onfocus

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

Sometimes an organization is so cartoonishly evil it takes a comedian to point it out. The Onion nails the tone of the bigoted NYT response to criticism of its reporting on trans issues.

"Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. The very notion is completely incoherent. Someone else shaming me is their free speech, and someone else shunning me is their free association, both protected by the First Amendment."

The Media is really struggling to find a middle ground between rational and fascist and failing miserably.

"The “both sides” model of journalism is being exploited by bad actors intent on spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. “If the weight of the evidence allows you to make a judgment, but instead you go with ‘he said, she said,’ you're behaving recklessly even as you tell yourself you're doing the cautious thing,” as press critic Jay Rosen notes."

Hedging must feel like the safe path for journalists—especially since they wouldn't want to anger Big Dowsing. This is a good example of how baked-in both-sides thinking is. See also.

Like the Ogilvy company meeting a few weeks ago, this is an inside look at employees pushing back against management decisions. It's fascinating to get insight into debates around language at a major media outlet like this. Language defines how we interpret the world, so this conversation is like watching people determine what is real.