When the NYT forgets about the Establishment Clause and public education.

I was stunned at something in the article "Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students," which focuses on an Ohio public school teacher, James Sutter, who's having trouble getting his lesson across to a student named Gwen Beatty, who, we're told, is a straight-A student.

When she insisted that teachers “are supposed to be open to opinions,” however, Mr. Sutter held his ground.

“It’s not about opinions,” he told her. “It’s about the evidence.”

“It’s like you can’t disagree with a scientist or you’re ‘denying science,”’ she sniffed to her friends.

Gwen, 17, could not put her finger on why she found Mr. Sutter, whose biology class she had enjoyed, suddenly so insufferable. Mr. Sutter, sensing that his facts and figures were not helping, was at a loss. And the day she grew so agitated by a documentary he was showing that she bolted out of the school left them both shaken.

“I have a runner,” Mr. Sutter called down to the office, switching off the video.

He had chosen the video, an episode from an Emmy-winning series that featured a Christian climate activist and high production values, as a counterpoint to another of Gwen’s objections, that a belief in climate change does not jibe with Christianity.

“It was just so biased toward saying climate change is real,” she said later, trying to explain her flight. “And that all these people that I pretty much am like are wrong and stupid.”

A public school teacher chose a video for the purpose of presenting an argument based on Christianity?! It's supposed to be a science class. It's not a class about the history of religion or comparative religion. As the NYT presents it, the teacher was introducing religious material for the purpose of bolstering a scientific conclusion.

Here's the video. It's almost an hour long, and I haven't watched it yet.



I don't know how much religion is in the video, and I'm not giving a legal opinion on whether the teacher violated the Establishment Clause. We can discuss that. I just want to call out the New York Times for its inattention to the Establishment Clause, which it usually expects its readers to take very seriously, especially in the context of educating children.

It makes me suspect that those who are demanding that we believe in climate change really are operating in a religion mode and that does not inspire confidence in science.

And, really, why is it so important for Miss Beatty to believe in climate change? She has an active and inquisitive mind. Why not feed it and support it and empower her to go where she sees fit? Bullying her with demands for belief — even without the religion larded in — isn't likely to inspire her to take on a STEM career.

I'd like to read the comments on this NYT article, but — despite the paper's new reliance on comments in lieu of a Public Editor — comments are not enabled for this one.

ADDED: "I have a runner" — that's weird. They have a word for kids like her? "Runner" made me think of "Logan's Run":

In the year 2274, the remnants of human civilization live in a sealed city contained beneath a cluster of geodesic domes... The citizens live a hedonistic life but, to maintain the city, everyone must undergo the ritual of Carousel when they reach the age of 30... [E]ach person is implanted at birth with a "life-clock" crystal in the palm of their hand that changes color as they get older and begins blinking as they approach their "Last Day." Most residents accept this promise of rebirth, but those who do not and attempt to flee the city are known as "Runners." An elite team of policemen known as "Sandmen"... are assigned to pursue and terminate Runners as they try to escape....

RUNNER!

"'Sad.' - to put this in modern Trumpian vernacular. I don't know what the NYT is turning into, but..."

"... it is losing that high-quality veneer that I used to sense when I first fell in love with this paper years ago. As a mid-30s age conservative I have often disagreed with 90 percent of the content of this paper, but that hasn't stooped [sic] me from loving it out of the sheer literary and intellectual quality. That aura is slipping. Some devilish, penny-saving, top-down, 'cutting-edge' algorithm seems to be dragging this paper into the pop-up ad, cheapo swamp of modern online journalism; valuing shiny click-bait multi-media, and poll-tested, echo-chamber-friendly, OBVIOUS content, over brave, individualistic, ORIGINAL, human brilliance. The purging of the public-editor is just another brick in the wall."

Writes Jack M, in what is the third-most-favorited comment on "The Public Editor Signs Off," the last Public Editor column in the NYT.

"My presence here is an anomaly. My presence shows that people that look like me, that are Pakistani, that are Muslim, are here for peace. We are the sex symbol. We are the people that everybody wants to hit on."

Says Ali Mushtaq, fit to print in the New York Times in "Pakistani-American From California Blazes a Gay Leather and Fetish Trail."

By “here,” Mr. Mushtaq meant at International Mr. Leather, an annual gathering of men (and a few women) in Chicago who are into kink and leather, and culminates with the pageant-style crowning of the year’s winner....

