Dysfunction at WaPo, NYT, Everywhere

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The WaPo's Malignant Bothsidesery
The Washington Post on Wednesday published an editorial comparing Trump's pardons or sentence commutations of all of the January 6 defendants, including people who committed violence and sedition against the United States, with Biden's pardons of some of his own family members as well as former government officials whom Trump has threatened to prosecute.

The editorial is just as ludicrous as it sounds. It's perhaps the purest distillation yet of the kind of inane false equivalencies and and bothsidesism ("balance") that rules the entire mainstream political media as well as, even more senselessly, the entire mainstream opinion media.

Remarkably, and admirably, veteran Pulitzer-winning Post editor David Maraniss took to social media to decry the paper's grotesquerie: "The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden's questionable pardons with Trump's outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable," he wrote. "The newspaper I've been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul." 

Aside from his family members, Biden pardoned retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Anthony S. Fauci, Biden's former chief medical adviser; and members of the House select committee that investigated Jan. 6 as well as the police officers who testified at their hearings. All of them have been targets of death threats by the MAGA faithful, as well as threats of prosecution from Trump for…well, nothing. They didn't do anything illegal as far as anyone knows. They opposed Trump, or were related to Biden. In Fauci's case, Trump was motivated by his followers who opposed public-health measures during the Covid pandemic and have made Fauci, an octogenarian who has dedicated his life to public service, into some kind of monster.

The editorial's headline: "Pardons from Biden and Trump flout the rule of law: In one day, two presidents set dangerous precedents."

The editorial itself is even worse than the headline would indicate. It is, in fact, outright stupid.

The piece declares that in issuing the pardons, the two presidents helped to "perpetuate America’s divisions." Biden "started the trouble" with his pardons, it says, as if Trump might not have pardoned the Jan. 6 goons if it weren't for that darned Biden. Meanwhile, Trump's "reckless handout risks emboldening militias and others to commit future acts of barbarity in support of political aims. When such violence is tolerated, it happens more often."

See? They're both bad.

It goes on to recount what actually happened on Jan. 6: mayhem and violence committed in an attempt to overthrow the government. Then comes the gut-punch sentence: "Biden’s pardons are a different sort of affront to justice, to be sure."

The "to be sure" statement is a go-to for sophists. It can usually be read as "To be sure, my entire thesis is bullshit, but now back to the thesis." It's a way for them, they believe, to defend themselves from the criticism that will surely come for their making what they know, somewhere in there, is a false or idiotic argument.

But that's not the end of the body blows. The editorial actually states that Biden's pardons "gave credence to Republican accusations that his family profited from his government service, going back to his time as vice president. If they did nothing wrong, they needed no pardons. If they committed crimes, why should they not be held accountable?"

In other words, "Oh, come on. It's not like Donald Trump is going to wield the power of government against innocent people." The editorial acknowledges Trump's threats by saying it's "true that prosecutors can harass people without bringing charges, forcing them to incur significant legal costs. But the Constitution gives every defendant the right to a speedy trial before a jury of peers, the opportunity to avoid self-incrimination and to appeal. Trump has availed himself of these rights, and so can anyone he pursues." (The Constitution also bestows the president with pardon powers, by the way).

Whether Biden's pardons were wise or just can certainly be argued by sentient adults. But that's not what happened here. By all appearances, no fully sentient adults were involved in this thing at all. The Post explicitly drew an equivalence so false it amounts to a straight-up lie, and supported it with arguments that any sentient adult would find laughable.

The once-great newspaper that pressed the Watergate story and the Pentagon Papers story in the 1970s, and has won 76 Pulitzer Prizes since the 1930s, is now explicitly a pro-MAGA propaganda mill, so we can expect a lot more of this. The editorial board and editorial-page editor David Shipley are so far playing right along with owner Jeff Bezos's commands (issued through ghoulish publisher Will Lewis) that the paper be more Trump-friendly. It seems likely that Shipley, a veteran of hack dens like NYT Opinion and Bloomberg Opinion, where he published all kinds of atrocious right-wing material, is fully on board. 

Mercy: So Uncivil
On Tuesday, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, pleaded with Donald Trump (who was in the front pew of the National Cathedral along with his wife Melania, J.D. Vance, and Vance's wife Usha) to please "have mercy" on immigrants and LGBTQ children, whom she said are "scared" by Trump's return to office and the things he plans to do to those people.

