I admit to baiting NYT reporters sometimes. It is my only real use of Twitter at this point.

Casually suggesting they're just some reporter at some outlet, for instance by comparing their take on something to a journalist at a random local paper, works surprisingly well.

I have not subscribed since I stopped reading newspapers on paper. I don't have time to do the crossword anyway. I do read Bouie's twitter, but in my defense I started reading him when he was at Slate. (I know that's not a very good defense.)

Anyway, I have very fond memories of going to get the Sunday paper, sitting down with coffee, and reading it.

I had resubscribed two years ago. I may cancel again.

I have been very happy with my WaPo subscription since last year, honestly. All the traditional US-national news coverage you need; analysis and opinion run about four parts good, two parts middling, one part bad.

They are just misunderstood. It was Michael Shear's typically lame-ass question at the presser (yesterday, day before?) that really undid me.

"You don't have a Republican Cabinet member, like President Obama and, I think, President Clinton had," he continued. "You -- you know, the executive orders that he's come out the gate have been largely designed at erasing as much of the Trump legacy as you can with executive orders, much of which the Republican Party likes and agrees with. You've put forth an immigration bill that has a path to citizenship but doesn't do much of a nod towards the border security. And you've got a 1.9-trillion-dollar COVID relief bill that has, as folks have said, already drawn all sorts of criticism. Where is the -- where is the actual action behind this idea of bipartisanship?"

And then he was on The Daily (my wife listens to it) talking about it this AM.

I also subscribe to WaPo. Every now and then, I actually go there and read it on purpose. But mostly, I'm just (usually, not always) thankful when I follow a link to a WaPo article, and it's sane and reality-based. Whereas FTFNYT? Well, FTFNYT. Idiots and traitors.

I only wish I could subscribe to the anti-NYT -- every dollar would remove a dollar of somebody else's subscription payments. I think I might give 'em away as Christmas gifts!

It is a problem, this lack of a way to "short" real-world institutions. Ah, well. I suppose the Kochs would short Planned Parenthood and Drag Queen Story Hour, and then that would be that. So maybe I shouldn't wish for it.

7.3: Business idea, a website to connect people on the fence about continuing their subscription and people who will pay them to tip the balance.

The WaPo also has a YouTube stream when big stuff is happening that is much less agonizing than any cable channel. I had it on most of the 6th.

The New York Times is a very good newspaper..... for me to poop on!

Get out of the bird's cage.

There have been decades where I felt the WaPo was garbage, but they did well these past four years.

Funny, I forgot I also subscribed in the decade before last for the few years I lived in the DC area, and then it was quite mediocre.

For some reason I have a strong memory of an opinion piece pompously ripping into Joe Biden being pompous at a committee hearing.

I think this was it. Including the obsession with counting the "I"'s that was later used against Obama.

My options for home delivery are Boston Globe, Boston Herald, NYT, and WSJ. Of those, NYT seems the least objectionable (Globe became useless around a decade ago, and it's actually more expensive than the NYT).

Not having a home-delivered newspaper is simply not an option.

The only good thing the NYT has done lately is send Maureen Dowd to get stoned out of her head on a Colorado hotel. If only my employer was so generous.

The Globe is owned by the NYT, which must really burn the Sawks fan who work there.

16: The Globe is crazy expensive. The NY Times does a good service by collecting all of the COVID data. I have an electronic Washington a post subscription.

18: I don't think so. John Henry (owner of the Sox) bought it from NYT in 2013.

The Globe also owns stat news. That's too expensive for me, but their covid coverage is free and excellent.

18: Not since 2013. John Henry (Sox owner) bought it from the NYT.

I subscribed to the WaPo just under a year ago, thinking it would be good for election coverage. I haven't really been disappointed, although I would have deplatformed Trumpish columnists if I was in charge. I'm wondering about renewing. I get most of my news from twitter anyway.

That NYT story about the head of the civil division plotting to take over the position of the acting AG, though, is amazing. There's a guy who should have a hard time finding a new job.

I remain ragey that the NY Times, like all other newspapers, provides no meaningful way to give feedback (good or bad) by reporter. I would gladly make micropayments for some of their high-quality investigative journalism, if there was a way to signal how much I loathe their savvy-style, harassment-enabling WH reporters.

As it is, I have a subscription to the Washington Post and several other news outlets (including my local Inkwire) and am quite happy with it.

Not since 2013. John Henry (Sox owner) bought it from the NYT.

Well, its true my information on that dates from circa 2012 or so....

I do waver a fair bit about whether to pay $40 for a NYT Cooking subscription, but I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. I can't stand the video-heavy, ad-saturated pages that seem so common these days on recipe sites, and their interface is nice and clean.

I miss the Times. I unsubscribed after the 2016 election, for obvious reasons. And since then I keep on wondering if I can convince myself that it's okay to give them money again, and every time they do something horrifying before I talk myself into it. But I still miss them: the WaPo isn't the same.

We can mostly poop on them by finding more reliable sources, paying for them, and linking to them instead of to the NYT, yeah?

Poop!

Witt: get UBlock Origin (Chrome extension) and you can read the recipes no problemo. FTFNYT!

23: I would love to make micropayments. I am grateful for their investigation of Trump's tax returns.

