One of the stranger, and more disheartening, of this year's so-called 'October suprises' was the revelation that much of the professional American newspaper business has amped up their moral cowardice.  Two major national newspapers, LA Times and Washington Post, decided to kill their endorsements for president at the 11th hour.  More precisely, the tech-billionaire owners of these newspapers decided to override their own professional editorial boards to kill these endorsements which had already been drafted and ready to publish.  The crucial distinction here is that these were not editorial decisions. 

There's a philosophical sentiment that newspapers shouldn't be in the endorsement game as it may give the impression of bias.  My question to that is, here in the 2024 American media hellscape after decades of standard and expected and largely uncontroversial political endorsements from news organizations, does anyone actually believe that it is these endorsements which present the biggest threat to the public's trust in media?  Like, looking around this place, someone thought that getting rid of routine political endorsements would solve the problems we face with media integrity?  OK - strong disagree, but OK - then, I have to wonder.......why wait until the 11th hour, after your editorial board has already produced this endorsement product, to then announce this sudden urge of principled neutrality?  And thus inspiring the resignations of some of your top editorial talent in the process?  Seems 'spish.  Somehow, this doesn't feel like the kind of sober and responsible judgment I'd prefer to see in my journalism.  And if, as professed, one has sincere principles that it is not the newspaper's business to tell their readers how to think, then why have these papers only included a moratorium on national elections, and will in fact continue to endorse local and state candidates?  (Because those candidates are far less powerful?)

There really just isn't any good excuse here, and in the most optimistic light, given the number of readers tossing their subscriptions in the trash, this decision will not likely convince anyone to vote any other way than they've already determined.  But it is a learning moment for the readers, to understand exactly what these papers stand for, and more clearly what they do not.  These billionaires have called this a return to a more principled tradition, but traditionally in journalism (at least among respected publications) the owner does not make editorial judgments for the professional editorial staff.

The LA Times story came and went without much notice, thankfully the WaPo story had more traction.  But immediately after that, the Gannett Company, which owns the USA Today and 200 other newspapers nationwide, made a similar declaration that they would not be endorsing national candidates this year and in the future.  (But they will still continue endorsing for local and state office.)  Now there's a lot to chew on this - like, how the hell did 200 of our local newspapers in major cities across the country happen to get bought up by a fucking private equity firm (charmingly named Fortress Investment Group) in the first place? - but this story should be more alarming than the WaPo one, and seemed timed to maybe escape under the furor.  Clearly media consolidation has come to claim its prize, and, as quoted in the Mother Jones article:

Here’s just a sample of who controls our major newsrooms right now. The five biggest newspaper chains in America are owned by a hedge fund, a private equity fund, another hedge fund, a billionaire family, and another billionaire family. Among major television news networks, owners include the Murdoch family, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery.

The LA Times might be an outlier to some extent.  There seems to be some controversy over whether or not the decision to axe the Kamala Harris endorsement was made by the tech-billionaire's daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, due to her distaste for Harris' position on the Israel/Gaza conflict.  (No word on how Nika feels about Jared Kushner's plans to build hotels on the rubble, but I'm sure she'll figure it all out.)  The father, and actual owner, disputes this, however it wouldn't be the first time that daughter Nika has presumed authority over her father's paper's press room.  To be absolutely clear, Nika Soon-Shiong has zero official authorities at the LA Times, and has no education or experience in journalism.  And if I have very little respect for billionaire owners assuming authority over their editorial staff, I damn well don't respect the presumptions of that billionaire's nepo-sprout.  But then again, that's just flagrant entitlement, and not necessarily corruption.

