Is it true, as Greenwald puts it, that "this NYT tech reporter doesn't know or care"?

This is exactly what has been happening for years. Governments tell Big Tech: censor who we hate or you'll be banned from our country. And they comply.

Brazil has been doing this for months. But this NYT tech reporter doesn't know or care because the targets were conservatives. https://t.co/VSm65n2VEX

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 17, 2023

The NYT tech reporter, Ryan Mac, responds:

"The decision to publish the Steele dossier originated with the reporter Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News...

"In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, 'viral' rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first. When it came to the Steele dossier, which a number of news organizations had in hand, Smith’s concern that someone else would beat him to the link made him feel physically unwell. His site wanted the traffic. And, when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the contents on air one day, Smith knew that viewers would be Googling for the goods. He and his colleagues, snatching the keyboard back and forth, composed a brief introduction that noted the dossier’s 'specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations' then posted the document itself, in PDF form. In his book, Smith recalls meditating on 'the viral power of an object... something that readers would fixate on and pass hand to hand.'"

Writes Nathan Heller in "BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars/Ben Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media" (The New Yorker).

So Smith had a temporary grip on clickbait, but can the man write a book? I see the hardcover, released last Tuesday, is #2,216 at Amazon. But who'd buy that in hardcover? Anyone interested in Smith's musings on virality would go with the Kindle, don't you think? I know I would, because I'd want to be able to cut and paste, using my own skill for presenting something you'd find delectable. But the Kindle version is at #5,107. I'm not interested in reading Smith's insights. Who wants the deeper thoughts of someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills? 

So I'm sticking with The New Yorker, which operates in the middle ground between clickbait and books. Nathan Heller pulls some quotation from the book:

"The highest-profile scholar of misinformation is being forced out at Harvard’s premier public policy school..."

"... and interviews and internal documents reviewed by Semafor illustrate the institution’s discomfort with her high-profile and politically charged work. Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, is a defining and combative voice in the study of how false information travels on the internet. She became a prominent commentator after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when many Democrats blamed misinformation on social media for his election. Her departure is tangled up in the arguments over whether misinformation is an academic pursuit or a partisan one, and it played out inside a cautious, American institution trying to hold a shrinking political center."

Write Ben Smith and Louise Matsakis at Semafor. 

That's the beginning of the article, and my first question — after I absorbed the idea that "misinformation"  is a field of scholarly study — was which way does this "politically charged work" lean? Too left? Too right? Too in-between? 

How far must I read to get to an answer? Without an answer, I feel misinformed by this article about misinformation.

There's some Facebook-related intrigue: one of Donovan's challengers was once the head of policy at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg has given millions to the Kennedy School, and Donovan has some "involvement" with an archive of documents leaked by a Facebook whistle-blower. The Facebook policy, we're told, is not to act as an arbiter of truth.

We're also told of an incident in which Donovan "took heat from the political left." I think that suggests that she herself is on the left. 

In January of 2021, a Shorenstein Center journal, Misinformation Review, whose editorial board includes Donovan, published a paper led by another researcher, Mutale Nkonde. The paper accused a group called American Descendants of Slavery of engaging in what it called "disinformation creep."

The paper relied on research from the progressive group MoveOn, and provoked heated denials from its subjects. In December of 2021, the journal retracted the study, finding that it “failed to meet professional standards of validity and reliability,” and that its conclusions were based on “a few selected tweets.”

Misinformation Review’s editors said the retraction was in response to complaints from ADOS, which last summer filed a defamation lawsuit against the Kennedy School and the author. Nkonde’s allies blamed Donovan, who does not oversee the journal.

Does not oversee the journal but is on the editorial board? 

In a letter to Donovan last October, Jessie Daniels, a professor at Hunter College, accused Donovan of engaging in a “nefarious whisper campaign” against Nkonde, and letting down the fight against “white supremacy” in favor of “maintaining the (white) status quo.” Daniels demanded Donovan apologize and tell funders that she was “mistaken,” and continued: “If, however, you’re not able to take this in, then what will happen next is not going to be pleasant for you.”...

