Sadly The Times has lost its shine and is not the paper of record anymore. It’s not all the news fit to print. Despite TFG attacking the media, they are contributing to his death grip on us. Their stories are just about always watered down with what I call “yeah but” comments. The economy is doing great, yeah but.... Inflation is way dow…
Sadly The Times has lost its shine and is not the paper of record anymore. It’s not all the news fit to print. Despite TFG attacking the media, they are contributing to his death grip on us. Their stories are just about always watered down with what I call “yeah but” comments. The economy is doing great, yeah but.... Inflation is way down, yeah but...
How about a clear, and undeniable story about republicans who voted against the infrastructure bill yet are claiming credit for projects in their districts as a result of the Act. Maybe they should take what Dr. Richardson has written here and turn it into a full blown indictment of the maga party.
In the harried lives of most Americans, no one takes the time to read a full article. Just like soundbites, headlines are scanned, read, and imprinted on the brains of readers. A long list of headlines from the past eight years would pretty much sum up the thoughts and opinions of the reader who doesn't take the time to inform him/herself. Whataboutisms abound. Truth be told, newspapers have failed us. Failed us badly.
If I may, I would like to expand your thesis even further - virtually all of today’s media in the US was hijacked by the attention economy when social media platforms added “news” plus the “like” function to their platforms. With the ubiquitous use of smartphones coupled with the presentation of the news (headlines) DESIGNED to attract the attention of the viewer, traditional print media decided they had to redesign their articles to attract viewership. Hence, the model we had been used to of in-depth articles and investigative reporting had to change to attract the attention of all who are glued to the phones.
A marketing model based on attention-frequency was insidiously coupled with this attention model, providing a revenue stream for the social media platforms and eventually the print media as they had to depend on this revenue stream to support their businesses. So now the role of the “free press” no longer provides a check on governments but has been captured by the attention-marketing-economy which is designed to hook us with emotion-laden headlines and/or pithy OPINION based versus FACT-based short statements and governments world-wide have struggled because of this shift. Some governments have recently begun to try to come to terms with this major shift in how we all get our “news”. For example, the European Union is actively engaged in developing guidelines designed to standardize some broad based guidelines to return its legacy news outlets to fact based reporting. We, in the US, will need to closely monitor what they are doing to see if our government has the political will to adopt such practices.
I learned somewhere that the average news article online is meant to be skimmed and/or read in 5 minutes. This makes it so easy to create misinformed voters who fail to become interested in politics. It's all dumbed down because of the silly mantra saying everyone is so busy, busy, busy when in fact, they're not.
Like the house of reps that didn’t get much done this year and take an extended break when so much needed to be done. No other employer would put up with employees pulling that crap. Why do we have to put up with senators who are NOT doing their jobs?
We can only vote them out. That is not always what voters do though. And the youth it seems, are so turned off with what is going on and all of the deceit and grifting that many refuse to vote thinking that is cancelling it out. They are so horribly wrong. When the choices are not so much to your liking, or when you think it won't matter, or when you are fooled by those who are the exact opposite of what is best for you and the country, you lose your ability to see clearly when you are being scammed.
I agree. The unfortunate thing is that if they are not receptive to even talking about it ( sadly, 49 yr old daughter will not discuss with me and is convinced that Kennedy is the best choice) there is little one can do to even engage in a discussion.
It's become a cliche. Parents frantically driving their kids around to play dates, working insane hours, no time for dinner so pick up some fast food every night, listening to TV news sound bites. It sells. I know many people who use it as an excuse not to live like mature adults managing their time and money.
We're busy doin' nothin', nothin' the whole day through, tryin' to find lots'a things not to do. (From the musical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.)
I must offer some rebuttal here. I think that if people could separate themselves from their fears, they would see that the NYT offers balanced reporting, an extraordinary difficult task as the paper of record in the United States and to some extent a leading paper in the world.
The problem is that we all want the Times to say ONLY what we want to hear, and I include myself in that. I find it disconcerting and sometimes a little upsetting when a viewpoint is expressed which, say, expresses reservations about something the Democratic Party has done that has gone awry.