Jeff Bezos is another matter.  It's already been reported that his Blue Origin company staff met with Donald Trump on the same day as the WaPo non-endorsement was announced, and that's a few billion dollars worth of government contracts on the line.  Not to mention that Trump had already in his first term denied Amazon's cloud service contract with the Pentagon worth $10 billion, explicitly as revenge for how Trump felt that Bezo's WaPo had been covering him.  That non-endorsement wasn't intended to sway voters' minds, but Trump's favor.  Don't get this shit twisted.  And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Bezos didn't hold out the endorsement as a cudgel to get the FTC to drop their anti-trust charges either.  In other words, there's a lot of damn good reasons why media consolidation, especially with non-media industrial interests, is a bad idea that we're going to learn about very shortly.  Like maybe why WaPo was so quick to denounce Harris' price-gouging efforts?  Also, Bezos reportedly sees conservative audiences as a "growth market", perhaps emulating Rupert Murdoch, which may also be why he chose to install as WaPo's brand new CEO Will Lewis, the guy who spent this summer under Scotland Yard scrutiny for whatever role he may have played in the Murdoch tabloid phone-hacking scandal.  So rest assured that WaPo may have lost its top principled editors, but they are now under the steady care of a guy who, at the very least, helped to cover-up the biggest privacy invasion scandal this side of the NSA.

As for Elon Musk, I don't think he needed much coaxing.  He seems pleased as pig-piss to play The Emperor's Kylo Ren.  Clearly he also has a lot of money, and potential investments, riding on Trump, and almost refreshingly he's pretty unambiguous about his total lack of scruples.  He's managed to turn Twitter - or in other words what is probably the world's most powerful media algorithm at least in terms of influence - into everything he claimed he was afraid of it being.  The "free speech absolutist" has had no qualms whatsoever in suppressing the speech of whomever he sees fit, while using the power of the algorithm to thumb the scales of what stories he prefers to dampen or amplify, and all without the transparency and expert consensus exposed in the 'Twitter Files', while he blithely and unapologetically continues to traffic in blatant and demonstrable disinformation even in violation of his own purported terms of services.  But is that enough reason to accuse Musk of possibly having malign designs on the election?  Or a more obvious question?

But never think that Elon Musk isn't paying it forward to his fellow tech billionaires, albeit for mutual benefit.  Let's consider this Berg that Zucks.  Here's a neat example of our current problem - consider, what if Kamala Harris came out and threatened to throw Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in prison for the rest of their lives for not helping her win the election?  Can you imagine?  Harris would be lucky to get a daytime judge show on CW after that.  You may not remember, because for some reason no one's really talking about it, but you know Trump did threaten to throw Mark Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life for not helping him win the election.  Like, not that long ago!  And somehow we were OK with that!  And I get it...poor Zuck.  But isn't that kinda a big deal?  And what did Zuck do, I wonder, after being threatened with lifetime jailtime by a prospective presidential candidate?  Did he stand and declare, "Not in America, you wont!" while lawyering up with the best team a billion dollars could buy?  No, he did not.  Zuck wept like a spanked baby, publicly reversed his previous claims about alleged censorship, and dutifully shut down Meta's CrowdTangle tool which was used for transparency and research into how misinformation spreads on Facebook.  CrowdTangle was an effective guardrail against Covid and election misinformation in 2020.  Or in other words practically a knife in Trump's back, as far as he's concerned.  And what's the result of having shut down this valuable research tool?  Mm, I see.

But we shouldn't be surprised that Zuck broke like a little bitch, or that Musk shoved some ad-revenue his way as comfort.  Really, we shouldn't be surprised by any of this.  The Tech Brothers have made up their mind that they're ready and willing to embrace Trump.  They're all facing anti-trust problems from the FTC, they're all facing privacy and data security violation fines from the EU, and maybe they feel they need someone so craven and belligerent to be their wild card muscle.  It's not like any of them care about democracy, only our plebeian easily-amused attention span-fueled eye-dollars.

