630 Comments

I'm glad Taibbi mentioned the NYT article where Rutenberg said reporters had to abandon professional standards to cover Trump.

As a former journalist I found the article to be one of the most offensive things I'd ever read.

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The day I read that - I was still at Rolling Sftone - was the first time I thought I might have to change jobs.

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I remember having beers with a fellow reporter during the Jayson Blair fiasco and saying, in a less than sober way, that fakers like Blair should get the death penalty.

I thought that throwing him in front of a train had a nice, dramatic quality to it.

People appalled by such sentiments don't understand how much integrity meant to reporters. We joked all the time about the clowns we covered (and worked for) but deep down our attitude was as serious as you could get.

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Lol I can imagine that! “Man, Train Collide.”

Although Jayson at least had a crack problem. It’s the sober editors I don’t get… You hit a chord when you reminiscence about the seriousness that was there once. I remember listening to my father talk about a colleague who got something wrong. It was like someone died in the office.

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My first job was at my hometown newspaper in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

One afternoon the editor, an old-school "just the facts, ma'am" type, got a complaint about an error in an obit.

He went from person to person in the tiny newsroom quizzing each individual about whether he or she had written the erroneous obituary.

Finally he found the one who'd made the mistake. The flustered scribe said meekly that he'd "assumed" that the mistaken information had been true.

Walt, the editor, bellowed "You assumed!" to make sure everyone witnessed the humiliation of their fellow journo.

The message was clear: This is serious business. Don't fuck around.

We didn't make much money but that didn't matter because we were hooked.

Years ago I read a short story about academics worried about cost-cutting

measures. One of the characters says the administrators "must never know how much we love our work and how easy it is for us."

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Journalism was serious business before 9/11. For years, my brother wrote for a respected guitar magazine. In the 90s, they had a roster of great writers and errors, even typos were a badge of shame. They'd get nose to nose arguing about what type of guitar strings Jeff Beck used, they were that serious. It was inspiring to see young guys taking their craft seriously. And they weren't

even writing about life and death matters.

Today the mainstream is all "Advocacy Journalism" to use a George Soros term.

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The ethical standards have been tossed away, for pure greed. Look at what Letitia James is doing. Look at what Fani Willis is doing. Look at Judge Engeron. Same church, different pew.

I’m a fan of professional golf. Literally, every pro golfer learns, and it’s unquestioned, that one has to call penalties on oneself. So, many of our political representatives and in the media have lower standards than golfers. Good grief!

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Jayson's crack problem is new to me. Possibly regarded as an asset by the DEI Times management. As for the "seriousness that once was," you've reminded me of my meeting with a Times executive on a Maine beach circa 1970, the father of a friend met that summer. He was intelligent, fair and respected. I only met him once. He gave me good advice merely by being who he was. An unforgettable event. Alas, he and his wife lost their lives when their plane crashed on the coast of Canada about 1998.

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Objectivity I was shocked to learn is now a dirty word in the new journalism. The logic of which is Orwellian , self-righteous, self-important and crusading.

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Sadly, yes.

Once-great news organizations like the NYT, WaPo and CNN are now propaganda mills.

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All by design in Mao's America. If you haven't heard of it, check out the book by Xi Van Fleet. A warning to American's.

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Too busy writing "their truth" to write the the truth. "After finishing college in 1991, Rutenberg began working for the New York Daily News as a gossip stringer." Word on the street is that gossip writers warp their minds around who might be fing whom.

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This was around the same time cable channels took reruns of "The Apprentice" off the air because it "humanized Donald Trump". The pettiness of it is nauseating.

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Wow ! Its a full court, all hands on deck effort to prevent Trump from being re- elected.. Nothing that counters the dehumanizing efforts against him can be allowed.

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What's encouraging, though, is the more they attack Trump, the more popular he becomes. Seems to indicate public trust in MSM is dwindling. For the record, I'm no Trump fan, but I knew from day 1 of "Russiagate" that it was all BS, and I've since so enjoyed being vindicated.

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Watching that train wreck a time or two put me ahead of the pack in predicting a Trump win. The con, the threats, the marketing, intimidations, anything goes, the “I’m the boss” attitude.which to many American workers means he alone can get things done. Many can identify with a fuck up who breaks all the rules.