Although he calls himself a Muslim (he studied Arabic and the Quran as a child), Mr. Mushtaq says his relationship to Islam today is “an ethnic identity as opposed to a fundamentalist religious identity.”... His Islam is not “the crazy people with the swords,” as he put it, but professionals “who consider themselves Muslim” and who “might approve of gay marriage.”

"New York Times picks an AI moderator over a Public Editor."

That's the headline at Engadget in a piece by Andrew Tarantola about the elimination of the "Public Editor" position at the NYT. I've already said a few words — at the end of this earlier post — about this change at the NYT, but I want to continue the discussion here.

What's the "AI moderator"? The Engadget headline is very confusing since it made me think the Times had artificial intelligence that could substitute for the role the Public Editor had played, which was to monitor the journalism in the newspaper. But, reading on, I see that the AI is about culling the comments:

The NYT's commenting system is powered by Google Jigsaw's Conversation AI, a neural network that has been trained to find and flag trolling, hate speech and gratuitous shitposts in the paper's online comments sections. However, the system is currently only working on around ten percent of the sites articles. With Wednesday's announcement, the program will be expanded to nearly all of the publication's articles. "This expansion," Sulzberger Jr. wrote [in a staff memo], "marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers."

So in addition to getting the Public Editor out of the way, the NYT is filtering out the contributions of readers who might push back against the distortions, omissions, and fake news. That's pretty interesting, considering that Sulzberger's staff memo also justified eliminating the Public Editor on the ground that readers were performing the role of keeping the NYT principled and honest.

From the memo (which appears in full at the link):

The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader's representative – has outgrown that one office. Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves....

Wow! Did you see the sleight of hand? The public editor was "the reader's representative," but now "we... all" should answer to the readers directly. Then who is representing the readers? You have no intermediary. You have the unrepresented readers, trying to make their questions and concerns heard with no surrogate on the inside, and you're also systematically cutting them off, using automation to distance them even further.

The public editor position, created in the aftermath of a grave journalistic scandal, played a crucial part in rebuilding our readers' trusts by acting as our in-house watchdog....

So you got that taken care of? You think we trust you now? Was it all only about mopping up after the scandal, and that's far enough behind you now? What matters isn't just whether we trust you — and obviously not all of us do — but whether you are actually doing an excellent job according to the best principles of journalism. But I hear you saying, that's good enough trust for now. Or even: The public editor brought some trust but also mistrust, and when trust/mistrust balance cut the wrong way, we ended it.

Here's the pitch from Sulzberger that times have changed and the internet is all the pushback needed to keep the NYT honest and principled:

[T]oday, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

It's not as though the Public Editor was cutting off the flow of criticism, hording it in a single office. You speak of the "modern" world, but you're acting as though the readers' input comes in via paper mail! The Public Editor selected whatever she saw fit to focus on in a column that appeared regularly, but everybody else at the NYT could also see the criticism. If you're just saying that you lazily relied on her and looked to her to answer the complaints, then you are admitting she was not "the reader's representative," she was your representative, saving you the trouble of dealing with the critics. But now you say you want to take on the very role you seem to admit you were avoiding bothering with. Why should we believe that you will take this role seriously if you didn't care about it when you had the Public Editor?

We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

I've been bothered for a long time that the NYT withholds comments on many articles that need pushback. So now they are going to have more, which is good, but it's still not all, only "most." And it's a bit deceptive to say that the expansion is made possible by Google. All Google is providing is the ability to limit the comments through some kind of automated process. They could have had comments on more or all of the articles, but they chose where to have them, and they apparently still plan to do that, even as they open up more articles to comments, which they're doing because they've built in more power to filter what people try to put up.

We will work hard to curate and respond to the thousands of daily comments....

But what will you work hard to "curate"? What is the standard of what you're keeping out? You won't be revealing that. Maybe you won't even see it. It's the robot's job.

... but comments will form just one bridge between The Times and our audience. We also, of course, engage with readers around the globe on social media, where we have tens of millions of followers. 

We'll see what that means. I'll do my part in social media. I do as much as I can. Who does more?!

We're given the names of 2 editors who will have a special responsibility. Phil Corbett leads a team that "listens and responds to reader concerns and investigates requests for corrections." And  Hanna Ingber will work "to make our report ever more transparent and our journalists more responsive." This seems to be internal work that is not itself transparent. there's no more Public Editor column pointing out problems like lack of transparency, but Corbett and Ingber might make the paper "ever more transparent." How will we know?

