The Gray Lady Ain't What She Used to Be.

[AnBr]

Taking into account that the population was a lot smaller before 1939...

[LFC]

Mar 5, 2022 3:05:50 GMT AnBr said:

Taking into account that the population was a lot smaller before 1939...

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Also, who is "Gary" Lady?

[AnBr]

Mar 5, 2022 4:54:47 GMT LFC said:

Also, who is "Gary" Lady?

One type of typo I am subject to committing is what I call a finger spoonerism where one finger fires too soon, inverting two letters.

[LFC]

Mar 5, 2022 11:46:21 GMT AnBr said:

Mar 5, 2022 4:54:47 GMT LFC said:

Also, who is "Gary" Lady?

One type of typo I am subject to committing is what I call a finger spoonerism where one finger fires too soon, inverting two letters.

I'm not sure why but this sounds vaguely dirty.

[indy]

Mar 5, 2022 11:46:21 GMT AnBr said:

Mar 5, 2022 4:54:47 GMT LFC said:

Also, who is "Gary" Lady?

One type of typo I am subject to committing is what I call a finger spoonerism where one finger fires too soon, inverting two letters.

'o' and 'r' seem to be my most used version of this, and 'from' appears as 'form' in a shocking amount of my typing.

[indy]

Mar 5, 2022 3:05:50 GMT AnBr said:

Taking into account that the population was a lot smaller before 1939...

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If they are unable to check the statement, why isn't this simply 'we don't know how true this is?' rather than partially true? Partially true also means partially false and how can they say that when by their own admission they can't check it?  They should have skipped this 'fact check'.

[LFC]

This is just pathetic.

The NYT Is Well Conditioned To Bogus GOP Attacks

An otherwise helpful story on the massive $350 billion in loans and guarantees for clean energy and automobiles included in the Inflation Reduction Act gives way to pearl-clutching over the kind of bogus narrative Republicans might come up with to attack the program. So well-conditioned is the Times to GOP bad faith attacks that it goes ahead and preemptively draws the comparison to Solyndra:

But like all government efforts to aid industry and advance new technologies, the expansion of the loan authority carries risks for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, who passed the bill without any Republican votes. About a decade ago, conservatives seized on the failure of Solyndra, a solar company that had borrowed about $500 million from the Energy Department, to criticize the Obama administration’s climate and energy policies.

Oh noes! It “carries risks.”

I wonder how many fossil fuel articles have brought up previous (and current) oil spills, natural gas venting, fracking groundwater contamination, etc. But yeah, let's bring up one failed company from over a decade ago.

[LFC]

While this is a somewhat general indictment of America's MSM it specifically calls out the NYT.

This is the thread he wrote countering the NYT's narrative.

A brief, somewhat nerdy thread written because of an belief on US public opinion and war expressed in this @nytimes editorial--which is widely shared but actually has little evidence to support it. That is that US public opinion loses interest in wars.

The idea that US public opinion on war is fickle and has a short attention span is widespread. The editorial is a argues that Ukraine needs to make concessions because US public opinion could do just that.

The real problem with this assumption is that there is almost no evidence for it beyond people thinking its true. There has actually been a huge amount of academic work on US opinion and wars, which shows a few things that puncture this lazy assumption.

One thing is that US public opinion is far more 'sticky' than people think. This study by John Mueller on US public opinion and the war on terror argues that the public actually is not easy to manipulate once it has made up its mind. jstor.org/stable/resrep3…

Here's what America's supposed loss of interest and support. Another poll posted over on the Ukraine thread showed the majority of Americans felt our military support of Ukraine was either at the right level or not enough.

✙ Kevin ✙ 🇺🇦🇮🇳🇬🇧🇪🇺
@mr_Kevin_1997

this polling data backs up what you were saying a few months ago

ian bremmer
@ianbremmer

% of americans who say the united states should continue to provide weapons to ukraine

august 2022: 51%
october 2022: 66%

-reuters/ipsos

[goldenvalley]

Oct 7, 2022 17:21:40 GMT LFC said:

While this is a somewhat general indictment of America's MSM it specifically calls out the NYT.

This is the thread he wrote countering the NYT's narrative.

A brief, somewhat nerdy thread written because of an belief on US public opinion and war expressed in this @nytimes editorial--which is widely shared but actually has little evidence to support it. That is that US public opinion loses interest in wars.

The idea that US public opinion on war is fickle and has a short attention span is widespread. The editorial is a argues that Ukraine needs to make concessions because US public opinion could do just that.

The real problem with this assumption is that there is almost no evidence for it beyond people thinking its true. There has actually been a huge amount of academic work on US opinion and wars, which shows a few things that puncture this lazy assumption.

One thing is that US public opinion is far more 'sticky' than people think. This study by John Mueller on US public opinion and the war on terror argues that the public actually is not easy to manipulate once it has made up its mind. jstor.org/stable/resrep3…

Here's what America's supposed loss of interest and support. Another poll posted over on the Ukraine thread showed the majority of Americans felt our military support of Ukraine was either at the right level or not enough.

