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7 Nov, 14 tweets, 11 min read
BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP

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More from @jbenton

Joshua Benton Profile picture
8 Nov
In small-town Louisiana, it was still cool in 1926 to arrest "idle negroes" who weren't working for local white farmers.

Once their labor force was captive, farmers would bail them out "as fast as they were locked up" and put them to work to pay off their bail. Image
(The Rayne Tribune, Oct. 9, 1926.)
Still happening in Shreveport in 1945.

And note the union involvement. People don't realize how much of the anti-union sentiment in the south is based on the desire to continue ownership over the labor of black people after 1865.

(Shreveport Times, Feb. 10, 1945.) Image
Read 9 tweets
Joshua Benton Profile picture
27 Sep
Biden (and, to an extent, Chris Wallace) have an astonishing opportunity on Tuesday night.

There have been a gazillion shocking stories written about Trump — and in general, they've barely moved the needle.

But on Tuesday, up to 100 million people will be...paying attention.
Biden has an enormous menu of options on what to focus on from the past 4 years — not just what's important but what might *stick* when people are paying attention that didn't when people weren't.
Like, remember the NYT tax evasion story from 2018? "Trump stole hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers through an illegal scheme to enrich himself."

Would that stick any better when 100 million people are focused, for however short a moment?

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Read 5 tweets
Joshua Benton Profile picture
26 Sep
Two years ago:

Famous liberal law professor says conservative SCOTUS nominee is actually awesome even though the prof thinks he's wrong about everything — because he's super smart!

*Five grafs in: Did I mention he was my law school student?

nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opi…
Today:

Famous liberal law professor says conservative SCOTUS nominee is actually awesome even though the prof thinks she's wrong about everything — because she's super smart!

*Four grafs in: Did I mention we clerked on SCOTUS together?

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
It's a remarkable denial of the raw political fact — accepted by every other player here — that the Supreme Court is an extraordinarily powerful force governing the lives of Americans, not an elite debating society for your generation's most spectacular legal minds.
Read 8 tweets
Joshua Benton Profile picture
25 Sep
@MicrosoftEdge Hello! I use Edge on my Mac and like using it on my iPad. But Edge iOS loses tabs more than any other browser I've used.

Once you get to around 100 open tabs, Edge iOS starts randomly (afaik, can't find the pattern) closing the oldest open tabs.
Found this out by accident and have not replicated it multiple times (including a few minutes ago!). I have also lost *all* open Edge tabs on iOS two or three times, with no apparent cause.
And unless I'm missing it, the things you might do to get around this problem aren't available. There's no "Recently Closed Tabs" you could refer to when something gets mistakenly auto-closed. And no "Bookmark All Open Tabs" that could at least take a snapshot of your open tabs.
Read 4 tweets
Joshua Benton Profile picture
24 Sep
This is almost more dispiriting than "we messed up."

Trump said this at 6:30. The @nytimes really can't get news that breaks at 6:30 p.m. onto Page 1 of the late city edition?
At my first newspaper job in the late 1990s, the final edition didn't hit the press until 1:30 a.m.

As of 2015, the Times' *first* city edition closed at 10:45 p.m., followed by 12:00 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. closes.

popularmechanics.com/technology/a14… Image
Print deadlines have gotten waaaaay earlier at a lot of papers, though the primary reason is that centralization has meant local papers are now sometimes printed a state or two away. (Like Gannett's Ohio papers now printed in Indianapolis.)

dispatch.com/news/20200106/…
Read 5 tweets
Joshua Benton Profile picture
24 Sep
False beliefs in COVID-related misinformation — like "it was created as a weapon in a Chinese lab," or "taking antibiotics prevents it" — have been stubbornly consistent since the pandemic's start

(People aren't learning as this drags on)

kateto.net/covid19/COVID1… Image
Also, there is a gap between Democrats and Republicans in how likely they are to believe COVID misinformation — but it's not a very big one in most cases.

(The "made in a Chinese lab" statement is the biggest exception: 35% of GOPers believe it, versus 14% of Democrats.) Image
What *does* predict whether you believe COVID misinformation? Where you get your news.

Worst is chat apps (WhatsApp, FB Messenger). Almost as bad is social media more broadly.

Best? Good ol' traditional media: newspapers, TV news, news websites. Image
Read 4 tweets

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