one prediction. If reproductive rights does have a big and widespread impact in November, the vast majority of the pundits and data journalists who completely missed it will find a way to claim they knew it all along.
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Wednesday, October 2, 2024

It took 3 days, lots of mockery, and being scooped by Colbert, but the New York Times finally got there

Finally talking about Trump's speeches.

Just to review, Saturday and Sunday Donald Trump gave a couple of speeches which draw all pretense of being a short of a cry for fascism. We talked about this Monday. Paul Campos also had an excellent post which included an appropriately outraged video commentary from former Republican operative Tim Miller. It also quotes Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

If you go back to our previous post and watch the clips we included, or watch the Tim Miller video, or review any reasonably comprehensive article on the speeches, I think you will see that every single one of Paxton's boxes has been checked here and in other recent statements by Trump and Vance.


These speeches have generated a great deal of attention – – even Stephen Colbert's Monday night monologue included clips from the Sunday speech arguing for a "day of violence" where police would have free reign to deal with an imaginary wave of looters – – but one place you didn't see any significant coverage was in the New York Times, either the online or print edition.



Finally (and I strongly suspect the criticism the paper was receiving on this was a factor), Trump's speech was finally deemed newsworthy by the New York Times, at least in the online edition. The story itself left a a lot to be desired. There was considerable sane washing, downplaying of language, and the complete omission of the most disturbing parts, but with the paper of record, I suppose we have to take what we can get.


Queued up to the part about Trump's speech.







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Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Debates that haven't happened yet aren't news (and vice-presidential debates are seldom news even after they happen)

In case you missed it, over the weekend former president Donald Trump gave a couple of speeches that were filled with racism, lies, violent fantasies, and calls for what would be considered by all but the most technical definitions, fascism. They were bizarre, frightening, and undeniably newsworthy. (They were also newsworthy in other ways such as the questions raised about Trump's mental state, but I think the fascism was enough to prove my point.)





Despite this, they received limited and heavily sane washed coverage from most of the establishment press and went virtually unmentioned by the New York Times.

As of Monday, the big political story was the upcoming vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, which is odd since that is it news at all. Like I said in the title, "Debates that haven't happened yet aren't news."


It is possible that some significant news will come out of the event, though even that is unlikely. The only case that comes to mind of something memorable coming out of the VP debate is "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" and if you remember the context for that one, it certainly did not produce a noticeable boost to the ticket that came out on the top of that exchange.

If it is not news, what exactly does debate coverage consist of? Mostly it is nothing more than horserace journalism played out in miniature you have tons of speculation, pseudo-thoughtful discussions of who the perceived front runner is, historical anecdotes of little to no relevance, and pregame analysis with recaps of old debates and opportunities to trot out the standard narratives. All of which is supposedly intended to answer questions that will be resolved the following evening and which (to reveal a dirty little secret of politics and political journalism) are almost never that damned important to begin with.

Despite the absurd weight put on them, presidential debates are a terrible way for voters to get a sense of who the candidates are and what their administrations and policies are going to look like. Primary debates are more defensible, but by the time you get down to the choice between two or very, very occasionally three choices, the candidates are familiar enough and the differences start enough that these constrained and highly artificial exchanges almost never tell voters anything useful.

Presidential debates are best viewed not in terms of information exchanged or intellectual skill, but as theater. That's why the few moments that people remember are either embarrassingly superficial (Nixon's lack of makeup, Gore's know-it-all attitude) or gotcha moments. That is the level they operate on. As with the conventions, they are fundamentally spectacles and opportunity for journalists to crank out tons of "news" and analysis without having to do very much work.

2024 is a huge outlier in this respect with both debates revealing important information to viewers.

While most of the discussion about Biden's debate performance has been oversimplified and badly thought out, pretty much everyone can agree that serious doubts raised about how rapidly the man was aging, whether he would be able to complete another term, and most consequentially, would he be able to beat Trump in the general election? As the triggering event in an almost unprecedented reshuffling of a presidential ticket, this was unquestionably newsworthy.

The second debate was important on two levels. For Harris, it gave voters a chance to evaluate a candidate who had stepped into the role very recently and get a feel for her resolve and competence. For Trump, a massive audience saw a tired looking erratic, often delusional, easily distracted and manipulated old man. It also gave us an instantly iconic moment in the history of presidential debates, "[T]hey’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Also unquestionably newsworthy.

But none of the extensive coverage leading up either debate was in any real sense informative. Worse yet, there were. Genuinely important stories were pushed out of the news by these empty calories then and now. If the mainstream press wants to regain our trust, they should probably start by not wasting our time.