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1984 Should be required reading .

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I'm just a working class yahoo so I used to rely on you people to point out when the bastards in power were lying to me & manipulating me.

Now I approach the news as if it were written on opposite day. If a major news organization tells me I need to look right these days I just automatically look left.

I know it's not much of a strategy but my options seem limited these days.

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I do that, too! You'd have to be a brain-dead zombie not to! Just look at all the fake news since 2015 or so: Trump is a Russian asset, Trump is a racist, all cops are racist pigs, "mostly peaceful protests," "summer of love" (as cities were burning), Covid came from a wet market, the shots will stop transmission & protect against the virus; well, at least the shots will keep you out of the hospital, the shots are totally safe! Then there was January 6th, in which a bunch of boomers & Gen X folks armed with nothing but cell phones and Trump banners attempted to "stage a coup," followed by the Afghanistan debacle, the CIA mucking around in Ukraine to start a proxy war, etc. . .

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Did you ever see any old Oprah shows where Oprah says some sort of cliched platitude & the whole damn audience nods in unison? That used to creep me out no end.

Now that the entire Democratic Party has seemingly mutated into an Oprah audience, gleefully nodding away at absurdities, I have come to realize that I didn't know the meaning of "creeped out."

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I had a similar epiphany some years ago, but it took Glenn Greewald to hit me over the head.

Greenwald said during the Obama regime: "If you want to know what Obama's going to do, just listen to what he says and turn it around 180 degrees. If he says he's seeking peace, war's coming".

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Good ole Barack Bush, as I used to call him.

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Here let me use the phrase "these days" one more time just for good measure.

Sheesh!

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I've actually been using the phrase "in the before times" to describe life before 2015 or so, when I first started noticing something was seriously off.

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1984 Is arriving , just 40 years late

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A lot of people saying it these days.

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right but the problem really is the supine who chide you for looking to the left. "They told you not to do that!" those are the ones stifling speech and are the most dangerous as they are our friends and family. the best example of the women who refuse to say anything as transgender men invade their most private spaces.

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Exactly - "DO NOT do your own research" said the CNN Potato, Brian Stelter. "That's DANGEROUS! Listen to the eXpErts!"

What's now called "misinformation" used to be called "opposing viewpoints".

CNN Indoctrination Kids

https://youtu.be/Mn-EQg9bODI?si=DgBQjDK43CseoJ3F

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Exactly. The more someone is vilified by MSM, the more I love them.

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Your approach to "news" consumption is not irrational given the near total structural rot throughout our media system.

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One could say the good ship Integrity has sailed, but in truth it sank when the crew began punching holes in the hull to drain the bilge water.

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03/17/24: John, it will hearten you to know that the evening of November 5, 2024, Rutenberg (why are all these spoiled brats reared in suburban Philadelphia?!) will be thunderstruck with fear and self-loathing. Guaranteed. Now, for a trip back to the past with a journalist with integrity, order "Looking For Trouble," by Virginia Cowles.

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I think suburban PA means MAIN LINE but they say "suburban" to sound like everyday people and they are not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Main_Line

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That's exactly what I though when I saw "suburban PA". The Main Line is Old Money in a way a wild colonial boy from California like me barely understands, but I've read about it and seen Gilligan's Island. I imagine Thurston Howell III would fit in nicely there.

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Good point. Of course, given Rutenberg's craven character, his point of origin could be anywhere (my guess is the Martha Stewart-endowed Convict's Maternity Ward in the Federal Alderson prison camp in West Virginia).

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"Kelly for Brickwork"

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When my family moved there in 1964, when I was in 8th grade, it was rock ribbed conservative Republican, and the Suburban and Wayne Times was as conservative a paper as you could find.

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Biden's defeat is not inevitable.

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I think the fix is in. I have no idea what form that takes, but I'm sure they're working on it. We'll have another season where Trump is leading at the end of the night, but then they'll keep counting votes and counting votes until the moment Biden is ahead and, at that instant, the counting will stop. And those who complain - or even question - will be prosecuted.

