#bothsidesism

[contemplatingoutlander]

Given what recently happened with the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial boards from endorsing Harris for president, it seems this excellent column by The Guardian's Rebecca Solnit is quite appropriate. Here are some excerpts:

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer. Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”. Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.” Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

[See more excerpts under the cut.]

[...] They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it. In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight. [...] Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?” [...] It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary. [...] A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[cherryblossomshadow]

op turned off reblogs but this needs to be shared

[mercuryismygenius]

"This kind of performative objectivity, where journalists search for negativity anywhere they can find it and exaggerate what little they can find, had the truth-twisting effect of making it seem as if Biden's transgressions were somehow equal to Trump's."

---Lee McIntyre, On Disinformation

[wat3rm370n]

Monica Gandhi, speaker at Stanford University MAGA adjacent political event.

Symposium of covid contrarians celebrating the anniversary of The Great Barrington Declaration.

The painful facepalm on the botched India prediction wouldn’t be the last time Monica Gandhi got it infamously wrong. There have been a virtual litany of examples, many covered by Medhi Hasan in an interview in 2022 with Gandhi that took her to task for many errors.

In mid June 2021 she was celebrated as a hero by San Mateo County at a gathering, at least it was outside, but at this party they had a ribbon cutting ceremony where the ribbon was made out of medical masks and Monica Gandhi relished in cutting the masks with a big pair of scissors and then jumping up and down with a line of people prematurely celebrating the supposed end of the pandemic. This was about 6 months before the horrendous winter Omicron wave, the deadliest surge for American cancer patients that peaked in January 2022.

In October 2021, in a bizarre mixed up woke-washing statement to Democracy Now, Monica Gandhi declared that she would not be getting the public health recommended booster dose of covid vaccine, and claimed it was in protest for people in other nations who hadn’t been caught up in getting vaccinated at all yet. This made no sense because unused vaccines in American communities would not somehow miraculously mean that people on other continents would get those doses, they would merely go to waste, and then lesser vaccinated Americans would just be more likely to continue getting sick, crowding in hospitals, and maybe even more likely to take the virus to other places when they traveled. Vaccine equity is a serious issue but not one that would be ameliorated by Monica Gandhi personally declining a boost, and public health is certainly not served by this upside down messaging to depress vaccine booster uptake in the U.S. This argument of hers frankly sounded ever so reminiscent of climate contrarians who muddy the discourse with woke-washing disinformation like framing climate justice as colonialism by demanding that regions harshest hit by climate change need fossil fuel, and by chastising as supposedly elitist any legitimate criticism of predatory practices like crypto orbs distributed in developing countries.

But embracing the upside down is how Monica Gandhi is such an insidious covid contrarian. She was contrite and publicly apologized for the gravely mistaken prediction about India. I have no doubt she was sorry. She went on Democracy Now to coo socially responsible lefties with a pro-vax and pro-mask message. And she used the pandemic to make a progressive case for universal healthcare, saying the lesson should be “to recognize healthcare as a right, not a privilege.” in her book She went on MSNBC in the summer of 2021, to make a case for businesses to require vaccination. Monica Gandhi is not MAGA. 

In sales they call this trick start with a yes, or “the yes set” technique, described as “creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree” and which sales experts openly state is a type of hypnotherapy. It plays on one of the many cognitive biases that trip people up, especially when people are not vigilantly engaging in critical examination, which is usually. I call it Truth with a Lie Chaser - today the influencer says something you like, and tomorrow they take money to try to sell you something. It’s about gaining trust by creating a comfortable rapport in order to introduce other stuff. Another form of trickery at play here is manipulating the natural desire for people to be told what they want to hear. David Gorski pointed this out about Gandhi positioning herself “as the “reasonable” middle ground between “let ‘er rip” ideologues like Makary and Atlas and conventional public health science recommending standard public health interventions to mitigate the pandemic, viewing the latter as too strict, all the while polluting the COVID-19 information landscape with obvious misinformation and falsely pacified people the worst was over, when in fact the worst was yet to come.”

