January 3, 2017 – COMFORT THE AFFLICTED

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“The newspaper … comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” That phrase from Finley Peter Dunne, a Chicago newspaperman who knew better, was in a sentence he wrote to make fun of the hypocrisy of newspapers. Since the media take themselves so seriously, they have ignored the irony and repeat it often to wrap their efforts in virtue and importance. Other Dunneisms; “politics ain’t beanbag” and “all politics is local.”

Shortly, we will have an administration the media will want to afflict, and they thus will be performing a public service because they will be highlighting missteps of the Trump administration. This will be a welcome change from what we have experienced over the last eight years from people like David Remnick of the New Yorker, Fareed Zakaria of WaPo, etc., whose interviews of the president have resembled tongue baths. Truly they have spent this time “comforting the comfortable.” But, in the near future we can expect to start hearing about homeless people again. They’ve been ignored for eight years but a comeback is in sight.  

The media will be the least of Trump’s problems. Wait until the federal bureaucrats get into action. They will be on President Trump’s agenda like white on rice. During the last eight years the Bureau of Labor Statistics statistically disappeared 15 million people. They have increased the number of people “not in the labor force” to 95 million from 80 million. This created favorable unemployment rates for the current administration. Pickerhead predicts the reappearance of the disappeared. The gnomes at BLS will be subtle and slow, but by 2018, and certainly by 2020, the people who were an inconvenience for eight years will be recognized. Fooling with statistics is how you get a paragraph like this from Aaron MacLean of the Free Beacon.

… For years, Americans were told that after the financial panic in 2008, the president’s policies had put us on a steady course to a strong economy. But in much of the country, people looked around them and thought, That just doesn’t seem right. Especially in those parts of the country hit the hardest by the transition from the Industrial Era to the Information Age, people asked a number of questions. If the economy is doing so great, why are my adult children not moving out? If the unemployment rate is declining, why are so many prime-age males not working? And doesn’t it matter that the quality of jobs for non-college graduates is so obviously worse than it was a generation ago? Why, instead of working, are so many people dependent on public benefits and falling prey to addiction? …

   

That quote from “Requiem for a Narrative” jumped out of order in this post which has the goal of trying to explain how people who read the NY Times, in particular, and the mainstream media in general, become so ignorant. So, back to the main point as we get an inside look at narrative setting at the NY Times recently provided by Michael Cieply at Deadline.com who has been a movie critic for both the LA Times and the NY Times.

… For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.” …

 

 

Here’s more on “the narrative” and how it works. Go to your search engine and ask for “Trump transition in disarray.” Bing provided 2,800,000 results which look like the following items. This was the narrative shortly after the election which finally collapsed since it was not supported by facts. 

Firings and Discord Put Trump Transition Team in a State …
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/trump-transition.html
Nov 15, 2016 · WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition was in disarray on Tuesday, marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American …


Trump transition team in disarray after top adviser …
www.theguardian.com › US News › Trump administration

Video embedded · Donald Trump’s transition to the White House appeared to be in disarray on Tuesday after the abrupt departure of a top national security adviser and …


Trump transition plunges into disarray with staff shake-up …
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/11/15/trump…
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s transition operation plunged into disarray Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Mike Rogers, who had handled …

And so on . . . .

 

 

Scott Alexander provided another recent example of how the NY Times distorts the news. In an article on educational vouchers the Times says;

… Only a third of economists on the Chicago panel agreed that students would be better off if they all had access to vouchers to use at any private (or public) school of their choice. …

But, Mr. Alexander points out;

… 36% of economists agree that vouchers would improve education, compared to 19% who disagree. The rest are unsure or didn’t answer the question. The picture looks about the same when weighted by the economists’ confidence.

A more accurate way to summarize this graph is “About twice as many economists believe a voucher system would improve education as believe that it wouldn’t.”

By leaving it at “only a third of economists support vouchers”, the article implies that there is an economic consensus against the policy. Heck, it more than implies it – its title is “Free Market For Education: Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”. But its own source suggests that, of economists who have an opinion, a large majority are pro-voucher. …

 

 

Getting ready for the offensive against Trump, the media is stocking its shelves with Dem operatives with bylines. The Daily Caller reports; 

WikiLeaks’ publication of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta revealed the close ties between prominent journalists and the Clinton campaign. Many of those same journalists will now be covering the Trump White House. …

… Last month, the New York Times announced it would be hiring Politico reporter Glenn Thrush to cover the Trump White House. Emails released by WikiLeaks showed Thrush sending stories to Clinton staffers for approval before publication. (RELATED: New York Times Hires Reporter Who Sent Stories To Clinton Staffers For Approval)

“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to [you],” he wrote in an April 30, 2015 email to Podesta, including five paragraphs from a piece titled “Hillary’s big money dilemma.”

“Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this,” Thrush added. “Tell me if I fucked up anything.”

“No problems here,” Podesta replied.

On April 17, 2015, Thrush sent an email to Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri with the subject line: “pls read asap — the [Jennifer Palmieri] bits — don’t share.”

Palmieri forwarded Thrush’s email to other Clinton campaign staffers, writing: “He did me courtesy of sending what he is going to say about me. Seems fine.” …

 

And Katie Couric is back at NBC. Her distortions were so blatant she got her own Pickings post last July; Lyin’ Katie Couric.

 

And to sum up this post, a delicious discourse on ”fake news” by Matthew Continetti was in last month’s Commentary.

… Why the obsession with fake news? Readers with long memories will note that the mainstream media did not use this term to describe the work of Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair, or the reporters who vilified and maligned the Duke Lacrosse Team, or the disgusting fabrications Rolling Stone told about fraternity life at the University of Virginia, or the myths parroted on CNN that Michael Brown shouted “hands up, don’t shoot” before he was killed in Ferguson. Nor was fake news a problem in 2012 when a man named Floyd Corkins said he shot an employee of the conservative Family Research Council in the arm because the Southern Poverty Legal Center had accused it of being a hate group. …

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