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
Quick 🧵 revisiting corporate media claims on the Covid lab leak theory then (a “conspiracy theory,” “misinformation,” etc.) vs. now (“okay the CIA even admits it”).
Trump’s return to the Oval Office has me reflecting on some of the worst “journalism” during his first term.
Of that long list, one in particular jumps out: the corporate press hype around the Steele dossier.
Do you *really* remember how bad it was? Follow along. ⤵️
Before I dive in, would really encourage you to read my full piece at @Holden_Court, because there’s too much to fit in a thread.
That said, surely you remember the dossier, a bunch of dramatic claims about Trump that even @nytimes now calls “discredited” open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…
But before that, there was the hype: the hero worship of Christopher Steele, the spy who was going to save American from Trump, the Russian puppet.
I mean, @washingtonpost put “hero” right in the title.
The rest of the piece is worse. WaPo repeats the claims — that the Russians had kompromat on him for engaging with prostitutes! Maybe Trump was compromised — verbatim without mentioning in the first instance that there’s no evidence these claims are true! Look at the highlights.
An unthinkable breach of journalistic ethics. There was plenty more.
Do you remember the media meltdown over Trump’s pardons? As Biden hands out decades-long passes to his family and friends, that concern is nowhere to be seen.
Biden no doubt wants you to forget this outrage in the glow of the inaugural.
Don’t. Screenshots help. ⤵️
When Trump announced pardons late in his first term, @nytimes said it “showed his willingness to use his power aggressively on behalf of loyalists” to “override courts, juries and prosecutors to apply his own standard of justice for his allies.”
When Biden did the same thing, @nytimes said he was using his “power to protect people targeted by…Trump” to “head off politically driven prosecutions.”
In honor of my securing the top spot on @StuDoesAmerica’s most frequent guests list, I wanted to highlight perhaps my favorite appearance: breaking down the media’s lovefest with former Gov Andrew Cuomo as he was killing countless New Yorkers.