Posted on 05/08/2024 7:22:47 PM PDT by TigerClaws
Don’t look now, but journalism might be back.
In a rare uplifting press story, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn seemed to lose patience with incessant demands that he elect Joe Biden instead of reporting news, directing an epic, And Justice For All-style “No, you’re out of order!” tirade against the White House and its lackeys.
When Ben Smith at Semafor asked Kahn about former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer’s complaint that the Times does not “see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” Kahn went ballistic.
“I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” Kahn snapped. “We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda, and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”
Kahn didn’t stop, announcing a formal re-drawing of lines in the sand. He told the White House that fixing the country is their job, reporting is his job, choosing presidents is the job of voters, and stop blaming us if you can’t get re-elected on your own.
“There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president,” Kahn told Smith. “It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”
Finally, in a sweeping indictment of Trump-era journalism, Kahn pointed a finger at a generation of reporters who appeared to arrive in newsrooms unequipped to deal with unpleasant facts. Sounding offended on behalf of the paper’s reporting reputation, which took a beating with years of misses on stories like Russiagate and factual fiascoes like the “Caliphate” podcast, Kahn reminded Times reporters that the job is about facing and reporting difficult truths, not striving to remake reality into a campus-like safe space, in pursuit of any political “mission”:
Kahn: I’m open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to being in an independent news environment. But I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like. Don’t you feel like there was a generation of students who came out of school saying you should only work at places that align completely with your values?
Smith: Don’t you think we all sort of said that to them?
Kahn: I don’t think we said it explicitly. I think there was a period [where] we implied it. And I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, “join us for the mission.”
Kahn’s outburst inspired quiet cheers by current and former working reporters around the world (one European journalist texted “F*** yeah!” last night). Naturally, the high priests of “moral clarity” media felt differently, staging a nuclear conniption fit in response to Kahn’s remarks:
The Biden administration brought Kahn’s outburst on itself, through a stream of leaks and nudges designed to publicly shame the paper that long ago went too far. The specific conflict probably started five years ago, but relations started steaming downhill with breakneck speed this past January. That was when officials from Biden’s re-election campaign invited representatives of the nation’s leading press outlets to an off-the-record retreat in Wilmington to receive, no kidding, campaign coverage instructions. From a January 7th article in Semafor:
Biden’s re-election campaign has begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters… Using it as an opportunity to tell them what they’re getting wrong… Officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short… In particular, campaign officials have chafed at…coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to… incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail… With the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,”
Those participants, bound not to write about their seminar by off-the-record conditions they themselves agreed to, then had to watch as someone leaked to Semafor that they’d sat like lapdogs while campaign aides rolled out a “coverage spreadsheet” showing where they’d failed to sufficiently amplify administration messaging on Donald Trump. (Apparently the off-the-record deals didn’t cut both ways.) Even worse, or better, depending on your perspective, Semafor’s “source familiar” went out of his or her way to say everyone but the Times got a gold star for obedience.
Consider all the brutal embarrassments to media in just that 200-word report. Someone told Semafor “top political reporters” for the Washington Post and New York Times as well as “ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg” all submitted to the indignity of not just one “briefing” from the president’s campaign aides on “what they’re getting wrong,” but a series of them.
Actually, more HONEST reporting comes out of Russia now than the US media. In the US media they’ll say something like “Trump’s lies about election fraud”, whereas Russian media will say something like “Trump’s claims about election fraud” - HUGE DIFFERENCE, and which one is more accurate, particularly before anything was even investigated.
Yeah, right, the NYTs lost its way during the “Trump Era.”
Two words; Walter Duranty
Its never coming back.
This is literally beyond belief and is illustrative of the smug, self serving Biden crime machine:
<><>Wash/Post, NYT, ABC, NBC, WSJ, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg top journos
<><>actually submitted to Biden-inflicted indignity
<><>several “briefings” on “what they’re getting wrong”
<><>then told how Biden wanted Trump covered
<><>the “do as we say” meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,”
<><>journo lapdogs lapping up Biden’s “coverage spreadsheet”
<><>even earning a Biden “A for obedience.”
He will be issuing an apology shortly.
Please, don’t throw me in the briar patch!
Once the media/entertainment elite lionized those two, a whole generation of journo-commies went to college and aimed to infiltrate the major news organizations, which they did.
But just before he died, former FBI kingpin Mark Felt outed himself. He explained how he was the secret "Deep Throat" who provided all the juicy details that took Nixon down. And of course, not a single word of remorse or contrition was heard from the Fake News.
In other words, all Bernstein and Woodward did was merely listen to what Felt was saying. They did not performed any so-called "investigative journalism" at all. So the entire premise of the commie journalists was fabricated by the press themselves.
In fact, it would interesting to trace the multiple streams of corruption and gullible voter habits that have created our current crisis.
I'd love to see a flow chart showing that -- if anyone has seen such a thing.
“There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president,” Kahn told Smith. “It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”
Um, I don’t think it’s anyone’s job to prevent that from happening.
The Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn podcast “America This Week” is by far my favorite podcast.
“...” Kahn snapped... “We become an instrument of the Biden campaign?...”
STOP RIGHT THERE!!!
Wrong tense. It ought to read, “ BECAME an instrument of the Biden campaign...”
Well, they did check sources, but I get your point pundit. Listening to disgruntled 'intelligence' people also became 'standard' after Watergate. Intelligence is an easy source that's biased but credible. For their part intelligence folks learned how to milk that advantage with partnering causing a marriage between government and the press that gave us the 'Pravda' look to the MSM we have today. Also DNC war rooms discovered if you put MORE self serving stories into 'news packets' along with intelligence stuff that more of the stories you want run will run. (the more self serving stories rejected the better because editors felt good about their great judgement in catching the self serving etc etc etc.)Well, at least that's how it looks IMHO.
That's not fair! Her speeches consist of saying a simple statement, and then repeating it several times.
She does rearrange the words in versions 2 and 3; I'll give you that.
True, the intelligence community learned how to exploit the press. They learned the craft of toppling governments and getting rid of leaders they didn’t like. Then they said, “Hey we can apply the same tools and techniques to run the U.S. government.”
And, of course, the internet and tracking your identity wherever you go was part of the game.
Thank God Musk took over Twitter and Trump started Truth.social. From those beachheads, maybe we can begin to see respect for free speech come back and our Republic preserved.
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