Category Archives: Grey Lady

Come on, “liberal media”

I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with the NY Times, though they do excellent and important investigative work from time to time.  Their default position seems to be that whatever benefits Wall Street is more or less good for our well-educated readers and there’s no point to seem one-sided in balancing the grim and desperate needs of the oppressed and the ongoing bright prospects of the perpetually challenged well-to-do. 

The Grey Lady often does this balancing in a somewhat subtle manner, which makes it look like cranky caviling to take issue with it much of the time, though once a while something obvious jumps out and punches me.  Like the headlines they post, amplifying right wing talking points, on the same day government reports come out highlighting the success of any one of Biden’s several major economic initiatives. On the same day the US economy reported another record month for job growth, the Grey Lady offered this on page one:

Nobody at the NY Times has access to google?   Five seconds with that arcane search engine and you discover that Biden, in spite of cheery jobs numbers, low unemployment numbers, infrastructure repair jobs booming and other good things he has done against determined, sometimes insane opposition, may not have all that much to do with Worldwide inflation.

Read the Times headline, against the backdrop of brutal anti-Biden propganda in the FOX infotainment universe and you come away thinking not only has Biden jeopardized the economy of the US with run away inflation, he’s fucked just about every other wealthy country too!   Check out the damage he’s done!

A few seconds on Google, and you have the beginning of a more nuanced, realistic picture of global inflation

Belgium 8.3%

Brazil 11.3%

Canada 6.7%

European Union 7.8%

Germany 7.4%

Hungary 8.5%

India 6.95%

Mexico 7.68%

Netherlands 9.7%

Poland 12.3%

Spain 8.4%

UK 7%

source

There are lower inflation numbers in Scandinavia and other places, Japan 1.2%, Afghanistan is doing fantastic (relative to inflation, that is), with only 1.56%, and higher ones, 16.7% in Russia, 13.7% in Ukraine, 69.97% in Turkey, but the US numbers are not out of line with inflation in other wealthy nations in the aftermath of a massive global disruption due to a deadly pandemic.   We are also aware of the unimaginably gigantic windfall profits the richest individuals and corporations raked in during that same deadly period.   Oh, well.  Biden may be doing some things right, against tremendous odds, but… look at that fucking record inflation he is causing!  Everywhere!!!

An insightful exchange about healthier “social media”

Gail is Gail Collins. Bret is Bret Stephens. They write for the New York Times. As the Gray Lady styles it:

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.

Gail: Lord help us. Even if Twitter tanked, wouldn’t there be some new post-Twitter communications system coming around the bend soon? You’re 10 times smarter than me about this stuff, so tell me what you think, and I’ll adopt it as my theory. At least for the spring.

Bret: Maybe in the distant future a big media company will create a platform in which non-unhinged adults can exchange ideas, air their disagreements without rancor, make a few jokes, have their claims fact-checked before they are published and then go out for a friendly drink.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that social-media companies should try to honor the spirit of the First Amendment, even if they aren’t legally bound by it. But the idea that Twitter is a good forum for speech is silly. Trying to communicate a thought in 280 characters isn’t speaking. It’s blurting. You don’t use Twitter for persuasion. You use it for insults and virtue signaling.

A healthy free-speech environment depends on people talking with each other. Twitter is a medium for people to talk at others. The best thing that could happen to Twitter isn’t an acquisition, by Musk or anyone else. It’s bankruptcy.

Gail: Wow, I’ve always pretty much avoided Twitter, but it was mainly out of laziness. Now I’m cloaked in righteousness and am deferring to you on all Twitter topics.

This Is Not the Year of the Optimist https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/opinion/twitter-musk-biden-midterms.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkTFUaCybSRdkhrxqAwuTQwaAgi2W7KTWOSnNIzugYBc2F-kvRaLBmfJ0zwzGfDpdnAYMYecZTnKVZLlA_DE6huIeFk5AIZHtu8I-5VztrmsiUBe59rG7hYizpd791geDn4kiKbDO7XqSMhGYzZ1ow-esTflCs330PxqnHA7Q1joE4haF9c8g8ETQQZyCKvO3qDgF-OLiGbRLc7go0X4JJSG2Z3I7cu_9bLlIkWR-RR2h_4G089NpbJNoQWa3_JBUnc8P66q4D-NNkThH71esD1sKNscfVzA

Whataboutism, April 19th edition

In the tit for tat, kick ’em hard, anywhere you can get a boot on ’em, marketing-driven world that is American politics, the advertising hungry corporate media still plays along, faithful as a terrier to the idea that fairness means presenting both sides of everything as having a more or less equal argument. It plays beautifully into a prevalent technique, persuasive to masses who already believe, hammered eternally by one side that is actively much worse than the other: whataboutism. 

On one side, you have a long, well-funded multifarious plot culminating in a Hail Mary riot to stop the certification of Trump’s loss in Congress, after a “stolen election”.  You have the wife of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice urging the outgoing president’s chief of staff to take action, in the name of Jesus Christ and all that is holy, to overturn the election results to keep Trump in office, somehow.  We’ve read Donald Trump Jr’s seditious texts, starting a couple of days after the election his father was about to officially lose, about keeping his father in power no matter what, using the leverage of his massive government power.   You have pinhead real estate fortune heir Jared Kushner, months after leaving his appointment as Trump’s minister with a dozen portfolios (Covid, peace in the Middle East, ending the Opioid epidemic, rooting out government corruption, making business deals with wealthy sheiks. etc.) getting two billion dollars from the murderer of a journalist, Muhammad bin Salman, a close friend of his he met as his father-in-law’s informal Saudi envoy.   