So the alleged misinformation is itself, allegedly misinformation. How can you do this kind of study without attracting a strong defense from those you accuse — especially if you are accusing from a perch at Harvard? 

I don't think the Semafor article ever answered my question whether Donovan leaned left or right. I do see that she seems to have offended 2 entities — Facebook and American Descendants of Slavery. I looked up American Descendants of Slavery in Wikipedia and see this presentation of the controversy:

In a 2020 article in Misinformation Review... a group of authors, including academics and journalists, some affiliated with the Democratic Party-linked activist group MoveOn, analyzed postings with the #ADOS hashtag on Twitter in the runup to that year's elections, where ADOS had urged voters not to cast a presidential vote for any Democrat unless the party formally endorsed reparations. The authors concluded that ADOS was a disinformation operation that served the interests of the political right by discouraging Blacks from voting....

So it seems that "Misinformation Review" was serving the interests of the Democratic Party. Is this why the Semafor article feels so obscure? It's hard to say whether it's left or right wing to criticize a group that seems to be on the left for helping the political party on the right.

I wish Semafor would work harder at speaking clearly about this problem! It's important to look at the way black people are expected to vote for Democrats. Here, it seems, ADOS was making strong demands and trying to exert real pressure on Democrats. How is that "misinformation"? It's just a political technique that hurts Democrats.

ADDED: Back in November 2021, Ben Smith himself wrote a NYT article that featured Donovan, "Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars/Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer."

Shorenstein’s research director, Joan Donovan.... strongly objected to my suggestion that the term ["misinformation"] lacks a precise meaning. She added that, appearances aside, she doesn’t believe the word is merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like.

Ha ha. Was it part of Smith's "suggestion" that "misinformation" is "merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like" or did Donovan come up with the scathing suggestion herself just so she could deny it? I think Smith said it and Smith thinks it — correctly! — so why doesn't he own it? At least in 2021, when writing for the NYT, he spelled it out — "merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like." Now, on his own new project Semafor, he's much more obtuse. Is that because he's pitching Semafor at a higher-education level? Or is it because he wants to serve the interests of Democrats?

The 2021 piece continues:

Instead, she traces the modern practice of “disinformation” (that is, deliberate misinformation) to the anti-corporate activists the Yes Men, famous for hoaxed corporate announcements and other stunts, and the “culture jamming” of Adbusters. But their tools, she wrote, have been adopted by “foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers.”...

That's a cagey answer. She's tracing the origin of the term and the "modern practice," and that may not seem to be all about helping the Democratic Party, but the question should be about what was going on with the research she directs. Is that about looking for things Democrats don't like? 

"How do you know who’s in bad faith? Like, what’s my faith? You’re sort of looking into people’s hearts..."

"... and saying, 'This person who disagrees with me, they’re not mad at me because I got something wrong, they’re not mad at me because they think I’m too liberal, they’re fundamentally in bad faith.'"

Ben Smith challenged Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz grilled over claims that critics are acting in 'bad faith'" (NY Post)(video of a long interview at the link).

Lorenz's babbling non-answer is so inane I couldn't decide whether to accuse her of being in bad faith or confess that I no longer knew what "bad faith" even is:

"There are four main goals for TikTok’s algorithm: 用户价值, 用户价值 (长期), 作者价值, and 平台价值, which the company translates as 'user value,' 'long-term user value,' 'creator value,' and 'platform value....'"

"The document, headed 'TikTok Algo 100'... offers a new level of detail about the dominant video app, providing a revealing glimpse both of the app’s mathematical core and insight into the company’s understanding of human nature — our tendencies toward boredom, our sensitivity to cultural cues — that help explain why it’s so hard to put down.... It succeeded where other short videos apps failed in part because it makes creation so easy, giving users background music to dance to or memes to enact, rather than forcing them to fill dead air. And for many users, who consume without creating, the app is shockingly good at reading your preferences and steering you to one of its many 'sides,' whether you’re interested in socialism or Excel tips or sex, conservative politics or a specific celebrity. It’s astonishingly good at revealing people’s desires even to themselves.... The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about 'pseudoart,' observed that 'people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.'"

