This simple headline fail is an example of why the NYTimes, as it currently is (and has been for longer than most in major media are willing to admit) needs to be kneecapped at every opportunity.
All they have to do to not get the sh** kicked out of them is what they did at first - which as you so accurately and thoroughly point out in today's newsletter, is actual journalism, as compared to the biased bs they added later.
If we're throwin' adjectives around, the one I'd pick for Biden on this issue is "persistent." Joe Manchin wouldn't go for the broader student-loan forgiveness that Biden had promised, but Biden didn't give up, he then tried loan forgiveness through executive action, which was reined in by the Supreme Court, but even then he didn't give up. I've got a lifetime of experience of Democrats throwing up their hands and saying "Gosh, we'd love to help you, but what can we do?", pointing to the latest setback as a reason to simply give up. Oh, have I got my issues with Biden, but on this one issue he's won my heart. And a note to other Democrats: No, I don't expect Big Rock Candy Mountain results, but what I do want to see is EFFORT.
And if you do something to address a problem it raises people expectations, and they may even get more angry and frustrated because now their feeling that they're getting screwed and deserve redress has been validated. Which is all perfectly normal, the response to small reforms is often greater outrage, something all autocrats know, give 'em nothin' and eventually they may all get discouraged and melt away. I don't think Biden is surprised that one consequence of small scale student-loan reform is louder calls for more and not "Bless you, sir!" That he knows this and undertakes what reforms he can is to his credit.
Halfway through reading the post, I started wondering if the changes might be some sort of ploy for attention. Taking a perfectly fine headline and changing it to something so aggressively counter to the NYT's purported values almost feels like they're rage-baiting.
Absolutely, it's a trick used by MSNBC as well: Increase people's "engagement with the platform" by continually upping their anxiety level. So it's always "Bad news for Biden" and somehow Trump's multiple criminal indictments are actually GOOD for him because they "energize his base." So you'll tune in tomorrow, just like teens engage with social media more if it increases their insecurities about their standing in their peer group.
Aren't all contextualizing headlines editorializations? The problem with a straight headline is that it doesn't invite a reader in. What they're looking for is: X happened and here's why it matters. If the story was about for example voters loving Biden's cancelation record, then it would probably read more positively. But I don't think that's part of the story. (I'm not looking to defend this headline anymore than I already have it certainly reeks of bias)...
I think one issue here is that for the next nine months the ONLY context the Times will be interested in is the electoral context, does this "win the week" for Biden or Trump? Policy does have real-world consequences, and that's a real context, but don't expect to see anything but horse-race context through November.
Does the article include the factual numbers initially in the headline? I wonder if the NYT is baiting for online engagement while preserving the option to go "We reported the facts! It's not our fault most people don't read the article."
I'm a bit of an old fart when it comes to website optimization, but doesn't screwing with a headline over and over again seriously impact their analytics and SEO?
Excellent piece Parker, and spot on IMO. I was generally apolitical but read newspapers to stay informed. Those included the NYT, San Francisco Chronical, WSJ and two local City newspapers. I read fast, and world consume the A sections, the business sections and the opinion sections cover to cover. It until around W’s last term when I noted incremental but profound changes that can be described as left subtle but consistent left political bias. Later this bias was confirmed by a landmark study by UCLA.
My work to understand what was happening concluded in there being five primary causes.
1. Changes to the media business because of tech, resulted in fewer seasoned reporters and more younger, lower-paid employees with the control of their season editors and more senior peers.
2. Theory based content and curriculum in college humanities thus cementing a certain worldview in the minds of journalism graduates. That world view includes a general cynical view of facts and truths being a construct of white male patriarchal oppression, and everything is relative to power. Already tuned to idealism, these young writers would reflect these views in their work without editors stopping them.
3. Somewhat related to #1, social media combined with shrinking paid subscribers (ironically the drop was concentrated with younger consumers not buying print), the pursuit of followers because a side hustle for reporters, and the general shift was the news organizations seeking niche followers favorable to biased political/ideological reporting.
