Thread by @GregTSargent

Today’s NYT featured a headline above the fold that read as follows:

“Biden Misstep Delivers Grist to Harris Foes”

This gets at one of the very worst things about the way political media has functioned during the Trump era. Here's a thread on the problem. 1/

https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1851946535602245836

I'm not sure what Biden meant w/the "garbage" comment. But even the harshest interpretation of it can only be that he meant Trump supporters *who openly make virulently racist displays* are "garbage."

That's news, I guess. Cover it, sure.

But what made it *front page* news? 2/

Why did this merit above-the-fold coverage days before the election?

*Because Trump/Rs made a big issue out of it.*

The headline itself gives away how this works. The news hook is literally that it provided "grist" to Republicans.

The problem with this should be obvious. 3/

It outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad faith actors, in this case, Rs feigning outrage about it. In a sane world, you'd say, "tough call what Biden meant, but now that he clarified, this lost its intrinsic importance."

But instead... 4/

Instead, this treatment of the event ties judgments about its importance directly to the noise level that Republicans can drum up around it.

The story itself also gives away how this game works. It admits the comments were muddled, but says Trump "sought to amplify" them. 5/

It's self-perpetuating: Event is judged as important b/c Rs said it was; that leads to outsize coverage; this "amplifies" it further. That *makes the original event seem important,* which colors how it's perceived by readers.

This is a constant problem 6/

https://x.com/GregTSargent/status/1788187187512520756

The real problem here is in this convention that "neutrality" consists in adopting a kind of imagined midpoint from which each side is subjected to an equivalent degree of criticism lobbed by other. This is plainly prone to hacking by bad faith actors. 7/

https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851636335439716828

I would ask defenders of the media: Are you really denying that the use of "this provides grist for attacks" as a news hook is a widespread convention that's prone to bad faith exploitation? Is this not problematic in the least? Is it all just fine? Media has this all aced? 8/8

CODA: If "neutrality" consists in adopting a midpoint where each side is subjected equivalently to the criticisms of the other, what disappears is any discerning judgment about whether an attack is a grounded criticism or not, one that is important for people to know about.