The 4th Estate Thread Has Surrendered

[Kurth]

If he were able to fix some of the problems we're facing, he could wear sequined Barbie sneakers with light-up soles for all I care.

I think Skechers makes those!

[LordMortis]

But why wasn't he socks?

[Holman]

I'm more worried about the bad tailoring on that Air Force uniform.

[Blackhawk]

But why wasn't he socks?

Two possible reasons. One, those are the kind of slip-on shoes that are designed to work without socks, made with mesh rather than solid material (IE - they're a summer slip-on, not a tennis shoe/sneaker/whatever), and two, the same company makes socks that barely come over the heel to wear under various shoes (IE - he may have actually been wearing socks.)

[Alefroth]

Has there been confirmation he isn't wearing low rise socks? Maybe the House should investigate.

[Jaymann]

Flesh colored socks.

[Kraken]

I wish every day could be a slow news day.

[GreenGoo]

Has there been confirmation he isn't wearing low rise socks? Maybe the House should investigate.

Haha! I get it! Because cocaine and not wearing socks are equally serious offenses!

[Blackhawk]

Haha! I get it! Because cocaine and not wearing socks are equally serious offenses!

At least the socks actually had something to do with Biden to begin with...

[GreenGoo]

Haha! I get it! Because cocaine and not wearing socks are equally serious offenses!

At least the socks actually had something to do with Biden to begin with...

Wait, I thought the house requested a report from the secret service about the presence of cocaine being found. What has that got to do with Biden? I guess he lives there...

[Carpet_pissr]

Has anyone thought to check for the presence of bears in the WH?

[GreenGoo]

Has anyone thought to check for the presence of bears in the WH?

I have yet to see it. Worth watching?

[Blackhawk]

Haha! I get it! Because cocaine and not wearing socks are equally serious offenses!

At least the socks actually had something to do with Biden to begin with...

Wait, I thought the house requested a report from the secret service about the presence of cocaine being found. What has that got to do with Biden? I guess he lives there...

He lives in a huge building with thousands of staff and visitors.

WASHINGTON, July 5 (Reuters) - Cocaine discovered in the White House on Sunday was found in a cubby hole in a West Wing entry area where visitors place electronics and other belongings before going on tours, a source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

I'm pretty sure that, even if he cokes up, Biden doesn't keep his stash in the pre-tour coat check room. According to some lazy googling, the White House gets around 6,000 visitors per day. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to conclude that Biden is about as far down on the suspect list as you can get.

Investigate it? Absolutely. Congress getting involved? Why the hell would they even care?

Oh, right. Biden being blamed for it makes for a great sound bite for a party that doesn't actually need facts. They just need to have it reported that they're looking into it to make Biden the prime suspect (and guilty) in the eyes of their voters, and to make some people on the fence a little doubtful.

[GreenGoo]

Yeah, I understand why you think it's bogus.

I think it's a legitimate request made for bogus (political) reasons.

I don't understand why asking for an actual (legitimate) SS report of an actual (legitimate) event is so outrageous. The report exists, presumably, just give it to them. Is the house somehow barred from receiving these reports? Perhaps I am misunderstanding the house's role, as compared to the senate.

Bending data to smear your opponent is just politics as usual. It's practically half of everything that defines politics.

Discussing whether Biden is an actual user or not is a red herring and irrelevant as to whether the house has a right to read these sorts of reports.

[Blackhawk]

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the house's role, as compared to the senate.

No, but I think you're misunderstanding our objections.

I don't think that anybody suggested that they don't have the right. Of course they have the right. That's not what people are rolling their eyes over.

I think it's a legitimate request made for bogus (political) reasons.

That's what it's about. It's the bogus reasoning that people are sick of, mostly because it has been one minor thing after another that the right has tried to turn into a scandal. It's exhausting, and, unfortunately, it's at least somewhat effective. I have heard people parroting their invented criticisms, more than once, people who have started to believe all of the negative, invented press while at the same time those people hand-wave actual corruption and crime.

So we blow off steam about yet another absurd, dishonest, manipulative non-event. That's it - we're blowing off steam, not trying to start a revolution over a pinch of powder or lack of socks.

[Pyperkub]

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the house's role, as compared to the senate.

No, but I think you're misunderstanding our objections.

I don't think that anybody suggested that they don't have the right. Of course they have the right. That's not what people are rolling their eyes over.

I think it's a legitimate request made for bogus (political) reasons.

That's what it's about. It's the bogus reasoning that people are sick of, mostly because it has been one minor thing after another that the right has tried to turn into a scandal. It's exhausting, and, unfortunately, it's at least somewhat effective. I have heard people parroting their invented criticisms, more than once, people who have started to believe all of the negative, invented press while at the same time those people hand-wave actual corruption and crime.