4. There has been a giant consolidation of media business with Wall Street owning a controlling interest. This connects the media to the elite establishment managerial class, the same that likes to collude with elite establishment administrative and ruling class (aka government and politicians). The media narratives and reporting approved is that which pleases the owners, and the owners have a globalist agenda because it supports greater Wall Street returns. Republicans want to pull back to focus on domestic issues and note that the long-run Global Order pushed by the elite establishment has decimated domestic working class economic opportunity while jacking up the cost of living despite cheap Walmart crap. The elite cabal the owns the media knows the damage their money pursuits are causing and are using the media to foment political was to detract the voters from seeing the truth and coming together to reject the elite cabal.
5. Infiltration of the NGOs that publish standards of professional journalism. There was a code of journalistic conduct from the Society of Professional Journalism. It has been changed to a woke agenda.
Have you ever read any Chomsky? Because none of this is new, and none of it is a conspiracy. It's always been the case that the function of the media is to communicate the ideas of the ruling class (so the rest of us know what to think.) And under capitalism, the ruling class is the capitalist class. True, in the United States for a limited post-war period, working people were able to capture a growing share of the national wealth thanks to strong labor unions, but with the near-destruction of organized labor, we reverted to the normal state of affairs, nearly all wealth flowing to the upper 0.01%, the rest of us left to survive on crumbs. Anything else would be SOCIALISM.
Well no. The newspapers tended be staffed by more blue collar journalists and editors that kept the radicals and idealists from making an ideological mess of the paper. Pulitzers where given to those that challenged the establishment, not those that supported it.
I think the technical term for this thing you're doing (where you try to explain a historical trend using whatever factors might pop into your mind) is "bullshitting." A fine thing to do at the bar over some beers or in a dorm room at 2am, but if you want me to visit your dorm room to listen to more of your theorizing, you're going to have to supply some weed.
So your answer is "No, I've never read Noam Chomsky"? It's fine if you want to theorize off the top of your head (I've noticed you've never provided a single piece of actual data to support your theorizing). But other people have thought these things through, maybe even more thoroughly that you have, maybe start with Manufacturing Consent (or at least the Wikipedia page for it?)
I have read Noam Chomsky as well as many other publications and studies related to the changes in the news industry. Canada is dealing with similar problems but maybe even more profound.
Part of the problem is the corruption of the education system. The other part of the problem is media and tech corporate consolidation owned by the elite billionaires that want to control the world.
Socialism and labor unions are not the solution for anything as the history of collectivism proves. The problem is that we don't have a real capitalist system, we have a corporatist system that has been moving toward a globalist corporatocracy. https://socialmisfit.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-corruptors-of-capitalism
I think it's pretty clear that you don't actually understand these terms you're throwing around and to you "Corporatism" just means "Corporations doing things I don't approve of."
Corporatism is the central control through regulatory and tax policy that is a collusion with big government with big corporations at the expense of open market competition. The globalist corporatocracy takes this to to a new level where the control would be in Beijing or Brussels. This is obviously too complex for your meager business brain and that is why I linked the article I wrote so you can educated yourself. But of course you are sure you know everything and everyone that has a different view than you is ignorant.
Corporatism is Marxism's spawn. The idea is socialism but with private property ownership. In practice it never works and ends with government first controlling the private property and then owning it. Corporatism is the corruption of capitalism moving toward collectivism.
Capitalism isn't at all corporatism. Capitalism was never designed to be only an excuse for corporate consolidation only to generate more profit and owner wealth. It was never conceived as defending absolute egoism - the view everyone should be free and expected to take care of themselves and government should just stay the hell out of the way (which means that government gets in the wrong way). Capitalism is primary a social system supported by an economic model of rewards for productive merit. But it is an invisible hand benefit to society, and good governance does not seek to collude with corporations to engineer outcomes, but to govern the competitive playing field so that domestic economic opportunity is maximized and the system SUPPORTS PEOPLE TAKING CARE OF THEMSELVES.