I don’t suggest it’s deliberate on the part of Monica Gandhi since I don’t really believe her to be some PR mastermind. But I could see her triangulation for whatever reason being very attractive to the actual PR savvy operators, recognizing its value, and her walking ass-backwards into audience capture to those who boost her voice. It’s also possible that being the supposedly “reasonable” middle ground is like catnip to a mass media all stunlocked on the false balance of truth and lies, no matter how many criticisms pointing out the flaws and the dangers, and the complete absurdity of it, summed up well by Hayden Buckfire: “Clearly, an equally weighted roundtable discussion between squirrel believers and squirrel denialists would not be worthwhile.”

Crosspost from Teams Human substack & full pdf version.

[lenbryant]

love is love hate is hate

ninja wisdom from super dragon ninja ryu hayabusa

[contemplatingoutlander]

JOURNALISTIC CHOICES: Telling the Truth vs. "Bothsidesism"

Ben Raderstorf does a great job in this article discussing the dilemma modern journalism has in covering a lying, dangerous authoritarian like Donald Trump, without "appearing partisan." Raderstorf argues against bothsidesism, and in favor of good journalists just simply telling the truth.

[T]he best way for independent, fact-based media to win back the audiences they’re losing to polarization is to not chase them.... But rather, to double-down on independence, objectivity, and honesty. To report reality as it is and to let the chips fall where they may. To draw a hard distinction between the normal political jockeying of healthy democracy and actions that threaten our system of government.   Back in 2022, in response to questions from reporters about how to discern between those two things, we wrote a report on how experts understand threats to democracy: The Authoritarian Playbook: How reporters can contextualize and cover authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual. 

"Modern autocrats don't crush journalism — they corrupt it." 

Raderstorf also talks about how 21st century autocrats like Viktor Orbán (who is a role model for Trump) apply pressure in subtle ways to eventually "corrupt" journalism.

These days, many autocrats don’t just smash printing presses, throw reporters in jail, and be done with it. Often they pursue a more nuanced, and more insidious, strategy.   With a combination of intimidation, coercion, and financial manipulation, they slowly corrode the independence and autonomy of the press until it ceases to be a meaningful check on power. The media still exists; it’s just an empty shell, a useful facade.   Put differently, modern autocrats don’t crush journalism — they corrupt it. 

[See more below the cut about the role of "anticipatory obedience" and the changes in leadership at CNN and The Washington Post.]

[edited]

"ANTICIPATORY OBEDIENCE": An Explanation for Why CNN and The Washington Post Changed Their Leadership

Raderstorf mentions how the two journalistic outlets that Trump targeted most vehemently as president are the two that eventually replaced their leadership--and as a result, weakened their journalistic integrity.

In an article this week in the Columbia Journalism Review, my colleagues Ian Bassin... and Maximillian Potter ... dive into several case studies. They connect troubling dots suggesting that Donald Trump deployed the Orbán strategy in his first term to greater effect than many realize. [...] In their piece, Ian and Max explore the two major instances in Trump’s first term when he attempted to wield the powers of the presidency against journalists for coverage he didn’t like. First, by threatening to block a proposed merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Second, by looking to raise shipping rates on Amazon, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post.  In both cases, Trump mostly failed to carry out his threats. But… it’s also true that both CNN and the Post subsequently went through high-profile leadership shakeups at least partly in response to Trump. For CNN, this was Chris Licht’s short-lived tenure and disastrous efforts to make the network “more neutral.” For the Post, it was Bezos installing a new publisher: “Will Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch executive who has spent most of his career in right-wing media.” [...] Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny that autocratic leaders often succeed simply because the media, business leaders, and civil society look ahead to possible repression and move preemptively towards self-preservation. What he calls “anticipatory obedience."

[unknownbirds]

if your art is "experimental", what is your null hypothesis?

[because--palestine]

Jon Stewart Says Israel & Hamas Are Equally Bad

Finally someone points this out!!

When I posted a comment on the monologue expressing disappointment about his bothsidesism, I was accused if being partial.