A good example occurred at the time of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I was delighted with Biden’s action. It was decisive, bold, and long overdue.
Then it went sideways in a hurry and the Times was not slow to point it out. The chaos at the airport, the lack of good intelligence to recognize how ready the Taliban was to leap back into power, and the failure to liberate Afghans who had acted as translators and eyes and ears for the American military were all reported quite without fear or favor.
At first I was angry. Withdrawal was necessarily going to be difficult and problematic. Good intelligence was hard to come by. The mistakes were secondary to the bigger fact that America was finally out of its never-ending war. . . Could the media not stop nattering about these so-called “failures” in the operation. I never considered cancelling my subscription as it’s not the kind of impulse act I’m inclined to. But I burned at the time.
By the end of the summer I had cooled somewhat and recognized that if the withdrawal had been improperly devised in many ways and these errors hurt a number of people seriously, then it was the role of the NYT and frankly all media of conscience to report it in a clear-eyed way. I learned a lesson and it has stuck.
The NYT does not indulge in the sort of grossly unequal ‘what-aboutism’ that has become a terrible hallmark of these days. It has not failed to report economic progress under Biden. Nor has it failed to spend time, effort, and money to demonstrate that the message of better economic times is either not getting through to people, or I suspect being ignored by millions whose mind is made up and want no contradictory evidence that might slow down Trump’s re-ascendancy to the Presidency. Its polls showing Trump’s terrible momentum have been shocks to the system in recent weeks. But I fully trust they were carried out fairly. I also feel that while they have delivered a terrible shock to the system it is good for us to know as much about the battleground as possible, and even polling, which is fast becoming a pseudo-science, tells us clearly the nature of the struggle ahead.
Then there is the division which must be made between news and opinion. News tells us both pleasant and hard truths and the Times spends a fortune in producing it in as eye-catching a way as possible.
The opinion section is, for the most part, informed, far-seeing and offers good for thought. I know of no regular columnist who supports Trump. I find the views of Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens difficult to take at times, but they are a necessary corrective to my deep bent to the left. Thomas Friedman is sometimes pedantic and puts himself far out enough in his generalizations that one must think hard before accepting it at face value. Yet he is enormously well-informed, deeply patriotic and often singularly wise. Is there any doubt where Maureen Dowd stands? Paul Krugman’s mastery of the economy is breathtaking. I could go on but have an undisputed knack for being tedious so will leave the op-ed alone, hoping I haven’t left out a voice who without question should have been included. Ah I did. . . Jamalle Boue is brilliant.
We all recognize that the Times is a corporation and it exists to make money. Therefore it needs the broadest subscription model possible in order to give value to its advertisers. This means inevitably that it must report freely and fairly on the entire spectrum and risk losing the “fly off the handle” types.
I, for one, do not envy them the dilemmas they face. Nor am I surprised when they write articles that would give succour to today’s voters on the American right. I read (some of) these and do not find them wildly unbalanced.
I strongly disagree that the NYT is not the “paper of record” anymore as has been asserted today and other days. The fact that the Right hates it pretty much generally en masse (but long for its approbation) should tell us that leaders of conscience at the Times are appalled by the malice, impropriety, criminality and general lack of seriousness of today’s Republican Party.
We need the Times. We must point out its errors in judgment when they occur, but we need it as a starting point for our understanding of truth. We cannot read it as we do Letters from an American. As I’ve mentioned Professor Cox Richardson leans heavily on failures of the right and successes of the left, using her vast knowledge of history to buttress the few conclusions she allows herself. She is fighting for democracy to survive and thus inevitably writes what we want to hear. At some times this could be called cheerleading. In these most dangerous it is a most necessary arousal of Americans to fight the waves crashing on the shore.
I am terrified of 2024. I don’t think any of us can imagine the utter chaos this year will bring. Already the battle over Trump’s right to be on the ballot is stating to rage and we still have a couple of days to rest up before the most consequential year of our political live kicks off. Things will become real immediately the calendar turns and that which is irrational, spiteful, conniving, fraudulent, and possibly violent will take over. The daily news may be unable to keep up.
