Tag: media criticism

“Bloodbath”-Gate: Yes, Trump Meant the Auto Industry. At First, Anyway

Still, maybe he only meant an economic bloodbath. In fact, that’s just typical Trump bluster—built as usual on lies. The Biden economy as we all know reeled from inflation in 2022 and 2023, and that overwhelmed the narrative. Beyond that, the 289,000 jobs gained per month during Biden’s term is the highest for any president […]

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The Right-Wing War on Abortion Has Nothing to Do With Babies

This is the crux of the whole damn thing: It doesn’t matter what a person wants the autonomy for! She can want to use her bodily autonomy to conceive through in vitro fertilization with her husband of 15 years, or she can want to use it to take Plan B after a one-night stand, or […]

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A Year of Republicans Lying About Abortion

As Brian Beutler pointed out in his Off Message newsletter, this was worthy of alarm bells: “The question of whether elites, particularly center-right elites, choose to abide fascism is central to the survival of democracy.” In a later post, Beutler dove deeper into Dimon’s rhetoric, and found evidence that whatever ties that might have bound […]

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Bill Ackman Is Going to Help Save Journalism

But Business Insider never made any allegation of intent on Oxman’s part in its reporting. The word “intent” appears nowhere in the publication’s articles. The reporters simply described the use of improperly cited or copied text without ascribing any motive to it, such as fraud or deceit. It is possible to accidentally plagiarize text or […]

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Bill Ackman’s 77-Page-Long Case Against Himself

But Business Insider never made any allegation of intent on Oxman’s part in its reporting. The word “intent” appears nowhere in the publication’s articles. The reporters simply described the use of improperly cited or copied text without ascribing any motive to it, such as fraud or deceit. It is possible to accidentally plagiarize text or […]

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The Brokered Convention That Could Break the Democrats

As Brian Beutler pointed out in his Off Message newsletter, this was worthy of alarm bells: “The question of whether elites, particularly center-right elites, choose to abide fascism is central to the survival of democracy.” In a later post, Beutler dove deeper into Dimon’s rhetoric, and found evidence that whatever ties that might have bound […]

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The Democrats Are Blowing the 2024 Election

As Brian Beutler pointed out in his Off Message newsletter, this was worthy of alarm bells: “The question of whether elites, particularly center-right elites, choose to abide fascism is central to the survival of democracy.” In a later post, Beutler dove deeper into Dimon’s rhetoric, and found evidence that whatever ties that might have bound […]

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The Only Mental Acuity I’m Questioning These Days Is the Mainstream Media’s

But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of […]

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The Corporate Crooks Who Got Caught Stealing Workers’ Wages

As Brian Beutler pointed out in his Off Message newsletter, this was worthy of alarm bells: “The question of whether elites, particularly center-right elites, choose to abide fascism is central to the survival of democracy.” In a later post, Beutler dove deeper into Dimon’s rhetoric, and found evidence that whatever ties that might have bound […]

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How the Media Falls for the Right’s Fentanyl Lies

But more coverage alone isn’t enough. The mainstream media is terribly handicapped by its supposed devotion to balance and “objectivity.” When one major political party, its presidential candidate, and its allies in infotainment are lying at top volume, the traditional “on the one hand, on the other hand” two-step is no longer an adequate way […]

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The Rot in the Media Industry Starts at the Top

Several nonprofit models are leading the industry routinely investing in consequential investigative journalism at a time when the scope of so many of their peers seems to be shrinking—including Mother Jones, ProPublica, and The City—the last of which staved off its own bout of potential layoffs in 2023 by giving its employees the option to […]

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The Incompetent Bosses Driving American Journalism Into the Ground

Several nonprofit models are leading the industry routinely investing in consequential investigative journalism at a time when the scope of so many of their peers seems to be shrinking—including Mother Jones, ProPublica, and The City—the last of which staved off its own bout of potential layoffs in 2023 by giving its employees the option to […]

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Take the Houthi Support for Palestinian Liberation Seriously

Similarly, belittling Ansar Allah’s Palestine solidarity misrepresents it as some form of shrewd opportunism—a way to appeal to the mass pro-Palestine sentiment in Yemen and across the Arab world. Support for the Palestinian cause is, in fact, foundational to Ansar Allah’s movement. Regardless of the positive impact its actions have had domestically, its pro-Palestine position […]

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You Can’t Bomb the Houthis Into Not Supporting Palestine

Similarly, belittling Ansar Allah’s Palestine solidarity misrepresents it as some form of shrewd opportunism—a way to appeal to the mass pro-Palestine sentiment in Yemen and across the Arab world. Support for the Palestinian cause is, in fact, foundational to Ansar Allah’s movement. Regardless of the positive impact its actions have had domestically, its pro-Palestine position […]

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Donald Trump Is Losing It. Will the Media Make It a Story?