[mymatedave10]

this applies to the upcoming UK general election, am I thrilled with Starmer? No, but he’s miles better than the Tories.

Every time I advocate for voting people are like "no you shouldn't vote! Read this literature, it'll totally change the way you view voting!" And every single time it's the same fucking "you shouldn't vote because both parties are exactly the same so it won't make a difference who wins" bullshit wrapped up in some fancy language

[mercuryismygenius]

"It is imperative that journalists seek a higher standard of reporting than the false dichotomy between political bias on the one hand and massaging a story in order to avoid the *perception* of bias on the other."

---Lee McIntyre, On Disinformation

Tumblr wouldn't let me add italics in the Quote function (wtf?), so I used asterisks instead.

[cherryblossomshadow]

"Snowflakes", they call us? Get enough snowflakes together and you've got an avalanche. Tried standing in front of one of those lately?

.

Not that we're beholden to the ideals of the Founding Fathers or anything, but a fact that drives me crazy is that Thomas Jefferson (yes that Thomas Jefferson) talked about how every law should naturally expire after 19 years. "If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right." X

He said this because he believed "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living," another truth he thought to be self-evident. X X

(he also talked about how debt collectors shouldn't be able to collect things like property from a dead person, bc then one person "might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, & then the lands would belong to the dead, & not to the living." Which I think is FASCINATING)

… Originalists never talk about that, but whatever

[glitterarygetsit]

some further first-time 911 viewer observations, tsunami edition, summarised from my discord screamings:

eddie dropping chris off with "his buck" just say "other dad" already

A FUCKING TSUNAMI??!?!

oh. oh no. oh no. he's got to tell eddie that--oh no.

THEIR FACES

i am emotionally compromised

OH THANK FUCK

i'm gonna watch that conversation again *watches it seven more times*

buck's "wait, am i gay?" post-feels face

THEY CAME BACK

oh shit buck is down SO bad

SOMETHING VERY LGBTQ IS HAPPENING RN

FUCKIGN KISS ALREADY

[nooblord9001]

‘If you (non-americans) had kept your fucking gob shut about Harris, this wouldn't have happened.’

Sorry, next time a fucking genocide happens to my neighbors I’ll just make sure to keep my mouth shut so you can continue living in the heirs your country has granted you at the expense of everyone else, you repugnant, soulless, sellout fucking liberal husk of a human being. ‘This wouldn’t have happened’ your country is a breeding hive for Nazis and you keep exporting them around the world, how about you worry about that before you scold people across the planet for thinking that your election being between Hitler and Hitler-lite is a disgrace?

[definitelynotplanetfall]

why tf do people hate q girl so much i don't understand it. i won't pretend that she isn't like. self insert oc coded. but if she's annoying you really don't have to interact with her very much? what's the psychology of someone who blows up a town because of an annoying character and then posts about it on the subreddit full of people who presumably like the game.

like i *get* setting off a nuke in grit gate in a test save or a mode that lets you revert because you're bored or frustrated or want to test the game's explosion mechanics or to sate the same baffling lizardbrain impulse that compels people to kill as many bystanders as possible in like gta. i'm trying not to be precious about pixel people. i just don't get setting off a nuke in grit gate *bricking an in progress run because a character annoyed you* and then posting about it on reddit in a bid for what, pity? advice? accolades?

[punishedgwyndolin]

https://www.tumblr.com/transmascpetewentz/731113886411014144

Is it my imagination, or is lazer dude indirectly reffering to us evil, tankie bigoted mal- I mean TMAs as antisemites for being in general pro palestine liberation and agaisnt zionism/the Israel goverment?? Or just recognizing that Israel is objectively oppressing palestine???

you know i keep thinking that spacelazar guy cant get, like, worse, after all the bizarre tranmisogyny they post and the male socialization takes but this kinda takes the cake, what the hell lmao. "a terrorist organization that puts thousands of palestinian lives at risk"? tankie propaganda? "never speak to me about trans solidarity again"? what the fuck liberalbrain are you on? really funny he's still sore about that cuntboy joke and blaming it on trans women though