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I live in Phoenix, & I fully expect the Dems to steal the 2024 election, just like they stole the 2020 and 2022 elections. Our legislature has not been able to pass meaningful election reform measures, so I know they'll just keep counting ballots until Biden is ahead. He'll probably get 90 million votes this time around.

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Living in Illinois, it is given.

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French President Macron made a declarative public statement "as far as I'm informed, I don't think Donald Trump will be the next president". Huh? I wonder who told him that? And I think you're right. The 2020 election was fishy as hell. Rock-ribbed republican Kari Lake lost the governor's race in Arizona to a woke, upspeaking, vocal-fry-effecting twit. The chance of that happening is lower than the chance of Trump winning the vote in San Francisco.

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Yep.

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After the TikTok, ban has basically given Biden the censorship power, oddsmakers now lay even odds on a Biden victory.

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I wonder who read the whole Bill. Another Government grab.

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Correct. Pray tell, what happens on November 3rd? (I don't know, but I definitely do not like what I see).

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His victory is not inevitable, either. Vote!

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Addendum (03/19/24 3 am): Square that with the data telling me that November 5, 2024 will be the worst day of Jack Smith's miserable little life.

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Good to know that integrity is still a prized quality amongst other journalists. Thanks.

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Jayson Blair! A haha joke-boy-fool NPC from wayback. DEI anyone?

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I'm amazed that he didn't get a post-scandal Pulitzer Prize.

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Well, when the DOJ attorneys defending PFIZER (a private company) cites an editorial article in JAMA as a defense for dismissing a very big FRAUD case re the fake, botched "vaccine" clinical trials (Brook Jackson vs Ventavia Research Group), something has gone very wrong with our legal system.

"The United States should not be required to expend resources on a case that is inconsistent with its public health policy." -because a couple of doctors claimed the covid vaccines saved millions of lives?? They show no data, it's an editorial (opinion) article!!

https://open.substack.com/pub/sashalatypova/p/department-of-justice-admits-pharmaceutical?r=r7n8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Sharyl Attkisson does a 10 min TED Talk about how the media/govt plants misinformation articles, especially using Wikipedia, then they use those articles as "proof" of their stance.

Astroturf and manipulation of media messages-Sharyl Attkisson

https://youtu.be/-bYAQ-ZZtEU?si=XAYOCbaHANb-gPf5

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So glad Matt moved on and organized Racket News. It's been a blessing for me.

The NYT story is appalling and a pitiful attempt to discredit the work that Matt & colleagues have done to defend our First Amendment rights, which the NYT seems to be taking for granted.

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Free speech for me, but not for thee. Nor thee, thee, thee...

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I think the Times sees a huge chasm between their own First Amendment rights which are sacred, and our First Amendment rights which are an abomination.

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Right. That goes to their moral vanity.

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Same a-holes elites who covered up the Holocaust because us ordinary Americans weren't ready to hear about it.

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Apparently we’re not smart enough to have them? Might be too dangerous to ourselves?

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I'd substitute "seems to be taking for granted" with "appears all too willing to sacrifice for seemingly political and personal ends."

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Nailed it, cheers. Ask not for...

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Perhaps most puzzling is that, having tried "advocacy journalism" for eight years, and having experienced massive losses of public trust, subscribers, and newsroom jobs, they seem to draw no connection whatsoever between the two.

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They also tend to neglect the business of journalism.

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Only when the subsidized pay ends and it negatively affects them personally, will they change. I thoroughly believe these TV "news" anchors like Savanah Guthrie, Lester Holt, et al, have been promised some prestigious position once the "big takeover" is complete.

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Lester got his dream job, co-hosting the true crime show Dateline.

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"It reminds me of the queen in Snow White who gave up her own beauty and became an old lady just to give Snow a poisoned apple in a failed attempt to bring her down. And so the media relinquished its respected reputation just to bring The Donald down" --- Don Surber (March 14, 2024).

Mr. Surber continues:

NYT’s fair-haired boy Jim Rutenberg whose research seemed to consist of talking to Carolyn Ryan, The New York Times’s senior editor for politics, wrote the media manifesto. He made excuse after excuse after excuse for turning the news media into a propaganda machine.

