onfocus

Some journalists are so caught up in the debate furor that one of the most dangerous and consequential Supreme Court terms in memory was pushed off the front pages. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on immunity found that president’s might actually be kings, that’s a game changer that deserves more attention than it got. Instead, news outlets have dedicated most of their resources to covering every blip on the Biden debate follow up instead.

Wake up, journalists! Our democracy depends on an informed electorate and this horse race BS is a sideshow compared with the real story of a massive judicial power grab by a corrupt court.

Anyway, my point is just: none of this will change if Harris replaces Biden at the top of the ticket. The idea that the media -- with these soulless careerist court gossips in charge -- will allow it is just fantasy. They need Dems in disarray & so they will engineer it.

I don’t like to link to stuff on new Twitter but this is a nice summary of the media mode of operation. There is no move that Democrats can make that will change how the media covers them. You have to factor that into your decision making.

We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied, with 67% focused just on Biden’s age or mental acuity and only 7% on just Trump’s.

Look how not biased against Republicans they are! They are public opinion makers, not public opinion reporters.

If the entire press establishment sees fit to call on Biden to drop out of the race because of a bad debate, why haven't they applied this same logic to the convicted criminal who promises to destroy American democracy and rule as an authoritarian dictator?

My hunch is media owners think a Trump dictatorship would be better for their bottom line. Or maybe they’re true believers? The results are the same.

A president should be of decent character. A president should be entrusted to faithfully execute the law. The trial made clear that Trump is not of decent character and has no fealty to the law.

It’s so rare for someone in the media to state the obvious.

Since 2015, there has been this strong desire to make Trump more complicated than he is, as if his power and influence mean that he must have depth and substance. But he doesn’t. Trump is a glorified bully. And like all bullies, he wilts in the face of anyone willing to stand up and say no.

This is a rare good reminder in the NYT. The media needs this invincibility narrative but it doesn’t match reality.

"Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes," according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's good to see fact checking like this happening in the media. It's very difficult to correct lies when the media is flooded with bs, but the attempt to correct the record is important.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

I know it’s true, but it feels rare to see it in print because media organizations typically don’t acknowledge this truth. They usually smooth over reality so they don't offend potential customers and make their owners happy.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent…You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.

So strange that everyone at the NYT is working on this project to normalize Trump. Shouldn’t there be high profile resignations or some indication of unease from professional journalists?

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

This article really is as good as everyone is saying. Read it on the Internet Archive while you still can. Why it was removed we'll probably never know. cough unhappy rich people cough