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Thanks for this. They used to play this on old fashioned terrestrial radio when, ironically, I was a photographer for the geology dept at Cornell. They were heavily subsidized by the oil industry. I learned what a Bouguer gravity anomaly was.
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This is called 'Trickle Up".
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https://twitter.com/jstein_wapo/status/1147680100240035841?s=21
https://twitter.com/ebruenig/status/1147727192820002816?s=21
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I’ll have to vote for whoever I’m told I should vote for. Just like every other election. Those “deepstate” conspiracy folks are way out there, but I’d buy that there are people behind the scenes nudging things in their desired direction. People who have way more power and influence over our so-called democracy than I’ll ever personally obtain.
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So wait, does this mean that finally everyone is in agreement about “fake news”?
weird.
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The corporate media, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex; it’s all the same bastard billionaires.
It’s a small club, and you ain’t in it.
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It might well be true that the assignment of this reporter to this candidate at this newspaper was intentional corporate suppression, but wouldn’t it be nice to know the knowable thing, namely how it actually happened, as evidence for that theory, rather than claiming as a matter of faith that the theory is the cause?
The NYT is not a one-trick pony. For example, they just endorsed Tiffany Cabán for Queens DA. They have also run articles critical of candidates across the spectrum. The FAIR writer Katie Halper happens to be focusing on the Sanders coverage because she’s a strong Sanders supporter. If Ember got the Sanders gig intentionally from someone out to scuttle BS’s, that is something worth knowing and not just assuming.
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More false news reporting. Views are not news worth. The New York Times should be ashamed of its publication style of reporting. Maybe it National Enquired style of reporting has its place if so then New York a quickly loosing it’s standings.
It’s not only “who” but also “what”, namely the paper’s institutional culture that’s been in place for generations.
I count on the NYT as one of the most professional American news outlets available, one whose rank-and-file staff really does aspire to preserve the kind of journalism that used to be the norm before cable news. I review its offerings daily and have no qualms about providing links to its stories. I accept the sincerity of everyone involved when they say (as they frequently do) that a free press is a key institution of liberal democracy. And I appreciate its consistent positions for civil rights for racial and other minorities, for feminism and reproductive choice, its championing of education, and its opposition to virulent bigots.
That said, I also go in with the understanding that the NYT serves a particular group of establishment consensuses about economics and the military-industrial complex, adheres to their core assumptions, and always – always – defers to their authority. In doing so it has become part of the American establishment.
It doesn’t do this for no reason. It also doesn’t just do this as a component of access journalism, although that plays a part. It does this mainly because it knows its audience. The NYT, while styling itself the U.S.'s default “newspaper of record”, is a news outlet not for the entire country but is produced for (and by) the socially liberal portion of the country’s top 20% in terms of financial and social and cultural capital (with aspirational gradations within). These are the privileged “winners” in American society. The NYT is presenting this audience with a narrative, a comforting story. The Style section, more than any other, will give you a clear idea of the paper’s target demographic and psychographic (watching its home delivery TV ads is also informative).
That group (I’ll count myself among them) has objectively done very well for the past several decades thanks to neoliberal globalism and American imperialism – some of us will admit it, others live in a state of meritocratic denial. The paper – like its intended audience – will frequently question the “excesses” of those systems and expose major screw-ups. It will sometimes play a half-hearted game of bothsides-ism in an effort to seem balanced (hence Bobo and Cardinal Douthat on the op-ed page, but also in the straight reportage). Once in a while it will wring its hands about the plight of Real America™, which sometimes leads to horribly misconceived pieces like the infamous “Nazi next door” profile but more often takes the detached tone of the anthropologist amongst the “savages”.
At its base, though, the Times will never seriously challenge the establishment view of the moment of capitalism or (at least at the beginning) America’s various military adventures or allies, even at the risk or angering some more liberal or progressive members of its target audience (again, myself included) now and then. In terms of American news outlets, it’s not like the “reality-based communiy” have many other places to go (or that the WaPo, WSJ, or LAT are any more prone to seriously challenging the consensuses described above).
All that, more than the billionaire (or perhaps “centi-millionaire”) Sulzberger dynasty or Dean Baquet or whichever go-along-to-get-along timeserver was put in charge of editing Ember (a nominal subordinate with more wealth and power than her “supervisor”), is why the NYT allows and encourages this.
That’s a generous description of what actually happened. Miller wasn’t Jayson Blair. She didn’t fabricate stories, but she did accept the fabrications of her powerful sources without question, got too cozy with them, and ended up drinking their PNAC Kool Aid to the point where she helped expose a CIA agent whose husband dared question one of the pretexts for the Iraq War that Miller was promoting.
From Teh Wiki summary:
It was alleged later in Editor & Publisher that, while Miller’s reporting “frequently [did] not meet published Times standards”, she was not sanctioned and was given a relatively free rein, because she consistently delivered frequent front-page scoops for the paper by “cultivating top-ranking sources.”
In 2005, facing federal court proceedings for refusing to divulge a source in the Plame affair criminal investigation, Miller spent 85 days in jail in Alexandria, Va. (where French terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was also held). After her release, the Times’ Public Editor Byron Calame wrote:
“Ms. Miller may still be best known for her role in a series of Times articles in 2002 and 2003 that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein already had or was acquiring an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction … Many of those articles turned out to be inaccurate … [T]he problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.”