This of course created a firestorm, because nobody's sensibilities are offended more easily than those of white conservatives who feel that criticism of Trump is criticism of them. And this wasn't even criticism. To iterate: this Christian clerical leader had asked for the president to have mercy on the people he's targeted, most of whom, she noted, are innocent. And that was too much not only for the fascists, but also for some media outlets. (Trump himself later called Budde "nasty," an epithet he seems to apply most often to women).

The Telegraph, a conservative, British news outlet topped its story with the headline "Trump and Vance ambushed by bishop pleading for ‘mercy’ on trans children: President attacked in sermon at inauguration service for making trans people ‘scared’."

The story itself was a mostly inoffensive, fact-driven report. The Telegraph also dedicated at least two opinion columns to Budde's plea. One, by smirking-fratboy columnist and assistant editor Michael Deacon, was headlined "This woke bishop’s pathetic attack on Trump sums up why he won." The argument here is yet again that the rise of fascism in America is entirely the fault of snooty liberals for insisting that people conform to the most basic standards of human decency. That argument is popular throughout the English-language media.

The New York Times made the case, albeit much more obliquely, in its coverage of the sermon. Here again, the story itself was basically fine, but the summary under the headline was "The direct appeal to President Trump on the first full day of his term was a remarkable moment at a National Cathedral event that traditionally has not been political."

It still isn't "political." The woman asked for mercy. In a church. She's a bishop. That's what they do, or should do. By declaring her remarks "political," the NYT not only echoed what Trump himself said about those remarks (as quoted in the story) but hewed to what seems to be one of its top editorial directives: to make reality itself a matter of "politics," where nothing is right or wrong, or true or false. For the mainstream media, everything is up for debate, and it's the job of journalists to simply lay out the arguments on either side, however ludicrous or evil one side might be.

Trump is No Girly-Man
In just two days, I've noticed several uses of the word "muscular" by reporters and pundits to describe what Trump is doing in office. Today it was  the NYT's Charlie Savage, who wrote in his Wednesday "analysis" piece: "On Monday, as Mr. Trump took the oath of office to begin his second term, he asserted a muscular vision of presidential power." Savage's first example: Trump's order that officials refrain from enforcing the TikTok ban. How muscular!

Savage is not alone. NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, shared the piece on social media, also including the word "muscular" as if it were perfectly normal. CBS News reporter Camilo Montoya-Galves opened his story about Trump's immigration crackdowns by citing the "muscular presidential powers" Trump is invoking. 

It's not so surprising to see right-wingers getting all sweaty over Trump's manful manliness, as Fox News did when it cited "Trump's muscular approach" to foreign policy (that is, talking about taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal) and when The American Conservative referred to Trump's "Trump's Muscular Pax Americana." But it's odd when it comes from more normie sources. When it's wielded by right-wing propagandists, "muscular" is probably just a simple manifestation of the male panic that drives the fascist movement. In the hands of the mainstream media, there is likely some element of that, but it seems probable that it's driven partly by political journalists' deep desire to carefully choose adjectives that soften what conservatives say and do (in this case, "lunatic aggression" would be a better descriptor). In that way, it's like when they use "fiery" to describe expressions of hateful bigotry or insane, incoherent Trump speeches. 

Nazi Exuberance
There's a strange trend on social media (or on Bluesky, at least) to hector people who have freaked out over Elon Musk throwing Nazi salutes during his inauguration speech because, after all, actual fascist policy is being enacted, and we should concentrate on that instead. As with a lot of such preening focus-policing, it assumes that it's a zero-sum situation: that the people who are freaked about the salutes don't know about the ICE raids. More to the point, it's that they don't care about the ICE raids (and etc.) because they're silly and shallow and focus on trivial things, and are not Serious and Concerned, like the hectorers. The man threw a Nazi salute at a fascist rally. He's at least nominally a top government official. It's a thing!

The media, meanwhile, has treated the whole thing as just another "controversy." That is, when it wasn't whitewashing it altogether.

A Washington Post video excerpt of Musk's speech, posted on Tuesday, bore the headline: "Elon Musk gives exuberant speech at inauguration."

Exuberant.

The summary referred to the speech as "high energy" and didn't mention the sig heils. And the excerpt, which showed signs of having parts cut out of it, didn't depict the salutes. It's easy to imagine a young desk staffer assigned to write the display copy for the Post's video pages (there was no story attached), perhaps terrified of being called out by editors at the now explicitly MAGA-friendly paper, was simply being careful and went way too far. But the headline was still there days later, and the rest of the Post's coverage of Musk's explicit endorsement of National Socialism gave Musk every benefit of the doubt, as most of the mainstream media has done. The salutes were covered elsewhere in the paper, with headlines about the "controversy" they caused.