I hope and believe that the Times is ready for a quantum leap into the unknown. We ain’t seen nothing, bad as the last eight years have been, and more than ever we need the paper of record.
Who knows? Perhaps Wordle will help to save democracy.
I tend to agree with Eric’s analysis, with a caveot or two. Robert Hubbel has made a point of encouraging folks to stay subscribed, but to comment back to the editors/writers when they are way off base, and suggests that this “movement” has seen a bit of success with a slight shift in editorial policy away from “what-about-ism”, raising the alarm against authoritarianism, and giving Biden’s successes appropriate due. We shall see whether this holds up as this most dangerous and precarious year moves forward.
Thank you. I do not know Robert Hubbell, but his idea is sensible.
Can anybody give a precise example where the Times has been dangerously off the truth in the last year? Perhaps I am overly gullible and need my eyes opened.
I'm not fully convinced. What I expect from a news venue is accurate reporting.
I see very little wherever I look. Back during the 2016 election our "paper of record" failed us. They chose to misrepresent a lot of the news, and bias was very evident. They intentionally mis-used "the power of the Recording Secretary" to decide which news should be featured more or less prominently and in some cases, opinion was presented as news.
Villains abound, and what drove this shift away from objectivity remains uncertain, however my confidence in the NYT will never be fully restored. I still read their stuff but from now on I'll use my critical eye to look for the moment a story pivots. Same as with most other news sources I catch that moment all too easily and all too frequently.
That’s an interesting idea Gary. You. have a talent for aggregation from different sources that I must lack. I read articles assiduously and give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless I read/hear something contradictory within a short while, the story holds firm in my mind. That is of course for sources that enjoy a reputation for probity, like the Times, Guardian, Globe and Mail, New Yorker, Atlantic et al.
Of course I realize that no story is ever fully accurate. Reporters inevitably carry their own perspectives with them and of course there is a limit to their sources. I assume you and I could be tasked with covering the same event and our stories might vary with some degree of significance.
I must say though, given the above, that I don’t expect malfeasance from the papers I read - a la Fox News for instance. I expect a general level of accuracy, innovative reporting styles and coherence.
Op-Ed’s are different. My assumption with them is that they will be intelligently written, supported with a thesis and indicate some recognition that there are two sides.
Maybe I am simply naive, but the sources I mention have been reliable. I don’t read in a “gotcha” vein. Perhaps I should be more rigorous.
I’m completely in the dark with your phrase “the power of the Recording Secretary”.
And finally I wish I could be pointed to a substantive pattern of behavior that would reflect dishonest journalism. I still hold to my idea that many people become piqued with the Times for not giving them the news that they *want* to hear so as to bolster their worldview.
I expect to be told the facts and then make my own determinations. If I demanded only one-sided "news" I'd be deluding myself. Since 'news' is mostly information someone else doesn't wish for you to know, corruption is never far away. Don't let yourself be misled simply because something is presented neatly.
Marvin Gaye said it best: "believe half of what you see and none of what you hear."
The term "the power of the Recording Secretary" is one I devised from experience. Whoever takes the meeting minutes controls the institutional memory. If the secretary decides not to record what you say in a meeting, often that's too bad for you and whatever point you wanted to make: It's been unilaterally dismissed. That's a lesson to be learned from the Mad Men days - wise bureaucrats know to NEVER piss off the secretarial staff.
“ Since 'news' is mostly information someone else doesn't wish for you to know, corruption is never far away.”
Respectfully, that is a beguilingly written phrase that takes an enormous leap of logic. There are all sorts of instances of news that people think you *should* hear and thus pass it on. Natural disasters, acts of bravery and unselfish service, technological leaps, archaeological discoveries are all examples of news that people want to get you to, not keep from you.
That is not the larger point however. Corruption is often far from news. News so often ferrets out villainy, corruption and brutality. The newsmaker and the reporter are all too often at odds with one another, rather than in bed.
I get your point. Newsmakers can often “persuade” news purveyors to ignore or sanitize something corrupt or criminal that they are involved in.