Rutenberg ended his piece, “As Ms. Ryan put it to me, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is ‘extraordinary and precedent-shattering’ and ‘to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous with readers.’

“It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.

“It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

Rutenberg is wrong. The solemn duty of those in the news trade is to tell the truth. They ain’t and we no longer care about their little stories and their melodramatic problems. The failure of the press to maintain its credibility makes reporters the Kakapos of the birdbrain world.

[End Don Surber. The Kakapos is an endangered bird species.]

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The solemn duty of the news is not to give us the Truth. It is to report the details of what is occurring so that readers can determine what is likely true. Truth is always elusive, but a firm grasp of who, what, when and how yields a pretty good grasp on why. The Times has largely abandoned this type of reporting. Perhaps because they can’t trust the public to reach the “correct” conclusions.

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Strange. I don't remember Mr. Rutenberg soliciting my views on the wisdom of what was supposedly done on this reader's behalf. How many other readers had input into the decision, I wonder. Did he conduct a survey?

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One must not challenge the omnipotence of The Almighty New York Times. Even when it's apparent that the King Has No Clothes.

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Nice how he manages to turn journalistic integrity into a "campaign's definition of fairnes" ... some petty, squabbly detail. The loftier ideal is to be "true... in a way that will stand up to history's judgment." History's judgment? We already know what that will be?

It gets harder and harder for me to believe these people take themselves seriously.

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He's saying all things must serve the revolution- the means justify the ends.

"History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian."

Marx, Speech at Anniversary of The People’s Paper (1856)

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"For days, I was haunted by ... those frozen, twisted bodies of the [Russian] 44th Division [annihilated in Finland in early 1940]...

'[T]he story ... was typical of the whole blundering strategy for which the dictatorship of the proletariat now paid freely with the lives of the proletariat."

--- Virginia Cowles, "Looking for Trouble," Faber & Faber 2021 reprint of the Harper 1941 edition (03-18-24).

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03/18/24: Trust me, they take themselves very, very seriously. "Humorless c*nts," as the Brits say. This enables the Rutenbergs to be able to justify / glorify their fascist attacks on the 1st Amendment (the protections of which only apply to THEM and whatever THEY say and print).

[My definition of American fascism is simple: This ideology justifies attacking/destroying the First Amendment to the American constitution. Period.]

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This is a fantastic comment on a nauseating trend.

Let me do a quick translation for those who like me, are bewildered by Rutenberg's doublespeak.

"It's MSM journalism's job to pre-write history in a way that supports the centralized, dystopic future our globalist paymasters want us to write."

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You aced it!

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“ disingenuous to their readers”….. LOL!! a that is all they are!!!!!

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Update (03/18/24): Carolyn Ryan's Wikipedia profile (03/18/24), and her role in the sordid nest of vipers on Eighth Avenue opposite the Port Authority building:

"Ryan is the managing editor of The New York Times...having worked there since 2007... She previously worked as the deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe ... In 2018, she won NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists leadership award."

And to confirm that she's a Clone of Political / Social Intolerance:

https://www.google.com/search?q=carolyn+ryan+new+york+times&sca_esv=cd43192195f14f59&sca_upv=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACQVn0_CbC-3p28Ps2T5IA-E69gMGqp0yg%3A1710790938728&source=hp&biw=1024&bih=499&ei=Gpn4ZdLZKdDR0PEPv_CwmA8&iflsig=ANes7DEAAAAAZfinKpScXribI6xa8c3Md7g6iUQGBJoU&oq=carolyn+ryan+&gs_lp=EgNpbWciDWNhcm9seW4gcnlhbiAqAggAMgUQABiABDIEEAAYHjIGEAAYCBgeMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYMgcQABiABBgYSOk-UABYjCZwAHgAkAEAmAHNAaABlQeqAQYxNC4wLjG4AQHIAQD4AQGKAgtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ5gCDaAC8gbCAggQABiABBixA5gDAJIHBjEyLjAuMaAH6D0&sclient=img

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Thank the gods that you did, Matt! You have been a candle in the darkness. Your gift of expression is their way of sending Truth as elixir!

