As a senior in college, I was fortunate enough to take part in a journalist exchange in the Soviet Union. A group of students and writers from the Times, Post, Chicago Tribune and WSJ spent the spring semester studying in Moscow and (then) Leningrad. As a student who had been drilled with the notion of objectivity and the sanctity of the 4th Estate (I was once marked down on an article for describing a fire as having flames shooting high into the sky, rather than quantifying objectively the size of the flames), I was shocked to learn that in the USSR, the media was actually PROUD of their role as mouthpiece for the state, defending perpetual revolution (read "resistance", "woke", critical race theory, etc).
There are few students of journalism or true practitioners of REAL journalism that can see today's media - both new and established - as anything more than I saw Pravda and Izvestia 4 decades ago. The Press that for centuries served its critical role as the 4th Estate has surrendered that role in favor of the Murdochian model of money grubbing, vulgar culture-making, and lapdogging for the neoliberals and neoconservatives that have so thoroughly corrupted every corner of our government.
Of course they object to Substack. They object to ANY free and critical thinking and to ANY information whose flow they themselves don't control. They are a contemptible lot of authoritarian tools whose scorn should be worn as a badge of honor. Clearly you and your cohorts at Substack are doing something right. Please keep it up.
I had a similar experience with a Russian journalist in the 1980s. “We are not that different,” he told me. I loved meeting him and talking face to face, but after a few days I decided we were indeed very different. Imagine how I felt decades later to run into a Russia Today TV crew on a story. “No, Russia Today is not a state organ, completely independent,” she told me. Let’s just say that when I saw her report, it was highly predictable and oddly aligned with Kremlin interests.
Actually, she's right. RT has complete freedom, unlike our broadcast stations which must toe the line as Matt has proven. "...oddly aligned with Kremlin interests" needs to be explained.
[Having been recently in Russia, I wish our government could be aligned with Kremlin interests, having spotless cities, no homeless, free education and healthcare. No place is perfect but Russia is certainly ahead of the USA. BTW, Navalny is extremely racist, a liar and an opportunist, and most Russians don't know who he is. And this is the guy the US is hanging its hat on?]
I think this is satire but can’t really tell, so I’ll respond. There are questions people ask when they are trying to learn a subject and get basic information. Journalists typically ask those. And then there are questions they ask when they want someone to say something that fits a purpose, like an attorney building a case or a partisan looking for a chink in an opponent’s armor. Both the Soviet-era guy and the RT woman did the latter. The conclusion is already set: what they want is confirmation.
Matt writes not of government control of media, but the how journalists can willingly don blinders to meet cultural pressures. I think you know the difference. As a fellow Baby Boomer told a Gen Xer in our newsroom who was ranting about how her generation was “oppressed” by Boomers, “There’s no oppression like government oppression.” It can only be ignored at risk of whatever penalties the state imposes. The generational rant, or some other fashionable complaint, you can listen to it and either accept it or just roll your eyes and get on with your life. Matt’s work is showing that media can fail to do its job when it succumbs to groupthink.
I think you have a misconception about the people to whom you refer. The Soviet guy lived in an entirely different political climate than the rt woman. No comparison. I am surprised and annoyed that our MSM keep deliberately using the term, "Soviet," as if it were still in existence. It's gone. Period. When Putin became president, he began instantly to change things, told the oligarchs things were going to change, they would have to pay their taxes (either that or be arrested and go on trial or leave the country). The various oligarchs chose their own paths. The richest one went to trial, was convicted and spent eight of his thirteen years in prison and was allowed to leave the country. [That's why so many rich Russians live in London.] Putin brought 75% of the country out of poverty. Why do you think he's had such a high rating among the people? Now, the young who are in the street protesting are of an age that they have no memory of their country before Putin, and like all young people the world over, want to protest over something. They have no idea what they are doing and are encouraged by the US and UK who are backing that idiot Navalny, an extreme racist (who say he still believes what he always has, Muslims are cockroaches and should be killed, are like rotten teeth that need to be pulled out) and and he earns his way in the world by being a shyster opportunist and liar.
Connecting this thread back to Matt and Glenn and Aaron and Caitlin and Bob Parry (R.I.P.), Joe, and other great reporters, they are the finders of truth who took down the lies about Russiagate that some of my friends still buy into, heaven forfend. Rob
Well, I accept that the Soviet system is gone. I had a newspaper colleague who had previously been an AP reporter in Moscow who was a great guide to perestroika and glasnost (sp?) and that whole period. (I still have the copy of Alan Morehead’s The Russian Revolution that he gave me, come to think of it.) But I thought it is expressly acknowledged that RT is state-controlled, no? I mean, you’re entitled to your opinion of life in Russia today, but I think it’s simply too different from all my other sources for me to swallow whole. But thanks.
My go-to source on Russia is Stephen F. Cohen, always. He's the most knowledgeable of the experts. He spent decades in the Soviet Union and, until his recent death, remained friends with Gorbachev. I will miss his sage commentary for the rest of my life.
I am cancelling the New Yorker after decades because they hired Masha Gessen, the worst reporter on Russia I've ever read. When even the New Yorker falls for Russiagate, it's time to leave. I've noticed she's affected other writers there.
No, rt is run on freedom of the press. No reporters there are ever told what they can and cannot say or report on.
Chris Cuomo was allowed to cover his own brother's governorship, fawningly interview him multiple times, and cover up his order sending COVID-infected patients into nursing homes.
What was that she was saying about journalistic ethics?
Although it's off topic, I find it fascinating that Cuomo's stupid nursing home policy and then lying about its implications didn't draw much ire from the left but the allegations of harassment are causing the sharks to circle.
I read an interesting theory that they know they have to get rid of him because of the nursing home thing, but they're using #metoo as the pretext because there would be too much collateral damage if the nursing home scandal plays out to the end. Other Democratic governors did the same thing, and the media feted him as the hero of COVID, so much better if that whole topic can be drowned out by something else.
I bet you're right, but it begs the question: why is this important point made by a thoughtful commentator on Substack, but you won't see it anywhere in the media?
I feel this question answers itself, as is in fact answered in Matt's piece: corporate interests, political interests, and newsrooms filled with employees with highly-coincidental and whitewashed intelligence agency backgrounds are why you won't see it anywhere in the mainstream media.
I can see that also. If his Covid policies are questioned, it will and should open pandora box on how he has destroyed NYC. Also, when (not if) there is another "pandemic" (not a denialist, just a factist) those pulling the puppet strings (imo, MSM, Big Tech, Gates, Politicians) will want to repeat the process to continue to create fear, division, destroy small business, schools, free assembley, free speech and increase control of our movements, medical choices, beliefs, etc.
I wouldn't say that, but in this instance, as far as I know, it was only Democratic governors who ordered COVID infected patients to be accepted into nursing homes (Whitmer, the guy in PA, and Cuomo).
And the media would not cover for Republicans. They portrayed Cuomo as the hero and DeSantis as the villain of COVID, which is just laughable. The nursing homes down here were locked down and protected quite early in the game, and Florida's stats are much better, even with an older population than NY.
While I agree with most of what you said, I will say that Florida is lying about their numbers. That’s already been proven. I don’t remember her name, but there was an episode a while back where a public health official or somebody in the public health sector in Florida came right out and said,”Florida’s lying about their COVID numbers.” So there’s that...
Arguably everybody is lying about their COVID numbers in asserting these are known things rather than degrees of likelihood on a spectrum. Positive PRC tests shouldn't be cases--but they are. Deaths related to COVID are not uniformly assessed, including some places--in some cases--recording deaths not caused by COVID (such as motorcycle accidents and murder) as COVID deaths.
At one point Florida was definitely wrong about their COVID numbers--as the nursing homes spoke out to suggest that the 200+ deaths attributed to their facilities (by the state) were highly inaccurate, and they were 2 or 1 or none. Similarly, I believe that at least one "whistleblower" was in fact herself manufacturing additional cases and got fired for it, but this is a recollection and not a specific reference, so I may be wrong about that. She got caught, and insisted the state was lying when in fact she had been.
Irrespective, the media has actively tried to make DeSantis a villain despite how much better the state has performed--by the media's own definition--than New York, New Jersey, et al, while lauding Cuomo despite the fact the nursing home stuff was at least partially known 10 months ago.
So it's reasonable to suspect there may be some political or ideological motivation to focusing on #MeToo than COVID performance.
Here's a hot take: Everybody is lying about their COVID numbers. Why? Nobody agrees on what a COVID death is. Someone dies of a heart attack, with COVID+ test? Someone dies of pneumonia caused by cytokine storm responding to COVID virus in his/her body? Someone testing COVID positive dying in a car accident on their way back from the testing lab? Someone recovered from COVID symptoms having a stroke after no longer testing positive?
All of these have been treated as the same thing: "COVID Death"
The odd thing is that a year after the first deaths, we still have no real statistical information about who is really dying and how. We don't know if there are certain genetic markers that make some more susceptible than others (similar to Tay Sachs and Ashkenazi Jews or Sickle Cell Anemia and African Americans); Nobody has done any reporting as to whether those dead from COVID-19 pneumonia had compromised lungs from behavioral issues (cigarette smoking/vaping/chronic marijuana smoking)...
It's almost as if people WANT everyone to believe that everyone has the same potential to die from this...
I hope you're never accused of some wrongdoing, if you consider a single individual's accusation as proof.
An allegation is an allegation. I am more inclined to believe Cuomo fudged his numbers because he had a major fuck-up to not draw attention to. What moron forces COVID patients into nursing homes?
CDC guidance at the time said that IF a nursing home was capable of adequately isolating COVID+ patients from the rest of the residents, they SHOULD avoid discriminating.
Cuomo's order was that NO nursing home SHALL refuse to accept a COVID+ patient.
He issued that order a few days before the USNS Comfort arrived and the 4000 fully staffed field hospital beds were delivered to him by Trump.
He didn't rescind it until 10 days AFTER the Comfort had left New York, having never been more than 1/4 full. Same with the field hospital beds. Never more than 1/4 full.
He had the beds. He had the staff. And he forced nursing homes incapable of isolating infectious patients to take them in.
I heard there was at least one home that was happy to take these patients, because they had facilities that provided for proper isolation (and hey, it's money). Others begged Cuomo to reconsider because they couldn't protect staff and residents.
And you know. He reconsidered. 10 days after the Comfort departed.
So the governor is ordering doctors not to record COVID deaths, or statisticians not to count them, and they are complying?
Big claims require strong proof. Maybe something's going on there, but state and federal bureaucrats generally hate Republicans, so a health official saying that Florida is lying about numbers is not proof.
What's it that Hitchen's Razor states? That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence? Something like that, and it seems to apply here.
She was a wee bit fanatical and was fired from her job for chronic insubordination. She then stole the computer from work, was accessing data from home and posting her "analysis".
My take was completely different. After a bit of research I filed that one under "disgruntled employee". And no, I definitely wasn't buying the FL governor's narrative, I simply did the work to assess what was going on. It also seemed legit that she illegally accessed a gov't system afterwards trying to embarrass them. Think of her like an Avenatti.
DeSantis issued an executive order prohibiting hospitals from discharging COVID+ patients into nursing homes. If there was nowhere else for them to go, the hospital had to keep them or find other arrangements.
A Republican governor will have a legion of media to point out what is happening under that administration. Or, as in the case of Florida, invent things that are happening. A Democrat governor, on the other hand, will get a pass on most issues.
This is one of the issues driving the whole push to Substack and other alternatives to legacy media. We aren't looking for a slant, but more information.
This is exactly right. I'm on the right and probably agree with only about 30% of Matt's conclusions (or less), but he gets there honestly and with panache, and I learn something worthwhile every time I read him. So I'm a subscriber here.
If people here on the left are interested in equivalent, honest people on the right for a different perspective, you might check out Rebeccah Heinrichs @RLHeinrichs, Lee Smith @LeeSmithDC, or Josh Hammer
Not sure about that, but I think there's something to be said for Republican politicians walking the straight and narrow in more ways due to their relationship with the media (generally more adversarial vs. chummy nature for Dems)
It's almost like it would be a good thing if the media was hard on Republicans and Democrats! Like it would be better for everybody, somehow. It's like the media giving a pass to one political party makes them think they can get away with anything.
