Cancel Culture
Cancel Culture
Blaming the world’s greatest newspaper for the cowardly new world.
OK, so now we’re supposed to blame the “corporate media” — and especially The New York Times — for the dead heat between Harris and Trump. Uh-huh. They’ve done such a piss poor job that nobody in America has seen the evidence that Trump is a moronic, ignorant, narcissistic, childish, career-criminal sociopath who spews lies like the rest of us exhale carbon dioxide. THE UNTOLD STORY, amirite?
No, iamwrong. As someone who has made a livelihood criticizing news coverage for 23 years, and castigated news organization for their wrongheaded Trump reporting as far back as 2015, and continues to be disgusted with the horse-race approach to election reporting and the destructive reflex to spotlight every Trumpruption (versus the larger evil), I think I have the standing to say the following:
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
Mind you, I have spilled a lot of ink, pixels and airwaves documenting NYT lapses. But the problem we face in this election is not Trump coverage. It isn’t even Trump. As previously discussed in this space, the problem is the convergence of demagogues and social media unlocking the native bigotry, ignorance and stupidity that fuels nativism, nationalism and grievance throughout the world. We have been exposed as an unexceptional nation as prone to fascism as any other.
If you want to blame media, I suggest you focus on Mark Zuckerberg. If he had an ounce of human decency, once he understood the power of the Frankenstein monster he created, he would have dismantled his algorithm for parts. But, you know … money.
Beyond that, I don’t even know what the sneering epithet “corporate media” is supposed to mean. I guess it assumes that media companies are such Zuckerbergian whores to profits and the status quo that they shy away from truth. Yeah, sure. That’s exactly where the “Trump bump” of audience growth comes from: suppression! Obvs. Especially at The New York Times. Here are some recent tweets, or Xcretions, or whatever:
Nothing to see here but the DEMENTIA: “Trump Tells Supporters to Get Out and Vote on January 5th.” Trump’s cognitive decline is getting worse by the day. Why does CORPORATE Media REFUSE to cover this?!
Why did corporate media refuse to cover this awesome Tim Walz speech?
Yesterday Kamala laid a smackdown on Trump, but you might not have heard that. Because the corporate media decided to basically ignore it. I think it’s absolutely newsworthy that Harris called Trump “too weak and unstable” for the job—so I covered it here:
The @NYTimes is an absolute joke.#DementiaDon #TrumpBias #CancelNYT
If you still have your subscription to @nytimes, why? This is what they do - nothing.
None of this is news. It’s just rehashed to complain about Biden. The NYT is just Trump Magazine and a crossword puzzle.
This is a 173 year old newspaper which is too old and demented to recognize that the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump far outweighs the issue of Biden’s age. #CancelNYT
So you’re going to cancel your subscription to the world’s finest newspaper, are you? Not saying you are a virtue signaling, empty-gesturing, self-destructive showboat or anything, but you might want to consider if you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face (or, as they say more colorfully in the Balkans, “cutting off your dick to spite the village”). Because if you had canceled, say, at the advent of the Trump administration, you’d have missed a few other stories:
In 2016, C.J. Chivers’ feature on a Marine’s postwar descent into violence; staff pieces on Vladimir Putin’s systematic harassment campaigns and frequently lethal violence against perceived enemies abroad; Daniel Berehulak’s photography documenting murderous, extrajudicial government violence in the Philippines.
In 2017, the expose by Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Michael S. Schmidt on sexual predation by powerful men, including Hollywood tycoons like Harvey Weinstein; national-staff reporting on Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election and ongoing influence on Trump’s campaign, transition and administration; graphic non-fiction by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan on the flight of political refugees in the United States fearing deportation.
In 2018, the 18-month investigation by David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Ross Buetner into the lies, shortcuts, false valuations and systematic tax evasion debunking Trump’s claims of self-made wealth and business genius. (This story triggered the New York investigations ultimately yielding convictions against the Trump Organization for fraud, and later the 34 felony convictions of Trump himself for business and electoral fraud in the hush-money case.); Brent Staples’ series of editorials on racial fault lines in America, historically and contemporaneously.
In 2019, Brian M. Rosenthal’s investigation of predatory lending schemes in the taxi industry turning drivers into de facto indentured servants; another staff investigation into Putin’s political and economic tyranny; Nicole Hannah-Jones’ “1619” project, illuminating the origins of racial oppression.
In 2020, ongoing, exhaustive coverage of Covid-19; Wesley Morris’s columns on the intersection of race and culture in America.
In 2022, coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including an eight-month investigation of war crimes in Bucha; Mona Chalabi’s deep dive into the wealth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
In 2023, staff coverage of the Israel-Hamas war; Hannah Dreier’s investigation into migrant child labor in the United States; Katie Engelhardt’s poignant and tragic examination of the effect of an elder’s dementia on an Iowa family.
