"Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump."

"Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, 'well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.' Maybe they simply fear being labeled liberal."

Writes Margaret Sullivan, in "An ugly case of 'false balance' in the New York Times/The mainstream media is still getting it wrong about Trump" (Substack).

Sullivan was formerly the "public editor" at the NYT.

I disagree with her and appreciate when the NYT declines to indulge in the usual liberal-press assumption that Trump is too abnormal to be treated as the major-party candidate he plainly is... especially when the other party's candidate is quite abnormal in her own way. I wouldn't mind reading a newspaper that treated them both as abnormal to the extent that they are abnormal. But for that, I write my blog.

"I do feel that the media column had run its course.... I’m not sure it’s possible to make much of an impact...."

"So I have pointed out the all-too-ingrained practices that obstruct that common good: the horse race politics coverage; the way we too often treat unequal things as if they were equal, often from a defensive position; the too-frequent anonymity given to sources with highly politicized motives.... I often find myself in awe of the work being produced [at The Washington Post]. It’s not perfect, of course.... I’m encouraged one day, despairing the next."

Said Margaret Sullivan, quoted in the Vanity Fair article "'CALL IT A SELF-IMPOSED TERM LIMIT': WHY MEDIA CRITIC MARGARET SULLIVAN IS EXITING THE WASHINGTON POST/After a decade writing columns puncturing—and praising—the press, the ex–New York Times public editor and departing Post columnist will be teaching at Duke and pursuing book projects, including a fictional series about a laid-off local journalist solving crimes."

I don't know why she said "I do feel that the media column had run its course." Did she mean that she's done what she could with her column or that we don't need media columns anymore? We at least need people to point out sloppy ambiguity. I'd say the media column hasn't been strong enough. Is WaPo replacing her? If so, why? To get someone nicer or someone stronger? If now, is it because it's been decided that the work is done (the work they want is done)?

How can I trust a column with "'The personal is political,' Gloria Steinem famously said"?

That's not a Gloria Steinem quote! It's easy to look up. Wikipedia has an article, "The personal is political":

The phrase was popularized by the publication of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch under the title "The Personal is Political" in 1970, but she disavows authorship of the phrase. According to Kerry Burch, Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, and other feminists given credit for originating the phrase have also declined authorship. "Instead," Burch writes, "they cite millions of women in public and private conversations as the phrase's collective authors." Gloria Steinem has likened claiming authorship of the phrase to claiming authorship of "World War II."

That is, it looks as though Gloria Steinem is at most "famous" for saying that no one person can claim to have said it first.

The column with the bad fact-checking is by Margaret Sullivan in WaPo: "Abusive media moguls harmed more than just individual women. They shaped a misogynistic culture." Excerpt:

The powerful and now-departed men of CBS — Moonves, Fager and star interviewer Charlie Rose — helped shape how our society sees women. The network, after all, is the most-watched in the nation. “60 Minutes” for 50 years has been the very definition of quality broadcast journalism: the gold standard.

It’s impossible to know how different America would be if power-happy and misogynistic men hadn’t been running the show in so many influential media organizations — certainly not just CBS.

Yes, we can't know what might have been without these apparently awful people running CBS, but what's the evidence that the shows the shows pumped out on CBS were importantly misogynistic enough to have made our culture the "misogynistic culture" it is? I can't find anything in Sullivan's column.

So... am I not reality-based?

"Why I started saying ‘reality-based press’ in 2017, instead of ‘mainstream media,'" by Margaret Sullivan, Media Columnist, at The Washington Post.

It seems to me that reality-basedness is something you have to prove, over and over again, whether you're the established press or alternative media. And I think the previous sentence makes me, a blogger, look more reality-based than you, a Washington Post media columnist.

Washington Post "stance on display" in a triad of Trump-related headlines.

I don't know what's oddest here:



1. "Trump’s stance on display..." tripped me up. Is there some "display" in the news about which Trump has a position, a "stance," that I need to know about? No, Trump has a "stance" — on what? — and he's showing it to us. The stance isn't on anything. It's just his self-assurance, the attitude that  he's "never wrong." The "stance" is not that he's "never loved more by his supporters." The love from the supporters is just a consequence, supposedly, of observing the display of the "stance." It's hard to read, because there's a colon after an introductory clause, and only one of the things after the colon is what the phrase before the colon is pointing at. When you click through, the story is "Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible," by Karen Tumulty. Why is this the top Trump story of the day? I guess it's because Trump made Obama's birthplace the story-of-the-day yesterday, and it must be wrestled into an anti-Trump story. So Trump's stating clearly that Obama was born in Hawaii becomes a generality about his character, which — I keep reading — is so different and much more dangerous than the character of all the other politicians, but I've never noticed that other politicians call attention to their errors as outright errors and refrain from deflecting blame onto others.