Or a political Uniparty, when it comes to neocons and endless wars.
No, but I don't know of a case where a Republican governor mandated nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients irrespective of their ability to quarantine them or protect their other patients and workers. This time around.
Ain't no magic in a label (or shouldn't be) but because the issue seems to implicate only Democratic governors this time around, there could be a reason why Cuomo's COVID performance is being downplayed compared to the sexual harassment allegations.
On April 29, 2020, Charlie Baker, the republican governor of Massachusetts, issued an order very much like Andrew Cuomo's, requiring long-term care facilities to re-admit residents who had been hospitalized with covid and then discharged from the hospital.
More inclined? Perhaps not. More enabled? You betcha.
Anyway, I cannot help but notice that the states that issued orders for nursing homes to accept COVID+ patients are the same ones suffering a pension crisis, and that virtually all residents of nursing homes are collecting pensions.
If I were the cynical type, I might think there's a connection there.
The democrat governors followed the advise of that group in Washington state that created the early models for Covid. Their advise was to keep the hospitals as empty as possible because their model predicted many thousands Covid patients would need the beds. They advised the governors to send the nursing home patients back to the nursing homes while they were still sick. They are also the ones that told Cuomo he’d need 40,000 ventilators. Anyway, it was only a few democrat governors that followed their advise that contradicted what the CDC recommended.
That's interesting information that I hadn't read before. The thing about Cuomo is, he sent COVID infected people back to nursing homes when both the Javits Center and the hospital ship were available but empty. Were the returnees upstate rather than in the NYC area? The facts matter her, but it's hard to get an unbiased account.
That’s because the model said he’d need all those beds for new cases. We sort of glide over how horrendous those early models were, now that we’ve lived through most of it.
Most patients who are admitted to long term care with skilled nursing die within 6 months without covid. The reporting during this crisis was, and continues to be misleading as they report deaths WITH Covid and FROM covid. No Ct count was required.
Two sides of the same coin. A governor by definition is an alpha political animal. democrat or republican they would do anything in their power to cover up, deflect or deny any culpability for anything negative of their making.
I would be skeptical there is a moral difference, but emphatic that Yes, Dems would be more prone to do that because they have a better shot at getting away with it, what with the corrupt media and the usual Democratic Party loyalty.
The guy's a corrupt thug who mishandled the greatest challenge of his administration, which resulted in not just the death, but the cover up of thousands of elderly people in nursing homes while the media celebrated him as a hero for not being Trump, but it appears the thing that will take him down is that he made an indecent proposal to a women at work.
Just once I would like to see someone in power taken down for corruption and incompetence and not just because they also happen to be a creep.
Didn't you know? The elderly population is disproportionately white and affluent. Meanwhile, women are more oppressed than ever, according to Gloria Steinem.
I think they did find the nursing home scandal horrible but they couldn’t say much because they spent months willfully ignoring it as they exclusively focused on Trump. The harassment allegations allow them to vent their anger and not have to link back to the virus and their different narratives on Trump vs Cuomo. It’s a way to channel their anger in a less political setting.
Both are despicable. You don't have to choose one or the other. I heard a guy, Ned Ryan, call the harassment, "a shiny little object of 'me, too' to distract...." from Cuomo's horrible killing of many, many elderly in nursing homes. Yes, that's more egregious, of course, but only a couple macho guys with penises could call sexual harassment, a "shiny little object."
That's because there are several Dem governors that did the same thing, it would be a massacre if the nursing home idiocy was exposed. There is another, perhaps conspiratorial aspect. Maybe these governors that have no issue killing babies, have no problem killing the elderly, especially if these elders cost the government money to house.
I think their sin is a little bit different, although it should still be career ending: I think they made a colossally bad and stupid judgment call, sending these nursing home patients back because they believed the wild models showing that we were going to end up like Italy (or at least the stories from Italy, not sure if they were entirely true), with overflowing ICUs and people turned away because there was nowhere to put them.
Why would they believe such a thing before the actual evidence came in, and when their hospitals were still mostly empty? Because modern liberalism is built on hysteria. They go from one manufactured hysteria to another. They do it partly for power, but they also believe some of their own propaganda.
I am of a certain age (born 1950) and recall how back in the 1960s we used to joke that 'legal ethics' and 'military intelligence' were oxymoronic. That hasn't changed, but we can now add 'journalistic standards' to the list.
She's actually defending a particular business model in news media that uses a cooperative arrangement between media companies and status quo power in which the journalists play their part in the distribution of propaganda.
And it's really interesting because when somebody publishes an angry incoherent screed in something close to a public meltdown like Dr. Robert's here, it suggests somebody at the brink of failure in maintaining their denial. It's as though Dr. Robert's knows very well in her unconscious thoughts what's really going on so her conscious narrative self has to work very hard to maintain belief in the bs story that NTY and Wapo are the good stuff.
I worked in a major newsroom for years until recently. The self-righteousness combined with ignorance of the J-school educated generations is striking. If you combine the barriers to entry - degrees, ability to afford internships and rent, the cultural and social capital needed to find opportunities and to stick in the culture - the end result is newsrooms full of mindlessly morally confident rich kids with no real education, no humility, no appreciation of nuance, and no understanding of what happens outside of their bubbles.
The way the industry is set up now attracts and promotes the kind of humorless, irony-deaf "hall monitors" Glenn talks about. You can't fill the national media with kiss-anyone's-ass, student council president, private school cosmopolitans who got A-pluses through J-school and are some editors daughter or nephew and not expect the culture to be totally out of touch, deranged, and entirely, pathologically certain of the correctness of its worldview.
Journalists and scholars who study the media for a living should take a look at who's being hired before they start complaining about independent media and a "reality crisis", but they won't because the problem is them, their colleagues and friends, and the dominance of their socioeconomic class in the industry.
Part of that smug attitude is amplified by having zero work experience outside their field. There used to be these things called summer jobs, or even trying to make a few bucks mowing a neighbor's lawn or shoveling their driveway. I'm not some grizzled veteran of hard labor, but I've at least bagged groceries and hammered nails. Journalist types see that work as well beneath them. It's for those dirty stupid people without a Bachelor's Degree.
Yep — “ the end result is newsrooms full of mindlessly morally confident rich kids with no real education, no humility, no appreciation of nuance, and no understanding of what happens outside of their bubbles.”
...and don’t think we plebs don’t see this. It’s so obvious!
Matt wrote in his book Hate, Inc. that back in the day, during the 60's and 70's, your average journalist had a social status somewhere between that of a plumber and a high school principal. Most of them had strong working-class backgrounds (he sited Mike Royko as a good example). Nowadays, most journalists are members of the upper class or the upper-middle class. Many have never had a meaningful relationship with a poor person or working-class person in their entire lives. And its shows in their reporting.
They not only would have canceled Molly, they would have pre-canceled her. Funny thing now is that the Left has it's own Molly, and she just about fits Liu's description to a tee. Poster girl level, actually.
It isn't just in Journalism. I met a women who is a nationally known Physician and child specialist who is also a university consultant who works with these institutions to teach the child-students how to become adults who can cope, who can tolerate disagreement without believing they are a victim of something, how to care for themselves and surroundings.
I don't think we're paying enough for our subscriptions. This writing is pure gold. And I don't even agree with the politics of the author. But I do care about journalism.
You have to think that these guys toiling away in the bowels of corporate media know they're on the wrong side. They've got to be miserable by and large. So your point about the economics of this is spot on. Like you, I'd pay more for Matt and Glenn and at least a few more if they were here.
I am an old lady sick of the lies in papers like the NYT and other papers. I’m not an intellectual but I used to read the news papers. I think they’re fascist organizations that want to smash any idea they don’t agree with. I’ll keep reading substack.
Right on, Marilyn, right on! You might like Sharyl Attkisson's book "Slanted". It covers the progression of papers down this path over her long and excellent journalism career. She was a highly decorated reporter for years and all this undermined her simply because she had a slight right of center outlook - even though her reporting could go after either side any time. Then she noticed that it was increasingly only allowed to hit the news if it fit the narrative.
This is just a (long) side note, but, speaking as someone who has a doctorate: what the hell is up with these losers making others call them “doctor?”
To be honest, I don’t think legit medical doctors, coaches, and military personnel should invite people other than their co-workers to address them as “doctor,” “major,” or (the weirdest one) “coach.” (When I taught at the college level, I didn’t even want my students calling me “professor” in class.)
There were a couple of teachers at my depressing public high school who went by “doctor”; I didn’t think about it as a kid, but of course it seems ridiculous in retrospect.
But the idea of being a “newspaper doctor”—it’s just too funny.
Second sidenote:
J-school professors should be ashamed of themselves. They continue to draw big salaries and soak up institutional prestige at the expense of the young people sitting right in front of them who are debt-financing expensive professional degrees that no longer have value.
Professors in all disciplines are too insulated from the human costs of student debt, and they too are complicit. (I have a friend who deeply resents the smug English professors who supervised her PhD knowing all along that she would be unemployable at the end of the program. You might criticize my friend for getting a dumb degree, but 22-year-olds, oddly enough, tend to listen to their parents and to the glamorous authority figures at their colleges.)
But there’s no degree quite like a J-school degree. Even in the 80s and 90s, when journalism was plausibly a path to a middle-class lifestyle, these programs were dubious: reporting didn’t need to be “academized,” and didn’t benefit from the academy’s attention. The degrees really just served a class gatekeeping function, the same way unpaid internships do. J-school is a big part of the reason that NYTimes staff meetings now seem like reunions of the Sidwell Friends Woke AV Club or the Swarthmore College White Allies of Black Panthers Fox-Hunting Society.
Since about 2000, though, J-school has been a scam on another level. These degrees can cost, literally, $300K (you do the math: 2 years of debt-financed Columbia tuition and NYC-area living expenses, repaid with interest on a 30-year schedule). THERE ARE NO JOBS for the people with these degrees. Also, the model of reporting that these schools teach is completely outdated and discredited—despised both within and outside of the profession.
What Matt, Glenn, Max Blumenthal, Jordan Chariton, and even the loathed Andy Ngo are doing is much truer to the scrappy, rebellious tradition of “reporting” (as opposed to the younger and shittier tradition of “journalism”).
Tl;dr: I guess I’m not a huge fan of the Substack-hating blog surgeon.
I could use it, but I don't because it (PhD in librarianship) is hard to explain. I prefer the first credential I got, which is the one of which I am most proud--"Librarian" and if I was teaching journalism I would be proud to be a "journalist."
“Librarian” tells strangers what you do. It’s an honest and descriptive title—and being a librarian is socially useful: especially now that so many things are being flushed down the memory hole.
We (librarians) are doing lots of data archiving. You would be pleased. If you need something you think is gone because not on Internet, ask one of us. We have rescued a lot.
Are there librarians specifically collecting and organizing memory-holed data? I'd love to see collections of articles containing falsehoods that garnered nothing but a one-line edit at the beginning, with no real retraction. I feel like this behavior has truly skyrocketed in the last few years.
Sadly, UCB dropped the "library" part of its degree and became the School of Information Science. Administrators wanted to be part of the tech boom and "library" sounds so fusty. That was my perception, anyway.
My place of work did, too. (It's now a "School of Information"). Sometimes I think I embarrass them that I persist in signing myself as a librarian. But computers are just a tool and librarianship goes back to Ashurbanipal 600BC and before that. I'm placing my bets on clay tablets.
Wow! I could not agree more. I am among those shouldering a huge amount of student debt for a journalism degree in a field that has been decimated by McKinsey, FB and the empty headed Ivy League talking heads. I love community journalism and I also like to eat regularly and drive a car that passes minimal safety standards. I learned everything I needed to know about being a good journalist by reading (everything I can get my hands on) listening to people when they speak (even if I hate what’s coming out of their mouth) and get this - by DOING the job. As it turns out these skills have also become unnecessary and are generally discouraged.
Those of us who work with soldiers refer to them by rank as a measure of respect; those who do not do so objectively are making the point that they think the soldiers they work with aren't worthy of same, and it is noticed. Ask a soldier, and the usual answer you will get is that they prefer to be called by name by civilians, as most of them don't get the rank designation correct anyway. They have their own rules for interacting with each other and follow them religiously.