On the other side, you have a shady character named Hunter Biden, son of the current president, and some shady consulting deals he made for large amounts of money.   When Giuliani was making wild, unfounded claims about fraud that wasn’t actually fraud, your Honor, and lunatics like Sidney Powell were threatening to release a Kraken she later claimed (as defendant in a defamation case) no reasonable person could have believed existed, one GOP talking point that was out there, after Trump failed to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption, was that Hunter Biden forgot a laptop at a repair shop that was loaded with incriminating details (including, of course, the now ubiquitous Republican charge of sexual deviance) about him and his criminal father, Trump’s 2020 opponent in the presidential election. Giuliani announced on FOX that, along with proof of a stolen election, he had the incriminating laptop, or knew someone who had it, or had seen it, or heard about it. Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post pushed the theoretically devastating Hunter Biden story too, the story was Murdoch’s exclusive, claiming they had the laptop, or had seen it, or knew somebody who claimed to have seen it and did a thorough unbiased forensic study of its highly incriminating (for Joe Biden) contents.

What has been the Republican party’s corporate media-abetted answer to the many serious allegations against their top officials, the trove of devastating new evidence we see every other day, the proof of multiple crimes committed in the name of party loyalty? The loud, childish but effective (with corporate media dutifully playing along) GOP response to the mounting evidence that many of them participated eagerly in Trump’s mad plan to stay in power was “what about fucking Hunter fucking Laptop fucking Biden?!! What are the Democrats hiding and why?”

As stories about  the insurrection culminating in the January 6, 2021 Trump riot at the Capitol (and continuing energetically since) continue to come out, as damning details create an increasingly gigantic mountain of evidence of a frenzied, sometimes insane, many-pronged plan, involving many prominent elected Republicans, to keep the losing candidate in power, the NY Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories asking why Democrats had not believed or seriously investigated the sketchy Hunter Biden laptop story.  Serious journalism, 2022, Tucker Carlson style — why did Democrats not seriously investigate this implausible story about a cunning criminal, son of their president, too stupid to cover his tracks?  Just asking…

Read this post mortem from the Washington Post and see what you can make of this obvious horseshit story about a seeming scumbag who has, significantly for any intelligent analysis of this instance of Whataboutism, never worked in the US government, not for his father or anybody else. Thank God, say Republicans under their collective breath, that intelligent analysis is no longer even a thing when it comes to US politics!

Now warning about Hunter Biden laptop disinfo: guy who leaked it.

INFLATION!

You want a scary story? The money you have in your pocket is losing value!

The pandemic seems to be winding down, and now with a centrist non-authoritarian in the White House, one who has shown a willingness to impose modest taxes on the wealthiest 0.01% of our finest citizens, human and corporate alike, the corporate media’s story seems unable to focus on the steady economic recovery in the USA, it must be on a crisis — and the failure of a reasonably competent Democratic president to fix things beyond any president’s control and against a united party determined to see him fail. Here’s the Grey Lady the other day, hammering a familiar corporate theme:

Gasoline weighed heavily in the increases, hmmm, oil company profits hit all-time highs. Hmmmm… maybe there’s another explanation for corporate leaders using Biden as a punching bag for this worldwide rise in gasoline prices and worldwide inflation…

Here’s Robert Reich:

people, just like you and me! For the love of God, haven’t they and their billionaire human counterparts been crucified enough by class and social justice warriors? Will the vicious attacks on our greatest never cease?

Probably not.

Not that they have any reason to care about that very much…

King Joe Manchin, colossally, corrupt (totally legally) piece of shit

The New York Times published a long article the other day about the most powerful Democrat in the United States, filibuster champion Joe Manchin III. The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is a savvy, Maserati driving, yacht dwelling man of the people who has made his personal fortune in the fossil fuel game. You might consider this a conflict of interest, a coal baron funded by Big Oil sitting athwart all plans to curtail the devastation being caused by the burning of these highly polluting, though lucrative to some, energy sources, but, as the New York Times points out, no laws seem to have been broken. It is a great benefit to have the laws carefully vetted by fossil fuel lobbyists, and studied by fossil fuel-enriched lawmakers of discernment like Manchin, lest the federal government use its power to coerce them into actions that disadvantage them in their God-given pursuit of happiness.

Here’s the Grey Lady with Senator Joe Manchin’s Conflict of Interest; how the West Virginia lawmaker intervened on behalf of a coal plant and made millions along the way.

At every step of his political career, Senator Joe Manchin III has helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business, including by blocking ambitious climate action.

A Times investigation has revealed the strands of the unusual relationship between Mr. Manchin and that especially dirty power plant, showing just how entwined they are.

Mr. Manchin…

The Girl Can’t Help It

I really don’t understand the Grey Lady, outside of as a floridly schizzophrenic purveyor of important investigative journalism and a reality shaping distortion lense.

Desperate Dems, in disarray, failing, turn to unpopular Biden for salvation. You read it in the paper of record, it must be true. Fuck me.

On the other hand, the predictable betrayal by corporate Democrats of policies to solve problems most people in the country share, based on polling, right-wing talking points and fundraising from wealthy donors, is not something that can be whitewashed, no matter how many fearful white people show up with buckets of white paint, or however plainly the influential Grey Lady paints it.