But one last thing, this is also worth noting, me thinks.  Mark Cuban, still a tech-bro but somewhat more benevolent, does make a very interesting point that unfortunately is well outside of my financial literacy:

Here is a contrary opinion on the emergence of Silicon Valley support for former President Trump. Which like all my opinions on here, probably won’t be popular.  It’s a bitcoin play.  What will drive the price of BTC is lower tax rates and tariffs, which if history is any guide (and it’s not always), will be inflationary.  Combine that with global uncertainty as to the geopolitical role of the USA, and the impact on the US Dollar as a reserve currency, and you can’t align the stars any better for a BTC price acceleration...

BTC could be what countries and all of us look to buy as a means to protect our savings.  Crazy? It already happens in countries facing hyperinflation.  And if things really go further than we can imagine today (and I’m not saying they will. Just that this has a possibility somewhere above zero), then BTC becomes exactly what the [bitcoin maximalists] envision. A global currency.

Again, I'm not sure I understand all of that, but I think I do know that there's likely going to be a lot more Americans harmed by this imminent "hyperinflation" than will be helped by the "BTC price acceleration".

But it fits with my thesis: The Money is betting on Trump; they don't give a fuck about you, me, much less democracy; and Money runs the corporate news cycle.

So how is our corporate news media treating Kamala Harris today after the public accusations from Trump supporters of being "the Anti-Christ"?

CBS Anchor Tells Kamala Harris: Trump ‘Called You Very Low IQ Person’;  Asks ‘Will You Take A Cognitive Test?’

And, tell me Kamala, why do you keep hitting yourself?

I'm starting to have a different perspective about that "broadcasting license" thing.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

And secondly, as pointed out already, when you realize Puerto Ricans are already American, it really highlights what these people actually dislike about them, and it's not the legality of their status.

Exactly right.  And to take issue with Jon Stewart (not over whether Hinchcliffe is funny or not - he's just wrong about that), I understand that this may seem similar to last week's segment, a case of the media focusing on something meaningless but viral - Trump at McDonalds or Arnold Palmer's penis - instead of something more substantial.  But I believe that Hinchcliffe - completely unintentionally, mind you - just happened to say something virally stupid that also happens to have profound importance on what Stewart was more focused on, the mass deportation stuff.  Hinchcliffe's dumb little joke is like a key that unlocks that basement full of bigotry.

Bill Burr has a good bit, not material yet but he's said variations on his podcast (paraphrase):  "I like how all of the problems in society, in the country, somehow it's always the immigrants fault.  Like they're causing all of the problems.  The people who just got here.  Suddenly we have all of these problems that we've always had..  You notice it's never the rich cunts who own everything, the tech-nerds running everything.  No, they could never do anything wrong, right?  It's only the people with one pair of shoes.  And people keep falling for this?"

Bill Burr won't get invited to a Trump rally.  Which is a shame because I think he would show up.  It'd be 'Philly 2.0'.  Oh, he'd drop a hard "c", but not on who they'd want.

"And another thing, you cunts!  The South lost the War!  Yeah, that's right!  Got their hillbilly asses handed to 'em in Gettysberg.  Unlike some folks, they conceded!!!  Some folks knew how to walk it off back then, before they invented sweatpants and Dew Dew drink!!!"

Jinnistan wrote:

I'm starting to have a different perspective about that "broadcasting license" thing.

I still have a few tabs open that I wanted to add to the last post, but these things get a little too ambitious.  But these are important points.  With Trump's 'fascism', the standard response is to claim hyperbole and fear-projection.  I think it's important context to the last lengthy post to what extent Trump has truly intimidated the media.  Threatening to throw Zuckerberg in jail is one thing.  Threatening the broadcasting license for network news is another.  (Note: network television doesn't have broadcasting licenses.)  The next question is to what degree are such threats credible, and can be said to cause such media timidity.

Most importantly, is that none of this is based on his opponent's imagination, but rather based on what Trump has actually said.  And so, again standard response, it becomes a case of us obviously taking Trump way too seriously, and what fools we must be to actually think that anything that comes out of his mouth is representative of his motives?

While campaigning for Republican congressional candidates in 2022, Trump repeatedly pledged to jail reporters who don't identify confidential sources on stories he considered to have national security implications.