Pelosi, to Trump, was the former opposition leader in the House. To Biden, that would be Kevin McCarthy. So let’s imagine together that last Friday night, Joe Biden had been speaking at a campaign event and had said: “You know, Marty Walsh, Marty Walsh, Marty Walsh…it was very disappointing the way he criticized Trump privately […]

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It’s Time for Democrats to Make Some Enemies

That brings us to the other commodity with which Democrats need to fill the space left by the absent primary: derogatory information about Republicans. This is one area where Democrats simply don’t seem to be on the same page. As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reported this week, Representative Jamie Raskin and his colleagues on […]

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What the Media Gets Wrong About the So-Called Border Crisis

Until 2022, Honduras was ruled by Juan Orlando Hernández, a repressive, corrupt president who both the Obama and Trump administrations propped up—supposedly because he represented “stability.” (Fortunately, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York was not buying it. Hernández’s preferred successor lost the 2021 election, and soon thereafter the ex-president was on […]

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Congress Is Sleepwalking Into a Draconian Asylum Ban

Broken down to the brass tacks, the uncomfortable reality is that it is not possible to make this type of change without excluding many thousands of otherwise eligible people off the bat. That’s especially true when it’s in tandem with other changes being contemplated, including a limit on the humanitarian parole program—which, while imperfect, is […]

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The Fourteenth Amendment Scolds Abetting Trump’s Return

And at the top of the plutocratic food chain, a billionaire’s charitable enterprise can become a philanthropic Death Star. This week, The Baffler’s Tim Schwab took a deep dive into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and discovered that the entity essentially exists as a public relations stunt to justify Gates’s own staggering wealth. One […]

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There’s Nothing Undemocratic About Barring Trump From the Ballot

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Claudine Gay’s Resignation Shines a Light on the Academic Hypocrisies of Elite Universities

Plagiarism is not a new problem at Harvard. For years it’s been clear that Harvard (and probably universities elsewhere) treat plagiarism as a minor offense when it’s committed by faculty or administrators and a major offense when it’s committed by undergraduates. I wrote about this 22 years ago when Doris Kearns Goodwin got busted for plagiarism while […]

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The Media Is Giving Donald Trump a Dangerous New Pass

As The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, pointed out, the word “vermin” has a fairly noteworthy place in the history of political rhetoric. “To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101,” he wrote. “Especially that particular word.” Nevertheless, Trump’s dangerous new escalation […]

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Poor Josh Hawley Can’t Help Himself

Fortunately, in some quarters, wage theft is being treated with the seriousness it deserves. Just this week, ProPublica produced a blockbuster report on wage theft in New York City, finding that from 2017 to 2021, “more than $203 million in wages had been stolen from about 127,000 workers in New York.” And Documented, which partnered […]

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Taylor Swift Has Broken Conservatives’ Brains

He’s not the first to notice this idea running through Swift’s lyrics, though others have been more charitable in their description of it. As Michelle Goldberg explained in an op-ed in The New York Times, Taylor Swift caters to a “huge underserved market for entertainment that takes the feelings of women and girls seriously.” To […]

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For The Wall Street Journal, the Climate Call is Coming From Inside the House

Unfortunately, the app’s search function is garbage. Much like Instagram, Threads only lets you browse for accounts, not keywords. And because the community is built entirely on the back of a visual app—one that is not particularly useful for rapid, text-based updates—it tends to be popular with cultural and visual creators. Thus, finding any information […]

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The Looming Government Shutdown Is Not the Fault of Dysfunction

Let’s begin with the states; they are raring to go. Texas, for example, seems to regard Supreme Court decisions as mild suggestions. In 2021, its SB 8 abortion bill didn’t merely test the boundaries of Roe v. Wade but successfully negated it, even though the landmark 1973 ruling was affirmed by the Court as recently […]

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We Have Two Medias in This Country, and They’re Going to Elect Donald Trump.

Today? They’re about the same size. In fact, the right-wing media might finally be bigger. Mainstream media audiences and newsrooms have shrunk. Consider: In 1990, newspapers reached 63 million readers; in 2020, that number was 24 million. In 2006, newspapers employed about 75,000 people. In 2020, that figure was 31,000. The right-wing media, meanwhile, has […]

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