So we blow off steam about yet another absurd, dishonest, manipulative non-event. That's it - we're blowing off steam, not trying to start a revolution over a pinch of powder or lack of socks.

Yup. It is *still* the same thing Trump was blackmailing Zelenskyy for. And the *same* approach which worked for Benghazi! and the Email Server.

It is performance politics to throw garbage against the wall in the hopes that it will stick. The other investigative arms *won't* do that in such a way as to achieve the innuendo politics the GOP is so dependent upon driving conspiracy theories.

There is ZERO legislative goal here, which is in VERY stark contrast to the January 6th investigation and legislative needs to clarify the rules to close the loopholes Trump tried to use to overturn the election.

[Pyperkub]

CNBC reporting Dominion have six other law suits warming including Guliani, Lindell, and NewsMax also it's likely Fox will pay out of insurance, so cost?,, meh. They just avoid having to have Murdoch and their personalities take the stand. So it's just a payday for Dominion. Great for them, as Zax says, disappointing for the nation.

Lindell going down the Alex Jones wabbit hole... one wonders whether he will be bankrupted and trying to hide assets based on this:

MyPillow is auctioning off hundreds of pieces of equipment and subleasing manufacturing space after several shopping networks and major retailers took the company's products off shelves.

The Chaska-based manufacturer recently listed more than 850 "surplus equipment" items on the online auction site K-Bid. Sewing machines, industrial fabric spreaders, forklifts and even desks and chairs are up for auction.

Founder and CEO Mike Lindell said MyPillow has experienced a loss in revenue and the items are no longer needed as the company consolidates its operations....

...When asked if the matter of the pending lawsuits has added to the challenges in his business, Lindell said "of course it has."

In April, an arbitration panel ruled that Lindell needed to pay $5 million to a software forensics expert who disproved several of his election claims in a "Prove Mike Wrong" contest. Lindell has challenged that ruling, calling it "frivolous."

"The $5 million is the lowest one," he said. "I will be vindicated in every single one."

[malchior]

Political cartoons don't drive clicks and might offend people so they too must go.

Even during a year of sobering economic news for media companies, the layoffs of three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists on a single day hit like a gut punch.

The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry.

Losing their jobs were Jack Ohman of California’s Sacramento Bee, also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists; Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky and Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Ohman and Siers were full-time staffers, while Pett worked on a free-lance contract. The firings on Tuesday were first reported by The Daily Cartoonist blog.

...

The last full-time editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer was Jim Morin of the Miami Herald in 2017. Since then, owing to the diminishing number of employed cartoonists, the Pulitzers have broadened the category in which they compete and renamed it “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.”

While written editorials can sometimes be ponderous and intimidate readers, the impact of a well-done cartoon is instantaneous, Pett said.

...

“Usually when you look at an editorial cartoon, it’s (done by) some guy like you who is pissed who can draw,” he said. “It’s just relatable.”

While economics is clearly a factor in an industry that has lost jobs so dramatically that many newspapers are mere ghosts of themselves, experts say timidity also explains the dwindling number of cartoonists. Readers are already disappearing, why give them a reason to be angry?

...

McClatchy insists that local opinion journalism remains central to its mission. The Miami Herald, a McClatchy newspaper, won a Pulitzer this year for “Broken Promises,” a series of editorials about a failure to rebuild troubled areas in southern Florida.

In the current atmosphere, however, opinion is less valued. Gannett, the nation’s largest chain with more than 200 newspapers, said last year the papers would only offer opinion pages a couple of days a week. Its executives reasoned that these pages were not heavily read, and surveys showed readers did not want to be lectured to.

That also meant less room for cartoons.

[Holman]

Political cartoons don't drive clicks and might offend people so they too must go.

[...]

Cowards.

I used to ask Eng 101 students if they knew anything about political cartoons and why they mattered. Most would just shake their heads and say they never thought about them.

Then I would pull up a PowerPoint with ten or fifteen of the most-shared and most interesting memes of the past year or so. Students recognized all of them, and they had things to say about them.

Obviously it's not a precise 1:1 correspondence, but the connection is pretty clear.

[Carpet_pissr]

“Readers are already disappearing, why give them a reason to be angry?”

The obscenely successful, rage-mongering Fox News says:

“LOL WUT?!?”

[malchior]

Good lord NY Times. They've sunk to a new low. I don't see the value of platforming that Coulter is crazy. We knew that. Her ideas don't reflect anything actually happening in the real world. I think Stephens cuts through this and highlights how silly this whole thing is. The standards at the NY Times have sunken considerably.

Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted an online conversation with Ann Coulter, who writes the Substack newsletter Unsafe, and Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant, to discuss their expectations for the first Republican debate and the future of American politics.