But the extrapolation you made is far too sweepingly intended for me to gloss over without comment. I hope I am as alert and well-informed as the majority of citizens, but I am disinclined to be cynical. In the larger atlas of my life, a propensity to go down rabbit holes is a luxury I cannot afford. And please don’t feel I’m accusing you of so doing. The phrase I used has become an ugly one.
In my too many years I have learned that corruption is eventually outed so often that it is near a truism to claim that people with evil on their minds either get caught or suffer karmic justice.
I’m uneasily aware that we’ve wandered well away from my defence of the NYT. I accept your disagreement without rancor or feeling that one of us is right and the other wrong. Wonderfully, the world is more complicated than that.
Thank you for your points and also for educating me on your “Recording Secretary” statement. As a teacher who has found joy in the profession for 50+ years, I could not more wholeheartedly agree with you on this point.
I also agree with some of this but I am seeing things in the NYT that are very wishy-washy and do not seem very well documented. I always do my best to figure out where the info comes from as I am reading. Sometimes it is blatantly false but sometimes not clear at all.
To your point I’m wondering if a vast letter writing campaign to the editorial board of the NYT might push them a bit more into the sunlight? Mike, what you said would be a great letter to the editor. Anyway just my opinion. Thanks for your thought and I see your point.
In my area if you write a letter to the editor and the editor doesn't like it....it isn't printed! Our daily newspaper is now delivered twice a week and is mainly high school sports and advertising! It is hard for a Democrat to get elected. Believe me....I know!
I canceled my subscription a few months ago. They are like Nikki: which way is the wind blowing? What shall we say that won't offend our advertisers? "Both-erism" to an art. I'm DONE!
I am not renewing mine for some of the same reasons. I found that I was opening fewer and fewer of their articles also. I have the games subscription still for a bit but will not renew that as well .
Sadly The Times has lost its shine and is not the paper of record anymore. It’s not all the news fit to print. Despite TFG attacking the media, they are contributing to his death grip on us. Their stories are just about always watered down with what I call “yeah but” comments. The economy is doing great, yeah but.... Inflation is way down, yeah but...
How about a clear, and undeniable story about republicans who voted against the infrastructure bill yet are claiming credit for projects in their districts as a result of the Act. Maybe they should take what Dr. Richardson has written here and turn it into a full blown indictment of the maga party.
In the harried lives of most Americans, no one takes the time to read a full article. Just like soundbites, headlines are scanned, read, and imprinted on the brains of readers. A long list of headlines from the past eight years would pretty much sum up the thoughts and opinions of the reader who doesn't take the time to inform him/herself. Whataboutisms abound. Truth be told, newspapers have failed us. Failed us badly.
If I may, I would like to expand your thesis even further - virtually all of today’s media in the US was hijacked by the attention economy when social media platforms added “news” plus the “like” function to their platforms. With the ubiquitous use of smartphones coupled with the presentation of the news (headlines) DESIGNED to attract the attention of the viewer, traditional print media decided they had to redesign their articles to attract viewership. Hence, the model we had been used to of in-depth articles and investigative reporting had to change to attract the attention of all who are glued to the phones.
A marketing model based on attention-frequency was insidiously coupled with this attention model, providing a revenue stream for the social media platforms and eventually the print media as they had to depend on this revenue stream to support their businesses. So now the role of the “free press” no longer provides a check on governments but has been captured by the attention-marketing-economy which is designed to hook us with emotion-laden headlines and/or pithy OPINION based versus FACT-based short statements and governments world-wide have struggled because of this shift. Some governments have recently begun to try to come to terms with this major shift in how we all get our “news”. For example, the European Union is actively engaged in developing guidelines designed to standardize some broad based guidelines to return its legacy news outlets to fact based reporting. We, in the US, will need to closely monitor what they are doing to see if our government has the political will to adopt such practices.
Thank you for this thoughtful and edifying response.
I very much doubt the govt will act to change anything.
I learned somewhere that the average news article online is meant to be skimmed and/or read in 5 minutes. This makes it so easy to create misinformed voters who fail to become interested in politics. It's all dumbed down because of the silly mantra saying everyone is so busy, busy, busy when in fact, they're not.
My mother used to use the busy word a lot. But she would say , 'busy doing nothing'. I think that about sums it up with people these days.