The NYT sees Vladimir Putin "shifting away," but I don't.

The just-up news story begins:

Shifting away from his previous blanket denials of Russian involvement in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia denied any state role on Thursday but said that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved.

What's the shift? All he did was acknowledge the possibility that private actors might have been involved. He's still saying the Russian government did nothing. How could he ever have purported to know what every person in Russia was doing, outside of the government? I think it would be hard for a leader even to know what everyone in the government is doing — does Trump know what every employee of the federal government is doing, what's going on in the "deep state"? — but it's patently impossible to know what every private person is doing. It was necessarily always implicit that he didn't know what private Russian hackers might be doing.

Two things are interesting.

First, Putin is asserting that he doesn't know that there were private Russian hackers doing anything. Maybe he does know but he's disclaiming knowledge.

Second, he's approving of what these people — if they exist — did, because he's calling them "patriotically minded." Or... that's only the first paragraph of the news story, which I've already shown I find misleading. Let's get down to more detailed paragraphs:

Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added.

That's not saying it would be patriotic of private hackers to interfere in the American election! He's talking — and I'm trusting this translation and cherry-picking — about the motives of hackers in general, saying they operate according to their own whims. Putin distances himself from these people. They do what they like, but they might choose to do things that are good for their country. The example he gives is not affecting a foreign country's elections. He speaks only of defending against speech that is disparaging to Russia.

The headline of this story is "Vladimir Putin Hints at Russian Role in Hacking of U.S. Election." I see no hint here at all. I'm calling "fake news" on this.

By the way, The New York Times just revealed that it is ending the position of "public editor":

"The responsibility of the public editor ― to serve as the reader’s representative ― has outgrown that one office,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in a memo to staff. “There is nothing more important to our mission, or our business, than strengthening our connection with our readers. A relationship that fundamental cannot be outsourced to a single intermediary.”...

Internal complaints about [Liz Spayd, the paper's sixth public editor,] had been rumbling for months. Though all public editors are, to a certain degree, unpopular within their own newsrooms, the disapproval with Spayd was particularly pronounced.

Times editor Dean Baquet called her piece on the paper's coverage of Trump and Russia "a bad column."

I enjoyed Baquet's use of the word "bad" — "a bad column" — so soon after reading Putin's "those who say bad things about Russia." It's so primitive, so elemental. Baquet fights against those who say bad things about The New York Times.

I've got to step up my monitoring of the NYT now that it's not relying on "a single intermediary" anymore. Baquet has triggered heightened scrutiny on "the paper's coverage of Trump and Russia."

You know, I've been working as an intermediary between you and the NYT every day, nonstop, for 13 years.

"Free speech or die, Portland. You got no safe place. This is America, get out if you don’t like free speech."

"Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom.... You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.”

Those are 2 statements by Jeremy Christian, from his appearance in the courtroom as he was arraigned after the murders on the MAX Green Line train in Portland. I read those statements first "in the NYT, which uses the verb "shouted" and a photograph of Christian with his mouth wide open to convey the tone of his speech. I was unsatisfied with the NYT because it shifted to the subject of Mayor Tom Wheeler's rejection of permits for "alt-right" events in Portland.

Looking for more detail about the arraignment, I switched to The Washington Post, which has video of Christian making the above-quoted statements. The video makes a different impression:


I was surprised how scripted Christian sounded, as if he were delivering a memorized speech. I also heard an additional sentence, after "Leave this country if you hate our freedom": "Death to Antifa." I'd been inclined to think of Christian as a ranting lunatic, but the delivery of these lines makes him seem more controlled in his structure of beliefs — not that the beliefs are cogent.

Christian leaps from the love of freedom of speech to a sentence of death to those who don't like freedom of speech. "Free speech or die" seems like a variation on "Live free or die," but you have to misunderstand "Live free or die," which is supposed to express willingness to die for the cause of freedom, not a desire for other people to drop dead if they don't value freedom above everything else.

Perhaps it's disgusting to analyze the words of a person who has done something so evil, but Christian's words are being quoted and used. He's not being hidden away and denied a voice, so it's not as if I can close the door and say don't listen to the rants of a madman.