Two weeks later, Miller negotiated a private severance package with Times’ publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. She contested Calame’s claims about her reporting and gave no ground in defending her work. She cited “difficulty” in performing her job effectively after having become “an integral part of the stories [she] was sent to cover.”
If (and it’s a big “if”) they decide to go after Ember over Sanders it will likely end the same way, with an “agreement to disagree” about the quality of her work, a face-saving claim that her becoming a part of the story became a “distraction”, and a negotiated severance package. If she cares to, she’ll write a book and hit the lecture circuit. The publisher and the senior editors and the institutional culture will remain in place.
Not really. “Fake news” is, to begin with, an idiotic term that’s now being applied from everything from outright hoaxes and fabrications to true stories that displease president* Biff and his suckers. What we see in this case is biased news, which wouldn’t be a problem if the reporter had been open about her named sources’ backgrounds and if the editorial culture at the Times had insisted she do so and been honest about its own leanings, as described above.
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A reporter not providing the relevant background of her named sources, especially when other reporters do it for the same individuals, is evidence enough that something is wrong. The Times may not be engaged in “intentional corporate suppression”, but that they’re once again letting a reporter get away with this kind of chicanery indicates at the very least that it’s expressing its institutional culture and priorities.
This is a good example of what I was discussing in my earlier comment. Cabán’s platform is one of criminal justice reform for Queens, which the NYT’s institutional culture can easily swallow – it can conceive of capitalism operating without the racist carceral state. If she had been running for Manhattan D.A. on a platform of giving investment bankers actual prison time for their misdeeds, though, I highly doubt she would have received its endorsement.
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it’s a shorter list who doesn’t
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I agree with this. @RioRico had asked the question who in the NYT organization was responsible for this, I simply said that was a good question and that a concrete answer (not vague “corporate forces”) would be useful information. (For example, unlike one poster in this thread I don’t think you can lump the NYT ownership with Jeff Bezos and AOL.) Did some editor intentional assign Ember to attack Sanders, or did she weasel her way into the gig for her own nefarious ends?
but that they’re once again letting a reporter get away with this kind of chicanery
We don’t yet know that their response will be to this.
Have you ever seen or read Manufacturing Consent? Sounds like you could use some of the education it provides on how the sausage product that is mainstream journalism gets made.
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In terms of general oligarchical control of the mainsteam media outlets in the U.S., one can easily make that case. Ultra-wealthy individuals and families and for-profit “slow AI” conglomerates, whatever their internal agendas, own most major newspapers and broadcast news outlets in the U.S. Public broadcast organisations here are also usually heavily dependent on corporate largesse. There are alternative ownership models available, but there’s no American equivalent of the Guardian’s Scott Trust and non-profits like ProPublica are the rare exception rather than the rule.
It would be comforting to pin this all on Ember or on a lone rogue editor or both, but that’s not how she got away with this. This is about an institutional culture that always defers to the establishment and about the allowances and excuses the paper makes for staffers who decide to go after a political figure who seriously threatens the establishment’s prerogatives.
We do to a degree. If Halper was aware of this, so was someone at the Times. Stories about Sanders are going to be reviewed by senior editors (they’re obviously important), Ember has spent just over a year on the politics beat (this usually warrants additional scrutiny), and others had already noticed problems with her reporting on Sanders at least since March. Other journalists, including ones from the Times, have correctly identified the same sources in proper context in other stories.
So yes, the Times has been letting her get away with this behaviour for at least two months longer than it should have. That she remains on the Sanders beat to this day shows their response.
As to what might happen now, my bet is that they won’t treat her any more harshly than they did Judith Miller, who was caught doing demonstrably worse things in the service of promoting a pointless and ruinous war. The institutional culture hasn’t changed that much, and if anything it has backslid with the elimination of the Public Editor ombudsperson position in 2017.
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Yes, 30 years ago when it was written. I also have friends on journalism school faculty, and friends in the print media, and have also donated regularly to FAIR for many years, so there’s no need to jump instantly to a patronizing accusation that I am a corporate media naïf.
In terms of general oligarchical control of the mainsteam media outlets in the U.S., one can easily make that case.
Attacking the NYT has been a popular sport since its founding, but it remains sufficiently different from the Newscorps and Hollingers of the world that lumping them together is at best uncritical.
Punch Sulzberger’s political biases often crept into coverage of certain stories, notably the Nicaragua coverage in the 1980s, and his son seems to be following suit, but it is not in a way easily predictable from any one set of corporate axioms.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for Ember is that she was hired for a position for which she was qualified, gradually moved over to political news because she was interested in it and convinced her superiors she could do a good job there, and got the Sanders assignment because she asked for it and had priority over others who also asked for it. If that’s not what happened then that is knowable. I find the resistance here to curiosity about that puzzling.
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Boy, what a shocker.
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Occam’s Razor states that "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily“. How does asserting that the opinions expressed in a publication more often than not reflect the opinions of the publisher introduce more entities than stating they don’t and introducing various circumstances that lead to that outcome without that happy coincidence of opinions of the publishers influencing content because they actually reflect the publishers opinions?
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The Times is the worst. Judith Miller presented as news. Maggie Haberman having deep family connections to Trump - Jesse Singal’s transphobia.
All those articles about the difficulties of people making $200k a year in NY compared to the really rich. All of a piece - afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable.
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