Like the house of reps that didn’t get much done this year and take an extended break when so much needed to be done. No other employer would put up with employees pulling that crap. Why do we have to put up with senators who are NOT doing their jobs?
We can only vote them out. That is not always what voters do though. And the youth it seems, are so turned off with what is going on and all of the deceit and grifting that many refuse to vote thinking that is cancelling it out. They are so horribly wrong. When the choices are not so much to your liking, or when you think it won't matter, or when you are fooled by those who are the exact opposite of what is best for you and the country, you lose your ability to see clearly when you are being scammed.
Education is the only way to help our youth or everyone who is misunderstanding how not works.
I agree. The unfortunate thing is that if they are not receptive to even talking about it ( sadly, 49 yr old daughter will not discuss with me and is convinced that Kennedy is the best choice) there is little one can do to even engage in a discussion.
Yikes
And she is educated and a successful business person. And her husband is military and also a compassionate and intelligent man.
Exactly 👍
It's become a cliche. Parents frantically driving their kids around to play dates, working insane hours, no time for dinner so pick up some fast food every night, listening to TV news sound bites. It sells. I know many people who use it as an excuse not to live like mature adults managing their time and money.
We're busy doin' nothin', nothin' the whole day through, tryin' to find lots'a things not to do. (From the musical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.)
I must offer some rebuttal here. I think that if people could separate themselves from their fears, they would see that the NYT offers balanced reporting, an extraordinary difficult task as the paper of record in the United States and to some extent a leading paper in the world.
The problem is that we all want the Times to say ONLY what we want to hear, and I include myself in that. I find it disconcerting and sometimes a little upsetting when a viewpoint is expressed which, say, expresses reservations about something the Democratic Party has done that has gone awry.
A good example occurred at the time of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I was delighted with Biden’s action. It was decisive, bold, and long overdue.
Then it went sideways in a hurry and the Times was not slow to point it out. The chaos at the airport, the lack of good intelligence to recognize how ready the Taliban was to leap back into power, and the failure to liberate Afghans who had acted as translators and eyes and ears for the American military were all reported quite without fear or favor.
At first I was angry. Withdrawal was necessarily going to be difficult and problematic. Good intelligence was hard to come by. The mistakes were secondary to the bigger fact that America was finally out of its never-ending war. . . Could the media not stop nattering about these so-called “failures” in the operation. I never considered cancelling my subscription as it’s not the kind of impulse act I’m inclined to. But I burned at the time.
By the end of the summer I had cooled somewhat and recognized that if the withdrawal had been improperly devised in many ways and these errors hurt a number of people seriously, then it was the role of the NYT and frankly all media of conscience to report it in a clear-eyed way. I learned a lesson and it has stuck.
The NYT does not indulge in the sort of grossly unequal ‘what-aboutism’ that has become a terrible hallmark of these days. It has not failed to report economic progress under Biden. Nor has it failed to spend time, effort, and money to demonstrate that the message of better economic times is either not getting through to people, or I suspect being ignored by millions whose mind is made up and want no contradictory evidence that might slow down Trump’s re-ascendancy to the Presidency. Its polls showing Trump’s terrible momentum have been shocks to the system in recent weeks. But I fully trust they were carried out fairly. I also feel that while they have delivered a terrible shock to the system it is good for us to know as much about the battleground as possible, and even polling, which is fast becoming a pseudo-science, tells us clearly the nature of the struggle ahead.
Then there is the division which must be made between news and opinion. News tells us both pleasant and hard truths and the Times spends a fortune in producing it in as eye-catching a way as possible.
The opinion section is, for the most part, informed, far-seeing and offers good for thought. I know of no regular columnist who supports Trump. I find the views of Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens difficult to take at times, but they are a necessary corrective to my deep bent to the left. Thomas Friedman is sometimes pedantic and puts himself far out enough in his generalizations that one must think hard before accepting it at face value. Yet he is enormously well-informed, deeply patriotic and often singularly wise. Is there any doubt where Maureen Dowd stands? Paul Krugman’s mastery of the economy is breathtaking. I could go on but have an undisputed knack for being tedious so will leave the op-ed alone, hoping I haven’t left out a voice who without question should have been included. Ah I did. . . Jamalle Boue is brilliant.