He joked that the prospect of prison rape would loosen reporters' lips about their sources.

"When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, 'I'd very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'" Trump told an appreciative crowd at a Texas rally. And Trump said he wouldn't limit it to the reporters: "The publisher too — or the top editors." He made the same claim two weeks later at an Ohio rally.

Journalists I spoke with raised other fears, principally over Trump’s promise to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Aside from [Mike] Davis—the self-proclaimed “viceroy” to Trump, who excused away his “rain hell” remarks from 2023 as “trolling”—another possible attorney general might be Kash Patel, who served as the chief of staff in the defense department during Trump’s first term. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” Patel said in an interview with Steve Bannon last year. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host, highlighted Davis’ remarks last November, saying “Mike Davis is exactly what the Trump administration lacked last time around: a skilled, even competent veteran of Beltway legal politics and rightwing causes, one who seems keen to transform Trump’s darkest fascist impulses into an actual policy agenda. He’s a microcosm of the mainstream GOP establishment’s move to the far right in the age of Trump.” (Davis’ reply on X: “I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag. But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with [the Never-Trump commentator Tim] Miller.”)

Cuban‘s point is that investors usually flee to safe assets in times of volatility and economic downturn. Often that’s the US dollar. You’ve probably heard of gold being used similarly. He’s supposing that if the dollar goes south because Trump tanks the economy, investors could flee to Bitcoin.

I’m probably missing some of the nuances, but I’d m guess that’s the gist of it.

I'm not one to put much faith in polls, particularly not a single outlier, but Harris leading Trump in Iowa (apparently due to a surge in women voting), even if it was just one poll by Selzer, was not something I expected to read this morning.

Will Trump lose that state? I would imagine almost certainly not. But my hope is that this is at least a sign that as we near the election, that there is a segment of the voting population that the majority of the last 9000 years of polls have not yet figured out how to take account of.

In the past two eleections it seemed that these unconsidered voters swung towards Trump (which has made the constant deadlock in almost every poll leading up to the 2024 election deeply unnerving), but maybe, just maybe, this time it will be the turnout for Harris that was underestimated.

And, yes, this is what it has gotten to...having to clutch at a single poll that could very well be due to some statistical error for some/any sense of hope.
 

Still cleaning up all of the post-holiday garbage (yes, my holiday goes right through Dia de los Muertos), and "garbage" has become the theme of the late-campaign season.

For the record, I agree with Biden, regardless of how he's interpreted, and I'm frankly sick of apologizing to abusive people for hurting their hypocritical feelings.  "All or nothing" idiots will say that Biden's "garbage" comments demeans half of the country, rather than applying any self-reflection over the garbage bigotry required in the wholesale demonization of Latino communities.  In the context to which he was speaking, Biden was absolutely correct, and of course it insults all of those people trying to defend and apologize for Trump's openly bigoted assault on non-white immigrant communities because it reminds them of their own dishonesty and, yes, deplorable disingenuity.  I'm tired of pretending that these people are more entitled to not being insulted than those people they insist on insulting.

Having said that, let's not act confused on why the mainstream media chose to make Biden's comments so urgent in our news cycle, exactly in such a way that they have declined to apply such urgency to Trump's day-one mass deportation plans, his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (last invoked to intern the Japanese in WWII), and his cohorts' constant perpetuation of the white replacement conspiracy theory - all of which are objectively exponentially more controversial and alarming and consequential to American citizens' well-being than any shade Joe Biden is capable of throwing right now.  Make no mistake - this hysterical hyperfocus on Biden's "garbage" slur, and pretending that this somehow is equal and cancels out all of the far more substantial and voluminous rhetoric from Trump and his propogandists, is nothing more than proof positive of the failure of our news media to properly place these racist and immoral policies by Trump in their proper proportion.