It’s a pretty long list, which I curated by only mentioning Pulitzer Prize winners. Over the past century they’ve had 182. They’ve had some other good stuff, too — from science, to sports, to politics, to business and economics, to government, to war, to natural disaster, to pop culture, to high culture, to technology, to law, to climate change and a great deal more, including Wordle.
You know what else you might find there, if you go for a look-see in recent editions? Some coverage that possibly doesn’t equate to a sinister scheme to protect Trump from criticism. For instance:
The Case Against Donald Trump
Our Reporter on Trump and a New Era of Political Violence
Trump Demanded Investigations of His Foes. He Often Got Them.
The Dangers of Donald Trump, From Those Who Know Him
From Melania Trump: Modeling, Motherhood and a Brazen Whitewash of a Presidency
How Donald Trump Learned to Pass the Buck
How Trump Could Punish His Enemies
Why Legal Experts Are Worried About a Second Trump Presidency
The Chaos of Trump’s First Term in 9 Minutes
Trump Promised to Release His Medical Records. He Still Won’t Do It.
Trump Brags About His Math Skills and Economic Plans. Experts Say Both Are Shaky.
Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’
Donald Trump’s Insatiable Bloodlust
You will also see — despite the obvious cover-up by the closeted MAGA zealots on the NYT masthead — some pieces touching on Trump’s mental and cognitive health. Now this is a tough subject, considering the Goldwater Rule, the ethical canon prohibiting physicians from speculating on the mental health of those they’ve not personally examined. There is also the general medical-ethics convention discouraging diagnoses of anyone or any condition outside of a doctor-patient relationship. So the Times is limited, as it was with Biden, to reporting only on campaign rhetoric, public opinion and reportorial observations minus diagnosis. Somehow — in spite of its bias, cowardice and sinister agenda — in its news pages and opinion pages, it has managed.
Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour
In Trump’s Speeches, Signs of Cognitive Impairment
Harris Suggests Trump Is ‘Weak and Unstable’ in Pointed Challenge
Trump Repeatedly Referred to Maine’s Female Governor as a Man
In a Rambling Speech, Trump Offers Gripes and Yet Another Tax Cut
Harris Uses Trump’s Own Words to Attack Him as ‘Unhinged’: ‘Roll the Clip’
Why Trump’s Weird Dance Party Is Deeply Alarming
Trump Has Become Unmoored in Time
Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age
Donald Trump Is Unfit for a Second Term
Now it’s a legitimate question why Trump’s manifest deficits, medical ethics or no, aren’t getting the same level of scrutiny as Biden’s. Could it be that Biden degenerated before our eyes, while Trump is basically the same lying, erratic asshole he’s always been? Could it be that in the overflowing cornucopia of Trumpian pathologies — such as wannabe dictatorship — the question of his age-related cognition barely matters in the process of journalistic triage? Is it possible that the Times has been working for months on a comprehensive, authoritative piece on his cognitive health that does not run afoul of medical and journalistic canons?
Yeah, though the last one is an educated guess, I’d say “all of the above.” But here are two better questions:
Is there anyone in America, let alone swing states, who has somehow missed the absolutely ubiquitous evidence of his gargantuan piece-of-shitness?
If they’re still planning to vote for Trump, or are somehow against all reason on the fence, is there any level of new coverage on his garbled speech and failing memory and cartoonish braggadocio that will make them pull the lever for Harris?
As former Times media reporter Bill Carter told CNN, “There might be some point to the accusation that the media have not sufficiently rung the alarms to alert the nation to an existential threat to democracy. But if Democrats lose to Trump after all THAT coverage, the fault will not be in the media, but in themselves.”
The Times is a great newspaper, sure, but the "closeted MAGA zealots on the NYT masthead" are doing some genuine harm.
I don't have the patience to extract the essence from this long rant in Tom Scocca's INDIGNITY Substack post today, so here's the whole thing:
___________
Why Won't People Take Donald Trump's Threats Seriously?
ON THE FRONT page of this morning's New York Times, the paper's scene reporter on the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Shawn McCreesh, described a confounding feature of the Trump 2024 movement:
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
The contrast between the raging, bigoted, ever more explicitly fascist Trump on the campaign stump and the Trump in the campaign polls is genuinely shocking. Trump the candidate is vicious and addled, visibly decrepit, unable to articulate a vision of the next four years beyond tariffs, ethnic cleansing, and a generalized vengeance. Yet Trump the candidacy is moving toward November as a standard, largely stable Republican presidential entry, seemingly destined to get the usual number of votes from the usual people in the usual places.