We all recognize that the Times is a corporation and it exists to make money. Therefore it needs the broadest subscription model possible in order to give value to its advertisers. This means inevitably that it must report freely and fairly on the entire spectrum and risk losing the “fly off the handle” types.
I, for one, do not envy them the dilemmas they face. Nor am I surprised when they write articles that would give succour to today’s voters on the American right. I read (some of) these and do not find them wildly unbalanced.
I strongly disagree that the NYT is not the “paper of record” anymore as has been asserted today and other days. The fact that the Right hates it pretty much generally en masse (but long for its approbation) should tell us that leaders of conscience at the Times are appalled by the malice, impropriety, criminality and general lack of seriousness of today’s Republican Party.
We need the Times. We must point out its errors in judgment when they occur, but we need it as a starting point for our understanding of truth. We cannot read it as we do Letters from an American. As I’ve mentioned Professor Cox Richardson leans heavily on failures of the right and successes of the left, using her vast knowledge of history to buttress the few conclusions she allows herself. She is fighting for democracy to survive and thus inevitably writes what we want to hear. At some times this could be called cheerleading. In these most dangerous it is a most necessary arousal of Americans to fight the waves crashing on the shore.
I am terrified of 2024. I don’t think any of us can imagine the utter chaos this year will bring. Already the battle over Trump’s right to be on the ballot is stating to rage and we still have a couple of days to rest up before the most consequential year of our political live kicks off. Things will become real immediately the calendar turns and that which is irrational, spiteful, conniving, fraudulent, and possibly violent will take over. The daily news may be unable to keep up.
I hope and believe that the Times is ready for a quantum leap into the unknown. We ain’t seen nothing, bad as the last eight years have been, and more than ever we need the paper of record.
Who knows? Perhaps Wordle will help to save democracy.
I tend to agree with Eric’s analysis, with a caveot or two. Robert Hubbel has made a point of encouraging folks to stay subscribed, but to comment back to the editors/writers when they are way off base, and suggests that this “movement” has seen a bit of success with a slight shift in editorial policy away from “what-about-ism”, raising the alarm against authoritarianism, and giving Biden’s successes appropriate due. We shall see whether this holds up as this most dangerous and precarious year moves forward.
Thank you. I do not know Robert Hubbell, but his idea is sensible.
Can anybody give a precise example where the Times has been dangerously off the truth in the last year? Perhaps I am overly gullible and need my eyes opened.
I know the story of which you speak. It simply has not come to my attention that it has been refuted because the sourcing was weak. My miss, I assume.
Here's Robert Hubbell on the NY Times, the media, and what we can do:
https://open.substack.com/pub/roberthubbell/p/help-shape-the-narrative?r=6pp8t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/roberthubbell/p/continuing-the-conversation-about?r=6pp8t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm not fully convinced. What I expect from a news venue is accurate reporting.
I see very little wherever I look. Back during the 2016 election our "paper of record" failed us. They chose to misrepresent a lot of the news, and bias was very evident. They intentionally mis-used "the power of the Recording Secretary" to decide which news should be featured more or less prominently and in some cases, opinion was presented as news.
Villains abound, and what drove this shift away from objectivity remains uncertain, however my confidence in the NYT will never be fully restored. I still read their stuff but from now on I'll use my critical eye to look for the moment a story pivots. Same as with most other news sources I catch that moment all too easily and all too frequently.
That’s an interesting idea Gary. You. have a talent for aggregation from different sources that I must lack. I read articles assiduously and give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless I read/hear something contradictory within a short while, the story holds firm in my mind. That is of course for sources that enjoy a reputation for probity, like the Times, Guardian, Globe and Mail, New Yorker, Atlantic et al.
Of course I realize that no story is ever fully accurate. Reporters inevitably carry their own perspectives with them and of course there is a limit to their sources. I assume you and I could be tasked with covering the same event and our stories might vary with some degree of significance.