Corporatism loves big government because they both share the same interest to make the masses dependent and in need of their power and control.
Conversely, capitalism is an egalitarian system. It works dynamically if supported correctly. The Scandinavian countries tend to get it. They don't make the mistake of a stupid black and white battle against capitalism and socialism. They understand that social benefits are also economic benefits and a system that best delivers economic benefits to the masses is going to best support the human condition. They certainly support unionization, but not stupidly. The US does things like Hostess Corporation... stupid.
The key is not to for example for government to set wages and allow unions to distort the market of wages, but to set the tax and regulatory policy to foment the generations of good paying jobs where the competition for labor talent raises wages as part of the law of supply and demand.
Capitalism is a system that expects the returns from domestic capital investment to benefit domestic labor. Corporatism is where the corporations collect together with government to maximize the returns of corporate investment without including domestic labor.
There are four mega food corporations that own 85% of all the brands on the supermarket shelves. Corporatism supports them eventually merging into one corporation. Capitalism would break them apart to foster more competition and economic access for everyone.
At least once per week I am reminded "Citizen Kane" first came to Public knowledge 05 SEP 41 and it mysteriously, at that time, rather tanked, possibly because too many powerful men were looking into a mirror and didn't like what they saw so blamed the mirror. Gold mines, emerald mines; not much of a difference when it comes to controlling The Narrative. How much longer until the Ondatra zibethicus (re)invents the snow globe and claims credit for an existing idea? Much more credit to the guy whose dad was a mechanic and repo-man, who actually did work to earn his kudos (Jobs). Every publisher whomever was, is, will be, is Charles Foster Kane.
“I’m totally happy to accept criticism, just not the criticism that anyone actually has.”
This simple headline fail is an example of why the NYTimes, as it currently is (and has been for longer than most in major media are willing to admit) needs to be kneecapped at every opportunity.
All they have to do to not get the sh** kicked out of them is what they did at first - which as you so accurately and thoroughly point out in today's newsletter, is actual journalism, as compared to the biased bs they added later.
They simply have to not f*** things up.
Nice example of how bad journalism actually takes a lot more work than the good kind.
If we're throwin' adjectives around, the one I'd pick for Biden on this issue is "persistent." Joe Manchin wouldn't go for the broader student-loan forgiveness that Biden had promised, but Biden didn't give up, he then tried loan forgiveness through executive action, which was reined in by the Supreme Court, but even then he didn't give up. I've got a lifetime of experience of Democrats throwing up their hands and saying "Gosh, we'd love to help you, but what can we do?", pointing to the latest setback as a reason to simply give up. Oh, have I got my issues with Biden, but on this one issue he's won my heart. And a note to other Democrats: No, I don't expect Big Rock Candy Mountain results, but what I do want to see is EFFORT.
True, but most media don't report the effort, then report lack of enthusiasm among voters who don't know about it.
And if you do something to address a problem it raises people expectations, and they may even get more angry and frustrated because now their feeling that they're getting screwed and deserve redress has been validated. Which is all perfectly normal, the response to small reforms is often greater outrage, something all autocrats know, give 'em nothin' and eventually they may all get discouraged and melt away. I don't think Biden is surprised that one consequence of small scale student-loan reform is louder calls for more and not "Bless you, sir!" That he knows this and undertakes what reforms he can is to his credit.
Fascinating, I had no idea such things were edited so much. Is it all based on clicks? Edit the headline until they are high enough?
Halfway through reading the post, I started wondering if the changes might be some sort of ploy for attention. Taking a perfectly fine headline and changing it to something so aggressively counter to the NYT's purported values almost feels like they're rage-baiting.
Absolutely, it's a trick used by MSNBC as well: Increase people's "engagement with the platform" by continually upping their anxiety level. So it's always "Bad news for Biden" and somehow Trump's multiple criminal indictments are actually GOOD for him because they "energize his base." So you'll tune in tomorrow, just like teens engage with social media more if it increases their insecurities about their standing in their peer group.
