1695
1696

Your pre-Sunday morning helping of some of the usual suspects in the major media being, well, what they usually are.

WaPo: Dems are tearing us apart! For House Democrats, impeachment probe widens the divide they hoped to bridge (The editor is clearly spinning furiously with that headline: the actual article, which is fine, is about Dem House members from districts that voted for Trump doing town halls and, y’know, talking to their constituents. It includes such decidedly low-drama 'grafs as “The audience there was largely supportive of impeachment, although of the two dozen questions, only a couple were on that subject. The rest were on health care, education, climate change and local issues.” Clearly a new Civil War is imminent.)

NYT: Top Donors Gather Amid Storm Clouds Over Campaign. Yep, the NYT is breaking out their trademark “clouds” for Joe Biden. Give 'em a couple of weeks and I’m sure they’ll also bedeck him with the “shadows” and “doubts” they have left over from their 2016 Hillary coverage.

CNN: Chris Cuomo looks at weeks of chaos created by the historically unprecedented acts of our country’s most openly corrupt and obviously inept president, as well as the party that constantly enables him, and reaches the obvious conclusion - both sides are exactly the same.

1697

Poll:
Donald Trump 17%
Rupert Murdoch 83%

1698

My vote goes to Newt. A pretty strong argument could be made for Ayn Rand, though.

1699

Rupert Murdoch was beneficiary of it, but wasn’t the initiator of it. That was almost certainly and entirely Rush Limbaugh, an entertainer who lucked into a political snark and awe neo-conservative as a pseudo-news entertain-caster haranguing on the every crime and transgression, real or imagined, of one democrat after another who was really the Shakespearean blueprint from which all future Conservative Infotainment would spawn.

To understand the modern Conservative movement today, you have to understand the language and appeal of Rush Limbaugh, the modern-day Father Caughlin of our time.

This is a great example - as a Progressive, you’re probably cringing. As a Conservative, you are cheering along.

What’s going on is really addressing the unstated assumptions of his crowd, about the way things are, the way things should be, and the way the “other side” (according to them) went so so wrong. Today there is now a whole other entire ecosystem addressing these assumptions more and more unmoored from reality itself, self-reinforcing, self-addressing, insular and isolated and angry.

1700

Newt and Rush were both patient zero hemorrhoids that led to Fox news, imo. One from the political side, one from the media side. Both massive shitstains who have irreparably damages the country.

1701

Murdoch has much, much wider geopolitical reach than Rush. And he’s been doing it since the 1970s (internationally - the 60s in Australia).

1702

Murdoch was already running a right-wing media empire (and his future media mastermind, Roger Ailes, was running Nixon’s media campaign) when Rush was flunking out of college.

1703

Many of the political sewers of our time are a trail of shit leading to the wellspring that is Murdoch. The world would be a better place if he died 50 years ago. Evil on a global scale.

1704

Not related to Trump, but I am impressed that a 1976 kidnapping inspired a 1971 movie!

1705

I thought Dirty Harry was inspired by the Zodiac killer…

1706

Yep, the scene in Dirty Harry where the killer threatens school buses was inspired by a similar threat the Zodiac killer made in a letter in (looks at Internet) October 1969.

1707

They still haven’t corrected it.

1708

NPR taking a bold, bold stand:

Even when Trump engages in corruption literally in front of the press’s eyes, they fall back on “according to some people.”

1709

Audacious! Ah, let mot juste.

Edit: hmm this is how it reads on the NY Times front page:

Analysis: Trump’s Audacious Move on Impeachment Tests Political Order

1710

TLDR: Biden isn’t going to stay quiet while the NYT does to him what they did to Hillary in 2016.

On Tuesday, the NYT published an op-ed entitled, “What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal - And That’s The Problem” by Peter Schweizer. The op-ed identified Schweizer as “an investigative journalist, [and] the author, most recently, of ‘Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

Here’s what the Times didn’t bother to tell its readers:

  • Schweizer is a senior contributor to Breitbart.
  • Schweizer is the author of the infamous Clinton Cash in 2015, a book clearly designed to torpedo Clinton’s campaign.

When Clinton Cash was published both the NYT and WaPo rushed to get exclusives from Schweizer and put his “revelations” on the front page. Giuliani’s buddies in the NY FBI used the book as a roadmap for their investigation of Clinton.

But surprise, surprise, the book turned out to be full of errors, the investigation turned up nothing, and having been burned in 2016 both NYT and WaPo passed on reporting Schweizer’s new book fully of hackery as fact. Apparently the NYT op-ed editor had no such scruples.

The Times has also retained Ken Vogel, another right-winger, to investigate Biden’s campaign.

Rather than wait for the Times to put out another vague, nonspecific multi-part series about “shadows” and “doubts” “looming” over the Dem frontrunner, the Biden campaign decided to be proactive. Today Biden’s campaign manager sent a letter to the Times:

In which Biden’s campaign manager says,

Are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?

We submit that the Times should publicly answer for these failure in reporting on this pressing issue fairly, accurately, and in a way that prioritized truth and judiciousness over sensationalism, as well as why, after the glaring mistakes of 2016, the Times has again given an underhanded hack the validation of its platform.

1711

Chatting with a NYT customer support agent now. Subscription cancelled.

Blizzard’s cravenness to China made me cancel my account there, and I guess I’m now in a FUCK YOU mood to every organization more worried about the bottom line than basic values.

1712

That’s an awesome letter. The Times really seems to think that journalistic ethics needn’t apply to their opinion section at all, and that needs to change.

1713

Welcome aboard the USS Fuck the NYTimes. Free drinks at the bar!

1714

I read the OPed it is really insidious. It spends as much time complain about Sec, Elaine Chao (aka McConnell wife) making a fortune from the Chinese as it does about Hunter Biden.

There is really nothing wrong with the OpEd itself, it is just this.

Peter Schweizer, an investigative journalist, is the author, most recently, of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

I’m sure my reaction to the editorial would have been, “hmm maybe we need to add some laws to deal with this issue.”. I would have had no idea who Peter Schweizer was or his hidden agenda.