onfocus

Since 2015, there has been this strong desire to make Trump more complicated than he is, as if his power and influence mean that he must have depth and substance. But he doesn’t. Trump is a glorified bully. And like all bullies, he wilts in the face of anyone willing to stand up and say no.

This is a rare good reminder in the NYT. The media needs this invincibility narrative but it doesn’t match reality.

"Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes," according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's good to see fact checking like this happening in the media. It's very difficult to correct lies when the media is flooded with bs, but the attempt to correct the record is important.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

I know it’s true, but it feels rare to see it in print because media organizations typically don’t acknowledge this truth. They usually smooth over reality so they don't offend potential customers and make their owners happy.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

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

Based on the measures developed for the study, the researchers find that in aggregate, after one year online attention towards a deplatformed personality is reduced by 64% on Google and by 43% on Wikipedia.

Deplatforming is an important tool that we shouldn’t throw out as useless.

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions, driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents, that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as plagued by danger and violence.

Questions not covered here: who does rising crime stories serve? Why is the media more eager to report rising crime compared with declining crime?

I can already hear the objections from the Times and its defenders: It’s not our job to make people care about things. Nonsense. Of course the news media plays a central role in determining what people think about. The choices they make about what topics to cover and how much to cover them send a clear signal to the American people about what is important; what is worth thinking about.

Based on the number of mentions, a single poll a year before an election is the most important thing to think about. The consequences of encouraging political violence, not as much.

Repetition is the most important element of communications, but you don’t hear President Biden hammering the theme of freedom, making it clear how close we are to the precipice of authoritarianism and spelling out what that will mean. As a result, many voters seem largely unaware that fundamental American freedoms are at stake.

Great article about why freedom is a much better message for democrats than the economy.

But yet the pundits have already pivoted from “Joe Biden is terrible and unpopular and should be ashamed of himself!” to “The Democrats just shockingly [not shockingly if you understand anything about America right now — Ed.] had yet another great election night, and for that Joe Biden should feel bad, because according to polls, which are the same as elections [No — Ed.], he is terrible and unpopular and should be ashamed of himself!”

Cathartic rant about media Trump thirst.