Talking to Trump supporters at his campaign appearance last week at the Detroit Economic Club, McCreesh came away with quotes that showed them in a state of acute denial, if not outright unreality. A “a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich.” who was a “former chief financial officer” told McCreesh he didn't believe Trump was really going to carry out mass deportations or implement punitive tariffs. Of the promised deportations, the source said, “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that."
A “40-year-old Detroit man who owns a book publishing company,” when asked about Trump's announced plan to purge the federal civil service, told McCreesh “It could just be for publicity.” A “49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station,” when asked about Trump's vows to “go after” the Biden family, said “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do.”
Why—after all these months of presidential campaigning and all these years of witnessing Trump in action—did these people in Detroit still seem to take him neither literally nor seriously? What would it take for the public to recognize how gravely, and how openly, Trump is threatening the basic premises of small-D democratic and small-R republican government?
Well. In that paragraph in which McCreesh explained the problem, the hyperlink for “jailing political opponents” leads to a story by four Times reporters about how “the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.” A note at the bottom of the story reads: “A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2024, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Paints His Foes As Due for Punishment.”
While that article ran on page A17, the front page of the Times displayed the headline stack “TRUMP EMBRACES TARIFFS AS A CURE FOR WIDER NEEDS / CLAIMS ARE EXPANDING / Trade Experts Say Pitfalls Outweigh the Benefits to Most Americans”—a critical look at Trump's trade platform, but one that treated it as a platform offered up by a regular candidate. The Donald Trump on the front page was maybe a threat to the expert consensus on import policies, or to the overall economy, but he wasn't threatening to lock anybody up.
McCreesh's link to “one really violent day” went to a brief September 30 Times story that was only published online. Instead, the next day's front page featured “In Vance’s Unabashed Approach, Trump Sees Fiery Kindred Spirit,” a story about “a unique partnership developing” between Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, describing how Trump “seems to be enjoying a more collaborative role with someone he views as a kindred political spirit to help lead his MAGA movement back into the White House.”
And the link to “a bloody story” didn't lead to a Times article at all, but to a user-made clip from a Trump rally on C-Span. The most prominent Times coverage of the remark came more than a week after Trump said it, in a long feature story describing the candidate's ongoing lies about how Aurora, Colorado, has supposedly been taken over by Venezuelan gangs; the story noted that Trump had said that getting rid of the gangs would be “a bloody story.” That piece ran on page A12, on a day the front page was “TRUMP UNHARMED AFTER SHOTS FIRED AT FLORIDA COURSE.”
The Aurora story, like McCreesh's dispatch from Detroit, captured the Times' confused approach to the Trump problem, in which publishing after-the-fact news analysis somehow ends up outranking, if not completely superseding, the work of publishing the news. The Times was reconstructing how the lies about Venezuelans had made it into Trump's campaign repertoire, without ever having constructed the story that Trump was lying in the first place.
What antecedent had the Times given the benighted Michiganders to convince them that Trump is a real threat? McCreesh's own campaign coverage has tended to strike what the Times takes to be a wry and knowing tone: telling the reader, when Trump visited a convention of Moms for Liberty—the racist and homophobic book-banning activist group—that the organization “can get a bit carried away” and that “one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler.” The paper later revised the piece and appended a correction, explaining “It was not an accidental use of the remark.”
Writing about Trump's increasing tendency to ramble, and how Trump had dubbed his the wandering style “the weave” and claimed it was intentional, McCreesh wrote, “it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.” It was an amusing account of an amusing character.
The day after his Detroit appearance, Trump went on to Aurora, where he told his rally crowd, “It is the enemy from within, all the scum that hate our country, that is a bigger enemy than China or Russia.” Now he wasn't talking about even imaginary Venezuelans, but his political opponents: scum.
The lead story on the front of the next day's Times was “MUCH OF WORLD TREATING TRUMP AS POWER BROKER / SHADOW WHITE HOUSE / Touching Base With Him Is a Ritual for Many Foreign Leaders.” The day after that, citing its own polling, the paper went with “DEMOCRATS FACE SIGNIFICANT DROP IN BLACK VOTERS / 2020 NUMBERS DOWN / Trump Chips at Support Among Black Men, New Poll Shows.” Why would anyone believe the country is deep in a crisis of democracy? If that were so, wouldn't it be front-page news?
__________
The Times has been burying the stories about crazy Trump and formulating sanitized headlines for the front page. It's not Cancel Culture Goes Mad.
Go get 'em! Of all the twisted responses to Trumpism, blaming the New York Times is the craziest. Thank you for applauding the Times' many significant contributions to public understanding & action. Journalists known to me personally are thoughtful, insightful, caring and intelligent [even you!] Mistakes are made but are corrected publicly. It's easy to fault others for shortcomings and oversights when we are blind to our own foolishness.