The Media/Journalism Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

The NYT should just admit that they rely on ads and tracking software even more than they rely on subscriptions. At least with other papers like the Seattle Times, they require you to allow ads in order to read their paper, but the tech section of the NYT will have columnists write articles on how you can subvert ads (tracking software is another issue entirely) on other sites, as they both track and sneak ads in every single article. Their ethics are not entirely pure either. NYT does do some things very well and of course the journalists and researchers deserve fair compensation, despite the fact that many weren’t even when subscriptions were at their peak, and despite the fact that they continue to bankroll the likes of Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman who at this point is using the paper to promote her book. 
 

I do wonder why newspapers don’t just become an employee owned enterprise and ditch the hierarchy as some truly independent local newspapers have elected to do.

[Cat]

It worked, and I was able to enjoy the article. Thank you!

[janea4old]

I've been reading the Seattle TImes with an adblocker for years. No subscription.  No limit in number of views.

Oh and that's another tip ..

Seattle Times reprints articles for free from New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, etc. 

If there's something on one of those other news sites, I just input the name of the article or a few key words and find it the same thing on seattletimes.com  It might be a few hours later or the next day, but it's there.  If I think the *original* article has since been updated, I got back to the original newspaper to find the updated version.

Edited June 21, 2022 by janea4old

[DramatistDreamer]

I always turn my Adblocker off for ST. I’m fine with having them get ad money, especially since they are a smaller, less deep pocketed newsroom and they were upfront about it and asked nicely, lol.

I have more of an issue with papers run by millionaires and billionaires like NYT and WAPO whose executives ride the high horse of journalistic integrity and are a veritable sh*show behind the scenes. If they were really invested in journalists getting paid they would not have had to fought unionization for so long. Also, they would have been an employee-owned enterprise like other companies. And they wouldn’t still have people with accusations of sexual predation still on their payroll. And since NYT (and likely WAPO too) tracks most of their readers, whether you have an account or not, I don’t feel compelled to subscribe to either. They make a healthy profit off profiling the vast majority of visitors to their site.

[janea4old]

Agree on all points.  Seattle Times does a lot of service.  I will reconsider having myself allow ads for their site.  They covered COVID-19 in depth daily since January 2020 before anyone else (because the first US cases were noticed near Seattle) (Of course we now know COVID was in New York in autumn 2019 but nobody knew that back then).

NYTimes *used to be* "all the news that's fit to print" but hasn't been that for a very very long time.  And yeah WAPO being part of the amazon conglomerate, enough said.
And not paying their employees enough.

Edited June 21, 2022 by janea4old

[Vee]

 

[DRW50]

What a surprise, MSNBC platforming grifters/cultists.

 

[Vee]

@DRW50

 

[Vee]

A bit of good news:

 

[DramatistDreamer]

Will the marathon of appeasement to Republicans never end?

 

[DRW50]

@Vee Pathetic stuff.  Reminds me that earlier today Jordan Charlton, yet another Bernie dead-ender/accelerationist, was tweeting out Puck News as the gospel truth (an article about how shocked Republicans are at Democrats not doing more after the Dobbs decision). 

I don't think it will sway many, because those who fall for this tend to be already be unlikely to vote for Democrats anyway, but the full court press from the garbage dump left, desperately working  to drown out any sense of motivation or activism, has been staggering, and shows just how in bed they are with the right. 

Here is Jezebel blatantly misleading people that Biden is soon going to appointed an anti-abortion judge:

Media Matters:

There is so much more where this has come from, including deadenders pushing people to boycott Planned Parenthood and instead donate to cult groups like Rise Up.

Edited June 30, 2022 by DRW50

[DRW50]

 

[Vee]

I agree with a great deal of what Valdez, etc. say but I think there's more room for nuance and also broad oversimplification on either side of this device than ever. Not everyone being supportive of the administration doesn't care about abortion, but not everyone very upset atm is a leftist deadender (and I'm not saying you're not very upset). The facts on this judge thing, for example, appear to be that there is a deal on the table for that anti-choice appointment the next time one becomes available. That is not going to be acceptable to Democratic voters in the current climate, and it shouldn't be. That potential deal needs to not exist yesterday.