Never call an enlisted person "Sir/Ma'am" is another general rule there.
Sarah Roberts terrifies me. Not only because she thinks censorship of viewpoints she disagrees with is a good idea, or because of her unfounded attacks on principled, legitimate journalists — but because so many liberal people agree with her.
The first thing we need to do is stop using the term "liberals" for them. That is an honorable title that belongs to people who believe in freedom of speech, due process, independent courts, and a restrained government. They are not liberals.
I agree our political terminology has lost all meaning. I find myself aligned with perspectives across the political map these days. The term conservative is equally nebulous. But the word "communist" carries significant historical context, much of which is not directly applicable. There is a self righteousness that is arising on the "left". An openness to ideas, experience, and communication are traditional liberal values, or so I once thought. They are cloaked in the historical shell of liberal values, but have lost the intellectual and emotional core that gave rise to these values.
Yes, yes, yes! We lack proper terms for the rise of these tyrants! I argue that the Establishment that Dr. Roberts, NYT, Fox, CNN, NPR, et al is neither exactly left nor right. The Establishment now stands for corporate hegemony over Western Civ, Perpetual War for profit, perpetual lowering of the value of labor & general impoverishment of the lower orders, & extinguishing civil liberties.
I view this project as neither entirely left or right. Yes, the left are sort of useful idiots chasing the promise of collectivism; the idea that on some fine day Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al, will pay in taxes the same percentage that we here pay, and that Russians & white supremacists lurk under our beds. But the right seems to think that the Pentagon exists to protect us, and that taxing Bezos would be immoral.
Matt argues Orwell's 1984 is overused, but I prefer it’s terminology because it makes no reference to the original left or right, but sticks to totalitarianism without political orientation, which I believe is where we’re headed. I love this Anthony Sutton quote:
“Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left, this is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them.”
I wish Matt would turn his mind to what we should call the Dr. Roberts in this Cowardly New World. The poor souls who went down on the Titanic all knew it was an iceberg, I imagine. We don’t know what to call what it is that is striving to enslave us.
Great contribution, Bill, to which I would like to add, as just another American in his early Seventies who has been a wage slave his entire life, a trenchant observation from a great mind of the Seventeen Hundreds:
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
«I argue that the Establishment that Dr. Roberts, NYT, Fox, CNN, NPR, et al is neither exactly left nor right. The Establishment now stands for corporate hegemony over Western Civ, Perpetual War for profit, perpetual lowering of the value of labor & general impoverishment of the lower orders, & extinguishing civil liberties.»
My usual point of political history:
* There are two main sides to the right, the "tory "(nationalist, industrialist, traditionalist) (which is itself split into "low tory and "high tory") and "whig" (globalist-interventionist, financialist, radical/"woke").
* During feudal times the right was "high tory" representing mostly farm owners and merchants.
* Then the "new right" arose which was "whig"; victorian liberals initially representing emerging "ironmaster"/business owner class, and they fought for freedom of the markets, freedom of contract, and related "radical" issues.
* Eventually much of the right morphed back into "high torysm" but more industry based as industry became a rentier business.
* Then finance (more precisely the "leveraged debt lobby") took over both parties turning them to "whig" politics.
* Recently the "low tory" right with Trump took briefly over the Republicans.
For the people, politics has been reduced to a sporting contest, with little discussion of any policies that impact capital. The terms have become cultural badges. For the media, politics has become a means to generate engagement and retain advertising consumers, discussing only policies that have no meaningful impact on capital or established power structures, preferring superficial and cultural criticism of the other political team. For capital, politics is an analysis and investment process, ensuring they have hedged properly between the parties to dictate the state processes and regulation that influences their industry.
Do the terms correctly group advertising demographics? Probably. Do they have any meaningful policy or political philosophy definitions attached to them? Less and less. Second amendment or trans rights? Chose your tribe. Workers party or bosses party? Not so clear anymore.
Power structures are necessary for the organization of complex societies. Positions within power structures should be based upon efficacy within a role, determined by those subservient to the role, democracy. Power structures require feedback mechanisms for optimizations and alignment. But what is optimization and alignment? Is it the greatest good for the individuals at all levels within the structure? Is it the greatest good dependent on proximity to the apex of the structure? America has decided on the later, but perhaps not by choice. Thomas Picketty showed us without active intervention wealth coalesces indefinitely. The great mass of wealth seems to now exist outside the organizational processes of society. Fluid wealth existing for its own sake, existing only to multiply by any means. Existing outside states, but having massive influence upon them.
The feedback mechanisms to power have all been neutered. Neutered through the dilution of political terms and philosophies, through election funding, through regulatory capture, through destruction of workers movements, through information control. Neutered because great wealth is beholden to nothing, has no direct attachments to societal structures. If Democracy is functionally a facade, what do the party terms even matter? What do we call those who viewed themselves as traditional liberals who have abandoned the core tenets of liberalism in greater service of capital? Traitors? Opportunists? Realists? What do we call those who have enslaved us? Rulers.
Mmmm...I catch your drift but I can’t agree with the entirety of your comment. You’re right that it makes a travesty of the term “liberal” to apply it to the citizens of Wokestan. As I was typing my comment that actually crossed my mind, but I let it slide because it’s an easy shorthand for a large segment of the population these days.
Where I disagree is with your blanket assumption that all these people are communists. I assume that some are, especially if you’re referring to the more public and vocal activist voices on the left. But I’m talking about people I know well, law abiding and mainstream members of my family and friends who go way back. I can assure you without one iota of doubt that they are not communists! Trust me, these late middle-aged New York Times readers sitting at home worrying about their second vaccine shot and examining their 401(k) accounts are what they themselves would refer to as old-school liberals. Like lobsters in a slow cooker, they have no clue that they’re being boiled alive. When I ask them if it isn’t getting a little hot in here, their eyes glaze over.
That’s what makes the current free speech crisis so tragic. It’s not an insidious cadre of commies who will do us on, it’s our own damn brain-dead “liberal” selves.
I'm going to push back again, this time on the use of the word "Nazis." I'm a Jew, and the nice liberal people I'm referring to here are mostly Jewish. And even if they weren't, it still takes a lot to cross the line from wimpy liberal to literal Nazi. My mother's parents lost all their family members in the Holocaust in Poland. My uncle died fighting the Nazis under Gen. MacArthur in the Philippines. That word has a particular and special resonance, and I don't employ it lightly. I share your disdain for the citizens of Wokestan and I see the ideological and tactical similarities that exist among authoritarian movements of many different time periods.
Although I know that the term gets thrown around rather casually these days, I'd prefer that we reserve the word Nazi for Nazis.
I mean, I'm assuming you didn't completely miss the last 20+ years of things like BUSH=NAZI and the related Trump lines.
Original Nazis aren't coming back; it was a European phenomenon associated with millennia of anti-Semitism across Europe, economic depression, national humiliation and one particular leader. The imitation Nazis like the crew in Skokie that the ACLU defended back in the 70s don't have much significance and are mostly doing what they do for notoriety. Also, most people today have no personal memory of why Nazis were hateful, for that matter. Finding people who were alive and aware in 1945 is growing rare.
Along comes a group that actually classifies people according to race and wants to ban books and cancel people out that aren't coordinated with their mindset, has a totalitarian philosophy and we're not supposed to make the obvious analogy?
..and has clear political power, forgot that part. The cancellations prove this.
The SPD and KPD were pretty sure that the Nazis were going to be short-lived, their biggest error. That's why they failed to fight and rolled over in 1933. I mean there were other problems in Germany...disunity for one thing... at the time that would have hindered resistance to the Nazis, but the lack of will to fight was the worst.
The first step to fighting back is calling them what they are.
She’s just after her 15 minutes of fame. The give away was that she elevated word count over substance. She had to have known that any subscriber already knows what they are getting for their money (you can read it free first, dummy!) and any non-subscriber knows that traditional media all lie. So any words after the first tweet were just attention whoring
"Unfettered free speech is a threat to Democracy" - we're hearing this more and more. Last October, NPR interviewed an author attacking free speech, the NYT has writers poo-poo'ing unfettered conversations. These people are losing control and they're lashing out. This is what happens when people in control feel their control slipping. These are the same people that lionized Andrew Cuomo. They're not exactly arbiters of truth.
I've been rereading Evans' "The Coming of..." and "...in Power" about the Nazis. Great trilogy of books btw. It's amazing how many quotes I can lift from these books that were made by Nazis (!) that mirror statements made in the press today by anti-free speech advocates. It's almost like they want us all to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
A supreme irony of the purportedly anti-Fascist nature of today's society is that they basically are using the Nazi (Fascist) playbook.
I'll have to check that out. Along this same idea, Bill Maher had an Obama impersonator on his show several years ago reading Trump's actual tweets. His point was that Republicans would have lost their minds if Obama said some of the things Trump actually said.
He should do the same today but use NYT reporters as the punchline, because that's what they've become. Better yet, use CNN anchors.
Of course, you could have Bozo the clown say Trump's lines, or Mister Rogers, and they'd be offensive to their targets. You know, this is as good a time as any to make the point that Trump was trolling you. He used his Twitter and to a lesser degree FB posts to troll. As for why he was trolling, he senses that by activating the anger of the Left, he can motivate all kinds of opposition to basically give him a free pass on whatever he does and support him unconditionally because the right kind of people hate him, the same ones they do. He was never dependent on the social networks for his followers and banning him and his supporters is pointless except to drive the fire and vigor to other venues. Therefore damaging the very social networks that banned him.
Let me point out that he raised taxes (quite a bit actually) on significant portions of his base in 2017, and did all kinds of unpopular things like create a 'voluntary' ban on window blinds that work in favor of the stringless kind that barely work and break constantly. No one batted an eye, because he had the right enemies.
Before he left office, he planted the poison pill of the stolen election. That one will bear fruit in two and four years, watch... Once again, the wrong people saying he's wrong won't accomplish jack shit except to accentuate the power of the message. The right people hating him, in other words. Whatever else he is, the dude is a master manipulator. Hatred of him redounds to his benefit. I said in 2015 that the only way to deal with Trump is to ignore him. The media and the Left just can't do it, though.
I think you've misunderstood Trump. He's like every other self absorbed person you'll meet. It's all about them and how you can serve them. The idea that he trolled everyone else misses the point. He's a drooling fool who wants to be loved and surrounded by sycophants. That's not trolling.... that's mental illness. In that sense, he's a perfect representation of millions who do pledge their allegiance to him.
I agreed with some of his policy choices, but he was so easily manipulated by TPTB, that he wasn't able to get the lion's share of his policies through.
It's sad. He was elected by frustrated and desperate voters, but because he's so dim, he wound up embarrassing himself.
Frankly I blame the Dems for Trumps victory - if they had addressed the legitimate concerns of many Trump voters over the last 30 years, Trump would not have had a good chunk of his "base" - and if the Ds continue as they have been, his "base" will be back ...
Good point, except that in fairness you should acknowledge that while Democrats were in the majority Mitch in particular, and Republican officials in general, openly and systematically sabotaged any proposed legislation that was good for the country if they thought it might be bad for the Republican Party.
If he wanted to be loved and surrounded by sycophants, he would have and could have done things differently. In fact, that statement is so far from the reality of his struggle to attain office and maintain office that you seem to be living in a different world than I am. He could have made things so much easier for himself at a thousand points. I had a hard time reading beyond that - I did, but it's not worth the effort to respond further. You'll see.
It's never worth even a second to address these level 5 TDS'ers. (Or BDS'ers or even ODS'ers for that matter.) They've got issues way deeper than a single politician and they probably won't get anywhere near them in this lifetime. They nurture, cherish and take every given opportunity to display those crosses. And like any religion, it is exactly what they say it is, no matter what. It has to be this way for them.
«Before he left office, he planted the poison pill of the stolen election. That one will bear fruit in two and four years, watch...y
Looking at it from far away, was the 2016 more stolen than the 2020 election?