2. The second headline is just plain funny. The media is "playing the stooge for Trump"?! And it's  time to stop. Subheading: "The Republican nominee said, 'Jump.' And TV news asked, 'How high?'" The media has been obviously trying to help Hillary, but I guess its efforts are so inept that Trump can figure out how to flip them into doing things to work in his favor. When I hear "stooge," I think of The 3 Stooges, and I guess if they ever formed a goal, they'd bumble into exactly achieving the opposite effect. Here's the full story — "It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump" — by Margaret Sullivan, WaPo's media columnist. It's another piece that follows on from yesterday's story-of-the-day, Trump's wrangling the media to hear his announcement of Obama's birthplace and deflection of blame onto Hillary. Sullivan explains how the press got played, but not why. The why is, I think, eagerness to help Hillary: They've made themselves stupid —  stupid for Hillary. What's the cure? I would think: serious, professional journalism. But Sullivan just tells them to stop it.

3. Oh, my, it's Laura Bush! Maybe she can help. The story is "In a tense election year, Laura Bush picks an interesting ally: Michelle Obama," by Krissah Thompson. It's as if somebody at WaPo decided to make the left-hand column as female-oriented as possible. All the authors are female. Story #1 alarms us about Trump's "stance" — which calls to mind that bane of female existence, manspreading. Story #2 calls to mind The 3 Stooges, who enact a style of male behavior that women find so off-putting. We all know women hate The 3 Stooges. And finally, there's relief: 2 female lead characters. If we can't love Hillary Clinton, surely we can warm up to these 2 solid standby females, Laura and Michelle. Gotta love at least one of them. First Ladies! Hillary was a First Lady, so... let's love First Ladies. Maybe that will help. Help us with our tension in this "tense election year." Laura and Michelle are sitting together on a stage at some worthy, non-tense event burbling about their mutual love and respect. Yes, yes, this is the tone we need now. Something gentle and feminine, not blustering and manspreading, not slapstick stoogery. There, now — do you see it? — forming mistily, gauzily in your mind? The female face — soft, smiling...

... tension-releasing....

"Many readers wanted to know the arrangements behind David Brooks’s participation on part of a $120,000 luxury trip..."

"... which he wrote about for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Many on Twitter and elsewhere charged that this must be a junket — a free trip for a journalist, which is, of course, an ethical no-no. (Others objected in strong terms to the article’s concept, its tone, and the The Times’s relative wisdom of spending a large sum of money for this purpose.) The Times’s standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, assured me late Friday that the company had paid for the portion of that trip for which Mr. Brooks was present. (Yes, that covered both bottles of champagne.) A sentence in the article making the arrangement clear to readers would have been a good idea."

Writes the NYT "public editor" Margaret Sullivan. I was one of the "others" who "objected in strong terms to the article’s concept, its tone." Here's my post: "It's not the most poorly timed NYT article ever, but...." I was just seeing a new comment on it from DANIELBLOOM:

Was Brooks shilling for the travel firm, and, did he accept offer of free trip for 6 days or did he pay his own way for the 25 percent of the trip fare? Like US$30,000 Fact checkers? Or was this a paid junket by the travel firm and therefore unethical for NYT reporter to accept this? Can anyone answer?

I hadn't thought of that question because I assumed the NYT paid for it, which was correct. I'm more interested in knowing whether he was able to hide his identity as an important reviewer, like a NYT restaurant reviewer. I remember NYT restaraunt reviewer Ruth Reichl talking about that:

"I have a really strong belief that I am there to be your eyes and ears when you're at the restaurant. I'm supposed to tell you what's going to happen to you, not what happens to the restaurant critic of The New York Times who is getting the best table and the chef is cooking the food specially and the portions are getting bigger and so forth. I think it's really important for you to know what's going to happen to you. And you can't do that if you're sashaying in as someone who's going to have a big economic impact on the restaurant."

But when you travel around the world in a small chartered plane with a group of people, you are having a much more intimate relationship with them than when you eat in a restaurant and the other people are at other tables. So I also wonder whether the people Brooks traveled with and wrote about (wrote about disparagingly!) knew they were under observation by a NYT writer. If they knew, did they consent? These people had shelled out $125,000 apiece for what, I assume, was, for them, their dream vacation. Were they put into the position of needing to account for what this powerful man might think and say about them? Was that fair? Or did they not know who he was, in which case the Four Seasons allowed them to be used as specimens from what Brooks ended up sniffing at as the "lower end of the upper class"?

The NYT's embarrassing attack on Clarence Thomas for writing in words that are "not his own."

