Originally published at: New York Times finally realizes Trump is old and confused - Boing Boing
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Too little too late. Joe Kahn and his fellow Bothsidesist Timesmen just had to be secure that they’d have their duopoly horserace before trying to cover their arses.
And even here they’re still punting. “Untethered to truth”, FFS. They’ll twist themselves into verbose pretzels rather than calling him what he is in plain language: a liar.
The failure of the NYT to do its job this election season has been stunning, even by the low standard established back when Judith Miller worked for the paper.
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What about when he was a nonsensical snaky lying real estate racist but not necessarily senile? Like he’s talked utter shit any time I’ve encountered him. And as a politician right from the cringe moment of slowly going down the escalators to vomit a senseless racist rant because people laughed at him at a comedy event.
ETA
Fixed slowly. Surreal comedy on Staircase One.
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They still can’t bring themselves to say that he lies. They’re still doing linguistic gymnastics to avoid using that word. Even CNN is finally using the word lies.
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I owe you a Coke; I was going to post the same sentiment. Cheers!
Edit to include an icy beverage for @Thomas_Muller, too.
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But are they reporting it as fact or opinion?
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They’re presenting it as an analysis piece, where they back up their premise with expert opinion and data.
The problem is that the premise is flawed, and deliberately so. After doing similar analysis pieces on Biden being too old for office, they’re belatedly doing the same to Biff just as they unsurprisingly endorse Harris in the op-ed page. Despite this attempt to once again appear even-handed, age isn’t what makes him unsuitable for the President. It’s that he’s a cartoonishly bigoted and narcissistic confidence artist.
But they can’t come out and say that, because he’s also the nominee of a duopoly party. So now they’re pretending that he’s just too old and that, as with Biden, they thought so all along.
Here’s a good example from the article:
Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age
Perhaps. But experts in criminal science know that frequent use of those grandiose terms is also characteristic of grifters and fraudsters, especially when they’re under pressure. The NYT isn’t going to allow those expert opinions or the premise they’d support into their analysis piece, because it raises questions about the Republican party that make their audience nervous.
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The NYT had been cheering for fascism since forever. Last time in what I can remember, it was almost a century ago. Nothing is new here. They’re just trying to keep the old tradition alive. /S
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the first clause really has nothing to do with the second, except for the times own skewed coverage
the two men are three years apart in age. ■■■■■ always would have been the oldest president in history if he won. they just rarely cared to mention it
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But now you can see that the NYT is within sight of the ballpark contains the job!
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The Times analysis found that Mr. Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.
Ouch.
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Rookie journalists are usually instructed to communicate to an eighth-grade reading comprehension level in order to reach the widest audience possible. I assume PR people, speechwriters, and politicians follow the same rule. Anyone writing for the NYT is aware of this, and even though they aim more for a 10th-grade level it’s interesting that the article doesn’t mention this.
I suspect they don’t because they know that writing discipline is a choice made by people in the communications business – a challenging one given the more successful ones have academic backgrounds that make them more inclined to write or speak in a more complex manner.
Acknowledging the speaking level as a choice would mean that they’d have to allow for other possibilities, such as:
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He’s aliterate to a degree that his communication level has atrophied.
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He communicates at that level because confidence men habitually do that to sort out the most vulnerable marks.
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He’s following an established fascist propaganda dictum:
FRITZ HIPPLER: I think the main thing of propaganda is what Goebbels repeated at all times. “The secret of propaganda is to simplify complex or complicated things, to make them as simple as possible. As simple that even the less ingenious men can understand what I mean. Simplify.” And then, if you had found the form which tells a complicated thing in the simplest way, when you have found this form, then, secondly, repeat it! Repeat it every day. Simplify and repetition. That’s the secret of modern propaganda.
To openly suggest any of these things about the Republican candidate, though, would be a lot more discomfiting to their ideal readers than chalking it up to old age or dementia. So they exclude the possibility that this behaviour might also be the result of a choice he made.
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Now running the show at the NYT. Make of him what you will.
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Without going into detail, there’s a lot of anxiety in that family about social and societal status in various American communities and about preserving the family lifestyle. Some of it may be understandble to most of us, some of it not at all, some of it esoteric. The Ochs-Sulzberger Family Trust says that its primary objective is that the outlet continues “as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare”, but a degree of fear and selfishness have both been very much present going back several generations.
That anxiety is what has them hiring Bothsideist decision-makers like Joe Kahn and performing so abysmally since 2015 in covering the resurgence of fascism in the U.S.
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