My impression is that in 2016 the democrats cheated quite a bit and the republicans not much, in 2020 both the democrats and the republicans cheated quite a lot, and the democrats outcheated the republicans. A voting surge of an average of 18% for the Republicans and 22% for the Democrats are ridiculously implausible, especially as that is a national average with much higher surges in some areas.
The bigger question is not whether there was massive cheating in 2020, but whether it changed the outcome: most of the cheating by republicans happened in areas that would have voted republican anyhow, and most of the cheating by democrats happened in areas that would have voted democratic anyhow. My impression is that without any cheating Trump would have won in 2020 too, but that is a pointless speculation, as it is an established american tradition that electoral fraud by political machines is a part of politics.
There are no Republican districts like, for instance, the 7-9th Congressional Districts in NY, just doing a quick survey. I saw a high of 84% of the vote going to the Democrat there in 2020. Those are Soviet or Nazi style figures.
I lived in the Northeast most of my life and was involved in NJ politics. Democrats and Republicans might be equivalent to each other in the desire to cheat on elections, but the Democrats have a much better opportunity to do so with their urban districts. It happens every cycle, and they can choose to expend more or less effort on getting out the fake vote. The dead vote en masse in every election in a place like New York, but the corruption goes much deeper.
If your my age you grew up with journalists being the biggest defenders of free speech. They regularly defended it in moral terms and were quick to cite people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, so I naively believed it was a moral stand.
Then technology allowed for competing voices.
With the benefit of history, I now understand defending free speech when you have the only voice is just a power play. .
Lesson to self; Never confuse bravado on ethics with naked self interest, even when it's almost certain the self interested will presented their best interests as the most ethical choice.
«journalists being the biggest defenders of free speech. They regularly defended it in moral terms»
That was usually just pious preaching.
«and were quick to cite people like Thomas Jefferson»
I can do that too, my usual quote from a letter by him to Walter Jones, 2nd Jan. 1814:
“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I inclose you a recent sample, the production of a New-England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. these ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening it’s relish for sound food. as vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries they have rendered themselves useless by forfieting all title to belief.”
It says so much about the state of legacy media that Dr. Roberts chose Twitter to get her message out about the importance of legacy media. Talk about implicitly acknowledging their irrelevance.
I subscribe to Substack, more specifically Taibbi and Greenwald precisely for the reasons outlined by Sara Roberts, just in reverse. So many of the news organizations I grew up with have run, not drifted, into being little more than outlets for my cultural betters. Fact-free, oily, bitter representations backed by nothing.
I've made my own newspaper. It doesn't mean I like it when Taibbi hits around opinions I hold dear, but when he does, he does it with facts, research, and an in-depth understanding of the subject he's writing about. You going to get reason and neutral presentation out of the NYT newsroom these days?
I used to love to read the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, and even (a very long time ago) the New Republic, because they had great writing, even though I was always politically to the right of them. Heck, I used to enjoy Cockburn and the older hard left version of Hitchens in The Nation, because man, they could write.
Now, those venues (to the extent they're still hanging on) are dominated by humorless scolds and anti-Trump obsessives. There's just no joy there. I'll never understand what happened to David Remnick, a brilliant guy and great writer, who has run the New Yorker into the ground.
I read Harper’s for three decades. Frankly, it was never the same after Lewis Latham left as Editor in Chief. I read his “Notebook” essay right out of the mailbox. Once they bought into the Russiagate hoax and published a hit piece on Jeremy Corbin chiming in on the outrageous charge of anti-semitism, I had enough. Bloody shame for the oldest periodical in the country.
I left my job at a larger company a few years ago to start a smaller company of my own. I used my skills and reputation I acquired throughout my career to help me land clients for my new company. While the work is the same, my company is run very differently from all of the others I worked for. I got rid of as much bullshit as I possibly could. I believe my work is much better than before simply because my product is from me as opposed to have my reports or proposals being run past a group of higher ups that are a step further removed from the process than myself. The money is about the same but I have less job security. I hope I never have to go back. And I'm guessing Matt and the other Substack writers probably feel similar to myself. I don't see why a writer should change the way they do business just because the press is listed in the constitution. If I do shitty work my company will disappear eventually and shitty writers will also disappear unless they get picked up by some shitty MSM company.
There's a nice pride of independence that comes with having your own business, but every single problem is your problem to sweat over and fix. I have some nostalgia about being able occasionally to slough off problems on others.
I would like to point out that basket weaving is an important craft and probably cannot be used as a signifier for nothing important. https://botswanacraft.com/botswana-baskets#
"When news agencies see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long as they’re wrong about the 'right' targets.
"As a result, many reporters by last summer found themselves navigating newsrooms where they were being discouraged, sometimes openly, from pursuing true stories with the 'wrong' message..."
THIS is why many critical thinkers don't feel good about traditional journalism anymore and highly value what you and others do at Substack. If I want an opinion about the state of journalism from an academic with a PhD in Library Science, I guess I know where to go.
Well, I have one (Phd in librarianship) but please don't imagine we are all the same. I teach about public libraries, and museums and the history of libraries. I do have one librarian concern. I hope the writers for Substack keep file copies in the event something happens to where they are stored. And then make them into a book.
But, but, but, ... did you really NEED a PhD in that subject to do your work or were you adopting credentials? This is a serious question. You teach? Is there something about having a PhD that makes for a better teacher, particularly about libraries, museums, history thereof? I think not.
Teaching and researching are two different things. And I am not really sure that Western Civilization depends on have Librarians (sorry) with PhDs.
Yes, you do need one to teach. The librarian degree is a master's degree. It is really like a law degree that it is a credential on top of your undergrad. So, if you want to work in medical informatics you would have a BA in biology or chemistry, then a library degree. Except now they are called information degrees. Hardly anyone calls them a library degree (but I do because I'm stubborn and proud to be a librarian). So people like me who teach in a master's program do have a PhD. It is a more complicated field than people realize and the PhD in librarianship was first awarded a century ago. Just one example, the man who wrote the Post-War Plan for public libraries that helped establish the complicated library system we have in the U.S.--Carleton B. Joeckel.
So you did not NEED it to teach, in fact. But, apparently, to teach wherever you teach, your institution REQUIRES it. Big difference. And therein the difference describes so much that ails our higher education situation. Joeckel notwithstanding.
I am not trying to trash you or your educational accomplishments. But, in point of fact, library "science" is not rocket science, no matter how adherents to the rubric wish it to be. Glorifying advanced degrees to have individuals become members of a particular guild, including teaching, is part of the larger problem of post-secondary education in the US -- and all that comes with it, especially student debt.
It was once called "Library economy." I needed to know a lot more than I did to teach it than do it. I won't tire you out w/ the standards for accreditation. I also needed to write books etc. and as we moved from card catalogs to OPACS the field became complex. My dissertation was on data archiving transition.
Truly. Plus with all of the archival Winston Smith “revisions” some online mags are making (cough, bon a-petite, cough) I no longer trust the digital medium to stay accurate. I’ve been trying to find every book that the Wokeratti could throw in the burn pile and buy print copies. At this point I no longer trust Amazon Kindle books so I’ve gone to places like Thriftbooks.com and just buying, buying, buying.
Matt, if you are still reading these comments....and speaking of Thriftbooks as K.M. just did...I went there to get Hate, Inc. and the cost of each of two used ones they had, one hard copy, one paperback, was $140.69. Say it isn't so. Where should I get a copy, and I hate to use Amazon. You can answer privately if you like since this has nothing to do with the topic (though your commentators drift all over the place). Rob
Did you ever have one of those amazing adventures like Noah Wyle from that TV show "The Librarians?" Go after the spear of Longinus or something like that?
We do have adventures, but mostly in archives and providing collections for the people who write books or articles. BTW, please acknowledge your librarians and archivists when you write something if we helped you. I became a librarian first and that is what I think I am. The PhD was so I could work with students and teach the history of libraries. Don't let me get started telling you about the MUNDANEUM or I'll keep you all day. You should check it out (librarian joke). http://www.mundaneum.org/en
I was doing some research in the stacks of our local university library and walked in on a couple very far into the process of getting it on. I had always thought of libraries as rated G, but I guess I was wrong.
You DO have your own library at Library Thing, right? (It is free). I did it in case a hurricane. I can look at all my books when I am away from them. https://www.librarything.com/home
Sorry, didn't mean to go full librarian, but you asked.
Roberts doesn't understand that we pay the subscription so Matt can have the freedom to do actual reporting, not just to feed us what we want to hear/read.
No, Lucas is confused. Your handful of big, national papers - NYT, WaPo, WSJ - may get occasional ads from those big firms, but those firms rarely advertise. The big 3 are largely funded nowadays by subscriptions (or, in the case of WaPo, by the owner's largesse courtesy of Amazon.com customers). Still, the circulation of those three papers is dwarfed by the combined readership of all the local dailies around the country - who do not get advertising from those big firms mentioned: they survive, still, on selling ads to automobile dealers, real estate agents, and local restaurants.
I worked in the business for 25 years - I think I know how it works.
You are confusing the influence of weapon manufacturers, Wall Street, the super rich, and large corporations with advertising or circulation dollars. This influence is not something you would encounter in the industry unless you were seated on the board of directors for those 25 years, but it is obvious to anyone with deductive reasoning who chooses to follow the money.
lol ... okay ... so they don't actually buy advertising from newspapers, but have nevertheless taken control of them through some secret, nefarious means? Oh, oh, I know! The Trilateral Commission!
The most important asset old media had was the credibility of their journalists. Selling their credibility to chase clicks was always a suckers bet. There's simply no longer enough revenue to sustain all the middle management in media who justify their existense by claiming they are there to enforce journalistic standards and ethics they long ago abandoned.
Now they're upset they no longer dominate the platform for all the same reason's they'r upset the 1st amendment covers more than just journalists. Like those who demand an apology and refuse to ever accept it, there's something especially insincere about people who want to silence others, then becomes outraged when those people find another place to speak.
Right now the New York Times is running the front page story:
"How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot"
Honestly, who gives a shit? At a time when the criminal system is broken, the first amendment is under assault and we have bombed Syria, do they really think that is what people care most about?
As a senior in college, I was fortunate enough to take part in a journalist exchange in the Soviet Union. A group of students and writers from the Times, Post, Chicago Tribune and WSJ spent the spring semester studying in Moscow and (then) Leningrad. As a student who had been drilled with the notion of objectivity and the sanctity of the 4th Estate (I was once marked down on an article for describing a fire as having flames shooting high into the sky, rather than quantifying objectively the size of the flames), I was shocked to learn that in the USSR, the media was actually PROUD of their role as mouthpiece for the state, defending perpetual revolution (read "resistance", "woke", critical race theory, etc).
There are few students of journalism or true practitioners of REAL journalism that can see today's media - both new and established - as anything more than I saw Pravda and Izvestia 4 decades ago. The Press that for centuries served its critical role as the 4th Estate has surrendered that role in favor of the Murdochian model of money grubbing, vulgar culture-making, and lapdogging for the neoliberals and neoconservatives that have so thoroughly corrupted every corner of our government.
Of course they object to Substack. They object to ANY free and critical thinking and to ANY information whose flow they themselves don't control. They are a contemptible lot of authoritarian tools whose scorn should be worn as a badge of honor. Clearly you and your cohorts at Substack are doing something right. Please keep it up.
I had a similar experience with a Russian journalist in the 1980s. “We are not that different,” he told me. I loved meeting him and talking face to face, but after a few days I decided we were indeed very different. Imagine how I felt decades later to run into a Russia Today TV crew on a story. “No, Russia Today is not a state organ, completely independent,” she told me. Let’s just say that when I saw her report, it was highly predictable and oddly aligned with Kremlin interests.
Actually, she's right. RT has complete freedom, unlike our broadcast stations which must toe the line as Matt has proven. "...oddly aligned with Kremlin interests" needs to be explained.
[Having been recently in Russia, I wish our government could be aligned with Kremlin interests, having spotless cities, no homeless, free education and healthcare. No place is perfect but Russia is certainly ahead of the USA. BTW, Navalny is extremely racist, a liar and an opportunist, and most Russians don't know who he is. And this is the guy the US is hanging its hat on?]
