“By the time anyone in those newsrooms wants to admit the pattern, they will already have done the job.”
Thank you Parker again for your incisive, insightful analysis that reaches across the specifics to reveal the mechanism that lurks beneath. I also appreciate that you widen the lens to show how Harris was not nearly as successful with this approach and leaves us to draw our own conclusions there.
Thank you for naming the dissonance and clearly laying out the timeline. In this time of personal overwhelm, I am very grateful for your writing which provides greater understanding and invites me to move beyond superficial dismissals.
The New York Times ran that story about how Trump decided to go to war, and the anonymous sources claimed that everyone in the room was against it except Trump. Probably all lies, but it does tell you something about how the war is going. Before the rats jump over the gunwales, they call the New York Times and say - off the record, of course - "I warned the captain about that iceberg!"
I always felt 'Hillbilly Elegy' was a bullshit creation. It's a terrible book, incredibly poorly written, and this bozo has built a whole career of it with the help of our pundit class.
Great work as always so glad I am a subscriber to you!!
Legitimately aggravating that these reporters are abandoning their journalistic integrity to hand J.D. bleeping Vance a megaphone. The meme about him screwing couches is more believable than his being a skeptic about war with Iran.
Fascinating. JD Vance makes the pattern here so stark. Why did the media believe Obama in 2008? What was the real evidence that he “always” opposed the Iraq war? How did he oppose it? I voted for him twice, but this claim always felt thin on evidence.
They believed him (and sold it for him) because they wanted to. They didn’t believe Hillary or Kamala, because they didn’t want to, so they trashed them.
JD doesn’t even try to present as anything other than a liar. A smarmy, duplicitous, slime bag who will say whatever is convenient to advance himself. They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats - a lie, but what clever propaganda, right? Our boy is so clever!
Why do they want/need so badly to believe him? Or at least his underlying motives (see, he’s really very smart and well intentioned!) It doesn’t say anything very lovely about our political media or the environment that created them. And after 10 years of watching them with Trump it’s unsurprising.
That's a great question. Myself, I'd say they're invested in a belief that we still live in normal times with two normal political parties, that debates are always between "two sides" which have roughly equal validity to their views, and maintaining this fiction requires some very special accommodations for the Republican side.
Of course, it could be simpler and it's just that their bosses tell them to put their thumb on the scale in favor of Republicans.
I don’t think they need to be told by their bosses. White conservative men speak for “real America” in the minds of the political media and will thus be granted endless credence and legitimacy long after they ought to have by rights burned through it. It’s race, class, and gender politics all rolled into one ugly hairball and coughed up by corporate media in place of anything resembling truth. If they didn’t know how to uphold and enforce our social hierarchies, they probably wouldn’t have been hired by their corporate overlords in the first place.
hmmmm ... i wonder if media outlets that are losing eyeballs can see a possible cause in this kind of behavior.
i lost any faith i had in the nyt during the vietnam war. a new generation can watch them do now what they did then; cheer on a hugely corrupt and damaging war in unprofessional ways, in comically credulous prose ... sigh, more lost subscribers.
my morning newspaper is built of substack journalists, some of whom i came to trust before they, and i,' left the washington post.
Brilliant analysis of our billionaires’ lapdog press.
“By the time anyone in those newsrooms wants to admit the pattern, they will already have done the job.”
Thank you Parker again for your incisive, insightful analysis that reaches across the specifics to reveal the mechanism that lurks beneath. I also appreciate that you widen the lens to show how Harris was not nearly as successful with this approach and leaves us to draw our own conclusions there.
Thank you for naming the dissonance and clearly laying out the timeline. In this time of personal overwhelm, I am very grateful for your writing which provides greater understanding and invites me to move beyond superficial dismissals.
🙏
Fabulous piece Parker. You’ve ripped off the phony media bandage once again. Thank you for this.
The New York Times ran that story about how Trump decided to go to war, and the anonymous sources claimed that everyone in the room was against it except Trump. Probably all lies, but it does tell you something about how the war is going. Before the rats jump over the gunwales, they call the New York Times and say - off the record, of course - "I warned the captain about that iceberg!"
I always felt 'Hillbilly Elegy' was a bullshit creation. It's a terrible book, incredibly poorly written, and this bozo has built a whole career of it with the help of our pundit class.
Great work as always so glad I am a subscriber to you!!
Legitimately aggravating that these reporters are abandoning their journalistic integrity to hand J.D. bleeping Vance a megaphone. The meme about him screwing couches is more believable than his being a skeptic about war with Iran.
Fascinating. JD Vance makes the pattern here so stark. Why did the media believe Obama in 2008? What was the real evidence that he “always” opposed the Iraq war? How did he oppose it? I voted for him twice, but this claim always felt thin on evidence.
They believed him (and sold it for him) because they wanted to. They didn’t believe Hillary or Kamala, because they didn’t want to, so they trashed them.
JD doesn’t even try to present as anything other than a liar. A smarmy, duplicitous, slime bag who will say whatever is convenient to advance himself. They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats - a lie, but what clever propaganda, right? Our boy is so clever!
Why do they want/need so badly to believe him? Or at least his underlying motives (see, he’s really very smart and well intentioned!) It doesn’t say anything very lovely about our political media or the environment that created them. And after 10 years of watching them with Trump it’s unsurprising.
"Why do they want/need so badly to believe him?"
That's a great question. Myself, I'd say they're invested in a belief that we still live in normal times with two normal political parties, that debates are always between "two sides" which have roughly equal validity to their views, and maintaining this fiction requires some very special accommodations for the Republican side.
Of course, it could be simpler and it's just that their bosses tell them to put their thumb on the scale in favor of Republicans.
I don’t think they need to be told by their bosses. White conservative men speak for “real America” in the minds of the political media and will thus be granted endless credence and legitimacy long after they ought to have by rights burned through it. It’s race, class, and gender politics all rolled into one ugly hairball and coughed up by corporate media in place of anything resembling truth. If they didn’t know how to uphold and enforce our social hierarchies, they probably wouldn’t have been hired by their corporate overlords in the first place.
hmmmm ... i wonder if media outlets that are losing eyeballs can see a possible cause in this kind of behavior.
i lost any faith i had in the nyt during the vietnam war. a new generation can watch them do now what they did then; cheer on a hugely corrupt and damaging war in unprofessional ways, in comically credulous prose ... sigh, more lost subscribers.
my morning newspaper is built of substack journalists, some of whom i came to trust before they, and i,' left the washington post.