Remember when Atrius used to call Yggles Big Media Matt? Big Media Ezra doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

That reminds me, I was going to try to figure out what a "substack" is.

22: Yes, it's extraordinary. Really gobsmacking.

I love how my iPhone wants to correct Atrios to Atrius, the name of a local physicians organization which may soon be bought out by Optum.

||

NMM to Larry King.

|>

It seems like the only reason for subscribing to the NYT is so that you can cancel your subscription when they piss you off. It seems like there should be a way to build a business model around that.

We get the Glob on paper, and WaPo and NYT via the net. You can't get good New England sports coverage w/o the Glob. (Also: paper to wad up when you are having a fire in the fireplace.) The others are good for calibrating your smugness detectors. I do like the Spelling Bee game in the NYT, though.

Fun fact: the Glob these days has fewer pages than our local town paper had pre-internet, and most of their non-sports articles are syndicated from the NYT and Reuters. A "section" is usually a single sheet wrapped in one fold-over sheet: six pages.

35: I don't care about Sports, but if I could pay for the non Sports stuff on,y for a lower price, I'd be thrilled.

33: If you were MMing to Larry King, it isn't that much more creepy today than before.

Procedural liberalism dictates that some distinctions may seem small, but matter greatly.

Also Kevin McCarthy said King has some responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.

He said you do too, Moby.

Right, but I can prove where I was.

Heebie's testimony doesn't count; she's implicated too.

I totaled a car (or two cars?) 250 miles away from D.C. that day. The police were there and everything.

My wife has subscribed to the NYT for years and it allows me to rage read their national political coverage (and for them to get some of our money...). As said above they often have quite good investigative* reporting and often very compelling data and visual journalism pieces (for instance their recent visual/map tick-tock on the 1/6 events was quite well done and the first that really gave me a good "spatial" sense of events). And their environmental and climate coverage has improved quite a bit in recent years, it used to be pretty blah and tended towards both-siderism. We added the WaPo either just before or just after the 2016 election and have been happy to have done so. (Having Chris Cillizza no longer there was certainly an improvement --see follow-up comment.) I have slowly brought my wife around to my view of the NYTimes national political coverage by time-honored method of exposure to obscenity-filled tirades**, but it remains an ongoing point of contention between me and and The NYC-based parts of our families.

*I think one of their biggest sins in the 2016 campaign was one of omission, they had very little coverage from their local investigative and financial people (I think they had the one pretty big Trump taxes story), but instead fronted their Clinton-derangement-addled*** national political team. Every fucking New Yorker *knew* Trump, and had for many years, yet the closest you got to that being published in the Times were Maggie's**** "normalizing" explainer pieces like the one after Access Hollywood.

**Which she gets to experience in the moment as we have our computers set up side-by-side at a long table in our "playroom" (name left over from the time of children). A lot of people find this odd if not downright perverse, but it has worked for us. It is also efficient.

***My pithiest take on NYT national political coverage is that they act as if Jeff Gerth (Whitewater guy) was an important and revered investigative journalist to be emulated rather than a borderline fabulist hack. He was closer to a Jayson Blair than a David Halberstam.

****More below, but I think she is emblematic of the strengths and weaknesses of their last 5 years.

15: Including the obsession with counting the "I"'s that was later used against Obama.

Truly an incredible feature of the Obama years. Utterly damning given where the bar went when they coveried Trump.

And that piece was a Dana Milbank joint. Asshole who is still there, but not as bad as Cillizza (who wrote and defended writing over 50 HRC email pieces). But when Milbank and Cillizza teamed up you got the real magic. Like their "satirical" sketch which featured Mad Bitch beer (something to do with HRC .when she was SoS I forget the details). And looking that up I was gratified to find Slate being Slate with "Another Round of Mad Bitch, Please. In defense of the offensive episode of "Mouthpiece Theater.'" Article by Jack Shafer, another sometimes OK journalist but who was absolute shit (and misogynistic as all get out) during 2016 and pretty shit from then until now.

Speaking of Chris Cillizza, I recently unearthed a GQ piece from 2016 that was infuriating at the time (and maybe even more so now), Inside the Mind of the Undecided Voter*.

In particular one of the subject was a "Politics reporter, 42, Washington, D.C." who I suspected was Cillizza but the age was off by 2 years. But get a load of this crap:

I cannot stomach Hillary Clinton. I just can't get with her. Maybe because I know too much. I find so much of her world hypocritical, reprehensible. I think the rest of the country sort of gives her a pass, like, "Oh, she's always been attacked by Republicans, it's not that big a deal, email shmemail!" But I'm like, "WHAT! This is a huge deal."

I think I would just have to sort of give in to my chaos theory of Trump and just hope that he surrounds himself with the right people enough that it's not a total disaster? Or Hillary would have to do a really convincing and honest come-to-Jesus with the media. A real press conference.I cover this stuff every day. So for me, four years of Trump, selfishly, sounds a lot more enticing, just because it's going to be a dumpster fire. And a Clinton administration would be more of what we're seeing now, which is carefully orchestrated speeches, behind-the-scenes Wealthy McWealthysons going in and out of the White House, and really horrible transparency with the press.