✙ Kevin ✙ 🇺🇦🇮🇳🇬🇧🇪🇺
@mr_Kevin_1997

this polling data backs up what you were saying a few months ago

The reporters and pundits perhaps were losing interest back in August. They project that onto the rest of us. Right now though, interest is high again.  

PS I wish they would lose interest in Hershal Walker's support for actual abortions.  I already know he's a hypocrite on this subject.

[LFC]

How can a new outlet that expects to be graded on their accuracy employee this asshat? It's like they're so desperate for "balance" that they'll hire a serial liar just to get it.

Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist with a long history of bad conservative takes—the same man who decided to quit Twitter after he threw a fit over being called a bedbug—says he’s changed. In an essay for the Times opinion section published Friday, Stephens claims that a visit to Greenland changed his mind on climate change, but the uniquely infuriating essay is still full of Stephens-style bullshit, horrible design choices from the Times, and bad faith arguments on climate. Not much has changed, it seems.

Despite being billed as a redemptive arc for Stephens’s former skepticism, the piece is filled with typical Stephens-style bad faith arguments that make it clear he is still not prepared to listen to experts on climate. It’s very clear from this piece that he is not all that concerned about what science is telling us about the worst-case scenarios, and is mostly focused on fighting the specific brand of leftist climate alarmists he—and many conservative thinkers—have decided are real, and more of a threat than warming temperatures themselves.

After acknowledging the reality of warming and the disaster befalling the glacier, Stephens spends much of the piece decrying government solutions as ineffective, too radical, unpopular and not necessary. Instead, he tells us, the markets must handle the changes we need. Along the way, he provides a lot of whataboutisms and flawed presentations of climate science that seem specifically designed to drive anyone who has been working on climate insane.

One obvious bad faith segment that caught my eye: Stephens quotes Steve Koonin, a former Obama administration official turned climate denier favorite talking head, on Greenland’s melt. Koonin, Stephens writes, “thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.” This claim of Koonin’s has been debunked multiple times by scientists; there is no note in the piece explaining that the claim is false. (We asked the Times if this passage was fact-checked or if the paper considered adding a caveat explaining that this is scientifically inaccurate; a spokesperson told us that it “was only introduced in order to dispute it, not quote it as a persuasive source,” as Stephens writes that he is “less sure” about claims like Koonin’s since visiting Greenland. We asked the Times to clarify if there was ever a discussion about specifically citing Koonin’s claims as false, and will update this piece if they respond.)

One of the most intensely ironic elements of the piece is that Stephens goes an entire essay without mentioning the powerful monied forces in the U.S. that have kept climate action from becoming effective. Stephens is all too eager to critique government-led responses to climate change, but he fails to address how in the U.S., at least, a carbon tax—one of the most basic climate policies out there—was rejected by President Obama after a previous effort to get a tax in place failed miserably thanks to Republican control of Congress. (It’s ironic that Stephens is writing this piece following the passage of the first national climate bill the U.S. has ever passed, and yet the Inflation Reduction Act gets no mention whatsoever.)

It would be one thing if Brett published this essay in a newsletter or a blog post. It would fit well with his old employers at the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page (although any acknowledgement that climate science has merit and that there are things to be concerned about may be too liberal for even them). But Brett is on staff at the New York Times, which seems determined to counter the really excellent work many of its other staff produce on climate in an ill-advised effort to appear bipartisan. Stephens has long excelled in the kind of whataboutism that the Times has demonstrated it is not prepared to fact-check or edit, and this piece unfortunately illustrates that too well.

The design of this piece—and the money and resources that clearly went into it—is, frankly, pretty embarrassing. From the jump, the images and design of the layout serve to reinforce the bad-faith statements Stephens makes. “Yes, Greenland’s ice is melting…” the headline reads on first load of the page; as the user scrolls, a “BUT…” appears, like a horrible textual representation of a Mr. Gotcha. The piece continues with a series of these, like a nonsensical book of Mad Libs:

[goldenvalley]

Oct 28, 2022 22:07:09 GMT LFC said:

How can a new outlet that expects to be graded on their accuracy employee this asshat? It's like they're so desperate for "balance" that they'll hire a serial liar just to get it.

Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist with a long history of bad conservative takes—the same man who decided to quit Twitter after he threw a fit over being called a bedbug—says he’s changed. In an essay for the Times opinion section published Friday, Stephens claims that a visit to Greenland changed his mind on climate change, but the uniquely infuriating essay is still full of Stephens-style bullshit, horrible design choices from the Times, and bad faith arguments on climate. Not much has changed, it seems.

He watched Greenland melt and has now seen that he was wrong in his denial?  Reminds me of Senator Inhofe with his snowball on the Senate floor saying "See here is snow.  There is no global warming!" only in reverse.   

And really the market is going to fix all this, not the government?  Well it'll take both but the market won't move unless prompted either by standards set by the government or a bunch of subsidies and tax cuts to incentivize the market into doing something.

[LFC]

NYT has an interesting point of view on the Frisch-Boebert race. At that time the tally was over 90%, had Frisch in the lead, and remaining counts were expected to lean Frisch. 

[LFC]

Ugh.