He's being quoted and used as a jumping off point for things people want to say, and what's particularly irritating — aside from the rank sensationalism of bloody murder — is the blithe assumption that Christian's agenda is racism. You can see that the arraignment quotes have no racist content at all. The statements from the murder scene (and in a recording made of him on a train on an earlier occasion) were anti-religion (and not just anti-Muslim). Where's the racism?

The WaPo article proceeds to talk about the "long and violent history of white supremacist and other racist activities" in the Pacific Northwest. It gives us a quote from a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, Karen Gibson: “The idea that Portland is so liberal supersedes this dark, hidden secret about racism.” Maybe so, but the article never establishes that Christian is a racist.

WaPo drags in Donald Trump:

Some residents said President Donald Trump has caused those racist demons to stir again....

“I don’t have that feeling like it can’t happen here — the way people talk about Portland — because we’ve got racism. We’ve got all kinds of things,” said Murr Brewster, who came to see a memorial at the city’s transit center. “It’s everywhere and the trouble is, it’s getting more and more prevalent.”

Primed, we hear next about Mayor Wheeler's effort to stop the planned rally, which, we're told, is billed on Facebook as "a Trump Free Speech Rally." Then this paragraph galumphs in:

Christian attended a similar rally in late April wearing an American flag around his neck and carrying a baseball bat. Police confiscated the bat, and he was then caught on camera clashing with counter-protesters.

That might put him on the pro-Trump side. But where's the racism? Was he armed with a bat because he wanted to fight the counter-protesters? That fits with "Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to Antifa."

Elsewhere, I'm seeing assertions that Christian was actually for Bernie Sanders. And here's a piece in The Oregonian, premised on a deep read of Christian's Facebook page: "His posts reveal a comic book collector with nebulous political affiliations who above all else seemed to hate circumcision and Hillary Clinton." And:

The question of whether Christian was a Trump supporter or a Sanders supporter, doesn't have an either/or answer, except: he definitely was not a Clinton supporter.

"Bernie Sanders was the President I wanted," wrote Christian in December. "He voiced my heart and mind. The one who spoke about the way America should gone. Away from the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes. The Trump is who America needs now that Bernie got ripped off."

But on Nov. 11, he posted that he was unable to bring himself to vote for Trump.

"I've had it!!! I gonna kill everybody who voted for Trump or Hillary!!!" he said in another post in early January. "It's all your fault!!! You're what's wrong with this country!!! Reveal yourselves immediately and face your DOOM!!!"

I'd say that sounds like a Bernie Sanders supporter. After Sanders dropped out and endorsed Hillary, he had nowhere to go. I don't know why white supremacists are getting blamed for Christian's insanely murderous rage. It would make more sense to blame the those who've been inflaming anger on the far left.

But back to the NYT, where this post began, because after reading The Washington Post, I did see more reason in the shift from what Christian said at the arraignment to Tom Wheeler's rejection of pro-free-speech rallies. Christian made free speech sound like an ugly, evil cause related to murder. Now, you should see that the violence Wheeler uses to justify repressing a free-speech rally is violence from those who oppose the rally, the counter-protesters. But Christian's extolling of free speech may obscure that. His jumbled, awful remarks at the arraignment are useful to anyone who would like to shape our brains to think: Free speech = Violence. And: To suppress speech is to suppress violence.

And who doesn't wish that the police could have arrested Jeremy Christian when they had him speaking and carrying a baseball bat at a rally?

"Two Kurdish German men accused of helping to kill their sister in 2005 because of her Western lifestyle were acquitted Tuesday in a Turkish court...."

The NYT reports (in an article by Patrick Kingsley).

A child of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants, Ms. Surucu was brought up in Germany before her father pulled her out of school and sent her back to her family’s ancestral village in Turkey, where at 16 she was forced to marry a cousin, according to German news reports.

After the marriage ended in divorce, she returned to Berlin and gave birth to a son, Can, but soon left her parents’ home to live as a single mother.

Prosecutors said that her conservative and religious brothers felt dishonored after she began refusing to wear a head scarf and started dating a German man. A German judge described the attack by Ayhan Surucu as “an ice-cold, execution-style murder.”...

A German court jailed Mr. Surucu in 2006, but acquitted Mutlu and Alparslan Surucu of involvement. A German appeals court later overturned the elder brothers’ acquittal, partly because of the testimony of Ayhan’s ex-girlfriend, who said they had helped him plan the murder.

