General Discussion

and my beef isn't necessarily with the nytimes in particular, although they have been getting worse and worse. they do still have their moments of integrity.

but therein lies the problem. the stories selected, the extent of the coverage, the ways the issues are framed, all the bias is strongly and pretty consistently right-wing.

a quick review of "scandals" should make it clear.

massive coverage was devoted to the hillary email nonsense that should have barely been a story at all. she set up a private server to handle non-classified information. without any probable cause of a crime, without any indication of a hack, without any indication of any leak of any classified information, and after 11 investigations and an insane amount of government money and time devoted to laboriously sifting through mountains of emails, they decided to retroactively deem a few items classified and claimed this was the scandal of the century. zero indictments later, hillary lost the election in large part due to the relentlessly negative coverage. the nytimes was only a part of this journalistic malfeasance, though a key player.

meanwhile, donnie has been blatantly and objectively far worse handling materials clearly labeled classified, including stealing them, keeping them poorly secured, sharing them with random guests, etc. he's also been convicted of 34 felonious counts. clearly far worse than anything hillary was accused of. yet the media, nytimes included, treats all this as a mere footnote. they covered those stories and moved on. some how hillary's molehill was a major scandal, but donnie's mountains were remarkable and forgettable.


bill clinton got savaged for his fling with monica. donnie has raped (oh excuse me, sexually assaulted in a way that the judge said amounted to rape) at least one woman, been accused of various kinds us sexual assaults by at least two dozen more, but again, those are just footnotes. hardly worth a mention if you ask the media.

oh, they said what really bothered them about the monica affair was the lying. yeah, except donnie is the most thoroughly documented liar in the history of the world but to the media, that's just donnie being donnie.


the media knows how to destroy political careers with scandals, even if there's not there there. they do it all the time to democrats. gary hart, al franken. the dean scream. meanwhile, donnie is one mind-blowingly massive scandal after another, yet the media refuses to give him the scandal treatment. hell, they hardly ever even use the word scandal.


donnie's entire political career involves the media bending any remaining journalistic principles to give him extensive and undeserved coverage. rule number one in journalism is dump any source that lies to you. spin is one thing, but just plain lies are another. yet the media is happy to go back to the lie machine over and over again.


oh, the hillary email thing? a truly balanced view would have given at least equal coverage to the angle that this was a corrupt abuse of congressional power by republicans to smear a political rival. that was the real and obvious story, but that angle was barely mentioned, and if it was, it was always just presented as the view of a few partisan democrats and hillary supporters.

then when donnie was being tried and convicted of his 34 felonies, he was allowed to rant for 10 minutes or so every single day of the trial in front of the cameras about how the trial was unfair because they found some relative of the judge was a democrat. i think donnie got more time on air to make up baseless complaints about the fairness of the trial than hillary ever got to point of facts about how corrupt the republican investigations into her emails were.


the bias is all over the place. they simply don't treat republicans and democrats the same.