Is there any better example of the hypocrisy than JD Vance's response to his side's Latino racism ("we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing") and his response to Biden's pushback on that racism ("This is disgusting!")?  This is entitlement in action - they have every right to slander minorities ("You people have no sense of humor") while reserving every right to be spared of any criticism ("How dare you?").

To disagree slightly with Biden, I do see some other floating pieces of garbage out there - these cowardly news outlets acting like such things are equivalent.
 

I don't expect a final vote tally tonight, and so far there haven't been too many surprises.  I guess there weren't enough Puerto Ricans in Florida to make a difference.

Wisconsin will not have a finished tally tonight, due to a glitch requiring a total recount of tens of thousands of ballots.  And we'll see whether or not those Russian bomb threats causing evacuations at a couple of polls in Georgia will delay the count there for long.

Isn't it enough to know that Russia cared enough to call?
 

I saw earlier a very pithy little critique of the news media, or more accurately a critique of audience frustration with the media.  It said something to the tune of "all liberals want is for the news to tell them how bad Trump is".  No, that is quite incorrect.  I do not need the news media to perform as my moral compass.  I know how bad Trump is.  What I need from the media is something a little more substantial and deep than giving me a "good/bad" assessment of anything.  I want to know the context of why and how Trump's badness will directly affect me and America.  The exact problem with the news media, over the past 20 years or so - or since Jon Stewart crashed Crossfire back in 2004 and told its CNN hosts to their faces that "You are harming America" - is their reducing our more complicated social and economic issues to the kindergarten morality of "good" and "bad".

Already by 2004, the corporate news media had figured out the value of compulsive engagement, the utility of fear and rage to keep people plugged into their news cycles far longer than is healthy.  This was however even further overcharged by the rise of social media, because these news outlets decided - made a conscious commercial choice - to abdicate editorial and journalistic judgment and let these social media algorithms dictate the priorities of what is and is not newsworthy.  Rather than have educated professionals assess the news events of the day and arrange these stories based on their necessity and civic relevance to their readers/viewers, they decided that it would be much easier to look at what was trending on Facebook and Twitter and building their news agendas based around these trends.  So, consider what the documentary, The Social Dilemma, had to say about the toxicity of these algorithms on users' psychology, and then understand that news media audiences, who may not even use these social media platforms, are inescapably being influenced by their algorithms in equally toxic ways.  Word of mouth fueled by algortihms becomes toxic even for those members of society who consume neither social media nor cable news.  Etc, etc.

But what's the ultimate symptom of engagement algorithmic directed discourse?  Reductionism and superficiality.  Cable news is no longer concerned with any type of in-depth discussion or dissection of issues, but rather focusing instead on "viral moments", gotchas and gaffes, memes and soundbites.  Again, this isn't particularly new, but the rise of the algorithms have simply made it a science.  And we're seeing the very clear effects of over a decade of this kind of toxic, viral-obsessed news coverage.

I saw this op-ed a couple of weeks back.  It's not very helpful on a much needed indictment of the media, instead presuming that these institutions are helpless to do anything other than treat algorithmic trends as something as natural as the weather.  But, even inadvertantly, the piece describes the problem in terms of its handicapping more substantial political messaging:

Former President Trump’s brief stop at a suburban Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday was largely a political stunt, but one that catapulted him into a viral moment his campaign seized upon to win headlines and attention.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Vice President Harris on the same day spoke to a giant congregation at a Black Baptist megachurch. At another stop, Stevie Wonder sang her “Happy Birthday” as she turned 60.

But both moments hardly registered.

The stark contrast showed off a key difference between the two candidates that could explain why the presidential race appears to be turning in Trump’s favor.

The former president, long a master of manipulating the media, is consistently getting attention with unscripted and sometimes erratic moments, while Harris’s more conventional approach wins less widespread coverage.

Notice the "win headlines"?  Obviously no sane adult would consider Trump's brief shift as a frycook has any substantial bearing whatsoever on either his ability to be a presdient or the efficacy of his policies.  Sure, this completely staged and irrelevant stunt may draw attention, but is attention enough?  Do we follow the fallacy of the old saying "any press is good press"?  If this were true, and we were to determine our political leaders based on sheer clicks and views of their actions, then shouldn't the candidates this year be Hawk Tua vs Diddy?

