I was never holding my breath for Siskind to be a good faith actor but the sheer depravity of her content (this is only a sampling) makes it impossible to keep her off the thread.
Listen, my expectations for Vogue weren’t high, but just look at these headlines and ask yourself “is it any wonder @NYGovCuomo got away with what he did?”
This article may be the worst of the Cuomo coverage from a mainstream outlet not named CNN, and that’s really saying something. google.com/amp/s/www.wash…
A brief aside here to point out that, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the people in this thread bill themselves as critics and/or objective.
If DCCC says this kind of stuff, well, that isn’t news.
Back to the program. Pretty incredible to me that Tanden, famous for being a mean person on the internet, had nothing but incredibly complimentary things to say about Cuomo.
It takes a lot to have so much badness that, even spread across an entire network, it’s still damning. But from their nightly Cuomo Bros saga to their ridiculous coverage, CNN has earned this spot.
Honorable mention. @SethAbramson, a man who needs no introduction.
I will point out, though, that each of these tweets were within two weeks of Cuomo’s having signed a decree requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients.
It is a testament to the outrageous level of Cuomo fangirling that Rubin barely cracks the top three. Here’s just a sampling of some of her remarkable tweets about Cuomo that have aged...imperfectly
(This will always be my favorite tweet of all time)
Where stupid goes, Schmidt and company are never far behind. The Cuomo situation was unsurprisingly no different. And this from a man who still pretends to be conservative about a liberal Governor.
Even above his network, Cillizza’s fangirlish coverage stands alone as the most egregious.
We can leave it to history whether @NYGovCuomo was a “terrific bureaucrat” who “benefited from radical transparency” but let’s just say that I’m skeptical.
There you have it, folks. The worst of the worst, in my eyes, accounting for both content and reach.
There are a lot of takeaways here, but I think one of them is pretty simple: stop worshipping politicians.
Lots of them are just bad people, and eventually the truth will out.
Perhaps the best takeaway is that, when a fawning mainstream media & blue check environment tells you a Democratic leader is without blemish, it probably just means that there are no blemishes that those folks are interested in talking about, even if many might exist.
It’s important to call out that, interspersed with these awful examples, there was a lot of reporting - particularly from local outlets - that was really, really good.
This may finally be the time some of these folks block me.
Folks will ask on occasion if they can support the work that goes into these. I’m flattered, but your local food bank needs that money a lot more. For those in DC, Capital Area Food Bank does great work. capitalareafoodbank.org
In case you missed it, I’ve been working on a series called “A COVID Autopsy” for the last couple of months, revisiting what the legacy media (and their frequently quoted “experts”) got wrong during the pandemic.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot. I started writing this years ago, got sidetracked by some life events (getting married, getting cancer, beating cancer, starting a new job) but finally finished it. I’ve linked to all six parts published at my newsletter (link to it is in my bio) in the thread below.
If you’re interested in how I think the response to COVID broke America, I hope you’ll give it a read, and share (with me in the comments, with others as you see fit) what you think.
Do you remember the start of COVID? Do you remember what the legacy media said back then, about the virus being no worse than the flu, and that masks didn’t work?
Do you remember the lockdown protests? Before protesting for “social justice” got a pass, the legacy press suggested protesting should cause the forfeit of health care.
A quick side by side of things legacy media outlets will describe as Nazi-adjacent when they’re about Trump vs. how these outlets talk about Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo, which an ex-gf of his confirmed to the NYT was deliberate.
Look ⤵️
Trump’s MSG rally? Nazi-related for @nytimes.
NYT, who broke the story that Platner told an ex-gf he had a Nazi tattoo, about his Nazi tattoo? Not Nazi. Just “new reporting…about his vulnerabilities.”
(It is funny to me that so many of the photos in pieces about Platner for NYT show him holding up his arm in a way that the paper would surely tie to the Nazis if, say, @elonmusk had done it)
When I saw the news that the Southern Poverty Law Center funded the hate groups like the KKK & Unite the Right they relied on to claim that white supremacy, inspired by Trump, was on the rise, I just knew the legacy media helped make it possible.
Boy was I right ⤵️
First, what happened.
A federal grand jury charged the SPLC with fraud for using donations to pay hate groups like the KKK millions of dollars, fomenting their activity in the lead up to the Unite the Right rally and after to drive more donations to SPLC.
I know it’s been a few days, but the entire legacy media ran with the claim that Don Lemon was arrested for doing journalism, when he was actually indicted because a grand jury found he violated worshippers’ freedom of expression.
Quick live🧵thread🧵, starting with @nytimes. ⤵️
Same thing at @NBCNews.
Omitted from the headline is what the actual charges are: interfering with these churchgoers rights.
Predictably, @CNN has gone to bat for Lemon.
What’s at issue isn’t “reporting” of a “protest,” and claiming to the contrary is pretty obviously misleading.
There’s another media hoax from Minnesota. Legacy outlets churned out headlines about a 5-year-old child used as “bait” by ICE.
The reality? The kid’s father, an illegal immigrant, abandoned him when he saw the agents. As even these outlets later concede.
Look ⤵️
Here’s how these hoaxes start. @washingtonpost alleges ICE used a 5-year-old kid as “bait” to arrest his father.
Not until five paragraphs into the piece do they acknowledge what really happened: the child’s father, an illegal immigrant, abandoned him when he saw ICE.
But this allegation was everywhere. We saw the same thing from @AP.
Explosive claim in the headline: “used as ‘bait’” (from the school, no less)
Reality: six paragraphs down, father abandoned child.