It's stupid enough to be Cillizza. I might try to sleuth it out (or maybe they changed the age a bit for anonymity). Insider brain death at it's most stupid.

*I did not recall seeing it at the time but LOLed at an editor's note at the bottom: Update 8:48 P.M. ET: An earlier version of this article included a subject who later admitted he was lying about being undecided. We regret the error.
An almost universally true statement about undecided voter pieces.

OT: Does buying a hybrid make sense if you only drive maybe 5 or 6 thousand miles a year? The price difference is surprisingly small in the RAV4.

Haberman was the right age to be the person in that story.

I don't get why George Conway continues to rate regular column space.

48: Hmm, I assumed a guy because of the stupidity and/or my own sexism and lack of imagination.

We asked our kids the dumb riddle about the kid in a car crash with his dad and the surgeon says the kid is their son and we've gotten both "Duh his mom's a surgeon" and "His parents are a gay couple."

47: Depends what you mean by "make sense." Do you want the gas money savings to pay for the extra cost of the hybrid? It also depends whether your miles are stop-and-go city miles or highway miles. City miles are where hybrids have an advantage.

Mostly city miles. I don't like going places.

Also depends if your only criterion is money, or also carbon.

Let's say carbon, but only if an appreciable amount of carbon per money.

For carbon offsets, I've been stealing my neighbor's propane tanks and burying them, so I need to do that less because I'm tired.

47: When we ran the calculation five years ago it didn't seem to make sense with respect to carbon emissions. Shiv doesn't commute except occasionally (pre COVID) for a quarterly meeting. My commute is under three miles. Most of the places we go are similarly close or are highway miles, so it didn't seem to be an appreciable amount of carbon saved for the cost. Average miles per year per car is about 4-6K.

I don't see how the answer to 'what about the legacy? whither unity?" isn't "check your sedition sock drawer, assholes", but then I'm not in politics.

That's our situation too.

With the NYT, I feel as though I am taking advantage of a collective action problem. The newspaper has had a recent, sharp upturn in the quality of its political coverage, and I attribute that improvement directly to things like people calling the city desk, screaming and canceling their subscriptions.

If you all hang tough, speak poorly about the NYT for its ongoing offenses, and refuse to subscribe, that will continue to increase the value of my subscription.

Oh, also, cost was a consideration (we unluckily had to buy two cars in the space of nine months.) But we're hoping that when it's time to replace our SUV, there's a good AWD hybrid option available.

The Peloton story wasn't so bad. Someone wrote a stupid sub-headline on the story, referencing an unfortunate sentence that was part of a well-meaning two-paragraph digression about the place of the Peleton brand in society. A mistake, sure, but also a mistake of a sort that has become less frequent at the NYT.

Regarding a defense of the Rolex thing ... I got nuthin'.

47: Apparently, CarTalk answered exactly your question. Short answer: probably won't really break even over the life of the car financially. Fuel economy differential is 41 city/38 highway vs 28 city/35 highway, so roughly 25% lower emissions, which is good but also not very large when you consider driving emissions for a low mileage driver.

https://www.daytondailynews.com/classifieds/cars/how-calculate-the-cost-savings-hybrid/ST9vA6jqT8gsz3vsdgjiiJ/

I wonder about the maintenance costs and if the manufacturing/disposal of the batteries doesn't counter some of the fuel saving.

Someone wrote a stupid sub-headline

Which is all most people read. And "they don't write their own headlines" is something of a standard defense in these situations, so, who the fuck does write all these shit headlines? They don't write themselves!

Not really on point in the hybrid discussion, but we got a plug-in hybrid, which can do about 15 miles on only electric, and that covers a surprisingly large number of our trips. And driving on battery power is very smooth and quiet. When the infrastructure is there for the more remote places we like to go (hella rural Wisconsin, most often), I'll be glad to switch to all electric.

64: Well, the writers of the stories don't write the headlines -- so when you call to berate them, that's a legit excuse. But they're certainly written by professional journalists employed by the New York Times.

There's an opening on their copy desk in Gainesville, Fla.. (I don't think that's for the actual print newspaper or the web version, but rather for ancillary publications.)

the writers of the stories don't write the headlines -- so when you call to berate them, that's a legit excuse

This is my point. There's no accountability for the headlines, even though they're often trash, and the most-read part of the paper.

I got in a lot of trouble in my circle for saying that journalists were responsible for the headlines attached to their articles. I know they don't literally write them, but by working for whatever editorial process that does, they have consented to them appearing next to their names. Trying to work for a newspaper but claiming the headlines next to your articles aren't your responsibility seems like it's trying to have things both ways.

During contract negotiations, journalists should insist on headline veto rights.

Headlines are generally written by sub-editors, a team responsible for that and layout of the print edition. Very rarely the reporter submitting a piece may suggest a head that the subbies accept because they like it. If you have a real problem with a headline, contact me Chief Sub-editor..

Ugggh, this story, about the Times, is horrible: https://mobile.twitter.com/JShahryar/status/1353124692069019649

71: yeah. Would Baquet be the decision-maker here? He is the male rage executive editor par excellence. See here on his replacing Abramson for instance. More here from before the replacement. It's all clearly steeped in misogyny.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet used to get so furious at his higher-ups -- Jill Abramson among them -- that he punched holes in the newsroom walls.