I must say though, given the above, that I don’t expect malfeasance from the papers I read - a la Fox News for instance. I expect a general level of accuracy, innovative reporting styles and coherence.
Op-Ed’s are different. My assumption with them is that they will be intelligently written, supported with a thesis and indicate some recognition that there are two sides.
Maybe I am simply naive, but the sources I mention have been reliable. I don’t read in a “gotcha” vein. Perhaps I should be more rigorous.
I’m completely in the dark with your phrase “the power of the Recording Secretary”.
And finally I wish I could be pointed to a substantive pattern of behavior that would reflect dishonest journalism. I still hold to my idea that many people become piqued with the Times for not giving them the news that they *want* to hear so as to bolster their worldview.
I expect to be told the facts and then make my own determinations. If I demanded only one-sided "news" I'd be deluding myself. Since 'news' is mostly information someone else doesn't wish for you to know, corruption is never far away. Don't let yourself be misled simply because something is presented neatly.
Marvin Gaye said it best: "believe half of what you see and none of what you hear."
The term "the power of the Recording Secretary" is one I devised from experience. Whoever takes the meeting minutes controls the institutional memory. If the secretary decides not to record what you say in a meeting, often that's too bad for you and whatever point you wanted to make: It's been unilaterally dismissed. That's a lesson to be learned from the Mad Men days - wise bureaucrats know to NEVER piss off the secretarial staff.
“ Since 'news' is mostly information someone else doesn't wish for you to know, corruption is never far away.”
Respectfully, that is a beguilingly written phrase that takes an enormous leap of logic. There are all sorts of instances of news that people think you *should* hear and thus pass it on. Natural disasters, acts of bravery and unselfish service, technological leaps, archaeological discoveries are all examples of news that people want to get you to, not keep from you.
That is not the larger point however. Corruption is often far from news. News so often ferrets out villainy, corruption and brutality. The newsmaker and the reporter are all too often at odds with one another, rather than in bed.
I get your point. Newsmakers can often “persuade” news purveyors to ignore or sanitize something corrupt or criminal that they are involved in.
But the extrapolation you made is far too sweepingly intended for me to gloss over without comment. I hope I am as alert and well-informed as the majority of citizens, but I am disinclined to be cynical. In the larger atlas of my life, a propensity to go down rabbit holes is a luxury I cannot afford. And please don’t feel I’m accusing you of so doing. The phrase I used has become an ugly one.
In my too many years I have learned that corruption is eventually outed so often that it is near a truism to claim that people with evil on their minds either get caught or suffer karmic justice.
I’m uneasily aware that we’ve wandered well away from my defence of the NYT. I accept your disagreement without rancor or feeling that one of us is right and the other wrong. Wonderfully, the world is more complicated than that.
Thank you for your points and also for educating me on your “Recording Secretary” statement. As a teacher who has found joy in the profession for 50+ years, I could not more wholeheartedly agree with you on this point.
Well said.
I also agree with some of this but I am seeing things in the NYT that are very wishy-washy and do not seem very well documented. I always do my best to figure out where the info comes from as I am reading. Sometimes it is blatantly false but sometimes not clear at all.
To your point I’m wondering if a vast letter writing campaign to the editorial board of the NYT might push them a bit more into the sunlight? Mike, what you said would be a great letter to the editor. Anyway just my opinion. Thanks for your thought and I see your point.
In my area if you write a letter to the editor and the editor doesn't like it....it isn't printed! Our daily newspaper is now delivered twice a week and is mainly high school sports and advertising! It is hard for a Democrat to get elected. Believe me....I know!
I canceled my subscription a few months ago. They are like Nikki: which way is the wind blowing? What shall we say that won't offend our advertisers? "Both-erism" to an art. I'm DONE!
I'd like to see this HCR edition as a full page op-ed in major newspapers.
I agree. Few people in the US know all of that party history. It is important to read this to understand what is happening today.
I cancelled my subscription about 6 months ago. Still with WAPO for now.
I am not renewing mine for some of the same reasons. I found that I was opening fewer and fewer of their articles also. I have the games subscription still for a bit but will not renew that as well .
The word pathetic comes to mind...shocking!