From "How TikTok Reads Your Mind/It’s the most successful video app in the world. Our columnist has obtained an internal company document that offers a new level of detail about how the algorithm works" by Ben Smith (NYT).

This article downplays the importance of ownership by a Chinese company (ByteDance): 

"These are, I should stress again, a bunch of nice, thoughtful people.... I should stress again that these are smart people...."

"And they followed the deep partisan grooves of contemporary politics, in which liberals believed the absolute worst of a Trump supporter. But they also contained a thread of real conspiracy thinking — not just that racism is a source of Trumpian politics, but that apparently ordinary people are communicating through secret signals."

From "I’ll Take 'White Supremacist Hand Gestures' for $1,000/How hundreds of 'Jeopardy!' contestants talked themselves into a baseless conspiracy theory — and won’t be talked out of it" by Ben Smith (NYT).

"If the article shows your home or apartment, says what city you’re in and you don’t like it, you can complain to Facebook. Facebook will then ensure..."

"... that nobody can share the article on its giant platform and, as a bonus, block you from sending it to anyone in Facebook Messenger. I learned this rule from a cheerfully intense senior Facebook lawyer... who... was trying to explain why the service had expunged a meanspirited New York Post article about a Black Lives Matter activist’s real estate purchases.... The policy sounds crazy because it could apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of news articles every day — indeed, to a staple of reporting for generations that has included Michael Bloomberg’s expansion of his townhouse in 2009 and the comings and goings of the Hamptons elites. Alex Rodriguez doesn’t like a story that includes a photo of him and his former fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, smiling in front of his house? Delete it. Donald Trump is annoyed about a story that includes a photo of him outside his suite at Mar-a-Lago? Gone."

Writes Ben Smith in "Is an Activist’s Pricey House News? Facebook Alone Decides. The New York Post has complained that Facebook is blocking and downplaying its stories. But the platform doesn’t pay any special deference to journalists" (NYT).

Smith is surprised that the journalists don't get special treatment on Facebook. The rules are the rules, and they apply to NY Post and NYT reporters just as much as they apply to a random private citizen. A good way to build respect for a system of rules is to have no exceptions — to make them neutral and generally applicable. That's something everyone instinctively understands... at least before they get distracted into thinking about how they or somebody they like really is special and deserves privilege.

Here's Smith:

A decision by The Post, or The New York Times, that someone’s personal wealth is newsworthy carries no weight in the company’s opaque enforcement mechanisms. Nor, Facebook’s lawyer said, does a more nebulous and reasonable human judgment that the country has felt on edge for the last year and that a Black activist’s concern for her own safety was justified.... The point of Facebook’s bureaucracy is to replace human judgment with a kind of strict corporate law....

Corporate! I think the big concept that rules are rules — no exceptions! — extends way beyond the corporate setting. Smith complains that Facebook is using "its own, made-up rules rather than exercising any form of actual judgment." 

The judgment is in making a rule that you are willing to apply across the board. That's the test of a good rule! This is basic ethics. Yes, you get a "made-up rule," but you've made it up using sound ethics!

No wonder the Facebook lawyer was "cheerfully intense"! She understood exactly why her interpretation was admirable. I'd have been cheerfully intense explaining that too. I'm feeling cheerfully intense just writing this!

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"My crime was to arrange a symposium around an extract [of 'The Bell Curve'], with 13 often stinging critiques published alongside it."

"The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent TIME, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the NYT and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being canceled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologize and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of genetics in intelligence among different human populations was still an open question, he had his headline: 'I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.' In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was 'one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades.' To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem."

Writes Andrew Sullivan "My run-in with the New York Times/'This is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else'" (Spectator).

"So what does [Andrew] Sullivan believe about race? ... Mr. Sullivan said he was frustrated by the most extreme claims that biology has no connection to our lives."

"He believes, for instance, that Freudian theories that early childhood may push people toward homosexuality could have some merit, combined with genetics. 'Everything is environmental for the left except gays, where it’s totally genetic; and everything is genetic for the right, except for gays,' he said sarcastically. I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q.... that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups. 'It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,' he said.... 'Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.' I’ve been reading Mr. Sullivan too long to write him off.... I wish Mr. Sullivan would accept that the project of trying to link the biological fiction of race with the science of genetics ought, in fact, to be over."

