The NYT should retract that article. But it should also publicly explain the process by which it came to portray a GOP campaign consultant and a GOP official as regular swing voters.
How did @elainaplott make contact with them? Did a GOP flak set it up? Did she research them?
Did any editor involved in the process ask how she found these people? Or if she had asked if they had worked in politics? Or if she had independently researched their backgrounds before building a story around them?
@nytimes These are not people to whom the article “referred incompletely,” btw. These are people who *never should have been in the article in the first place.*
The premise of the article is “voters sticking by Trump.” GOP operatives are not valid examples of this, even if identified!
How did she come to interview those people? Did any editors ask her that, or what she did to check their backgrounds? Is that standard practice? You claim to be explaining how this happened, but you haven’t actually explained anything.
Thanks. How did you come to talk to and quote those two people? Did anyone put you in touch with them? Did you stumble across them on a street corner at random?
Also, the Times has not actually fixed the errors. Adding more ID doesn’t solve the problem; they shouldn’t be in the article at all. Identified or not, a Republican official is not a valid example of “voters sticking with Trump.”
Trump’s gonna get through the first twelve minutes without using a racial slur and reporters will write their “new tone” ledes, which they will refuse to reconsider over the next hour.
and the day ends the way it was always fated to end
To be more precise, I should have said “with time,” not “in time.” The “in time” part is in doubt … though I’m working on it.
The explanation — the *real* explanation — is that John Roberts & his fellow conservatives on the court are as hostile to democracy as the Republicans who appointed them, and want to help those Republicans govern via minority rule by white conservatives.
I’m reminded of 2007, when much of the news media (particularly Chris Matthews) wouldn’t shut up about the danger of “drama” and “distraction” due to unfaithful Bill Clinton returning to the WH if Hillary won.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani was also running and got ~none of that.~
When Giuliani ran for president he had been thrice-married, once to his cousin, had separated from his wife via press conference and moved out of the mayor’s mansion, and his wife sought a restraining order to keep his mistress from entering the mansion.
Media ignored it all.
Which … ok. Except that simultaneously, they were obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s *husband’s* infidelity and whether that would pose a distraction if she won.
Which is an extremely obvious and extremely sexist double standard.
Reagan/Bush: Iran-Contra successfully covered up in part because of pardons
Bush II: let’s look forward, not back at torture, lying into war
Y’all, I’m not sure “let’s just move past Republican wrongdoing and let history judge them” creates good incentives.
Things are shitty now in part because whenever Republican presidents dabble in fascism, media and political elites quickly insist on letting them off the hook, stupidly certain that the fever has broken and it’s time to unite.
The media also doesn’t want to admit that this is in part due to decades of incitement by conservatives and Republicans that the news media treated as the equivalent of Patty Murray or Dick Durbin.
Michelle Mallon wrote In Defense of Internment; cable bookers put her on TV. Pat Buchanan praised Hitler; CNN and MSNBC both hired him. CNN hired Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, too. (Trust me I have a million examples.)
On any given weeekend for the last 30 years there have been more racists on the Sunday shows than black people.
This is not an accident: Republicans have illegitimately seized control of the judiciary specifically so they can use the judiciary to destroy democracy, because they know they are a minority party.