"Biden shows one weird trick to forgive your student loans"
Aren't all contextualizing headlines editorializations? The problem with a straight headline is that it doesn't invite a reader in. What they're looking for is: X happened and here's why it matters. If the story was about for example voters loving Biden's cancelation record, then it would probably read more positively. But I don't think that's part of the story. (I'm not looking to defend this headline anymore than I already have it certainly reeks of bias)...
I think one issue here is that for the next nine months the ONLY context the Times will be interested in is the electoral context, does this "win the week" for Biden or Trump? Policy does have real-world consequences, and that's a real context, but don't expect to see anything but horse-race context through November.
Does the article include the factual numbers initially in the headline? I wonder if the NYT is baiting for online engagement while preserving the option to go "We reported the facts! It's not our fault most people don't read the article."
I'm a bit of an old fart when it comes to website optimization, but doesn't screwing with a headline over and over again seriously impact their analytics and SEO?
Excellent piece Parker, and spot on IMO. I was generally apolitical but read newspapers to stay informed. Those included the NYT, San Francisco Chronical, WSJ and two local City newspapers. I read fast, and world consume the A sections, the business sections and the opinion sections cover to cover. It until around W’s last term when I noted incremental but profound changes that can be described as left subtle but consistent left political bias. Later this bias was confirmed by a landmark study by UCLA.
My work to understand what was happening concluded in there being five primary causes.
1. Changes to the media business because of tech, resulted in fewer seasoned reporters and more younger, lower-paid employees with the control of their season editors and more senior peers.
2. Theory based content and curriculum in college humanities thus cementing a certain worldview in the minds of journalism graduates. That world view includes a general cynical view of facts and truths being a construct of white male patriarchal oppression, and everything is relative to power. Already tuned to idealism, these young writers would reflect these views in their work without editors stopping them.
3. Somewhat related to #1, social media combined with shrinking paid subscribers (ironically the drop was concentrated with younger consumers not buying print), the pursuit of followers because a side hustle for reporters, and the general shift was the news organizations seeking niche followers favorable to biased political/ideological reporting.
4. There has been a giant consolidation of media business with Wall Street owning a controlling interest. This connects the media to the elite establishment managerial class, the same that likes to collude with elite establishment administrative and ruling class (aka government and politicians). The media narratives and reporting approved is that which pleases the owners, and the owners have a globalist agenda because it supports greater Wall Street returns. Republicans want to pull back to focus on domestic issues and note that the long-run Global Order pushed by the elite establishment has decimated domestic working class economic opportunity while jacking up the cost of living despite cheap Walmart crap. The elite cabal the owns the media knows the damage their money pursuits are causing and are using the media to foment political was to detract the voters from seeing the truth and coming together to reject the elite cabal.
5. Infiltration of the NGOs that publish standards of professional journalism. There was a code of journalistic conduct from the Society of Professional Journalism. It has been changed to a woke agenda.
Have you ever read any Chomsky? Because none of this is new, and none of it is a conspiracy. It's always been the case that the function of the media is to communicate the ideas of the ruling class (so the rest of us know what to think.) And under capitalism, the ruling class is the capitalist class. True, in the United States for a limited post-war period, working people were able to capture a growing share of the national wealth thanks to strong labor unions, but with the near-destruction of organized labor, we reverted to the normal state of affairs, nearly all wealth flowing to the upper 0.01%, the rest of us left to survive on crumbs. Anything else would be SOCIALISM.
Well no. The newspapers tended be staffed by more blue collar journalists and editors that kept the radicals and idealists from making an ideological mess of the paper. Pulitzers where given to those that challenged the establishment, not those that supported it.
I think the technical term for this thing you're doing (where you try to explain a historical trend using whatever factors might pop into your mind) is "bullshitting." A fine thing to do at the bar over some beers or in a dorm room at 2am, but if you want me to visit your dorm room to listen to more of your theorizing, you're going to have to supply some weed.