From "I’m Still Reading Andrew Sullivan. But I Can’t Defend Him/He’s one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades, but he’s shadowed by a 1994 magazine cover story that claimed to show a link between race and I.Q." by Ben Smith (NYT).

I went over to Twitter to look up what Sullivan had to say, and at the top of my feed was this:

I’m still reading the NYT but I can’t defend it.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) August 31, 2020

"The Week Old Hollywood Finally, Actually Died/The streaming services are in charge, and bringing a ruthless new culture with them."

A NYT article by Ben Smith.

[O]n Aug. 7...  WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood.... In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke.... Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice....

The new WarnerMedia chief executive, Jason Kilar, spent the formative years of his career as the senior vice president of worldwide application software at Amazon, known for its grim corporate culture.... Many of the new leaders are admirers of the culture at Netflix, which is hardheaded and unsentimental....

WarnerMedia includes HBO, which has its new streaming service, HBO Max.  The executive in charge of it is Casey Bloys, who is, we're told, "a great programmer, not a power player or politician of the old model. "

He has, he said in a telephone interview, told his new team that he wants programming on the streaming service that will complement the buzzy, complex adult shows like “Watchmen” and “Succession” that HBO is best known for. He is pointed [sic] to straightforwardly fun titles that appeal to younger audiences like “Green Lantern” and “Gossip Girl" as models for broadening out the service....

"The coronavirus crisis means that states like Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump tweets false allegations about fraud...."

"I spoke last week to executives, TV hosts and election analysts across leading American newsrooms, and I was struck by the blithe confidence among some top managers and hosts, who generally said they’ve handled complicated elections before and can do so again. And I was alarmed by the near panic among some of the people paying the closest attention — the analysts and producers trying, and often failing, to get answers from state election officials about how and when they will count the ballots and report results. 'The nerds are freaking out,' said Brandon Finnigan, the founder of Decision Desk HQ, which delivers election results to media outlets. 'I don’t think it’s penetrated enough in the average viewer’s mind that there’s not going to be an election night. The usual razzmatazz of a panel sitting around discussing election results — that’s dead,' he said.... [An] important change that many political types suggest: Get rid of the misleading 'percent of precincts reporting' measure. In states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, it would be easy to have 100 percent of precincts reporting their Election Day results — but have mail-in votes piled up in a warehouse, uncounted...."

From "How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong/We may not know the results for days, and maybe weeks. So it’s time to rethink 'election night'" by Ben Smith (NYT).

"Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens [on the streets of Ferguson], and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters..."

"... most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms. And by 2014... Twitter...  offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism. Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.... The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.... Mr. Sulzberger... told me... 'We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.'"

Writes Ben Smith in "Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms/Staff members’ demands helped end the tenure of James Bennet as Opinion editor of The New York Times. And they are generating tension at The Washington Post. Part of the story starts in Ferguson, Mo." (NYT).

We’re not retreating from the principles of... objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective....

"Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting... you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic..."

"... with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove. Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.... It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a predator like [Harvey] Weinstein or to shed tears over [Matt] Lauer’s firing. And readers may brush aside these reporting issues as the understandable desire of a zealous young reporter to tell his stories as dramatically as he can...."

From "Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?/He has delivered revelatory reporting on some of the defining stories of our time. But a close examination reveals the weaknesses in what may be called an era of resistance journalism" by Ben Smith (NYT).

A long article. Much more to read. Check it out. But I will tell you that one thing that is not discussed is Ronan Farrow's treatment of his (presumed) father Woody Allen, notably his work suppressing Woody's autobiography. The censorship of a viewpoint in somebody else's book is worse than the omission of "complicating facts and inconvenient details" in your own reporting. Where is the true spirit of journalism?

IN THE COMMENTS: Dave Begley said: "Ronan must have something coming on Biden. That's why the NYT is attacking now."

"... this kind of stuff is just a really horrible look for you guys. frankly, it’s whiteness manifest..."