I think this is satire but can’t really tell, so I’ll respond. There are questions people ask when they are trying to learn a subject and get basic information. Journalists typically ask those. And then there are questions they ask when they want someone to say something that fits a purpose, like an attorney building a case or a partisan looking for a chink in an opponent’s armor. Both the Soviet-era guy and the RT woman did the latter. The conclusion is already set: what they want is confirmation.
Matt writes not of government control of media, but the how journalists can willingly don blinders to meet cultural pressures. I think you know the difference. As a fellow Baby Boomer told a Gen Xer in our newsroom who was ranting about how her generation was “oppressed” by Boomers, “There’s no oppression like government oppression.” It can only be ignored at risk of whatever penalties the state imposes. The generational rant, or some other fashionable complaint, you can listen to it and either accept it or just roll your eyes and get on with your life. Matt’s work is showing that media can fail to do its job when it succumbs to groupthink.
I still don’t know if you’re serious or not.
Jim F., Serious.
I think you have a misconception about the people to whom you refer. The Soviet guy lived in an entirely different political climate than the rt woman. No comparison. I am surprised and annoyed that our MSM keep deliberately using the term, "Soviet," as if it were still in existence. It's gone. Period. When Putin became president, he began instantly to change things, told the oligarchs things were going to change, they would have to pay their taxes (either that or be arrested and go on trial or leave the country). The various oligarchs chose their own paths. The richest one went to trial, was convicted and spent eight of his thirteen years in prison and was allowed to leave the country. [That's why so many rich Russians live in London.] Putin brought 75% of the country out of poverty. Why do you think he's had such a high rating among the people? Now, the young who are in the street protesting are of an age that they have no memory of their country before Putin, and like all young people the world over, want to protest over something. They have no idea what they are doing and are encouraged by the US and UK who are backing that idiot Navalny, an extreme racist (who say he still believes what he always has, Muslims are cockroaches and should be killed, are like rotten teeth that need to be pulled out) and and he earns his way in the world by being a shyster opportunist and liar.
Connecting this thread back to Matt and Glenn and Aaron and Caitlin and Bob Parry (R.I.P.), Joe, and other great reporters, they are the finders of truth who took down the lies about Russiagate that some of my friends still buy into, heaven forfend. Rob
Well, I accept that the Soviet system is gone. I had a newspaper colleague who had previously been an AP reporter in Moscow who was a great guide to perestroika and glasnost (sp?) and that whole period. (I still have the copy of Alan Morehead’s The Russian Revolution that he gave me, come to think of it.) But I thought it is expressly acknowledged that RT is state-controlled, no? I mean, you’re entitled to your opinion of life in Russia today, but I think it’s simply too different from all my other sources for me to swallow whole. But thanks.
Jim,
My go-to source on Russia is Stephen F. Cohen, always. He's the most knowledgeable of the experts. He spent decades in the Soviet Union and, until his recent death, remained friends with Gorbachev. I will miss his sage commentary for the rest of my life.
I am cancelling the New Yorker after decades because they hired Masha Gessen, the worst reporter on Russia I've ever read. When even the New Yorker falls for Russiagate, it's time to leave. I've noticed she's affected other writers there.
No, rt is run on freedom of the press. No reporters there are ever told what they can and cannot say or report on.
Chris Cuomo was allowed to cover his own brother's governorship, fawningly interview him multiple times, and cover up his order sending COVID-infected patients into nursing homes.
What was that she was saying about journalistic ethics?
Although it's off topic, I find it fascinating that Cuomo's stupid nursing home policy and then lying about its implications didn't draw much ire from the left but the allegations of harassment are causing the sharks to circle.
I read an interesting theory that they know they have to get rid of him because of the nursing home thing, but they're using #metoo as the pretext because there would be too much collateral damage if the nursing home scandal plays out to the end. Other Democratic governors did the same thing, and the media feted him as the hero of COVID, so much better if that whole topic can be drowned out by something else.
This seems plausible to me.
I bet you're right, but it begs the question: why is this important point made by a thoughtful commentator on Substack, but you won't see it anywhere in the media?
I feel this question answers itself, as is in fact answered in Matt's piece: corporate interests, political interests, and newsrooms filled with employees with highly-coincidental and whitewashed intelligence agency backgrounds are why you won't see it anywhere in the mainstream media.
I hadn't heard that but it's certainly a plausible take
I can see that also. If his Covid policies are questioned, it will and should open pandora box on how he has destroyed NYC. Also, when (not if) there is another "pandemic" (not a denialist, just a factist) those pulling the puppet strings (imo, MSM, Big Tech, Gates, Politicians) will want to repeat the process to continue to create fear, division, destroy small business, schools, free assembley, free speech and increase control of our movements, medical choices, beliefs, etc.
Should have read your post first!
Would democratic governors be more inclined to cover up deaths than republican ones?
I wouldn't say that, but in this instance, as far as I know, it was only Democratic governors who ordered COVID infected patients to be accepted into nursing homes (Whitmer, the guy in PA, and Cuomo).
And the media would not cover for Republicans. They portrayed Cuomo as the hero and DeSantis as the villain of COVID, which is just laughable. The nursing homes down here were locked down and protected quite early in the game, and Florida's stats are much better, even with an older population than NY.
While I agree with most of what you said, I will say that Florida is lying about their numbers. That’s already been proven. I don’t remember her name, but there was an episode a while back where a public health official or somebody in the public health sector in Florida came right out and said,”Florida’s lying about their COVID numbers.” So there’s that...
Arguably everybody is lying about their COVID numbers in asserting these are known things rather than degrees of likelihood on a spectrum. Positive PRC tests shouldn't be cases--but they are. Deaths related to COVID are not uniformly assessed, including some places--in some cases--recording deaths not caused by COVID (such as motorcycle accidents and murder) as COVID deaths.
At one point Florida was definitely wrong about their COVID numbers--as the nursing homes spoke out to suggest that the 200+ deaths attributed to their facilities (by the state) were highly inaccurate, and they were 2 or 1 or none. Similarly, I believe that at least one "whistleblower" was in fact herself manufacturing additional cases and got fired for it, but this is a recollection and not a specific reference, so I may be wrong about that. She got caught, and insisted the state was lying when in fact she had been.
Irrespective, the media has actively tried to make DeSantis a villain despite how much better the state has performed--by the media's own definition--than New York, New Jersey, et al, while lauding Cuomo despite the fact the nursing home stuff was at least partially known 10 months ago.
So it's reasonable to suspect there may be some political or ideological motivation to focusing on #MeToo than COVID performance.
Here's a hot take: Everybody is lying about their COVID numbers. Why? Nobody agrees on what a COVID death is. Someone dies of a heart attack, with COVID+ test? Someone dies of pneumonia caused by cytokine storm responding to COVID virus in his/her body? Someone testing COVID positive dying in a car accident on their way back from the testing lab? Someone recovered from COVID symptoms having a stroke after no longer testing positive?
All of these have been treated as the same thing: "COVID Death"
The odd thing is that a year after the first deaths, we still have no real statistical information about who is really dying and how. We don't know if there are certain genetic markers that make some more susceptible than others (similar to Tay Sachs and Ashkenazi Jews or Sickle Cell Anemia and African Americans); Nobody has done any reporting as to whether those dead from COVID-19 pneumonia had compromised lungs from behavioral issues (cigarette smoking/vaping/chronic marijuana smoking)...
It's almost as if people WANT everyone to believe that everyone has the same potential to die from this...
"That’s already been proven."
I hope you're never accused of some wrongdoing, if you consider a single individual's accusation as proof.
An allegation is an allegation. I am more inclined to believe Cuomo fudged his numbers because he had a major fuck-up to not draw attention to. What moron forces COVID patients into nursing homes?
CDC guidance at the time said that IF a nursing home was capable of adequately isolating COVID+ patients from the rest of the residents, they SHOULD avoid discriminating.
Cuomo's order was that NO nursing home SHALL refuse to accept a COVID+ patient.
He issued that order a few days before the USNS Comfort arrived and the 4000 fully staffed field hospital beds were delivered to him by Trump.
He didn't rescind it until 10 days AFTER the Comfort had left New York, having never been more than 1/4 full. Same with the field hospital beds. Never more than 1/4 full.
He had the beds. He had the staff. And he forced nursing homes incapable of isolating infectious patients to take them in.
I heard there was at least one home that was happy to take these patients, because they had facilities that provided for proper isolation (and hey, it's money). Others begged Cuomo to reconsider because they couldn't protect staff and residents.
And you know. He reconsidered. 10 days after the Comfort departed.
So the governor is ordering doctors not to record COVID deaths, or statisticians not to count them, and they are complying?
Big claims require strong proof. Maybe something's going on there, but state and federal bureaucrats generally hate Republicans, so a health official saying that Florida is lying about numbers is not proof.
What's it that Hitchen's Razor states? That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence? Something like that, and it seems to apply here.
She was a wee bit fanatical and was fired from her job for chronic insubordination. She then stole the computer from work, was accessing data from home and posting her "analysis".
My take was completely different. After a bit of research I filed that one under "disgruntled employee". And no, I definitely wasn't buying the FL governor's narrative, I simply did the work to assess what was going on. It also seemed legit that she illegally accessed a gov't system afterwards trying to embarrass them. Think of her like an Avenatti.
NJ did too.
DeSantis issued an executive order prohibiting hospitals from discharging COVID+ patients into nursing homes. If there was nowhere else for them to go, the hospital had to keep them or find other arrangements.
A Republican governor will have a legion of media to point out what is happening under that administration. Or, as in the case of Florida, invent things that are happening. A Democrat governor, on the other hand, will get a pass on most issues.
This is one of the issues driving the whole push to Substack and other alternatives to legacy media. We aren't looking for a slant, but more information.
This is exactly right. I'm on the right and probably agree with only about 30% of Matt's conclusions (or less), but he gets there honestly and with panache, and I learn something worthwhile every time I read him. So I'm a subscriber here.
If people here on the left are interested in equivalent, honest people on the right for a different perspective, you might check out Rebeccah Heinrichs @RLHeinrichs, Lee Smith @LeeSmithDC, or Josh Hammer
@josh_hammer
Not sure about that, but I think there's something to be said for Republican politicians walking the straight and narrow in more ways due to their relationship with the media (generally more adversarial vs. chummy nature for Dems)
It's almost like it would be a good thing if the media was hard on Republicans and Democrats! Like it would be better for everybody, somehow. It's like the media giving a pass to one political party makes them think they can get away with anything.
Or a political Uniparty, when it comes to neocons and endless wars.
No, but I don't know of a case where a Republican governor mandated nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients irrespective of their ability to quarantine them or protect their other patients and workers. This time around.
Ain't no magic in a label (or shouldn't be) but because the issue seems to implicate only Democratic governors this time around, there could be a reason why Cuomo's COVID performance is being downplayed compared to the sexual harassment allegations.
On April 29, 2020, Charlie Baker, the republican governor of Massachusetts, issued an order very much like Andrew Cuomo's, requiring long-term care facilities to re-admit residents who had been hospitalized with covid and then discharged from the hospital.
Well, there you go. He should be similarly taken to task, especially if outcomes were similar.
Good to know.
More inclined? Perhaps not. More enabled? You betcha.
Anyway, I cannot help but notice that the states that issued orders for nursing homes to accept COVID+ patients are the same ones suffering a pension crisis, and that virtually all residents of nursing homes are collecting pensions.
If I were the cynical type, I might think there's a connection there.
The democrat governors followed the advise of that group in Washington state that created the early models for Covid. Their advise was to keep the hospitals as empty as possible because their model predicted many thousands Covid patients would need the beds. They advised the governors to send the nursing home patients back to the nursing homes while they were still sick. They are also the ones that told Cuomo he’d need 40,000 ventilators. Anyway, it was only a few democrat governors that followed their advise that contradicted what the CDC recommended.
That's interesting information that I hadn't read before. The thing about Cuomo is, he sent COVID infected people back to nursing homes when both the Javits Center and the hospital ship were available but empty. Were the returnees upstate rather than in the NYC area? The facts matter her, but it's hard to get an unbiased account.
That’s because the model said he’d need all those beds for new cases. We sort of glide over how horrendous those early models were, now that we’ve lived through most of it.