In 2016 *everything* mattered and my favorite indirect thing to point to is Baquet becoming exec editor 2 years earlier. Abramson was not my favorite and of course she had her own mild case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome (impossible not to at the Times) but I firmly believe if she had been at the Times Clinton probably would have won. Fight me.

72.last: A less strong case could be made for Margaret Sullivan staying on as public editor. She was easily the strongest person to have held that role (others ranged from pure suck to pretty bad, the last one Liz Spayd was pretty dreadful but got let go (and position eliminated) after she dared to voice mild criticism after the 2016 election. Sullivan was there for the original "Clinton Cash" stuff and other abominations and did push back on them, but rather mildly. I suspect she realized that she was powerless against the deep culture of the NYT*. So I don't think she would have actually made much of a dent during the campaign (she left for WaPo in May 2016); would love to know her real thoughts on how things went down there---to my knowledge she has not weighed on that specifically although she has written a lot on the general topic of media (often inadvertently) boosting Trump.

Anyway another reason WaPo has been much better than the Times these last 4 years.

*From what I can see Sulzberger is a shit like so many media moguls, but in the Jeff Zucker** vein rather than the Rupert Murdoch one.

**Despite CNN being hated by Trump (who actually loved to watch it) and his cult they were awful in so many ways during 2016. Probably a whole 'nother thread but I'll just mention: Jeffrey Lord, Corey Lewandowski, Zucjker's angry public rebuke of Donna Brazille (who is a shit, I am manifestly *not defending her) just before the election, and his behind the scenes fawning over Trump (as reported recently).

61-70: On headlines. I certainly understand the headline "process" but am with ogged and Nathan Williams on not giving much of a shit. It is the thing they literally lead with and the thing most often seen. If it is back on someone like Baquet so be it, but it is a systematic problem. Similar to the way people are so quick to point out the "wall" between op-ed and news when I rail about the utterly batshit craziness of the WSJ Whitewater op-eds in the 90s (truly carry OANN-level stuff). The vast majorities don't know that and do not care. A headline glance while they are getting their financial news hit is all they remember--why otherwise semi-reasonable people told me in 2016 that there were "lingering questions" over Vince fucking Foster.

And back on the headlines, don't even try to tell me that a "star:" reporter like Peter "Fucking Supercilious Fuckhead" Baker could not at least pushback on egregious things like the "A Cloud over Trump's Presidency is Lifted" headline on his (pretty bad in its own right, but not as bad as the headline) report on Barr's lies about the Mueller Report. Fucking bullshit. Every once in a while they do change one like after Thrush/Haberman got Trump to say he thought Susan Rice committed a crime (I think they added "without evidence" to the headline). And there the headline was the lesser part of the problem, savvy Timesers milking an inflammatory quote out of Trump for a story that centered him with no regard for the black woman who was being smeared.

I realize I am becoming Bob Somerby with my repetitious screeds but so be it.

74.last led me to see whether Daily Howler was still going. And the answer is, Yes!. At a new site at blogspot...

And the latest post is about a Margaret Sullivan columns which he has agrees with in part, but ... shiockingly ... ends up excoriating her for not including Goree's treatment in 2000* among her examples of previous media malpractice.

*And I would get in hot water with him for that shorthand as he was at pains to dramatically explain the War on Gore ran from 1998 to 2000 not just during the election year

I need to drop looking at Twitter before Lent. I just saw that "Farina" was trending and I figured Dennis Farina died. But I guess he died several years ago and "Farina" is an alias for cream of wheat.

Stormcrow, you need to write a book. I've always found everything you've written about the NYT super-illuminating, and yet now most of it is buried in the archives somewhere.

I didn't care very much about the NYT treating Wolfe poorly because after all she's a lousy enough person to work for them in the first place. But then earlier today she tweets that people should NOT cancel their NYT subscriptions: https://mobile.twitter.com/Wolfe321/status/1353248028484890624. So now I'm feeling actively hostile to her.

I will never understand the reasons behind the depth of their irrational animus towards Gore and H Clinton. And I'm sure that I cannot be convinced that, among other factors, that animus wasn't a but-for cause of the defeat of both of them.

Obviously, the owners like it, and hire editors who promote it. And so writers write it. Is there an extent to which readers want it? Some significant portion of the readership, maybe concentrated among the class of people targeted by the advertisers in the paper? Or maybe just by the people who associate with the ownership?

Is the Style section still mostly about awful people?

Remember our principle that journalism on technical subject matter usually drives people expert in that subject matter to despair over the entire edifice of journalism?

Apparently a similar process jolted one person out of Qdom.

I would image very few lawyers in Qdom for that reason.

Except for the ones making money from it.

This is all an interesting perspective from an angle that looks odd from here.

About headlines, the thing about NYT headlines that always strikes a British hack is just how fucking dull they are. The purpose of a headline is to get people to read on, not to summarise the story, or so we believe. [This is a general complaint of mine about the news business: if everything that matters can be said in the first three paragraphs, why not stop then?]