So wrote an aide to Kamala Harris, Mediaite reports, after a Buzzfeed reporter named Katherine Miller tweeted:

Hard to know if last night harmed or helped Warren, but think all can come together and agree a debate highlight was Warren telling Kamala Harris no about banning Trump from Twitter then just continuing with her point in the manner of shrugging off a Greenpeace clipboard person.

The Kamala Harris aide reacted to that by texting this to BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith:

hey i have talked to her directly a few times when she’s tweeted out stuff like this, and i told her i was glad she deleted this tweet, but this kind of stuff is just a really horrible look for you guys. frankly, it’s whiteness manifest. if kamala shrugged off a warren critique of how she wasn’t with her on Facebook, we’d get raked and she would get lauded as taking on corporate power. the blithe mockery here of kamala, while lauding warren’s style, is just not up to par. i say this to you just to be super frank and because i really like your guys’ work, the platform, and your reporters. we work well together across the board. but this is a bit problematic.

Smith replied:

Do you seriously not have real problems? This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.

And I guess that aide wasn't ready to see the text made public.

frankly, it’s whiteness manifest... What a phrase! I could see using it jocosely, but not by someone running for president.

"Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick."

Wrote Jake Tapper, in email to Buzzfeed's Ben Smith, quoted in "Emails Reveal Jake Tapper Ripping BuzzFeed Editor Ben Smith as ‘Irresponsible’ For Publishing Trump Dossier" (Mediaite).

Male bravado, even in humiliation. It's a funny expression. You've got the concession that the other man has impinged on you and hurt you, but you've worked in an image of your huge, out-there dick.

ADDED: In other news of newsfolk talking about body parts, there's "Rachel Maddow Skewers Matt Whitaker for Chugging Water at Hearing: 'A Lullaby for Your Kidney Health.'" I guess that's all they had on Matt Whitaker. Matt Watertaker. So much less amusing that "Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick." But to be fair to Rachel. She was on TV. We're not seeing her email, which might have much sexier body parts than kidneys.

"The incoming administration dismissed CNN and BuzzFeed News’s report as 'fake news,' a term now used by partisans and cynics to discredit reporting they don’t like. We should have seen that coming."

"BuzzFeed News’s reporting helped popularize the term to describe a new breed of fraudsters. But the dossier is a real document that has been influencing senior officials, lawmakers, intelligence agencies and, potentially, the new commander in chief. Nobody should fall for this attempt to turn the press on itself by making a reasonable debate about transparency into a media civil war. News organizations should instead consider this reality: Our audience inhabits a complex, polluted information environment; our role is to help them navigate it — not to pretend it doesn’t exist. The need to show our work and earn trust has never been more important, since once reliable official sources are peddling 'alternative facts' — as the White House press secretary did Saturday."

Writes Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, in a NYT op-ed titled "Why BuzzFeed News Published the Dossier."

The term "alternative facts" came not from the press secretary, but from Kellyanne Conway, in a "Meet the Press" interview with Chuck Todd that I described as a 9-round fight, here. Chuck Todd kept asking Conway "why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood?"

And then we get the sound bite of the whole morning, as she attempts, at long last, to refute Todd's idea that it was a "provable falsehood":

What-- You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains--

Todd sees the gem he has caused to come into existence and plucks it out to hold in his hand and admire:

Wait a minute-- Alternative facts?

Conway tries to plow on, but he repeats the Conway's terrible phrase:

Alternative facts?... Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.

I scored a big win for Todd in what was Round 3. But in the comments at my post, I got more deeply into the question of what "alternative facts" means:

In context and read sympathetically, "alternative facts" doesn't mean that there are competing versions of the truth and you can refer to all of them as "facts."

Actually, that wouldn't bother me that much, because it would mean that the word "facts" was being used to mean "assertions of fact." Chuck Todd used the word "litigating," and in litigation there are factual issues, and litigants try to get the "fact-finder" to accept their assertions of fact as the facts. If one litigant states a fact — X is true — the other litigant may say X is not true. It would be awkward but understandable to call X and not-X "alternative facts."