Frank Bruni: Stuart, I’ve done many of these political roundtables, but never one at a juncture this titanically and transcendentally bizarre. The first Republican debate of the presidential election season is tonight, the party front-runner is absent, and he’s running, oh, infinity points ahead of his Republican rivals despite two impeachments, 91 felony counts and unquantifiable wretchedness. Color me morose.

But also, illuminate me: Given Donald Trump’s lead and its durability, does this debate matter, and how? Is there an argument that it could change the trajectory of this contest?

Stuart Stevens: If a candidate enters the debate with a strategy of taking out another candidate, it can change a trajectory. In the 2012 primary, Mitt Romney did this to Rick Perry in their first debate and again in a subsequent debate to Newt Gingrich. (I was the campaign strategist for that Romney campaign.) But you must go into a debate with the attitude “one of us will walk off this stage alive.” I don’t think anyone has the nerve to do that.

Ann Coulter: I think this is Ron DeSantis’s to lose. If he’d just ignore the media and be the nerd that he is, he’ll do great.

Bruni: Stuart, do you agree that DeSantis has an underappreciated strength and that there’s really a path for him to this nomination? And other than DeSantis, is there anyone on that stage tonight who could have a breakout moment and matter in this nomination contest?

Stevens: DeSantis is Jeb Bush without the charm. He is a small man running for a big job and looking smaller every day. If I were advising Tim Scott or another candidate, I’d advise them to use the debate to attack DeSantis and blow him up. This is a man who lost a debate to Charlie Crist.

Coulter: I’m sorry, but this just shows that you have zero understanding of the country, much less the party. Also, famous last words, but: I don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but you’d really do the country a solid if you could get Democrats to stop indicting him.

[malchior]

Great thread that talks about another paper gutting local reporting.

This is just some of the stuff I’ve done recently. It’s terrible to know the Tribune won’t do work like it anymore.

I am so sorry to the hundreds of thousands in prison, jail or elsewhere in the system. And for the countless more who love them. Mostly, I’m sorry for all Texans.

I have a lot of thoughts about leadership failures that led us here. But I’ll just say I feel for my colleagues who were also laid off, and for the ones left to pick up the pieces.

They weren't failures per se. Oligarchs gutting journalism has been the end goal here.

[malchior]

Will Bunch at the Philly Inquirer takes his peers to the woodshed for their continued malpractice.

They stood on an arena stage in Milwaukee under a massive sign that read “Democracy” — the metaphorical 800-pound gorilla that loomed over this strange political event but was never really discussed. When the dust finally settled after two hours of the first televised debate of the 2024 GOP primaries, nothing — from the rude kids-table outbursts from the impertinent Vivek Ramaswamy to the doomed efforts by Nikki Haley or Mike Pence to be the grown-ups in the room — actually mattered inside the airy Fiserv Forum except for one thing.

All those not-so-wonderful people out there in the dark. A mob that raged, and ultimately ruled.

This audience seemed to only care about The Man Who Wasn’t There — Donald Trump, who was too busy refueling his private jet for his next arrest to bother attending. The restive crowd reached its peak when its bête noire, the anti-Trump turncoat Chris Christie, dared try to challenge Ramaswamy’s outburst that POTUS 45 “was the best president of the 21st century.” It filled the basketball arena with boos.

...

As the night dragged on, the only “issues” the crowd seemed jazzed about were brash challenges to scientific truths that it considers elite liberal pieties — like Ramaswamy’s false claim that climate change solutions have killed more people than climate change — or authoritarian vows of violence, like Ron DeSantis’ promise to render any drug dealers at the border “stone cold dead.” None of the eight people on that stage “won” — only Trump, his angry mob, and a 21st-century brand of American fascism that is the enemy of democracy, the writing on the wall.

If you watched the hours of TV news coverage during an especially momentous week in August, there was little sense of that reality, and for long stretches of pundit blather, none at all — as talking heads gave earnest high school debating marks to candidates who are all but ignored by the GOP voter base. The disconnect deepened the next night as Trump turned what would surely be his comeuppance — his surrender at Atlanta’s bug-infested county jail for fingerprinting and a mug shot ― into an outlaw display of authoritarian force.

It was a remarkable night of imagery over substance, yet there was little discussion of why this accused felon was getting a phalanx of dozens of motorcycle cops, comprising police who are drawn to Trump’s authoritarian bluster like moths to the light. Trump’s glowering mug shot instantly became the most talked about picture in American history — yet not one pundit was able to explain why tens of millions of everyday voters are so eager to return to the White House this man who attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, or why his poll numbers rise with each indictment. I guess the 20th-century author and socialist Upton Sinclair really nailed it when he wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

America is entering its most important, pivotal year since 1860, and the U.S. media is doing a terrible job explaining what is actually happening. Too many of us — with our highfalutin poli-sci degrees and our dog-eared copies of the late Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes — are still covering elections like it’s the 20th century, as if the old touchstones like debates or a 30-second spot still matter.