And no one who has not worked on a big paper can have any idea of just what a sausage machine it is. The reporters' copy is just the meat and the whole thing is assembled on the back bench, including the headlines, of course. Once you have handed over your words, you don't see what happened to them until they're published. This isn't an infallible rule, and at some parts of some papers, I could watch the process all the way through, but there was no right to do so whatever.

The pressure on headlines comes from two places more powerful than high-minded readers. The first, and obvious, one comes with political journalism, where the people you write about read the headlines with great care and will retaliate if they don't like them. And when they retaliate, someone else gets the story. It takes a strong mind and corporate culture to resist that sort of thing. I suspect that the legendary boringness of respectable US journalism is in part an attempt to defend against such pressures.

The second, which is new since the web, and really not appreciated outside the business, is the degree to which everything on the web is instrumented with a view to maximising the time that people stay on the site. It's not entirely algorithmic as it is on purely social media, but -- believe me -- the papers know not just who clicked on what and when but how long they read for (you do damn well if even a tenth of readers get to the bottom of the story), where they came from, where they are going to afterwards, whether they shared it, and so on. So editors are concerned with those figures above all.

I find the WaPo opinion pieces deadly predictable. Not that I disagree with them, but I already know that Trump is evil and his regime a disaster; I would prefer something to make me think.

There were always readers convinced that they knew the internal politics behind decisions the Guardian took and they were always somewhere between wrong, and not even wrong.

79: might it have been the narcissism of small differences? This is a wild guess, but if you know that someone has feet of clay, yet are expected to boost them continually you might kick against these pricks even when the alternatives are clearly dreadful. Not an excuse, but a possible explanation.

The NY Post has other issues, but they try to make headlines that are interesting. Otherwise, U.S. newspapers do generally suck at headlines.

Granted, you're not going to reach the heights of "Headless Body in Topless Bar" if you are covering a trade pact or budget bill.

Apparently a similar process jolted one person out of Qdom.

That's an interesting thread; thanks.

And now for the Somerby-esque comment I was originally planning to make today, some random thoughts on various players the Times. A caveat that I of course do not know how things actually work there so may be unfairly ascribing things to individuals, however 1) I don't care and 2) I have gotten a lot from articles about them plus their tweets rather than their own articles which is problematic of course but often more revealing (especially because they are almost I universally a thin-skinned lot). 3) Also interview with them.

The Three Morons from Hell (Friedman, Dowd, and Brooks)--Enough said. The fact that they were prominent columnists in the newspaper of record for so many years is an indictment of our entire species of self-destructive half-bright monkeys.

Baquet--see above. Punch a wall for me motherfucker.

Sulzberger--ditto

Peter Baker--Pompous conventional spin. Says he does not vote so that he can stay truly stay "unbiased." A horror, but more professional than some. Always there to normalize the truly fucked up and let you know how it affects the horserace.

Maggie Haberman-- see some above. But a very interesting and complex person in my mind. I think she is among the smartest and most ambitious and also very ruthless in her uses of sources. Beat sweetens with the best of them, while being smart enough to give cover. Not able to really express my thoughts on her without writing even more than I would be willing to read, but a couple of revealing things from her tweets. (There are many, many examples of her knee-jerk defensiveness not included):
1) Her gleeful announcement that Amy Chozick "got her hands on that Clinton Cash book y'all".
2) A tweet where she disagreed With Michael Tracey but allowed she was usually "there for him." (Is there a more pathetic person in media than Tracey?)
3) Her push back after Trump "lied" about the associations of some judge. Her (narrowly correct) point was that Trump had no idea who the judge was so he was not "lying." The implications of Trump's willingness to invent any self-serving bullshit left as an exercise for the reader (which I think is a microcosm of the larger stupid debate on how to characterize Trump's various utterances. It was all self-serving bullshit of one kind or another, that was the lede, not the flavor of any particular bullshit burger.)

Amy Chozick-- Was not great in 2016, unsurprisingly she was enmeshed in NYT Clinton Think, but does seem to have had some self-awareness. Her coming out publicly with her frustrations about being relegated to email watch in the office in October 2016 because the "election was over" despite her expressing her desire to be out actively continuing to cover the campaign was revealing. And I will note that she seems to have disappeared somewhat since, or at least been relegated to less important, less political stories.

Glenn Thrush--misogynistic gossip columnist hack. I think he is still around but cut way back after the revelations about his sexual abuse pre-Times. His journalism combined the worst of Politico both-sides sensationalism with the studied eye of a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist.

Michael Schmidt--Clearly has tentacles deep into DOJ and FBI. Much of his stuff the last 4 years had been more thoughtful than I would have thought. But for years leading up to 2016 he was very hackish as most clearly seen in various TV appearances where he would be all but gloating about HRC emails and the like (recall one in particular where he was gleeful about the "hundreds of thousands" of HRC emails on the Weiner laptop). I think editing helped tone that down in his articles. I think he and his "sources" raises a very interesting dilemma for journalism-- who is a "source" and who is a subject of a story (or a set of stories). (I guess easy answer, if you talk to me in "private" you're a source). In this case I am 100% sure Schmidt has knowledge of any number of potential stories about the NYC FBI and the like that reflect quite poorly on those sources. OK, I get it, but the seeming credibility with which they were treated seems way off to me. (For instance the fact that Horowitz (FBI IG) never got around to investigating NY FBI leaks despite that internal recommendation would make a good NYT story. Especially since Horowitz investigated lots of things at Sessions/Barr prompting.)