[goldenvalley]

Dana Milbank at WaPo had some words about not just NYT, but all major papers and tv pundits. His conclusion:

The news media took the faulty assumption that Republicans would enjoy a red wave and plugged in explanations for the imagined outcome. Democrats blew it because they spoke too much about abortion and democracy, and too little about the economy and crime. (In fact, crime and the economy figured prominently in many Democratic campaigns.)

What happened that made them think that?

I was baffled. What were they seeing that I and, more important, the Democratic operatives I spoke to weren’t seeing? Back in mid-August, I wrote a column titled “Why that red wave might end up a ripple.” I noted that Democrats had pulled even on the “generic ballot” — which party voters prefer for Congress — at a time in the cycle when the incumbent president’s party is almost always losing ground. Democrats’ standing receded slightly since then, but the contests remained extremely tight. The races were stable, both in public polling and in the private polling I had seen.

So what happened? Political journalists were suckered by a wave of Republican junk polls in the closing weeks of the campaign. They were also swayed by some reputable polling organizations that, burned by past failures to capture MAGA voters, overweighted their polls to account for that in ways that simply didn’t make sense. And reporters fell for Republican feints and misdirection, as Republican operatives successfully created an artificial sense of momentum by talking about how they were spending money in reliably blue areas.

It was telling that Republican campaigns didn’t release their own polls to confirm the dubious results Trafalgar and Rasmussen were producing. Still, such polling helped skew handicapping websites. RealClearPolitics, for example, moved Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) into “toss-up” status in the closing days of his reelection bid. Bennet beat his Republican opponent by double digits.

A couple of reputable polls also came up with some suspicious conclusions. Three weeks ago, a New York Times-Siena College poll caused a news media sensation when it found Republicans with a four point advantage in the generic ballot. (A Monmouth University poll found a similar GOP advantage.) But the Siena poll showed that women were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, at 47-47. Had the gender gap disappeared entirely for the first time in modern history? Or was there something screwy with the weighting?

[LFC]

Ouch.

[LFC]

Another hammer on a really, really stupid premise. If you can't tell what positions Musk supports then you don't belong in a job where you report and expound on politics.

[goldenvalley]

I was reading some idle chat in a Lawyers Guns and Money post that was off topic but interesting.   The writers said reporters and pundits are always looking for nuance, for something complicated and they assume everyone uses nuance.  That's why they keep looking for Trump's ultimate plan or the reasons behind what he says or does.  Same with Musk.  But the bottom line is that these two people say whatever pops into their heads at any given moment.  Like I said earlier...live nerves reacting to stimuli.  There is no thought, just raw emotion and narcissism.

[andydp]

Dec 12, 2022 16:57:00 GMT goldenvalley said:

I was reading some idle chat in a Lawyers Guns and Money post that was off topic but interesting.   The writers said reporters and pundits are always looking for nuance, for something complicated and they assume everyone uses nuance.  That's why they keep looking for Trump's ultimate plan or the reasons behind what he says or does.  Same with Musk.  But the bottom line is that these two people say whatever pops into their heads at any given moment.  Like I said earlier...live nerves reacting to stimuli.  There is no thought, just raw emotion and narcissisms 

The story is recorded during WWII when Pres Roosevelt made the "Unconditional Surrenderer" (of the Axis) a goal.  He was asked about it.  He said he was thinking of Gen Grant and how he had been nicknamed Unconditional Surrender Grant.  So he thought it was a good phrase to use, when dealing with the Axis.  

Maybe this "pop in their heads" theory is common on both sides of the leadership street.

[LFC]

More journalistic malpractice from the NYT. Apparently they can't even tell the difference between a scam program where immigrants are lied to, promised aid, and then dumped on the street in another state in winter with no resources and a program that provides aid to help immigrants get to places where they have actual connections and support. Cuz, you know, same thing. Here's the lead paragraph. I wish I could say "Unbelievable!" and mean it.

New York officials, who once condemned Texas leaders for busing migrants from the southern border, calling the treatment inhumane, are buying bus tickets for newcomers who want to go north and seek asylum in Canada.

The article goes on to describe people being met and helped with their plans. Money will be sent to one NY town to help with the number of immigrants going there to cross into Canada. Great job keepin' it real, NYT.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 16, 2023 15:19:42 GMT LFC said:

More journalistic malpractice from the NYT. Apparently they can't even tell the difference between a scam program where immigrants are lied to, promised aid, and then dumped on the street in another state in winter with no resources and a program that provides aid to help immigrants get to places where they have actual connections and support. Cuz, you know, same thing. Here's the lead paragraph. I wish I could say "Unbelievable!" and mean it.

New York officials, who once condemned Texas leaders for busing migrants from the southern border, calling the treatment inhumane, are buying bus tickets for newcomers who want to go north and seek asylum in Canada.

The article goes on to describe people being met and helped with their plans. Money will be sent to one NY town to help with the number of immigrants going there to cross into Canada. Great job keepin' it real, NYT.

Where are the NYT editors...people who actually read the articles before publication who are supposed to say "wait a minute, this is an inaccurate analogy"?  Is NYT being gutted of reporters and editors so it can pay big salaries to opinion writers that offer differing viewpoints?