"[Kamala Harris] is up against the car wreck on the side of the street syndrome,” said Frank Sesno, a former national political journalist and media professor at George Washington University.

We're currently voting for the "car wreck" like dogs chasing squirrels.  And our news media is failing to add substance and context to our political discussions because it would turn off these easily distracted eyeballs.  Instead of realizing what a crisis this in itself represents for our society, the news media's best response is to ask why Kamala Harris isn't acting like more of a carnival freak.

Jon Stewart has been making these distinctions over his last couple of appearances, understanding that Trump joking about the size of Arnold Palmer's penis gets a lot of viral attention online, but why is the news media incapable of choosing not to cover the silly and inane and focus more on the more important policy stuff?  This is, after all, a presidential race, not the fucking Gong Show.  But his more recent interview with NYTimes' Ezra Klein has a more telling exchange, about 17 minutes in:

Stewart: I can only tell you my experience, but in my experience, media has an effect.  It has a weight and it has an ability to warp perceptions.  Cable news to me was mindblowing.  The 24-hour news cycle is good for one thing, and that's 9/11.  When 9/11 happens, you want that station to be on all day ... because the world is so tenuous in that moment.  But in the absence of it, how are you going to keep people watching?  We have to sort of impose a kind of contrived urgency or a fear.  It's nothing new, it's just a question of degrees....It's always been about "How do we keep the eyeballs?"

You have to keep stimulating people further and further to different extremities to get that same hit of dopamine.  And those apps and that media are scientifically designed purposefully....like our food is designed to escape that part of your brain that says, "I should stop eating right now"...This is purposeful.  The way that we are divided as people, some of it is political and weaponized by political actors, but the majority of it is capitalism.  Capitalism with the idea of "How do I generate the most income out of engagement?"  And it turns out that fear and anger and hate and outrage pay huge.  I'm not suggesting that a monkey washing a cat isn't a tremendous video, and that will also get clicks, but that's not a business model.  The business model is creating an atmosphere of outrage and anger.  So you ask if that has an effect?  It absolutely does, and I think it does rewire the brains of the users.

In other words, when you have a news media subscribed to a business model that rewards divisiveness, fear and anger, then should it be any wonder that the presidential candidate who most provokes division, fear and outrage happens to be leading in the polls?  The news media seems either oblivious or simply indifferent about their role in tacitly endorsing the most toxic candidate due to employing this business model.

Klein: You were saying, there was AM radio, and then there was Fox News.  One thing that has happened in my lifetime - and I'm 40 - is this tremendous segmentation.  The media broke into these little competitive slices.  Competition can create a lot of innovation.  And if the innovation is how to get your little slice away from everyone else, sometimes the competition can become warping.  One of the things I think people get really wrong about the media is that they think it is stronger and more self-directed than it is, particularly when it has gotten very very competitive.

Stewart: When you say "self-directed", what do you mean by that?

Klein: I've been involved in a lot of different media over the years and I think something that has surprised me, going from someone who reads it to somone who makes it, is watching the way media comes to reflect its audience, unless a tremendous amount of editorial strength is applied in the opposite direction.

Stewart: Man...you just named the game....The thing you just said about the media not being 'self-directed', I think, is probably putting your finger on exactly what is troubling.  That they themselves are victims of the incentivized algorithm that they're trying to compete with, as opposed to viewing it as part of an ongoing battle to combat lies.

As long as the news media can treat Trump as a clown, as a joke, with his McDonalds gig, with his crude locker humor, with his silly viral weirdness, then they won't have to focus on the really really dark shit in his stated policies.  That's why an exponential amount of network news time was devoted to that stupid Puerto Rico joke rather than to Trump's stated intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act on Latin communities.