Nick Confessore--Straight news guy but a conservative asshole. Most illustrative example was when he went deep in a twitter spat over how the EMAILs had disproportionately dominated election coverage. Criticism not even directed at the Times itself, but he was there misusing statistics and the like to "prove" to us idiots that there was no undue focus. Asshole. Tweeted on election night in 2016 "Where's your blue wall now?", a tweet which gets you fired if you are a progressive woman contract editor per 71. Often defended as a "good, careful journalist" by mainstream media critics, I think he would make a good, careful PR person. Craft is not everything.

Ken Vogel--The prickliest motherfucker of the whole motherfucking prickly bunch. Brings strong the Politico vibe. Seems to get his facts right, but also seems to relish contrarians. See his defense of his Ukraine stories where he basically got the facts right but never owned up to his slanting them as bad for Biden. Seems to be ragrded as an arrogant asshole even by other media members.

Jonathan Martin, Alex Burns--Can't keep them straight. Run of the mill straight national news guys always can be counted on to horserace/both sides the issues of the day. Very guy guys (my understanding is in the clique that helped dump Abramson because she was too abrasive... to be replaced by Dean 'wall-puncher" Baquet). I got blocked by Burns in September 2016 during a twitter spat where when pressed on any actual corruption in the Clinton Foundation to justify their spate of stories Martin offered the Clinton Cash BS. Somewhere in there I opined that the NYT National Political team clearly had the self-awareness of a sea cucumber. And so blocked. But a rare time I was even in a dialogue where I got noticed by a blue check. My only other such block was from Ron Fournier (and maybe Glenn Greenwald? One of those white guy misogynistic "lefties" anyway).

Carolyn Ryan-- Almost forgot her. Has been relegated to important but internally-focused roles. Was a mess as editor In DC. Cultivated Drudge mentions and open about opining that everything Clinton was corrupt. She went to far with that at some point early in the campaign and sent back to NY internal roles. I hate follow her on twitter where she avoids politics after a couple of ill-advised sort of gloating tweets about HRC in the woods after 2016 loss.

Elisabeth Bumiller--Followed Ryan in Washington. Has been a bushel of leaves throughout her career as far as I can tell. Was passively useless and overawed when she covered the GWB admin in the early 2000s.

Now I need a cigarette.

85 If reporters are bored with presenting a truthful narrative about public figures, they might try to find another job. I'm not asking them to say that Al Gore is the Second Coming. But the presentation of Republican candidates as if the whole question is whether or not the Democrat is the Second Coming, and if not, well who cares, you can pick the one you think will be more fun suggests writers who have completely lost the plot. It was bad with Gore, but way beyond unforgivable with H. Clinton.

I appreciate that 84 appropriately contextualizes any inference I am making about the individual actors. Old guy in Pittsburgh has opinions about things he has no real inside knowledge of*.

On the other hand, I pay attention and remember a lot, and am comfortable with reporting on the impressions made, and in some case things hard to see if enmeshed in the workings of the sausage factory.

*I am reminded of how in my run-of-the mill workplace in a large industrial enterprise, I would be constantly confronted with things of the order of "such and such happened because so and so wanted it to." In fact 50 people wanted 500 things and thos one thing came out of a unholy mix of those desires and other internal and external constraints.

And so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the present.

Speaking of, did you ever commute by kayak?

How long until the Times hires the "smartest" Q-cultist to write for their op-ed page?

One of my earliest memories of interaction with NYT journalists was pre-Twitter, by email, WIMHMHB. I was puzzled at an article about the decline of Parisian cafes whose evidence was just individual cafes closing; I thought given the standard turnover rate it should be easy to find such anecdotes regardless of the state of the industry, and pressed the writer on this. I may have been a bit badgering, I was 22-25, but this guy responded with pure rage and offended authority, saying of course it was correct because otherwise he wouldn't have written it.

77: Stormcrow, you need to write a book.

Among my delusions when I retired was that I would do just that. Or more correctly, that I would compile the material in a book like form, the actual production of book being beyond even my own delusional fantasies.
But I am sort of using the comments/ archives here to get some of it down in writing (and to experience how thin it all is*). I have accumulated a lot of links and sources at least; I do wish I had screenshotted more of the revealing tweets.
(Actually twitter advanced search is very good, but a lot of people in the public eye clean up after themselves.)

And actually having actual Trump in office kind of deflated my appetite; when I envisaged it as a warning against a future Trump if our political discourse continued as it had.

Some of my working chapter titles

Chuck Todd is Dumb white Supremacist, but not as Dumb as Chris Cillizza
John Roberts is the Most Effective Racist in America
If You watch Sunday Morning news Shows You are Hurting America

And then I planned short interlude chapters entitled "Two Minute Hates" where I would include controversial topics to rile up readers bored by the other stuff. Some:
Harriet Miers Would Have Been a Far Better Justice than Samuel Alito
Your Seemingly Sophisticated Criticism of Alanis Morrissette's "Ironic" Reveals Yu a a Big Fucking Idiot
Fresca Mixed with Cheap Merlot Makes the Best Wine Cooler
It's a Fucking Hard "G" You Fucks.