It's important that people screen signal to noise, and righteous anger in the wrong directions vs. complete irrationality - for example, Jude Doyle going around trying to claim that Biden has always been 'rumored' to be anti-choice when his pushing hard for the pro-choice Souter nomination before Republicans found out years ago is a matter of record. That's just flat wrong and needs to be refuted. I do not believe Biden is anti-choice. But pushing back on the WH weighing an anti-choice judge deal, or coming at the WH and party apparatus for its extremely weak and confused response to the last few weeks and months - I think that's fair. I frankly think it's been a rolling shítshow. I think they've been shellshocked since Manchin nuked BBB, as it upended virtually all of their conventional wisdom and have never fully recovered, and I think the overall Dem leadership response to Roe has been embarrassing so far. There's a few nice statements from Pelosi, etc. but that's not enough. Critics are correct IMO when they say the WH and the Dems must be specific about what seats need money where, why and what they specifically will pledge to do when they get them. Not platitudes and clucking about destabilizing the country - it's already destabilized. We are in an asymmetrical war.

I think the WH can still do more to fix the problems, and I am very glad Biden finally got on the page of the base today re: the filibuster, but it's going to take a lot more. Which is why accurately parsing what is happening, vs. leaping to extremes of 'they don't care/are doing nothing/are shills' or 'they're doing fine and people are overreacting' is so important. I think both Valdez and say, Oliver Willis have legitimate strong points to make, when they're not demeaning each other and coming off like assholes in the process (or if Willis would stop going off on his stupid joke tangents). That's the box we're all in.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Vee

[DRW50]

I would agree if I thought it would matter, but I think the end result would just be the choices they ask people to donate money to being nitpicked into oblivion, or a lot of responses along the lines of, "Well you gave money to Henry Cuellar, so why don't you just spend your own money and leave us alone." So many of these attacks are in such bad faith and so coordinated - seeing MSNBC platforming that dangerous Rise Up cult to blast even the idea of fundraising for Democrats rang huge alarm bells for me. 

I do think the response has been a mess, and I've been complaining about their choices since a good while before Manchin killed BBB, but so much of the response on social media is very top-down from people who are motivated and compensated to depress Democratic turnout. 

I wish Pelosi had been able to hand the reins in the House over to someone a while back. I wish a better choice than Biden had been Bernie's main opposition in the primary. I wish Democrats were better at strategy and communication. But more than anything I just wish people would realize Democrats are not going to be near of what they want and, trite as it is, they just have to still keep voting and try to change the system as best they can, even if realizing that makes them look bad to their edgelord friends or means they have to see that they actually can't change the world through sarcastic tweets. 

[Vee]

Those kind of responses are always going to be there from some, and Twitter is not real life. That doesn't mean messaging and targeting still can't substantially improve, because it definitely can within the Democratic machine.

I think Biden was a good candidate, better than a lot of people were willing to admit (both media and on the left), and probably the only one who could've taken Trump in that field. I think he's a good man who I'm glad is there. I admire Pelosi immensely for a lot of the work she's done, and I know she'll spend the rest of her life taking the same ageist and misogynistic slings and arrows she's been taking for years while doing hard work. I'm never going to disrespect the whole of that establishment when my family worked down there most of my life, alongside many of those people, and knows it and some of them intimately - I know how much of the real work is just slow, boring and head-down stuff. And I think Democrats can and are able to be most of what the majority of people who are not Very Online need them to be. But I think the stated belief when entering into office that the GOP fever would break, and the current strategy of putting a band-aid on where we've been at and trying to rewind it back, has completely failed. And that's not all on Biden or his fault, it's systemic. A number of people in the party don't want to accept that we're at where we're at and can't just go back to the relative pre-Trump normalcy of hunting for purple seats with less urgency, just like you still have many burnout leftists still refusing to acknowledge that not engaging in '16 and claiming they 'can't be bullied by SCOTUS to vote for Clinton' helped get us to where we are now. 2016 was it for so many of these things. The truth is a lot of different elements bear different responsibilities and have made different mistakes, and both the responsibility and the urgency have to be acknowledged and reckoned with. The good news is, I think, is that Joe Biden is much more likely to do that than say, Dave Weigel or Will Stancil.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Vee