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Monday, September 30, 2024

The (Man who Would Be) King's Speech -- Sane Washing through Silence

Over the weekend, Donald Trump gave a pair of speeches filled with lies and violent fantasies, racism, authoritarian and sometimes overtly fascist proposals. That alone should make the speeches newsworthy. We also saw delusions, loss of focus, bizarre boasts and odd fixations, and even moments of unintentional honesty. That too should make the speech newsworthy. On top of all that, we saw dwindling crowds, audiences that ranged from bloodthirsty to apathetic, and people literally leaving from the stands behind him as he was speaking. For a press corps obsessed with vibes and horserace stories, this should of been pure catnip.

To say that the press failed to capture what was going on in their reporting would be a gross understatement. To say that the press in many cases did not even try to capture what was going on in their reporting would be a gross understatement. To get a sense of where the Trump campaign is at the end of September, even at the very least need to look at the more notable moments from the weekend. To get a truer sense they need to be watched.







But at least the America First part is on brand.



Did they forget Trump wasn't supposed to know this guy?

This is a small sample of the videos in this thread. For a better sense of what the speech was like, you should probably click through to the whole list, or even, if you are up to it, watch longer excerpts. You will find that in terms of disturbing rhetoric, or bizarre digressions, or authoritarian language, I did not cherry pick. Having watched these, take a minute and ask yourself what an accurate headline for this might be, then look at how Bloomberg described the event. (From veteran journalist Mike Jacobs.)

But perhaps the worst kind of sane washing is simply acting as if none of this even happened. This is the NYT front page from the next day.


Instead we got a heart-warming and apparently time-sensitive human interest story about Vance's mother.

 

In some ways, Sunday's speech was worse. Think about the implications of this.



A momentary lapse to honesty and the sort of slip that, in a normal campaign, would be sewn to the candidates shirt like a scarlet letter.

Watch the woman in pink on the left. For most of the video, she manages to keep her face hidden. Check out her reaction around the 50 second mark when she realizes she's on camera.

For another unintentionally revealing moment, after you've processed the fact that no real reason was given to lock Harris up, check out what the camera reveals as it pans over the crowd spontaneously chanting "lock her up!"


You'll notice that several of the audience members in the stands behind him have left.

Does anyone actually believe that happened? Is it a lie? A fantasy? Does Trump at this point know the difference?

All of these would be good questions for journalists to be asking. As of early Monday morning, let's see how the New York Times has attempted to answer them.





"All the News That's Fit to Print."
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Friday, September 27, 2024

Abortion in 2024 doesn't mean what it did in 2021

Before 2022, the typical media representation of abortion generally involved a woman, more often than not single, who unexpectedly found herself pregnant. The issue was often framed as abortion vs. adoption. While most Americans supported the right of these women to choose, it did give the other side an opening, fairly or unfairly. Those who believed that life began at conception could argue that the woman had chosen to create this life. Even more potent was the puritanical disapproval of sexually active women. As the numbers showed, this was always a losing argument for the antiabortion side, but it was not a disastrous one. For the movent, it was probably their best framing possible.

This is no longer how most people think about abortion.

Extreme laws and, even more importantly, strict enforcement has changed the public face of the issue. Even if we put aside the question of rape and incest, there are a lot of very disturbing gray areas and unintended consequences, and those are the cases that have come to define abortion in the past two years. It is horror stories like those below that have come to be associated with Dobbs in the popular mind, and the impact of those stories will continue to grow, particularly since the Harris campaign and a large number of Democratic candidates will continue raising awareness of these tragic events between now and election day.

For more than a couple of years now, the New York Times and other establishment media outlets have been pushing the narrative that Dobbs won't seriously affect upcoming elections, but they have been using static (and often questionable) analytic methods to describe a situation that is anything but static. I don't know how reproductive rights, which now includes in vitro fertilization and increasingly contraception, will play out in November, but I do believe the potential impact is very large indeed.



Another factor that I suspect will amplify the effect is the lack of empathy and often outright misogyny coming from the right. This video forcefully makes that point. It is difficult

More details on this story here. (John McEntee is quite the piece of work. He is also almost certain to have a powerful role in the White House if Trump wins again.)



Finally, here is a dystopian but not without factual basis ad from the Lincoln Project. I'd recommend watching this first then check out the CNN discussion. We can discuss whether this cross a line (but be warned, I like LBJ's Daisy ad).








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Thursday, September 26, 2024

Like we've been saying, he's not the same Trump

From our ongoing "why is this not a bigger story?" series:


 

Breaking it down: People in Trump's camp give three primary reasons he's hitting the road less this time, Axios' Sophia Cai reports:

  1. He's a known quantity. The campaign feels less need to define him or his candidacy for voters this time around.
  2. Rallies are expensive. Trump's campaign managers this cycle are keeping a closer hold on the purse strings.
  3. He's older, and more inclined to spend his time at Mar-a-Lago.