So your answer is "No, I've never read Noam Chomsky"? It's fine if you want to theorize off the top of your head (I've noticed you've never provided a single piece of actual data to support your theorizing). But other people have thought these things through, maybe even more thoroughly that you have, maybe start with Manufacturing Consent (or at least the Wikipedia page for it?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/barro/files/bw04_0614.pdf
https://timgroseclose.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/MediaBias.pdf
I have read Noam Chomsky as well as many other publications and studies related to the changes in the news industry. Canada is dealing with similar problems but maybe even more profound.
Part of the problem is the corruption of the education system. The other part of the problem is media and tech corporate consolidation owned by the elite billionaires that want to control the world.
Socialism and labor unions are not the solution for anything as the history of collectivism proves. The problem is that we don't have a real capitalist system, we have a corporatist system that has been moving toward a globalist corporatocracy. https://socialmisfit.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-corruptors-of-capitalism
I think it's pretty clear that you don't actually understand these terms you're throwing around and to you "Corporatism" just means "Corporations doing things I don't approve of."
Corporatism is the central control through regulatory and tax policy that is a collusion with big government with big corporations at the expense of open market competition. The globalist corporatocracy takes this to to a new level where the control would be in Beijing or Brussels. This is obviously too complex for your meager business brain and that is why I linked the article I wrote so you can educated yourself. But of course you are sure you know everything and everyone that has a different view than you is ignorant.
Difference between Capitalism and Corporatism is what, exactly?
Corporatism is Marxism's spawn. The idea is socialism but with private property ownership. In practice it never works and ends with government first controlling the private property and then owning it. Corporatism is the corruption of capitalism moving toward collectivism.
Capitalism isn't at all corporatism. Capitalism was never designed to be only an excuse for corporate consolidation only to generate more profit and owner wealth. It was never conceived as defending absolute egoism - the view everyone should be free and expected to take care of themselves and government should just stay the hell out of the way (which means that government gets in the wrong way). Capitalism is primary a social system supported by an economic model of rewards for productive merit. But it is an invisible hand benefit to society, and good governance does not seek to collude with corporations to engineer outcomes, but to govern the competitive playing field so that domestic economic opportunity is maximized and the system SUPPORTS PEOPLE TAKING CARE OF THEMSELVES.
Corporatism loves big government because they both share the same interest to make the masses dependent and in need of their power and control.
Conversely, capitalism is an egalitarian system. It works dynamically if supported correctly. The Scandinavian countries tend to get it. They don't make the mistake of a stupid black and white battle against capitalism and socialism. They understand that social benefits are also economic benefits and a system that best delivers economic benefits to the masses is going to best support the human condition. They certainly support unionization, but not stupidly. The US does things like Hostess Corporation... stupid.
The key is not to for example for government to set wages and allow unions to distort the market of wages, but to set the tax and regulatory policy to foment the generations of good paying jobs where the competition for labor talent raises wages as part of the law of supply and demand.
Capitalism is a system that expects the returns from domestic capital investment to benefit domestic labor. Corporatism is where the corporations collect together with government to maximize the returns of corporate investment without including domestic labor.
There are four mega food corporations that own 85% of all the brands on the supermarket shelves. Corporatism supports them eventually merging into one corporation. Capitalism would break them apart to foster more competition and economic access for everyone.
At least once per week I am reminded "Citizen Kane" first came to Public knowledge 05 SEP 41 and it mysteriously, at that time, rather tanked, possibly because too many powerful men were looking into a mirror and didn't like what they saw so blamed the mirror. Gold mines, emerald mines; not much of a difference when it comes to controlling The Narrative. How much longer until the Ondatra zibethicus (re)invents the snow globe and claims credit for an existing idea? Much more credit to the guy whose dad was a mechanic and repo-man, who actually did work to earn his kudos (Jobs). Every publisher whomever was, is, will be, is Charles Foster Kane.