The Times' Adam Liptak wrote, in paragraph 2, that "opinions contain language from briefs submitted to the court at unusually high rates." And then way down in paragraph 15:

Over the years, the average rate of nearly identical language between a party's brief and the majority opinion was 9.6 percent. Justice Thomas's rate was 11.3 percent. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's was 11 percent, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 10.5 percent.

So, obviously, there is absolutely nothing special about Thomas's use of language that's also in the briefs.

And, I would add, the use of the same language isn't even a problem, because briefs and court opinions are always studded with quotes from old cases and the kind of stock word clusters that make up legal doctrine and shouldn't be paraphrased. I'm surprised the shared language is as low as 11%. I'd guess that any judge that does us readers the service of keeping it concise would have a higher percentage, because there'd be less filler and verbosity to dilute the necessary language.

My link goes to the blog post at Reason.com, which cites Orin Kerr's trenchant criticism....

The implication is that Justice Thomas is not doing his job. Not only does he not ask questions, he doesn’t even think for himself. For the New York Times audience, it's the kind of ideological catnip that is likely to make a lasting impression...

... and the wan response to Kerr from the New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan:

I thought the article’s language was quite careful, and, from what I can tell, accurate. But the overall impression it left may well have overstated the case.

And I think those 2 sentences are careful — careful not to hurt Adam Liptak's reputation and careful not to get in the way of the game of inspiring contempt for Clarence Thomas.

Sullivan's short piece  is mostly — talk about using words not your own! — a reprinting of email  from Adam Liptak. I'll put these 4 paragraphs after the jump because they're too long and windy (like a not-concise judicial opinion). I read them with growing outrage at the Sullivan's weak acceptance with mild distancing. She couldn't even say that Liptak overstated Thomas's distinctiveness. It had to be "may well have overstated." Embarrassing!

The NYT public editor takes back her criticism of the NYT in the reporting of the Ferguson shooting.

Margaret Sullivan regrets her accusation that the Times reporters enaged in "false balance" and gave "dubious equivalency" to anonymous sources:

Giving implicit credence to the named sources who described Michael Brown as having his hands up as he was fired on by Officer Darren Wilson, I criticized the use of unnamed sources who offered opposing information: They said that the officer had reason to fear Mr. Brown. I even went so far as to call those unnamed sources “ghosts” because readers had so little ability to evaluate their identity and credibility.

Now that the Justice Department has cleared Mr. Wilson in an 86-page report that included the testimony of more than 40 witnesses, it’s obvious to me that it was important to get that side of the story into the paper.

"Was Times ‘Disgusting’ to Grant Anonymity to Al Qaeda Source?"

NYT "public" editor responds to FBI director James B. Comey.

"Nobody is saying 'that news organizations should simply defer to the government when it comes to deciding what the public has a right to know about its secret activities'..."

"... which is how [NYT Public Editor Margaret] Sullivan mischaracterized [Michael] Kinsley’s argument [against Glenn Greewald]. Of course the press can, and should, fight for its rights. But we won’t always win; it would be arrogant to suggest that we always should. The rule of law applies to everybody, even reporters."

RELATED: Snowden did a TV interview last night.

"There are times that what is right is not the same thing as what is legal,” Snowden said. “Sometimes to do what’s right you have to break the law.”...

“Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else,” Snowden told [Brian] Williams. “Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country and knowing when to protect the Constitution against the encroachment of adversaries. Adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies.”

The NYT public editor registers 2 polite objections (where strong criticism would make more sense).

1. "As the Latest Christie Story Evolved, The Times Should Have Noted a Change."

“We made dozens of changes to this story, and it’s all happening live in front of the reader,” he said. “The story probably went through two dozen versions.” Editors can’t be expected to describe each one of those changes, [the Metro editor, Wendell Jamieson said].

And he added that no change, including the one I mention above, “alters the essential truth of the story, which is that a former Christie ally has opened fire on him in a big way.”

What an outrageous move! Defining something as "the essential truth" so that the thing that did change appears inconsequential: What really matters was that Christie was getting attacked, not the assertion that the attacker was in possession of "evidence" against Christie. But it was that evidence that got everyone excited, which was the point of the big scoop that Jamieson seeks to defend. The public editor, Margaret Sullivan, mildly chides him. There should have been "some sort of notice" of this edit.

2. "On Kristof’s Column About Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen..." Sullivan says that she's "troubled by the same questions raised" in email sent to her by a professor named Chris Rasmussen, whom she quotes:

The writers who are permitted to “columnize” for The Times have a tremendously influential platform, and I wonder whether they should use that platform to advocate on behalf of personal friends, as Mr. Kristof did yesterday....