But what I think Conway meant was that there are many different factual issues, and some people choose to forefront one factual issue — such as the size of the crowd at the Inauguration — when there are many other factual issues that could have been selected as the main story. There are "alternatives" in that you don't have to make such a big deal out of that one thing, and you could emphasize something else. The "alternative facts" were all the other things that Trump did, good things, that would have put him in a good light, and the media is criticized for picking out the fact that diminished Trump.

"The New York Times is sitting on an audio recording that some of its staff believes could deal a serious blow to Donald Trump..."

"... who, in an off-the-record meeting with the newspaper, called into question whether he would stand by his own immigration views," says Ben Smith at BuzzFeed.

On Saturday, columnist Gail Collins, one of the attendees at the meeting (which also included editor-in-chief Dean Baquet), floated a bit of speculation in her column:

The most optimistic analysis of Trump as a presidential candidate is that he just doesn’t believe in positions, except the ones you adopt for strategic purposes when you’re making a deal. So you obviously can’t explain how you’re going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, because it’s going to be the first bid in some future monster negotiation session.

Sources familiar with the recording and transcript — which have reached near-mythical status at the Times — tell me that the second sentence is a bit more than speculation. It reflects, instead, something Trump said about the flexibility of his hardline anti-immigration stance.

There's a lot of off-the-record stuff out there. It informs the material that is written and released. We get processed news, and it's very frustrating, because we don't trust those who are filtering the raw material. Now, we shouldn't trust those who are giving the off-the-record interviews either. Trump speaks to us and Trump speaks to the NYT. I presume he's sort of lying all the time. I presume that about all politicians.

The NYT got what it got out of him, under the conditions of off-the-recordness. We get what we get out of the NYT, under the conditions of its interest in maintaining the capacity to assure sources that it will keep its promises. And we presume the NYT is biased in various ways and that it's selecting and skewing what it's giving us. Right now, it's under pressure to release more than it normally would, and the argument is that the impending nomination of Donald Trump presents a special case and the usual rules do not apply.

As for that "second sentence" — "So you obviously can’t explain how you’re going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, because it’s going to be the first bid in some future monster negotiation session" — it reinforces what intelligent observers already assume and feel we've more or less heard in Trump's public statements.

Yes, Trump opponents would love to have the behind-the-scenes quote. We'd love to hear the way Trump would phrase it in secrecy as he tries to con NYT editors into seeing him as a reasonable, trustworthy candidate.

And yeah, I wrote "con" in that last sentence. It sprang to mind as the right word. I was not — not consciously — thinking of Rubio's new stock insult for Trump: "con man."

For the record, I assume politics involves conning. There must be conning. And we must be cunning about conning. He who says the other guy is a con man is also a con man. It's all a con. Now, everybody grow up. Quick, please. Because it is Super Tuesday.

"Trouble with the catchphrase ['Love trumps hate'] is that no one associates Hillary with love."

Writes Meade in the comments to the previous post about Hillary's new "love" theme, which is assumed to be a response to the perception that Trump represents hate. Is it true that "no one associates Hillary with love"? I was trying to think of her talking about love, and then Meade asserted that it's Trump who's always talking about love, which makes me think of how Trump often talks about how much people love him (as in "The Hispanics love me!").

But I did some research about Trump and love, and I came up with this Ben Smith piece, "I Asked A Psychoanalyst To Explain Donald Trump/'He actually, believe it or not, he has a need to be liked.'"

Stanley Renshon is a sweater-wearing Freudian psychoanalyst who has made a sideline through the years of painstaking psychobiographies of American presidents.... He has read all the [Trump] interviews....

“I think he actually, believe it or not, he has a need to be liked,” says Renshon. “He’ll use the phrase ‘he likes me’ or ‘they like me.’ When somebody uses that phrase often, you have to give credit to the idea that that’s something important to them, their need to be liked."

Renshon rejects the idea that Trump is a narcissist:

“He appears to be a real American nationalist with an observable, if bombastic, love of his country... Obviously a love of country is inconsistent with real narcissism, where there is no room for love of anybody or anything but yourself.... I think he genuinely feels like the country is going to hell, and I think he genuinely feels he can do something about it."