Most patients who are admitted to long term care with skilled nursing die within 6 months without covid. The reporting during this crisis was, and continues to be misleading as they report deaths WITH Covid and FROM covid. No Ct count was required.
Two sides of the same coin. A governor by definition is an alpha political animal. democrat or republican they would do anything in their power to cover up, deflect or deny any culpability for anything negative of their making.
I would be skeptical there is a moral difference, but emphatic that Yes, Dems would be more prone to do that because they have a better shot at getting away with it, what with the corrupt media and the usual Democratic Party loyalty.
Ya, I loved that too.
The guy's a corrupt thug who mishandled the greatest challenge of his administration, which resulted in not just the death, but the cover up of thousands of elderly people in nursing homes while the media celebrated him as a hero for not being Trump, but it appears the thing that will take him down is that he made an indecent proposal to a women at work.
Just once I would like to see someone in power taken down for corruption and incompetence and not just because they also happen to be a creep.
Didn't you know? The elderly population is disproportionately white and affluent. Meanwhile, women are more oppressed than ever, according to Gloria Steinem.
KS,
Side note: Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA all her adult life. I used to wondered how she could date Henry Kissinger. Now I know.
Angelina Jolie works for MI6.
Strange things happen in the secret lives of agents. Makes it hard to accept well known people at face value.
I think they did find the nursing home scandal horrible but they couldn’t say much because they spent months willfully ignoring it as they exclusively focused on Trump. The harassment allegations allow them to vent their anger and not have to link back to the virus and their different narratives on Trump vs Cuomo. It’s a way to channel their anger in a less political setting.
Both are despicable. You don't have to choose one or the other. I heard a guy, Ned Ryan, call the harassment, "a shiny little object of 'me, too' to distract...." from Cuomo's horrible killing of many, many elderly in nursing homes. Yes, that's more egregious, of course, but only a couple macho guys with penises could call sexual harassment, a "shiny little object."
And then he admitted that he didn't even need the beds.
That's because there are several Dem governors that did the same thing, it would be a massacre if the nursing home idiocy was exposed. There is another, perhaps conspiratorial aspect. Maybe these governors that have no issue killing babies, have no problem killing the elderly, especially if these elders cost the government money to house.
I think their sin is a little bit different, although it should still be career ending: I think they made a colossally bad and stupid judgment call, sending these nursing home patients back because they believed the wild models showing that we were going to end up like Italy (or at least the stories from Italy, not sure if they were entirely true), with overflowing ICUs and people turned away because there was nowhere to put them.
Why would they believe such a thing before the actual evidence came in, and when their hospitals were still mostly empty? Because modern liberalism is built on hysteria. They go from one manufactured hysteria to another. They do it partly for power, but they also believe some of their own propaganda.
>but they also believe some of their own propaganda.
Of all the things George Orwell was prophetic about, this one has been on my mind lately: the Inner Party believed its own propaganda most fervently.
More like causing the wagons to circle.
I am of a certain age (born 1950) and recall how back in the 1960s we used to joke that 'legal ethics' and 'military intelligence' were oxymoronic. That hasn't changed, but we can now add 'journalistic standards' to the list.
Easily the best headline on this topic by great journalist Elizabeth Nolan Brown over at Reason Magazine:
"Cuomo Asks America To Hold Off on Believing Women This Time"
https://reason.com/2021/03/01/cuomo-asks-america-to-hold-off-on-believing-women-this-time/
She's actually defending a particular business model in news media that uses a cooperative arrangement between media companies and status quo power in which the journalists play their part in the distribution of propaganda.
And it's really interesting because when somebody publishes an angry incoherent screed in something close to a public meltdown like Dr. Robert's here, it suggests somebody at the brink of failure in maintaining their denial. It's as though Dr. Robert's knows very well in her unconscious thoughts what's really going on so her conscious narrative self has to work very hard to maintain belief in the bs story that NTY and Wapo are the good stuff.
Dumb question, but was that nursing home policy really so unreasonable? AFAIK, NYC hospitals were having trouble with patient overload.
I worked in a major newsroom for years until recently. The self-righteousness combined with ignorance of the J-school educated generations is striking. If you combine the barriers to entry - degrees, ability to afford internships and rent, the cultural and social capital needed to find opportunities and to stick in the culture - the end result is newsrooms full of mindlessly morally confident rich kids with no real education, no humility, no appreciation of nuance, and no understanding of what happens outside of their bubbles.
The way the industry is set up now attracts and promotes the kind of humorless, irony-deaf "hall monitors" Glenn talks about. You can't fill the national media with kiss-anyone's-ass, student council president, private school cosmopolitans who got A-pluses through J-school and are some editors daughter or nephew and not expect the culture to be totally out of touch, deranged, and entirely, pathologically certain of the correctness of its worldview.
Journalists and scholars who study the media for a living should take a look at who's being hired before they start complaining about independent media and a "reality crisis", but they won't because the problem is them, their colleagues and friends, and the dominance of their socioeconomic class in the industry.
Part of that smug attitude is amplified by having zero work experience outside their field. There used to be these things called summer jobs, or even trying to make a few bucks mowing a neighbor's lawn or shoveling their driveway. I'm not some grizzled veteran of hard labor, but I've at least bagged groceries and hammered nails. Journalist types see that work as well beneath them. It's for those dirty stupid people without a Bachelor's Degree.
*BA, a BS is dangerous. Liberal Arts are “our” kind of people
Yep — “ the end result is newsrooms full of mindlessly morally confident rich kids with no real education, no humility, no appreciation of nuance, and no understanding of what happens outside of their bubbles.”
...and don’t think we plebs don’t see this. It’s so obvious!
Matt wrote in his book Hate, Inc. that back in the day, during the 60's and 70's, your average journalist had a social status somewhere between that of a plumber and a high school principal. Most of them had strong working-class backgrounds (he sited Mike Royko as a good example). Nowadays, most journalists are members of the upper class or the upper-middle class. Many have never had a meaningful relationship with a poor person or working-class person in their entire lives. And its shows in their reporting.
Where's Molly Ivens when you need her ...
They not only would have canceled Molly, they would have pre-canceled her. Funny thing now is that the Left has it's own Molly, and she just about fits Liu's description to a tee. Poster girl level, actually.
Forgive my denseness - but who is the Left's Molly?
It isn't just in Journalism. I met a women who is a nationally known Physician and child specialist who is also a university consultant who works with these institutions to teach the child-students how to become adults who can cope, who can tolerate disagreement without believing they are a victim of something, how to care for themselves and surroundings.
She is very busy.
I don't think we're paying enough for our subscriptions. This writing is pure gold. And I don't even agree with the politics of the author. But I do care about journalism.
This!
You have to think that these guys toiling away in the bowels of corporate media know they're on the wrong side. They've got to be miserable by and large. So your point about the economics of this is spot on. Like you, I'd pay more for Matt and Glenn and at least a few more if they were here.
Pretty sure people toiling in the bowels of every corp are as you describe.
I am an old lady sick of the lies in papers like the NYT and other papers. I’m not an intellectual but I used to read the news papers. I think they’re fascist organizations that want to smash any idea they don’t agree with. I’ll keep reading substack.
Same here, including the old lady part.
Right on, Marilyn, right on! You might like Sharyl Attkisson's book "Slanted". It covers the progression of papers down this path over her long and excellent journalism career. She was a highly decorated reporter for years and all this undermined her simply because she had a slight right of center outlook - even though her reporting could go after either side any time. Then she noticed that it was increasingly only allowed to hit the news if it fit the narrative.
This is just a (long) side note, but, speaking as someone who has a doctorate: what the hell is up with these losers making others call them “doctor?”
To be honest, I don’t think legit medical doctors, coaches, and military personnel should invite people other than their co-workers to address them as “doctor,” “major,” or (the weirdest one) “coach.” (When I taught at the college level, I didn’t even want my students calling me “professor” in class.)
There were a couple of teachers at my depressing public high school who went by “doctor”; I didn’t think about it as a kid, but of course it seems ridiculous in retrospect.
But the idea of being a “newspaper doctor”—it’s just too funny.
Second sidenote:
J-school professors should be ashamed of themselves. They continue to draw big salaries and soak up institutional prestige at the expense of the young people sitting right in front of them who are debt-financing expensive professional degrees that no longer have value.
Professors in all disciplines are too insulated from the human costs of student debt, and they too are complicit. (I have a friend who deeply resents the smug English professors who supervised her PhD knowing all along that she would be unemployable at the end of the program. You might criticize my friend for getting a dumb degree, but 22-year-olds, oddly enough, tend to listen to their parents and to the glamorous authority figures at their colleges.)
But there’s no degree quite like a J-school degree. Even in the 80s and 90s, when journalism was plausibly a path to a middle-class lifestyle, these programs were dubious: reporting didn’t need to be “academized,” and didn’t benefit from the academy’s attention. The degrees really just served a class gatekeeping function, the same way unpaid internships do. J-school is a big part of the reason that NYTimes staff meetings now seem like reunions of the Sidwell Friends Woke AV Club or the Swarthmore College White Allies of Black Panthers Fox-Hunting Society.
Since about 2000, though, J-school has been a scam on another level. These degrees can cost, literally, $300K (you do the math: 2 years of debt-financed Columbia tuition and NYC-area living expenses, repaid with interest on a 30-year schedule). THERE ARE NO JOBS for the people with these degrees. Also, the model of reporting that these schools teach is completely outdated and discredited—despised both within and outside of the profession.
What Matt, Glenn, Max Blumenthal, Jordan Chariton, and even the loathed Andy Ngo are doing is much truer to the scrappy, rebellious tradition of “reporting” (as opposed to the younger and shittier tradition of “journalism”).
Tl;dr: I guess I’m not a huge fan of the Substack-hating blog surgeon.
I could use it, but I don't because it (PhD in librarianship) is hard to explain. I prefer the first credential I got, which is the one of which I am most proud--"Librarian" and if I was teaching journalism I would be proud to be a "journalist."
“Librarian” tells strangers what you do. It’s an honest and descriptive title—and being a librarian is socially useful: especially now that so many things are being flushed down the memory hole.
We (librarians) are doing lots of data archiving. You would be pleased. If you need something you think is gone because not on Internet, ask one of us. We have rescued a lot.
Are there librarians specifically collecting and organizing memory-holed data? I'd love to see collections of articles containing falsehoods that garnered nothing but a one-line edit at the beginning, with no real retraction. I feel like this behavior has truly skyrocketed in the last few years.
There are some projects like this: https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0021872/
Sadly, UCB dropped the "library" part of its degree and became the School of Information Science. Administrators wanted to be part of the tech boom and "library" sounds so fusty. That was my perception, anyway.
My place of work did, too. (It's now a "School of Information"). Sometimes I think I embarrass them that I persist in signing myself as a librarian. But computers are just a tool and librarianship goes back to Ashurbanipal 600BC and before that. I'm placing my bets on clay tablets.
Amen - in 1000 years will some one find the Dead Sea I-Pad?
Wow! I could not agree more. I am among those shouldering a huge amount of student debt for a journalism degree in a field that has been decimated by McKinsey, FB and the empty headed Ivy League talking heads. I love community journalism and I also like to eat regularly and drive a car that passes minimal safety standards. I learned everything I needed to know about being a good journalist by reading (everything I can get my hands on) listening to people when they speak (even if I hate what’s coming out of their mouth) and get this - by DOING the job. As it turns out these skills have also become unnecessary and are generally discouraged.
Oh, they are still quite necessary ....
Your second sidenote is the most underrated take on the media ecosystem today. The labor economics of this sector matters a lot!
Those of us who work with soldiers refer to them by rank as a measure of respect; those who do not do so objectively are making the point that they think the soldiers they work with aren't worthy of same, and it is noticed. Ask a soldier, and the usual answer you will get is that they prefer to be called by name by civilians, as most of them don't get the rank designation correct anyway. They have their own rules for interacting with each other and follow them religiously.
Never call an enlisted person "Sir/Ma'am" is another general rule there.
This.
I have a PhD in psychology. When people refer to me as Doctor I use a Monty Python voice and encourage them to call me “Doctor MyBrainHurts!”