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Hey Matt, a favor, please. Press Jim to explain how his own infamous call for an end to objectivity in journalism is, in all substantive and identifiable ways, different from a demand that "journalists" constantly misinform the public?

Follow-up question: given that the NYT has a reach several thousand times your own, and that of almost any other outlet, hasn't JR's proposed approach to abandoning objectivity, made the NYT provably the single largest private source of misinformation on the planet since 2016, outside of social media, - and made Jim Rutenberg the Typhoid Mary of the recent collapse of trust in modern media. I'd love to hear him try to explain his way out of this fact pattern.

Jim's not alone, of course, plenty of outlets including lots on the right long ago abandoned any pretense to objectivity. Can't express really my own gratitude for your efforts. Many thanks.

Update: Trump is likely already preparing to deploy "the NYT is the Wuhan lab of the fake news epidemic killing journalism in America today" meme.

Jim Gutenberg, the Typhoid Mary of the misinformation epidemic works. As does: JT the NYT newsman who managed to destroy an entire industry almost single handed. JT editorial gave every dishonest hack and editor the green light to go full Morning Joe, all day every day.

(Edited lightly for clarity and color.)

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I’m so glad you did!

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If Rutenberg's 2016 article prompted Matt to change jobs, then at least it produced one positive result. Unfortunately the larger effect was that most reporters and publications voluntarily converted themselves into unreadable (and ultimately redundant) political tools.

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"As a former journalist I found the article to be one of the most offensive things I'd ever read."

True, but at some level I appreciate that he was willing to make it clear what the new reporting standard at the New York Times was. Same with Leonard Downie Jr. at the Washington Post:

"Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust

By Leonard Downie Jr.

January 30, 2023 at 7:15 a.m. EST"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/

At least now it's clear to all what the situation is.

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If someone tells me he's a sellout and a weasel who doesn't deserve to be taken seriously I suppose there's a certain value in that.

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Marty Baron's response was also worth reading, but I believe his is the minority opinion in newsrooms these days.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/24/journalism-objectivity-trump-misinformation-marty-baron/

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WTAF?!

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Same. It was unbelievable. The article made everything clear to me. It turned me from a disappointed Bernie supporter into full-on Trump supporter. Fuck those assholes.

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the strangest thing about all of that is that Trump was primarily a threat to obscure standards that few outside of Washington even knew existed. How many times did they freak out because he broke some "precedent" that was established in the 1980's and was never any sort of law, much less important?

Really, for everything, Trump's cardinal sin for these people is that they feel he has poor decorum. That is a fair criticism of Trump, it just isn't nearly as important as they think it is. But they are Pharisees through and through, they care far more about the liturgy and rules of government than its meaning or function.

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I suspect the Borg hates Trump for a number of reasons.

One has to be his habit of mocking them publicly, of saying the emperor has no clothes.

That unnerves them because they know it's true -- they are frauds, transparently so.

Another reason is that, rhetorically at least, he seems to back a more nationalist approach in contrast to their globalist, America Last, philosophy.

The most important reason is related to the first: sometimes Trump tells the truth. The Borg cannot withstand a steady barrage of facts because it's based on lies.

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he tells his version of the truth sometimes, but it is indeed things they feel can't be said.

I think a lot about Taibbi talking about how he was in the press pool at an early even and none on of the other journos understood why riffing on them was working with the crowd .

The big thing though, is also as Taibbi has said, Trump's description of a ruling class that wins every time while your job gets shipped to China was broadly correct, even if his solutions were less so.

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The glorious passion of Donald Trump....

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Yep! That comment says all we need to know.

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The NYT, New York Toilet, is where Deep State takes its dumps.

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“ The Rubbish they Choose to Publish”……

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The Deep State is in MIAMI FLORIDA AND NASHVILLE. Tennessee and Colorado Springs Colorado. IT is centered in Kansas ask Ambrose Bierce or Lyman Frank Baum or Thomas Frank.

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There is no such thing as a Conservative Contraian it is an OXYMORON.

It is Abracadabra and Hocus Pocus and totally out of focus.

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Why do you care?

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why don’t you think there is no such thing….when the world is fillred with such idiotic ideas…being contrarian is being conservative…not swallowing the codswallop is contrarian

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