*For instance, I wanted to use the Trump/Thrush/Haberman/Susan Rice thing as an intro to chapter exploring how crap the Times (and others) have been in covering prominent black women in the federal government (Lani Guinier, Jocelyn elders, Shirley Sherrod, Maxine Waters etc.) . Have done some of the research on that but the writing of it seems beyond me.

85: My only email interaction with a NYTer was actually with Clyde Haberman (Maggie's father) about the Blumenthal Vietnam bullshit. He responded with something along the lines of "than you for reading."

Interestingly he seems to now be a member of the NY Times editorial board (long after stopping writing for them, he is 75) but I have noticed he has been unabashedly pro-Democracy in a Trump-bashing and partisan way on Twitter. And sort of sub-tweeting the Times. (And more "partisan" than the editor in 71.)

For instance: Indeed. Tomorrow Benghazi, and the next day they'll talk about Monica Lewinsky. And the day after it'll be how Obama saluted with a coffee cup in his hand.

I

This book definitely needs to happen.

Further to 98: Also I don't write so good, also.

How may I be of service?

100 was not supposed to be to 99.

I mean, it COULD be. I was just saying it openly.

98: I'd thank you for writing a post so right up my alley, but sadly it was ogged.

101: Oh wait, 99 is a Prank comment! Prank comment!

You could write it for me.

Nick Confessore--Straight news guy but a conservative asshole. Most illustrative example was when he went deep in a twitter spat over how the EMAILs had disproportionately dominated election coverage. Criticism not even directed at the Times itself, but he was there misusing statistics and the like to "prove" to us idiots that there was no undue focus. Asshole. Tweeted on election night in 2016 "Where's your blue wall now?", a tweet which gets you fired if you are a progressive woman contract editor per 71. Often defended as a "good, careful journalist" by mainstream media critics, I think he would make a good, careful PR person. Craft is not everything

He got a very thorough briefing from me about Viktor Bout having read my blog and then published without giving me any credit whatsoever.

That's an asshole move too.

The WSJ did much the same, CBS discussed it at great length and then spiked the story.

OT: They always shoot at the women first.

I'm guessing the shooting wasn't a local Upper Arlintonian. I have serious questions about healthcare in rural, militia-friendly areas post covid/coup. It was already hard for many places to keep a doctor.

I decided to eat cheese and crackers washed down with beer until I felt better about the future.

My favorite story about the cultural status of the New York Times. My employment with the New York Times featured on my resume when I was interviewing for jobs at college graduation time, and hadn't had any full time jobs, and again two years later when I was back on the market but only had one full time job.

Recurrent interview conversation: Your work for the Times stood out on your resume.

Me: Thanks. The toughest part was getting up so early in the morning.

Followed by, How did you break into that organization? or, what did your learn about their organization?
Or some more subtle fishing for the inside gossip for working there.

The worst was, how did you manage to report for the Times while going to college full time?

Me: Great organization! I was a deliverer in the dorms for a few years. They always got the papers to us before 6 a.m. even on the snowiest days, and the pay was pretty good for a job that ended before breakfast.

(and thinking, asshole, the resume says, New York Times Delivery Service, because that's the name of my employer. I didn't hang out with William Safire or Red Smith. You know what newspaper deliverers do. You are asking about the Times because you stopped reading after the first three words on a line of my less-than-one-page resume.)

Sometimes someone would deliver a soliloquy on the various columnists, or talk about how their business or their high school football had been covered by the paper and I would just nod along.

The best part of delivering a newspaper on campus, of course, was seeing who was sneaking out of whose room in the 6-7 a.m. period.

I have never subscribed. I usually took a copy for myself when I delivered, since I filled the old school newspaper boxes, and no one could have noticed. After college I left the metro region.

96: My plan for the thing I won't actually do in retirement is to create a blog called "Better Times" or "Good Times" or something like that, with an eye toward taking stories from major publications and rewriting the headline and first few paragraphs to make the story honest, or to put the important stuff up top.

I was thinking of drinking and eating in nice restaurants.

Right. I'm talking about my plan for what I won't do.

I think a lot of the structural stuff the NYT does is defense of NY as the financial and media power center of the US. I don't know whether it's conscious or not, or rather, I can't tell how many people do it consciously, but it's definitely there.

Bill made a lot of hay in '92 about how "they" didn't want someone from a -- his phrase back then -- "small Southern state" to lead the nation; or at least he did that in the Southern state I saw him campaign in, the message was probably tailored elsewhere as well.

The tendency goes back a ways, too. I wish I could remember where I read the story, but I recall one about Bert Lance wondering why the NY/DC media tore into him when Carter appointed him. The answer was "we didn't want you to become Chairman of the Fed."

In this view, banking is and of rights ought to be a NY fiefdom. Probably advertising, too, though I don't have any good stories from there. Politics is a codominium grudgingly shared with DC. Definitely publishing.