Hahaha, I work in PhD-infested place. We only call each other Doctor in jest.
Yup, agreed. (And yes, I literally CRINGE (or LAUGH) when somebody refers to me as Dr, just as I did when I was a university prof/researcher.)
Sarah Roberts terrifies me. Not only because she thinks censorship of viewpoints she disagrees with is a good idea, or because of her unfounded attacks on principled, legitimate journalists — but because so many liberal people agree with her.
The first thing we need to do is stop using the term "liberals" for them. That is an honorable title that belongs to people who believe in freedom of speech, due process, independent courts, and a restrained government. They are not liberals.
They are communists.
I agree our political terminology has lost all meaning. I find myself aligned with perspectives across the political map these days. The term conservative is equally nebulous. But the word "communist" carries significant historical context, much of which is not directly applicable. There is a self righteousness that is arising on the "left". An openness to ideas, experience, and communication are traditional liberal values, or so I once thought. They are cloaked in the historical shell of liberal values, but have lost the intellectual and emotional core that gave rise to these values.
Yes, yes, yes! We lack proper terms for the rise of these tyrants! I argue that the Establishment that Dr. Roberts, NYT, Fox, CNN, NPR, et al is neither exactly left nor right. The Establishment now stands for corporate hegemony over Western Civ, Perpetual War for profit, perpetual lowering of the value of labor & general impoverishment of the lower orders, & extinguishing civil liberties.
I view this project as neither entirely left or right. Yes, the left are sort of useful idiots chasing the promise of collectivism; the idea that on some fine day Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al, will pay in taxes the same percentage that we here pay, and that Russians & white supremacists lurk under our beds. But the right seems to think that the Pentagon exists to protect us, and that taxing Bezos would be immoral.
Matt argues Orwell's 1984 is overused, but I prefer it’s terminology because it makes no reference to the original left or right, but sticks to totalitarianism without political orientation, which I believe is where we’re headed. I love this Anthony Sutton quote:
“Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left, this is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them.”
I wish Matt would turn his mind to what we should call the Dr. Roberts in this Cowardly New World. The poor souls who went down on the Titanic all knew it was an iceberg, I imagine. We don’t know what to call what it is that is striving to enslave us.
Great contribution, Bill, to which I would like to add, as just another American in his early Seventies who has been a wage slave his entire life, a trenchant observation from a great mind of the Seventeen Hundreds:
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
«I argue that the Establishment that Dr. Roberts, NYT, Fox, CNN, NPR, et al is neither exactly left nor right. The Establishment now stands for corporate hegemony over Western Civ, Perpetual War for profit, perpetual lowering of the value of labor & general impoverishment of the lower orders, & extinguishing civil liberties.»
My usual point of political history:
* There are two main sides to the right, the "tory "(nationalist, industrialist, traditionalist) (which is itself split into "low tory and "high tory") and "whig" (globalist-interventionist, financialist, radical/"woke").
* During feudal times the right was "high tory" representing mostly farm owners and merchants.
* Then the "new right" arose which was "whig"; victorian liberals initially representing emerging "ironmaster"/business owner class, and they fought for freedom of the markets, freedom of contract, and related "radical" issues.
* Eventually much of the right morphed back into "high torysm" but more industry based as industry became a rentier business.
* Then finance (more precisely the "leveraged debt lobby") took over both parties turning them to "whig" politics.
* Recently the "low tory" right with Trump took briefly over the Republicans.
I prefer Brave New World ...
For the people, politics has been reduced to a sporting contest, with little discussion of any policies that impact capital. The terms have become cultural badges. For the media, politics has become a means to generate engagement and retain advertising consumers, discussing only policies that have no meaningful impact on capital or established power structures, preferring superficial and cultural criticism of the other political team. For capital, politics is an analysis and investment process, ensuring they have hedged properly between the parties to dictate the state processes and regulation that influences their industry.
Do the terms correctly group advertising demographics? Probably. Do they have any meaningful policy or political philosophy definitions attached to them? Less and less. Second amendment or trans rights? Chose your tribe. Workers party or bosses party? Not so clear anymore.
Power structures are necessary for the organization of complex societies. Positions within power structures should be based upon efficacy within a role, determined by those subservient to the role, democracy. Power structures require feedback mechanisms for optimizations and alignment. But what is optimization and alignment? Is it the greatest good for the individuals at all levels within the structure? Is it the greatest good dependent on proximity to the apex of the structure? America has decided on the later, but perhaps not by choice. Thomas Picketty showed us without active intervention wealth coalesces indefinitely. The great mass of wealth seems to now exist outside the organizational processes of society. Fluid wealth existing for its own sake, existing only to multiply by any means. Existing outside states, but having massive influence upon them.
The feedback mechanisms to power have all been neutered. Neutered through the dilution of political terms and philosophies, through election funding, through regulatory capture, through destruction of workers movements, through information control. Neutered because great wealth is beholden to nothing, has no direct attachments to societal structures. If Democracy is functionally a facade, what do the party terms even matter? What do we call those who viewed themselves as traditional liberals who have abandoned the core tenets of liberalism in greater service of capital? Traitors? Opportunists? Realists? What do we call those who have enslaved us? Rulers.
Mmmm...I catch your drift but I can’t agree with the entirety of your comment. You’re right that it makes a travesty of the term “liberal” to apply it to the citizens of Wokestan. As I was typing my comment that actually crossed my mind, but I let it slide because it’s an easy shorthand for a large segment of the population these days.
Where I disagree is with your blanket assumption that all these people are communists. I assume that some are, especially if you’re referring to the more public and vocal activist voices on the left. But I’m talking about people I know well, law abiding and mainstream members of my family and friends who go way back. I can assure you without one iota of doubt that they are not communists! Trust me, these late middle-aged New York Times readers sitting at home worrying about their second vaccine shot and examining their 401(k) accounts are what they themselves would refer to as old-school liberals. Like lobsters in a slow cooker, they have no clue that they’re being boiled alive. When I ask them if it isn’t getting a little hot in here, their eyes glaze over.
That’s what makes the current free speech crisis so tragic. It’s not an insidious cadre of commies who will do us on, it’s our own damn brain-dead “liberal” selves.
Woke Nazis then. Because they seem to have a lot in common with the NSDAP. The focus on race is one key similarity. Tactics is another.
I'm going to push back again, this time on the use of the word "Nazis." I'm a Jew, and the nice liberal people I'm referring to here are mostly Jewish. And even if they weren't, it still takes a lot to cross the line from wimpy liberal to literal Nazi. My mother's parents lost all their family members in the Holocaust in Poland. My uncle died fighting the Nazis under Gen. MacArthur in the Philippines. That word has a particular and special resonance, and I don't employ it lightly. I share your disdain for the citizens of Wokestan and I see the ideological and tactical similarities that exist among authoritarian movements of many different time periods.
Although I know that the term gets thrown around rather casually these days, I'd prefer that we reserve the word Nazi for Nazis.
I mean, I'm assuming you didn't completely miss the last 20+ years of things like BUSH=NAZI and the related Trump lines.
Original Nazis aren't coming back; it was a European phenomenon associated with millennia of anti-Semitism across Europe, economic depression, national humiliation and one particular leader. The imitation Nazis like the crew in Skokie that the ACLU defended back in the 70s don't have much significance and are mostly doing what they do for notoriety. Also, most people today have no personal memory of why Nazis were hateful, for that matter. Finding people who were alive and aware in 1945 is growing rare.
Along comes a group that actually classifies people according to race and wants to ban books and cancel people out that aren't coordinated with their mindset, has a totalitarian philosophy and we're not supposed to make the obvious analogy?
..and has clear political power, forgot that part. The cancellations prove this.
The SPD and KPD were pretty sure that the Nazis were going to be short-lived, their biggest error. That's why they failed to fight and rolled over in 1933. I mean there were other problems in Germany...disunity for one thing... at the time that would have hindered resistance to the Nazis, but the lack of will to fight was the worst.
The first step to fighting back is calling them what they are.
correction: who will do us IN...
She’s just after her 15 minutes of fame. The give away was that she elevated word count over substance. She had to have known that any subscriber already knows what they are getting for their money (you can read it free first, dummy!) and any non-subscriber knows that traditional media all lie. So any words after the first tweet were just attention whoring
"Unfettered free speech is a threat to Democracy" - we're hearing this more and more. Last October, NPR interviewed an author attacking free speech, the NYT has writers poo-poo'ing unfettered conversations. These people are losing control and they're lashing out. This is what happens when people in control feel their control slipping. These are the same people that lionized Andrew Cuomo. They're not exactly arbiters of truth.
I've been rereading Evans' "The Coming of..." and "...in Power" about the Nazis. Great trilogy of books btw. It's amazing how many quotes I can lift from these books that were made by Nazis (!) that mirror statements made in the press today by anti-free speech advocates. It's almost like they want us all to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
A supreme irony of the purportedly anti-Fascist nature of today's society is that they basically are using the Nazi (Fascist) playbook.
I'll have to check that out. Along this same idea, Bill Maher had an Obama impersonator on his show several years ago reading Trump's actual tweets. His point was that Republicans would have lost their minds if Obama said some of the things Trump actually said.
He should do the same today but use NYT reporters as the punchline, because that's what they've become. Better yet, use CNN anchors.
Of course, you could have Bozo the clown say Trump's lines, or Mister Rogers, and they'd be offensive to their targets. You know, this is as good a time as any to make the point that Trump was trolling you. He used his Twitter and to a lesser degree FB posts to troll. As for why he was trolling, he senses that by activating the anger of the Left, he can motivate all kinds of opposition to basically give him a free pass on whatever he does and support him unconditionally because the right kind of people hate him, the same ones they do. He was never dependent on the social networks for his followers and banning him and his supporters is pointless except to drive the fire and vigor to other venues. Therefore damaging the very social networks that banned him.
Let me point out that he raised taxes (quite a bit actually) on significant portions of his base in 2017, and did all kinds of unpopular things like create a 'voluntary' ban on window blinds that work in favor of the stringless kind that barely work and break constantly. No one batted an eye, because he had the right enemies.
Before he left office, he planted the poison pill of the stolen election. That one will bear fruit in two and four years, watch... Once again, the wrong people saying he's wrong won't accomplish jack shit except to accentuate the power of the message. The right people hating him, in other words. Whatever else he is, the dude is a master manipulator. Hatred of him redounds to his benefit. I said in 2015 that the only way to deal with Trump is to ignore him. The media and the Left just can't do it, though.
I think you've misunderstood Trump. He's like every other self absorbed person you'll meet. It's all about them and how you can serve them. The idea that he trolled everyone else misses the point. He's a drooling fool who wants to be loved and surrounded by sycophants. That's not trolling.... that's mental illness. In that sense, he's a perfect representation of millions who do pledge their allegiance to him.
I agreed with some of his policy choices, but he was so easily manipulated by TPTB, that he wasn't able to get the lion's share of his policies through.
It's sad. He was elected by frustrated and desperate voters, but because he's so dim, he wound up embarrassing himself.
Frankly I blame the Dems for Trumps victory - if they had addressed the legitimate concerns of many Trump voters over the last 30 years, Trump would not have had a good chunk of his "base" - and if the Ds continue as they have been, his "base" will be back ...
Agreed. Democratic party voters are as deluded as Trump supporters. The propaganda is working.
Good point, except that in fairness you should acknowledge that while Democrats were in the majority Mitch in particular, and Republican officials in general, openly and systematically sabotaged any proposed legislation that was good for the country if they thought it might be bad for the Republican Party.
If he wanted to be loved and surrounded by sycophants, he would have and could have done things differently. In fact, that statement is so far from the reality of his struggle to attain office and maintain office that you seem to be living in a different world than I am. He could have made things so much easier for himself at a thousand points. I had a hard time reading beyond that - I did, but it's not worth the effort to respond further. You'll see.
It's never worth even a second to address these level 5 TDS'ers. (Or BDS'ers or even ODS'ers for that matter.) They've got issues way deeper than a single politician and they probably won't get anywhere near them in this lifetime. They nurture, cherish and take every given opportunity to display those crosses. And like any religion, it is exactly what they say it is, no matter what. It has to be this way for them.
