onfocus

Kate and Josh discuss both campaigns’ closing arguments and the mess at the Washington Post.

This podcast episode is the best discussion I've heard of the Washington Post/Bezos endorsement debacle.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

If you have a billionaire you're basically immune from market forces. But very happy to see people stop supporting a billionaire's unprincipled pet project. Really nice work. I'm going to stop linking to it. (Up next: stop using Twitter?)

I don’t fear that my entire publication will be forced to kowtow to the whims of billionaire trying to make nice with a fascist. I don’t fear that an editor will tell me I can’t publish an article calling Donald Trump a fascist. I don’t have to get anyone to approve it when I say that I, and Citation Needed, wholeheartedly endorse Kamala Harris for president, not because she is perfect but because the other option is violent authoritarianism.

Molly White on the freedom and pain of being an independent journalist.

This early sneak preview of what dictatorship actually looks like is also providing the most important lesson we could have right now, which is how to not obey in advance but stand up against strongmen and bullies. How all of us respond over the coming days and weeks will decide the fate of the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.

More on billionaire capitulation.

On Friday, the Washington Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper would no longer make endorsements for president—after its journalists had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision was made by Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner.

What’s the point of a billionaire owning a newspaper if he can’t use it to promote his interests? Disgusting how ungrateful these billionaires are to the country and institutions that put them in a position to make billions.

The odds grow stronger every day that everything won’t be OK. A radical right-wing faction now fully controls one of our two major political parties and a super-majority in the Supreme Court. Its presidential candidate, a convicted criminal without an ounce of honor or conscience, has made clear his intention to be a dictator if elected. Supporting them is an army of activists who see the finish line in their long march to create an authoritarian — or outright fascist — regime that mocks the will of the majority with increasingly harsh minority rule.

Dan Gillmor is asking journalists to meet the moment.

At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent…You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.

So strange that everyone at the NYT is working on this project to normalize Trump. Shouldn’t there be high profile resignations or some indication of unease from professional journalists?

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

This article really is as good as everyone is saying. Read it on the Internet Archive while you still can. Why it was removed we'll probably never know. cough unhappy rich people cough

Drone armies, expanded overtime pay and over-the-counter birth control pills are just some of the new things Biden has ushered in as president that you might not have heard about.

Things we might know about if we had a functioning media.

In a just world, publishing such confidently incorrect pieces in an actual newspaper would result in the author’s career in opinion journalism coming to an end soon after. This is not a just world. The Post, a real newspaper that people read to learn about the important issues of the day, doesn’t seem to care if their columnists know what they’re talking about.

Trolling the libs for clicks is one way the media makes money. Making money is a higher priority than accuracy.