All The News That's Shit To Print
You gotta surf it
Does the print edition of the NY Times still carry the “All the News That’s Fit to Print” motto? I haven’t seen one in a while.
George W. Bush left office with a 33% approval rating, up from the mid-20s a few months earlier, from which we can infer that he got a statistically significant boost for leaving the White House. A decade later, his approval rating was 61%, a tad shy of Barack Obama’s then-66%.
The reason for Bush’s surge in popularity especially among Democrats, 54% of whom regarded him favorably in the 2018 poll linked above, is that the press have elided his crimes. He’s a grampa, a quirky painter, an elder … not statesman, exactly, but at least a guy who’s been around long enough that he might have become one.
So instead of beginning every story about his paintings or his principled opposition to Trump with “George W. Bush, who as president legalized torture and launched an illegal war that still haunts the world today,” they just go straight to the cutesy stuff.
“George W. Bush, who as president legalized torture and launched an illegal war that still haunts the world today, excoriated Donald Trump’s latest breach of propriety.”
“Michelle Obama says that she and George W. Bush, who as president legalized torture and launched an illegal war that still haunts the world today, enjoy a shared set of values.”
Obama’s husband presumably shares her values as well.
“George W. Bush, who as president legalized torture and launched an illegal war that still haunts the world today, has announced a portraiture series featuring former world leaders and fellow war criminals.” Ewww.
”And a dog.” Awww.
The press, with their weird tricks and their goldfish-like memories, were a favorite subject at BTC News. When I started writing about them in 2002-ish the country was in the throes of 911-ism and the impending invasion of Iraq; the papers, along with their sick and twisted cable news siblings, were neck deep in self-replicating horseshit.
(A few later apologized about their Iraq coverage, replicating in their apologies some of the same stupidities they’d committed to warrant them, especially the insistence that their sources, and their sources’ sources, had been misled, sometimes by their other sources; it was all one huge misunderstanding, they thought, and naturally tilted in favor of war).
It got so bad that we once nominated the Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington bureau—who the NY Times name-checked in their mea culpa linked above—to run the CIA, as they seemed to know more about what was happening at home and in Iraq than the agency, and certainly more than their competitors.
The secret, it seemed, was that they were limited to sources less lofty and ideologically-inclined, and more expert, than the ones accessible to the star reporters and editors at the big news organizations.
Things are worse now, and not only with the political press. To whatever extent the myth that reporters are liberal en masse has a basis in reality, it’s always been the sort of liberality with an unhealthy respect for authority. Trump’s off-the-wall authoritarianism supercharged their respect for the kind of authority they see as normal; his contempt for process strengthened their attachment to it.
For instance: a reasonable representation of differences between the two major parties—one utterly corrupt and now openly homicidal, and the other toddling along as usual, occasionally productive, also utterly corrupt, but with a generally kindly mien—is beyond them. They prefer to think of the parties as engaged in a conversation about governance, even if a rowdy one, often said to be made more difficult by extremists on both sides.
Alec Karakatsanis, a former local and federal public defender, runs Civil Rights Corps, an organization he founded to sue the most egregious civil rights violators among police departments and courts, and writes authoritatively on another manifestation of the press affinity with authority and the norm—what he calls “copaganda,” the product of cops and cop-friendly sources managing reporters on crime and criminality. After all the police murders we’ve seen, and police assaults on protestors, reporters at prestige outlets like the New York Times are still ready to buy (Twitter thread) whatever the cops are selling.
My point here, he said, after reading over the piece and realizing he hadn’t made one yet, is that the press are so neurotic, defensive and manipulable that evaluating what they write, or say, is all but impossible for anyone who is neither a subject matter expert nor a full-time reader of news. Developing a sense of when writers/talking heads are propagandizing, deliberately or otherwise, and when statements of fact can be reliably taken as fact, is beyond the reach of most people because they just haven’t the fucking time it takes to do that.
I welcome comments. I long for them.
(Contributors to this post include The Woodentops’ Granular Tales; The Mighty Lemon Drops’ World Without End; Marc Ford and the Neptune Blues Clubs’ The Vulture; Disney’s She Hulk; dark roast Sumatran coffee; more dark roast Sumatran coffee; Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Motivational Speaker; Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets’ Walkabout; Crosstown Traffic’s What Paper Can Do; Crumb’s Ice Melt; Gorillaz’ The Now Now; and Henri Herbert’s Boogie Woogie Piano, Vol. 2. Music recommendations welcome. This post took for fucken ever. )
Love you always crediting your contributors!