12.05.16
When push comes to shove, they won’t be on the ramparts
From the Dept. of Just Sayin’: Simultaneously disconsolate and apoplectic that Donald J. Trump will be president, the New York Times has apparently committed itself to advocating a coup everyday. Up front, an editorial from an elector who’s part of an effort to overturn the election as it slowly becomes clear the recounts won’t do it. Second, because of Trumpism and fake news (actually mostly 4chan, apparently) a mentally ill man went after a pizza parlor in DC. (Nope, mentally ill white ‘Mericans with guns have never believed nasty but ridiculous crap and threatened or carried out violence before, right?) Third, another editorial writer: “We stand at the precipice, staring into an abyss that grows darker by the day.” [1]
How many of the NY Times paying readers and workers would actually get up on the ramparts for a coup? Zero, probably.
Chris Hedges, who is published frquently at TruthDig won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting at the New York Times. He eventually left the newspaper after falling out of favor with those who ran the newsroom.
In early November he spoke at length on his career at the Times:
Those that persisted in reporting stories that made the elites uncomfortable … who cared about the marginalized and the poor, who wanted to write about issues such as race and class, increasingly had to run into walls erected by the editors. You either conform or, as Charlie did, quit. The Times consciously caters to an audience of roughly 30 million people it has defined as the country’s economic and political elite. It does not care about the middle class. It does not care about the working class. And it certainly does not care about the poor. The bulk of the paper, with its special sections such as Styles or Home, addresses the concerns of the rich—maintaining a second house in the Hamptons. Those sections expose its bias.
The entire piece at TD, five pages, goes a long way in explaining the internal institutional bias at the paper. After reading it, regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, it’s fairly easy to intuit why the newspaper, as one of the voices of the establishment, has pitched over into near advocacy of the belief that the president elect not be permitted to take office.
1. If you don’t agree with with the tone and content of everything Charles Blow writes, you’re probably a bigot/misogynist/etc.