...

If you watch enough not-Fox cable TV news, you’ll occasionally see an expert on fascism like New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat or Yale’s Timothy Snyder explaining the roots of this American authoritarianism, or you can read a piece like Margaret Sullivan’s Guardian take on the fascist appeal of Trump-clone Ramaswamy. But then it’s back to your regular programming, including a desperate desire to frame today’s clash in the context of long-lost 20th-century democratic norms, and to blame any transgressions on a mysterious “tribalism” that plagues “both sides.”

This weekend, the New York Times’ Peter Baker, an influential news analyst, noted on Twitter/X that in 1994 some 21% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats viewed the other party negatively, which has risen to 62% (GOP) and 54% (Dems). Baker was recommending a story condemning “tribalism,” when what we are really seeing here is the vitriol of an authoritarian movement and the increasing condemnation from those who are appalled by it.

[waitingtoconnect]

Yes but if we have someone who thinks drug dealers should be shot at the border then we need a debate! We need to get a no borders hippie from California Andrew put him against a gun loving maniac from Texas and an even more extreme neo facist from North Dakota!

That’s balance!

[Grifman]

"I want you to answer my question. Three times I've asked it. What did Donald Trump do that was 'downright abhorrent'? It's your words."

https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/169952 ... NcXCfN8s1g

Some of the media is still alive.

[Unagi]

fixed: (I realize at a technical level, X.com still gets the click - but a lot of people don't want to click that link)

[malchior]

A couple of hold outs asking tough questions hardly negates the hypothesis. I'm glad a few folks still will ask tough questions but it's unfortunately still rare. To go a bit deeper, I'm not sure this matters anymore without a broader base. If you look at the story's impact "out there", it has turned into the usual partisan bickering about whether it was fair to 'ambush' him with others saying Mehdi 'destroyed' him. It's just noise. As with everything the problem is 'us'. The media helped break us and now is caught in the vortex as well.

[El Guapo]

I don't know why this is suddenly bothering me, but shouldn't the thread title be "The 4th Estate Has Surrendered Thread"? As it is, it looks like this thread has surrendered.

[ImLawBoy]

I think it's a play on the original title of The Semi-Official Death Watch of the 4th Estate Thread and is intended to say that this thread surrendered.

[El Guapo]

All I'm saying is that I was never consulted on the surrender of this thread.

[stessier]

All I'm saying is that I was never consulted on the surrender of this thread.

We tried but Starlink was down.

[Unagi]

All I'm saying is that I was never consulted on the surrender of this thread.

We tried but Starlink was down.

Which is weird. I get the impression Starlink would be made available for surrender.

[Zarathud]

Only if you pay extra.

[Pyperkub]

Great thread that talks about another paper gutting local reporting.

This is just some of the stuff I’ve done recently. It’s terrible to know the Tribune won’t do work like it anymore.

I am so sorry to the hundreds of thousands in prison, jail or elsewhere in the system. And for the countless more who love them. Mostly, I’m sorry for all Texans.

I have a lot of thoughts about leadership failures that led us here. But I’ll just say I feel for my colleagues who were also laid off, and for the ones left to pick up the pieces.

They weren't failures per se. Oligarchs gutting journalism has been the end goal here.

Texas Trib wasn't oligarchs'fault tho. It was a pure overestimation of revenue growth by the non profit.

https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2023 ... r-layoffs/

Sent from my SM-S908U1 using Tapatalk

[malchior]

Throwback to our government lying to us and the media just going along without any confirmation. They pumped it out and helped stoke some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in our nation's history. None of what is described in the video existed. It was just a series of natural caves the locals knew.

Twenty years later they still haven't admitted they lied to us. Put this on top of Vietnam and you have some of the seeds of the crisis in trust that the plagues our politics. We're well past the point of healing this wound unfortunately.

[Carpet_pissr]

Interesting. If I scan the ol’ database, I don’t recall ever thinking it was anything more than a series of caves.

If, before seeing that video, you had asked me: was the Taliban hiding out in high tech, well equipped bunkers with computers, air and water systems and offices, or caves, I would have said ‘caves’.

[malchior]

There was an intense effort to spin Al-Qaida as some sophisticated operation with immense resources. This was just part of that over the top nonsense. I saw someone post a page of a Fantastic Four headquarters cutaway as a comparison. Lol.

[ImLawBoy]

I definitely remember the spin that Al Qaeda had Bond villain worthy fortresses dug into the mountains.

[Blackhawk]

This is all I see.

[malchior]

David Brooks getting laughed at is a great way to start a day. What an idiot.