I remember HarperSanFrancisco from the early 1990s making some headway as a successful and slightly different imprint. Part of a major house, sure, so they had some marketing muscle to back a West Coast list and outlook. And over the course of just a few years it basically withered on the vine. NY publishing was not going to let a counter center develop.

Anyway, the Times is never going to be the paper that it could or ought to be, because it will never take off those NY blinkers.

So apparently Biden's Rolex watch belonged to his late son Beau. I mean it would be a bullshit story even if that weren't the case but way to play yourself.

116: Where did you hear that? That makes the "outrage" a million times worse.

Twitter but unsourced, I'm looking for a source but so far that's it

Guessing we're going to have a round of dumb internet sleuthing this week. Several pictures on Twitter of Beau wearing a dark faced watch with silver band but clearly a different band style than the Rolex Joe had on. Doesn't mean it's not true because obviously some people have many watches but do we really have to go through a battle of low resolution pictures?

It's not so bad.

108, 109: My former peeps* they are not so good on the whole health and politics thing.

A white Ohio Republican lawmaker who questioned whether members of "the colored population" were disproportionately contracting COVID-19 because of their lack of hygiene will now lead the state's Senate Health Committee.

Politically, the whole state has become a mistake beneath a lake (Not that Western Pa can claim any better, by my reckoning Western Pa went Trump 55-45 a bit higher than Ohio's %. Sigh.)

DFH college is represented in Congress by Jim Jordan.

112: My plan for the thing I won't actually do in retirement

My other two plans that I am doing well at not doing were; 1) get back into doing some programming (which I stopped doing professionally in the early 90s....timing), and 2) write a paper related to my work.

On my other things (I actually made sort of a plan) like volunteering and getting out into nature a lot I've done much better at.

115: At times I've thought that Carville's "Washington always wins" should be "Actually, New York* always wins."

I've toyed with trying to find patterns that differentiate powerful Kingdoms/nations/empires with unified economic/political centers versus those where they are different cities. I don't know enough to even have an informed opinion, however.

*For some values of "New York."

NMM to Portman 2022. Are there Dem prospects?

123: Places that I would nominate as not having a unified political and economic capital: Postwar Germany, and even still after reunification. Turkey in its incarnation as a republic. Probably Italy. Maybe Spain? Maybe also the Netherlands. I only really know Europe.

Empires are an entirely different kettle of fish. As for patterns, it would be fun to try to tease out but I don't know how to even begin.

When Washington wins they play the Liza Minelli version.

124: Connie Schultz! (that would be awesome and historic, but isn't going to happen).

Lebron James! (almost as awesome and historic, but I'm pretty sure he'll still be playing basketball, and that might be too much even for him to balance)

Nan Whaley - Mayor of Dayton. I don't know much about her, but I've heard good things.

Tim Ryan - that's the name everyone brought up right away. He'd be better than Jim Jordan, who is the collective nightmare of all Ohioans to the left of the John Birch Society.

*For some values of "New York."

For instance "Harlem Globetrotters." In particular versus the Washington Generals as 126 made me think of.

124: I'm having this crazy thought that maybe this means Portman won't be as reliable a Republican for the remainder of his term.

And 127 and 129 remind me that 121.* was meant to be a footnote disclaiming any malice towards peeps other than my former peeps in THE state of Ohio.

130: I'm still not sure if you're meaning to include or exclude me from your Malice Zone.

"Port" means left, so he's obviously a secret liberal.

131: Are you one of my former peeps? To the best of my knowledge you are not.

127: or David Simon:

Now entertaining a weird fantasy about moving to Akron, changing my political party and running the ugliest, most profane, most rant-filled, fuck-you-fucking-morons campaign for U.S. Senator ever.
Upside: Fun; A debased GOP primary season.
Downside: I would be in fucking Ohio.

133: Peep is a current peep.

As suspected, Jake Tapper says the Beau Biden Rolex thing was not true.
Also, Obama had a Rolex too! Barack and Joe, the two most elitist presidents of the 21st century.

Ugh - Trump successfully ran out the clock on emoluments. Shoulda been tacked onto the new articles.

137: Or successfully stacked the Supreme Court to protect his interests.

125: Places outside of Europe/the US that don't have unified political/economic capitals, off the top of my head: Canada, Brazil, South Africa (doesn't have a unified political capital--ditto Bolivia, but I don't know much about it), India, China, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Vietnam, eventually Indonesia, Kazakhstan. A lot of these are cases where there used to be one clearly dominant city but the government moved to a new planned city for some reason.

Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and so on.

81: I have a lot of respect for that guy, it's a very encouraging thread, but I'd have a lot more respect for him if he didn't use "clinical therapist" in one line, and use "CT" in the following line to mean something completely different without defining it.

139. Also until recently Pakistan.

140: I don't think it is quite as relevant at the state level. In fact economic center/ state capital tends to be the exception (by my rough count 15-18 of the states are have unified government economic hubs), A few states are interesting in that the financial hubs have moved to the government hubs over the last few decades (Ohio and Tennessee are what I am thinking of, and although capitals are not yet "dominant" they are moving to become so).

Like with national capitals, every state has it's own story. I think of Albany as an intentional separation, and Annapolis as one where the economics overtook.

Our story here of course involves bribery and the egos of rival robber barons.