Personal friends? Sullivan does not provide any detail about this personal friendship. I clicked the link to see Kristof's own disclosure, which specifies who the friendship is with, but not the degree of warmth and interaction: "I am a friend of her mother, Mia, and brother Ronan, and that’s how Dylan got in touch with me." That disclosure appears only at the column, not at the blog post, which is where Dylan's open letter appears in full and thus the page most people are reading. Can't Sullivan do more than say she's "troubled" and that there are "questions"? I had to Google "what is nicholas kristof's friendship with mia farrow" in an effort to get details. I found this at a website the credibility of which I don't know:

But Kristof and Farrow aren’t just ‘friends.’ They are close friends. Romantic? I’m not suggesting that. They travel together, Kristof writes about Farrow often, he Tweets and re-Tweets her.

Why couldn't Sullivan extract details from Kristof?

Come on, Sullivan, be there for us. Yes, yes, I know. You're all going to say that of course the "public editor" position is NYT PR and a fraud.

The NYT public editor has "found that The Times sometimes writes about the administration’s point of view in The Times’s own voice..."

"...  rather than providing distance through clear attribution. This is a subtle thing, and individual examples are bound to seem unimportant, but consider, for example, the second paragraph of Friday’s lead story. (The boldface emphasis is mine.)"

The negative vote in Britain’s Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain’s involvement in a brief operation to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for apparently launching a deadly chemical weapons attack last week that killed hundreds.

"With the use of the word 'apparently' – rather than directly attributing the administration, The Times seems to take the government’s position at face value."

ADDED: The quoted sentence is bad for another reason. There's way too much happening in that sentence ,and phrases end up saying things that are not intended and that we're supposed to straighten out in our heads. Specifically, Cameron didn't call for punishing Assad "for apparently launching" the attack.

Cameron called for punishment for launching the attack, which Cameron believes happened. You only impose the punishment if you're satisfied that the thing deserving punishment happened. It's a separate issue whether it happened. The writer of the sentence and the editor who accepted it realized they don't know, so they wedged "apparently" into the sentence.

That's a type of error that you see all the time, often with the word "allegedly," as in: "John Smith was charged with allegedly murdering Joe Blow." No! Smith was charged with murdering Blow. Whether he did it or not may be in question, but the charge is murder, not alleged murder. You could say that it is alleged that Smith murdered Blow, but no one is charged with alleged murder.

Quite aside from the problem of journalists psychically merging with the government, there's flat out bad writing. Write better sentences that say only exactly what you know. Words like "allegedly" and "apparently" can help, but pay attention to where you put them and whether you're creating new, unintended inaccuracies.

The NYT public editor: "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture..."

"... and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive."

Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”

That's a lot more than awareness to not fitting in. It's hard to fit in with people you are attacking.

The NYT kept the Libya hearing off the front page because "It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing..."

Why, yes, it is a politicized thing, isn't it? Oh... you didn't mean your coverage of the news, did you? The NYT managing editor Dean Baquet was explaining to the NYT public editor why the decision was made to go with the 6 stories they did put on the front page...

... one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis.

Baquet said: “I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it.” And: “There were six better stories."

They put the story on page 3.

To be fair: The NYT put the original news of the Watergate break-in on an inside page. Was it page 18? Sorry, I'm not finding that fact as easily as I think I should. I did come up with the information that when Deep Throat/Mark Felt wanted to communicate with the Washington Post, Bob "Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20."

So the myth of the inside pages of the New York Times looms large in the annals of presidential scandal.

Is the Libya scandal as big as Watergate? The substance of it may be much worse than Watergate, and the Obama administration seems not to have heeded the old Watergate lesson that it's the cover-up that gets you, but if Obama loses the election, that will limit the dimension of the scandal. If he wins the election — especially if it's very close or contested in some way — Republicans may work themselves into a frenzy going after Obama. Remember that Richard Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal broke. The break-in was 5 months before the election, and the first stories had come out. The next 2 years were hell for Nixon, and he was drummed out of office. And Nixon had won by a landslide.

Can the NYT stop providing phony "balance" and help readers know what to believe?

The NYT has a new "public editor," Margaret Sullivan. She introduced herself last week and explained her concept of the role: "Put readers first... Encourage conversation... Promote transparency and understanding."

The Times’s decision to open itself to criticism from the inside, criticism that is made public, is a clear indication of its desire to keep its standards high.

It's a clear indication of its desire to clearly indicate its desire to indicate that it desires to keep its standards high. We'll see what Sullivan actually does. This week, her column is about "the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story" — taking cover under the appearance of balance — instead of "more aggressive on fact-checking and truth-squading." Journalists, we're told, have been feeling "pressure" recently "to be more aggressive on fact-checking and truth-squading." Recently? Why recently?