Another video, this time of Post staffers yammering on the paper's online panel show called "The Sidebar," referred to the salute in its headline as a "straight-arm gesture." The panelists concentrated not so much on the terrifying implications of the salutes themselves, but on how people reacted to them. In the video, Post columnist James Hohmann called Musk a "troll" and an "edgelord," but also asked, "who knows if it was intentional or not?" Which is a bit like asking "who knows if the sun is bright and hot?"

Meanwhile, over in the Post's opinion section, Megan McArdle, who has a long history of producing hilariously bad, often heartless columns, came out with a banger on Wednesday that took the "fascists are fascist because of liberals" theory to new heights. If I start digging into it, this segment will be way too long, so I'll just invite readers to behold the inanity. But beware: the headline is "The missing context from the Elon Musk salute:  We can’t have a functioning democracy if we think our opponents are evil." Also, we can't have a functioning democracy if our opponents are, in fact, evil, and are also in charge of the government. 

Editor Trump
Among the flurry of executive orders Trump issued on Inauguration Day was one rescinding an order President Biden issued in 2021 that created incentives and public investments aimed at getting electric vehicles to make up 50 percent of all new-car sales by 2030. The program provided capital to create a national network of charging stations and hefty tax credits of up to $7.500 for people buying EVs

The Washington Post's headline on its story about Trump dumping the initiative declared Biden's order to be a "mandate." It was not a mandate. The headline was still there, uncorrected, 10 hours after publication. Often, bad headlines like this (essentially broadcasting a lie) don't accurately depict the stories under them. In this case, it very much did. Labor reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley credulously quoted Trump's order declaring that he was ending Biden's "electric vehicle mandate," providing no indication that it wasn't a mandate until several paragraphs later, where she noted in an aside that "[t]he policy wasn’t legally binding."

This is the kind of thing that, by itself, might seem relatively insignificant, but which is perfectly representative of how the media operates in its coverage of MAGA. The default is for journalists to take their cues from Trump. The story went on to bothsides the question of whether the manufacture of EVs was creating jobs or, as Trump insists, killing them. The evidence Gurley cited seemed to indicate that it was creating at least as many jobs in total (EVs need less labor to produce, but the manufacture of their parts creates jobs elsewhere). But that evidence was offset by people saying the opposite without making a case for it, so the average reader likely came away from it not knowing any more than he or she knew beforehand.

Meta MAGA
When I started writing this newsletter on Inauguration Day, I didn't think I'd be including stuff social-media sites and search engines were doing, at least not regularly. But already there have been three incidents worthy of note.

Yesterday, it was Google creating a "patriotic" animated splash for results on searches involving the inauguration, and Meta apparently blocking Instagram searches on "Democrats."

Today it's Mark Zuckerberg's Meta/Instagram again. The site is now blurring at least some content related to abortions, as reporter Jessica Valenti noted on Bluesky. This stuff is getting really grim. Inane and farcical, and straight-up stupid from a business standpoint, but grim.

Fuck This
A Milwaukee TV-news outlet fired its popular meteorologist on Wednesday, apparently because she publicly harshed on Elon Musk for his Nazi salute. WDJT-TV meteorologist Sam Kuffel had posted a picture of Musk on Instagram and written "Dude Nazi-saluted twice. TWICE." And in a bit that I'm having trouble deciphering (though I get the gist) she added "You fuck with this and this man, I don't fuck with you. Full stop."

"Conservative" local radio yammerer Dan O'Donnell Tweeted in response: "EXCLUSIVE: @CBS58 meteorologist Sam Kuffel makes a pair of vulgar Instagram posts while spreading the lie that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute during yesterday's Presidential Inauguration."

Presumably, this was what led to the firing. Knowing what I know about newsroom ninnies, it seems at least possible, perversely enough, that if she hadn't been "vulgar," she might have gotten away with a warning, though of course it's impossible to say. (Also, I love the "EXCLUSIVE" from Dan the Newshound. He saw an Instagram post and Tweeted about it).

One might assume going in that the station is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, the giant, right-wing TV-news chop shop whose responsibility for bringing fascism to America is greatly underappreciated. But no: it's owned by a mainline, old-fashioned regional chain of TV stations, the Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting, which is also the creator of MeTV. In case there are any news directors out there looking for a meteorologist, here's Kuffel's LinkedIn.