Ok
«Before he left office, he planted the poison pill of the stolen election. That one will bear fruit in two and four years, watch...y
Looking at it from far away, was the 2016 more stolen than the 2020 election?
My impression is that in 2016 the democrats cheated quite a bit and the republicans not much, in 2020 both the democrats and the republicans cheated quite a lot, and the democrats outcheated the republicans. A voting surge of an average of 18% for the Republicans and 22% for the Democrats are ridiculously implausible, especially as that is a national average with much higher surges in some areas.
The bigger question is not whether there was massive cheating in 2020, but whether it changed the outcome: most of the cheating by republicans happened in areas that would have voted republican anyhow, and most of the cheating by democrats happened in areas that would have voted democratic anyhow. My impression is that without any cheating Trump would have won in 2020 too, but that is a pointless speculation, as it is an established american tradition that electoral fraud by political machines is a part of politics.
There are no Republican districts like, for instance, the 7-9th Congressional Districts in NY, just doing a quick survey. I saw a high of 84% of the vote going to the Democrat there in 2020. Those are Soviet or Nazi style figures.
I lived in the Northeast most of my life and was involved in NJ politics. Democrats and Republicans might be equivalent to each other in the desire to cheat on elections, but the Democrats have a much better opportunity to do so with their urban districts. It happens every cycle, and they can choose to expend more or less effort on getting out the fake vote. The dead vote en masse in every election in a place like New York, but the corruption goes much deeper.
If your my age you grew up with journalists being the biggest defenders of free speech. They regularly defended it in moral terms and were quick to cite people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, so I naively believed it was a moral stand.
Then technology allowed for competing voices.
With the benefit of history, I now understand defending free speech when you have the only voice is just a power play. .
Lesson to self; Never confuse bravado on ethics with naked self interest, even when it's almost certain the self interested will presented their best interests as the most ethical choice.
«journalists being the biggest defenders of free speech. They regularly defended it in moral terms»
That was usually just pious preaching.
«and were quick to cite people like Thomas Jefferson»
I can do that too, my usual quote from a letter by him to Walter Jones, 2nd Jan. 1814:
“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I inclose you a recent sample, the production of a New-England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. these ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening it’s relish for sound food. as vehicles of information, and a curb on our functionaries they have rendered themselves useless by forfieting all title to belief.”
This is sad but to me they're not losing control, but tightening the noose (around our necks, not theirs).
It says so much about the state of legacy media that Dr. Roberts chose Twitter to get her message out about the importance of legacy media. Talk about implicitly acknowledging their irrelevance.
lol - awesome! I totally missed the irony of that!
I subscribe to Substack, more specifically Taibbi and Greenwald precisely for the reasons outlined by Sara Roberts, just in reverse. So many of the news organizations I grew up with have run, not drifted, into being little more than outlets for my cultural betters. Fact-free, oily, bitter representations backed by nothing.
I've made my own newspaper. It doesn't mean I like it when Taibbi hits around opinions I hold dear, but when he does, he does it with facts, research, and an in-depth understanding of the subject he's writing about. You going to get reason and neutral presentation out of the NYT newsroom these days?
I used to love to read the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, and even (a very long time ago) the New Republic, because they had great writing, even though I was always politically to the right of them. Heck, I used to enjoy Cockburn and the older hard left version of Hitchens in The Nation, because man, they could write.
Now, those venues (to the extent they're still hanging on) are dominated by humorless scolds and anti-Trump obsessives. There's just no joy there. I'll never understand what happened to David Remnick, a brilliant guy and great writer, who has run the New Yorker into the ground.
I read Harper’s for three decades. Frankly, it was never the same after Lewis Latham left as Editor in Chief. I read his “Notebook” essay right out of the mailbox. Once they bought into the Russiagate hoax and published a hit piece on Jeremy Corbin chiming in on the outrageous charge of anti-semitism, I had enough. Bloody shame for the oldest periodical in the country.
*Lapham
I left my job at a larger company a few years ago to start a smaller company of my own. I used my skills and reputation I acquired throughout my career to help me land clients for my new company. While the work is the same, my company is run very differently from all of the others I worked for. I got rid of as much bullshit as I possibly could. I believe my work is much better than before simply because my product is from me as opposed to have my reports or proposals being run past a group of higher ups that are a step further removed from the process than myself. The money is about the same but I have less job security. I hope I never have to go back. And I'm guessing Matt and the other Substack writers probably feel similar to myself. I don't see why a writer should change the way they do business just because the press is listed in the constitution. If I do shitty work my company will disappear eventually and shitty writers will also disappear unless they get picked up by some shitty MSM company.
There's a nice pride of independence that comes with having your own business, but every single problem is your problem to sweat over and fix. I have some nostalgia about being able occasionally to slough off problems on others.
That's an awesome post, Mack - thanks for sharing.
I would like to point out that basket weaving is an important craft and probably cannot be used as a signifier for nothing important. https://botswanacraft.com/botswana-baskets#
On "30 Rock Fandom" I have no opinion.
"When news agencies see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long as they’re wrong about the 'right' targets.
"As a result, many reporters by last summer found themselves navigating newsrooms where they were being discouraged, sometimes openly, from pursuing true stories with the 'wrong' message..."
THIS is why many critical thinkers don't feel good about traditional journalism anymore and highly value what you and others do at Substack. If I want an opinion about the state of journalism from an academic with a PhD in Library Science, I guess I know where to go.
Well, I have one (Phd in librarianship) but please don't imagine we are all the same. I teach about public libraries, and museums and the history of libraries. I do have one librarian concern. I hope the writers for Substack keep file copies in the event something happens to where they are stored. And then make them into a book.
But, but, but, ... did you really NEED a PhD in that subject to do your work or were you adopting credentials? This is a serious question. You teach? Is there something about having a PhD that makes for a better teacher, particularly about libraries, museums, history thereof? I think not.
Teaching and researching are two different things. And I am not really sure that Western Civilization depends on have Librarians (sorry) with PhDs.
But otherwise I am fully with you j Substack.
Yes, you do need one to teach. The librarian degree is a master's degree. It is really like a law degree that it is a credential on top of your undergrad. So, if you want to work in medical informatics you would have a BA in biology or chemistry, then a library degree. Except now they are called information degrees. Hardly anyone calls them a library degree (but I do because I'm stubborn and proud to be a librarian). So people like me who teach in a master's program do have a PhD. It is a more complicated field than people realize and the PhD in librarianship was first awarded a century ago. Just one example, the man who wrote the Post-War Plan for public libraries that helped establish the complicated library system we have in the U.S.--Carleton B. Joeckel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_B._Joeckel
So you did not NEED it to teach, in fact. But, apparently, to teach wherever you teach, your institution REQUIRES it. Big difference. And therein the difference describes so much that ails our higher education situation. Joeckel notwithstanding.
I am not trying to trash you or your educational accomplishments. But, in point of fact, library "science" is not rocket science, no matter how adherents to the rubric wish it to be. Glorifying advanced degrees to have individuals become members of a particular guild, including teaching, is part of the larger problem of post-secondary education in the US -- and all that comes with it, especially student debt.
It was once called "Library economy." I needed to know a lot more than I did to teach it than do it. I won't tire you out w/ the standards for accreditation. I also needed to write books etc. and as we moved from card catalogs to OPACS the field became complex. My dissertation was on data archiving transition.
Truly. Plus with all of the archival Winston Smith “revisions” some online mags are making (cough, bon a-petite, cough) I no longer trust the digital medium to stay accurate. I’ve been trying to find every book that the Wokeratti could throw in the burn pile and buy print copies. At this point I no longer trust Amazon Kindle books so I’ve gone to places like Thriftbooks.com and just buying, buying, buying.
Matt, if you are still reading these comments....and speaking of Thriftbooks as K.M. just did...I went there to get Hate, Inc. and the cost of each of two used ones they had, one hard copy, one paperback, was $140.69. Say it isn't so. Where should I get a copy, and I hate to use Amazon. You can answer privately if you like since this has nothing to do with the topic (though your commentators drift all over the place). Rob
Did you ever have one of those amazing adventures like Noah Wyle from that TV show "The Librarians?" Go after the spear of Longinus or something like that?
We do have adventures, but mostly in archives and providing collections for the people who write books or articles. BTW, please acknowledge your librarians and archivists when you write something if we helped you. I became a librarian first and that is what I think I am. The PhD was so I could work with students and teach the history of libraries. Don't let me get started telling you about the MUNDANEUM or I'll keep you all day. You should check it out (librarian joke). http://www.mundaneum.org/en
Much appreciation to librarians and archivists;)
I was doing some research in the stacks of our local university library and walked in on a couple very far into the process of getting it on. I had always thought of libraries as rated G, but I guess I was wrong.
There is something about books that give people all kinds of ideas.
Amen! Do not assume that everything "on the web" will stay on the web - hard copies!
Would the dewey decimal system be a good tool for organizing Substack for future generations?
Thought you would never ask: https://www.oclc.org/en/dewey.html
But a less corporatized way might be Library Thing's Library cat. https://www.librarycat.org/
You DO have your own library at Library Thing, right? (It is free). I did it in case a hurricane. I can look at all my books when I am away from them. https://www.librarything.com/home
Sorry, didn't mean to go full librarian, but you asked.
Hee hee. My Mom was a librarian. I actually didn't realize ole Dewey made it to the internet age
Well the DDC did, but Melvil the person is now dishonored because he does not represent the “stated fundamental values of ALA [American Library Association] in equity, diversity, and inclusion.”https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/melvil-deweys-name-stripped-top-library-award-180972514/
Say it ain't so Dewey. On the other hand, is he much different from our current and first president?
Roberts doesn't understand that we pay the subscription so Matt can have the freedom to do actual reporting, not just to feed us what we want to hear/read.
Why can't Matt just get his money from weapon manufacturers, Wall Street, the super rich, and large corporations like "real" journalists do?
Meh - at most local papers, the advertisers are car dealers, real estate agents and restaurants paying the bills.
I think you are confusing these small potatoes advertisers with those whom Lucas named, those who are actually funding MSM.
No, Lucas is confused. Your handful of big, national papers - NYT, WaPo, WSJ - may get occasional ads from those big firms, but those firms rarely advertise. The big 3 are largely funded nowadays by subscriptions (or, in the case of WaPo, by the owner's largesse courtesy of Amazon.com customers). Still, the circulation of those three papers is dwarfed by the combined readership of all the local dailies around the country - who do not get advertising from those big firms mentioned: they survive, still, on selling ads to automobile dealers, real estate agents, and local restaurants.
I worked in the business for 25 years - I think I know how it works.
You are confusing the influence of weapon manufacturers, Wall Street, the super rich, and large corporations with advertising or circulation dollars. This influence is not something you would encounter in the industry unless you were seated on the board of directors for those 25 years, but it is obvious to anyone with deductive reasoning who chooses to follow the money.
lol ... okay ... so they don't actually buy advertising from newspapers, but have nevertheless taken control of them through some secret, nefarious means? Oh, oh, I know! The Trilateral Commission!
Muh, traditional media's just upset Substack has robbed them of their ability to kill the next Gary Webb.
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/?fbclid=IwAR279haW491mtNHLO7e0Bc46YeG2534UdYBt1k7lZc9fZejTI8aE6tYouY0
The most important asset old media had was the credibility of their journalists. Selling their credibility to chase clicks was always a suckers bet. There's simply no longer enough revenue to sustain all the middle management in media who justify their existense by claiming they are there to enforce journalistic standards and ethics they long ago abandoned.
Now they're upset they no longer dominate the platform for all the same reason's they'r upset the 1st amendment covers more than just journalists. Like those who demand an apology and refuse to ever accept it, there's something especially insincere about people who want to silence others, then becomes outraged when those people find another place to speak.
Right now the New York Times is running the front page story:
https://www.nytimes.com/
"How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot"
Honestly, who gives a shit? At a time when the criminal system is broken, the first amendment is under assault and we have bombed Syria, do they really think that is what people care most about?
I’m convinced that it is important to prominently present evidence that exposes the falsity of trending lies and misinformation.
She missed the bigger picture: Substack is the new journalism. I dont trust mainstream sources anymore.