The first two reasons don't make a great deal of sense. Trump may be a known quantity, but he's a known quantity who is either tied or running behind at this point in the race. It is entirely possible that he will outperform the polls as he did before or that things will break in his favor over the next few weeks, but arguing that he can simply coast from here is absurd.

The second reason is even sillier. Rallies are not that expensive and they can be a huge bargain relative to other options for getting a candidate's message out. Trump has no ground operation to speak of and a large television advertising buy at this point in the season would be far more expensive. Rallies energize the base, they help drive get out the vote pushes, and they generate tons of earned media. The Trump campaign may be at a financial disadvantage, but rallies should be the very last thing they cut.

Only the third reason is believable and it's also the one with the biggest implications. (The lede was definitely buried on the story.)

In terms of surprise, what's shocking here is that people with the Trump campaign are coming out and admitting that Trump is too old to campaign the way he used to. They try to couch it in milder terms, framing the decision as a preference, but this is a man whose best chance of avoiding prison is winning the upcoming election. Even with that level of motivation, he is still campaigning at around a third the level he previously did.

In terms of newsworthiness, what's important here is what has been important with this story four months. The Trump campaign has been pursuing a level of rallies and events so low as to defy any explanation other than some form of personal or organizational dysfunction. Either he couldn't or he wouldn't. One possibility leads to questions about age and capability; the other leads to questions about stability and mental state.

Trump and Biden both are showing clear signs of their age. It is true that these signs are different for the two men, but not to the extent that you can honestly claim to see them with one and not with the other. It is often said that Trump has a higher energy level, but that's not exactly true. Biden has certainly slowed down in the way he moves, talks, and probably thinks. His stammer is starting to return and he is somewhat more likely to struggle for or confuse names.

With Trump, things get a bit more complicated. As comic and writer Josh Johnson has observed, the key to understanding Donald Trump is to think of him primarily as an entertainer, and like most entertainers, he feeds off the energy of the crowd. As long as people around him are laughing and cheering and making him the center of attention, the adrenaline will keep flowing. I strongly suspect this is one of if not the main reason he keeps gravitating toward off message lines that get a big reliable response from the audience. The crowd is like a drug not just with the highs but with the crashes. Take away the adulation and stimulation, and he will often be unable to stay awake, even in situations where sleep is wholly inappropriate.

It is important not to mistake energy for acuity, or the lack of one for the lack of the other. Though it took him a little longer, Joe Biden could answer highly detailed questions about foreign policy from reporters and conduct complex face-to-face negotiations with world leaders. While Trump might not of been able to do that even in his prime, comparing debate performances and interviews from eight years ago and now reveals a man who is far more easily distracted and prone toward extended incoherence. In a story uncovered by a New York Times reporter but largely ignored by the paper, a few months ago Trump met with business leaders who either supported him are inclined to do so. Coming out of the meeting, most of those who were willing to comment talked about his inability to maintain a train of thought.

Yes, it's true that part of the huge gap between coverage of Biden's age and coverage of trumps age can be explained by the different ways they manifested themselves, but the main cause of the disparity was because reporters and more to the point editors chose to ignore half of the story. They saw a man who could not stay awake during his own criminal trial and decided that was a 24 hour below the fold story. They heard a man confuse people and events and then, rather than catching himself, continue making the same mistake often for minutes at a time. They heard him "remembering" things that never happened like the audience response to a debate that had no audience. Reporters who had in past Trump campaigns covered or at least done rewrites on multiple rallies in the same day now saw schedules with one event a week.

They had to notice. Except for a few rookies, everyone who covered 2020 or 2016 had to be aware that the Republican nominee was aging visibly, was showing less stamina, and was clearly in cognitive decline. There was simply no way for someone to be deeply involved in one of those past campaigns and the current one and not know that something was different.

While she was sending nude selfies to RFK Junior, Olivia Nuzzi famously claimed there was a conspiracy of silence around Joe Biden's aging despite it being one of the most over covered stories of the decade and there being a mere moratorium on stories about Trump's decline. After Kennedy had officially signed on with the GOP team and lined himself up a role in a future administration, while still carrying on the affair, Nuzzi wrote another piece for New York magazine explaining what a sane, thoughtful, and coherent fellow Donald Trump was. Because of her sexting scandal, people are reviewing those articles with a more critical eye. Now we just need to do that with all the other reporters who committed the same journalistic sins.

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