There's that word "love." Love of country. But do you associate Trump with love? You can say "love" a lot....

The solution to the problem of low turnout is to see it as a nonproblem.

WaPo's Dan Balz bawls about low turnout in "Everyone says turnout is key. So why does it keep going down?"

Boring!

I don't mean Balz is boring, though, of course, he is.

I mean hooray for boredom in politics.

It's healthy. These people who are incessantly trying to excite us about politics should feel horribly frustrated by our boredom. Our nonresponsiveness to their proddings and ticklings is the best thing we've got. No amount of money spent on advertising can move us. We've seen it all, and we've got lives to live.

Some people don't arrive at enough of an opinion to want to add their tiny bit of weight to one side as their fellow citizens determine which candidate wins. Their nonparticipation has meaning that deserves respect. There are innumerable reasons for nonparticipation, and one should not presume that the abstainers are lazy or numb. They may defer to the opinions of others. They may dislike all the candidates. They may think the candidates are similar enough that it's not worth putting time into teasing out the differences. They may have other things to do with that time. Better things.

We were talking about boredom in politics yesterday in this post about Hillary. Buzzfeed's Ben Smith had been musing about whether Hillary! could get women jazzed up about women!!! and in lust for seeing a — first!!!! — Woman President. And I said:

I'm sick of inspiration and claims of historiosity. We should all be perfectly jaded by now. Inoculated. It's healthful and wholesome. And so what if watching the campaign day by day is "a boring, grinding affair"? 

The quoted words were Smith's.

That's a problem for Smith, running his buzz-dependent website, but it's a nonproblem for the rest of us. Think of the time you can save not reading the websites that try to make something out of the presidential campaign every damned day. What will you do with all that time? Instead of thinking about how what happened in the last hour might be history, you could, for example, read history. May I recommend the Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge?

Coolidge was boring. Good boring. Let's be boring for a change. I want a boring President. Stop trying to excite me.

In the comments, Freeman Hunt wrote:

I have paid much attention to these elections in the past, and I see no difference that my attention has made. I therefore plan to devote very little attention to this election until it is time to vote. At that time, I will select the most boring, competent person who aligns with what I'd like to see done.

The End.

I've started a new tag: I'm for Boring. Like Freeman, I do vote, but I'm not voting because someone has excited me, and I don't think I ever have, now that I think of it. And I don't want other people to get excited. If that means they don't even vote, I respect that. Thanks for not getting excited and impulse voting. Politics should be boring. I want the government to be boring.

In the comments yesterday, cubanbob said:

I could be wrong but it seems you are hoping for Scott Walker for president. No one ever called him Mister Excitement and he does appear to be reasonably competent and law abiding....

And I said:

Walker excited the hell out of people around here.

I think Romney is nicely boring. Bring him back. That would be especially boring.

And John Althouse Cohen said...

Maybe the Democratic nominee should be someone who may not be the most exciting politician...

John linked here:

"Clinton still hasn’t unlocked the only thing that could really turn a campaign into a movement... authentic excitement among American women at her historic candidacy."

"There have been blips of real, viral enthusiasm... But for all the ersatz hashtags pushed by would-be grassroots support groups, it sure hasn’t happened yet," observes Ben Smith.

But... Clinton shouldn’t rely on inspiration for her candidacy. There is, after all, another way to win. Perhaps she can’t run a campaign modeled on the Obama 2008 movement. The alternative is Obama 2012 — a boring, grinding affair that sold a nascent economic recovery, scorched the Republican, and plodded to the White House.

I'm sick of inspiration and claims of historiosity. We should all be perfectly jaded by now. Inoculated. It's healthful and wholesome. And so what if watching the campaign day by day is "a boring, grinding affair"? That's a problem for Smith, running his buzz-dependent website, but it's a nonproblem for the rest of us. Think of the time you can save not reading the websites that try to make something out of the presidential campaign every damned day. What will you do with all that time? Instead of thinking about how what happened in the last hour might be history, you could, for example, read history. May I recommend the Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge?



Coolidge was boring. Good boring. Let's be boring for a change.



I want a boring President. Stop trying to excite me.