I would like to see a more detailed explanation of the German court's opinion. The brother who shot the gun was convicted and imprisoned, and his ex-girlfriend implicated the other 2 brothers. I'm guessing her testimony was deemed unreliable hearsay and a violation of due process. [ADDED: Wait. I'm misreading this. I'm not used to seeing an appeal from an acquittal. The appeals court overturned the acquittal, so it seems that the trial court excluded the ex-girlfriend's testimony, and the appeals court said it could be used.]

But the two brothers were able to leave for Turkey, where they lived freely for several years.

In a German documentary released in 2011, Mutlu Surucu said his sister’s “lifestyle change” justified her murder. “Why does a woman need to dress up so prettily?” he reportedly asked. “Why does she need to go out on the town? To attract men.”

It troubles me to see a quote of the questions about the sister's behavior but not for the idea that Mutlu Surucu "justified her murder." To express understanding of the killer's motivation is not to be an accomplice to the murder.

These honor killings are horrible, but they shouldn't undermine our commitment to the rights of the accused.

I'm just trying to understand the article as printed in the NYT. I have to read between the lines, but I'm assuming the brothers were not retried in Germany because there wasn't enough evidence once the testimony of the ex-girlfriend was excluded. That's why they were able to leave Germany and "lived freely" in Turkey. [ADDED: I'm wrong here. We don't have an answer to why Germany didn't do a new trial. Perhaps the ex-girlfriend's testimony was not that promising.]

Why did Turkey prosecute them? Was it because of the documentary? Was Mutlu Surucu prosecuted because he expressed an offensive opinion about women dressing prettily and going out on the town?

The NYT article, at first glance, looks sober, but it's actually — in a low-key way — sensationalistic. And it shows the unfortunate tendency to disregard the rights of the criminally accused whenever it's too much trouble or a distraction from the attitude chosen for the article. [ADDED: My criticism of the NYT was based on my misreading of what the German court's did, so I'll say it's too strong. But I would like more detailed reporting on what courts have done and consistent regard — even when you hate the crime — for the rights of the criminally accused.]

3 things in today's NYT show what I think is a realization that the talk of impeachment has gone too far and endangers the liberal agenda.

1. "For Trump's Defenders, White House Turmoil Is Politics as Usual":

But for many Americans, including President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters, the "crisis in Washington" is... the latest egregious example of mainstream media bias and of Washington insiders desperate to preserve their status taking revenge on the New York celebrity businessman....

"This is what I expected," said Jeff Klusmeier, an insurance agent in Louisville, Kentucky. "I expected the media to attack Trump. I expected the Democrats to attack him and call for impeachment. So it's par for the course for me."...

"The overwhelming majority of conservatives and Republicans believe that whatever you may think of Donald Trump, this is clearly being driven by many quarters of the media that chose sides in the election and were very upfront about it and haven't changed," Republican consultant Keith Appell told Reuters.

2. "How Impeachment Could Help the G.O.P., Not the Democrats" — a heading for letters to the editor responding to a column by Thomas L. Friedman recommending that Democrats give up on the idea of impeaching Donald Trump. One reader says that Republicans might decide it's in their interest to replace Trump with Pence, "who is truly one of their own, would be the best possible way to get their agenda back on track." Another points out that Pence is "a sane, mentally stable, true conservative" who would be hard to run against in 2018.

3. Most significantly: "Democratic Leaders Try to Slow Calls to Impeach Trump."

“No one ought to, in my view, rush to embrace the most extraordinary remedy that involves the removal of the president from office,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the sober-minded senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He warned that Democrats should not let their actions “be perceived as an effort to nullify the election by other means.”...

The demands of the radicalized party base are being amplified by growing calls from a series of Democratic candidates for statewide office who, in an effort to outflank their primary rivals, have started clamoring for Mr. Trump’s impeachment....

Most congressional Democrats... [fear] the expectations of their base... which are outrunning what is feasible as long as Republicans control both chambers of Congress. The fear, Democratic officials say, is that they will invite the sort of backlash from their base that Republicans got for overpromising about what was possible while President Barack Obama was in office....

Party strategists fear that Democrats might sacrifice the moral and political high ground by appearing too eager... [and] overplaying their hand.

It's hard not to see.

On the NYT front page right now:

Here's a Psychology Today article "We See What We Want to See." It gets our attention with Grace Kelly's breasts:

“At the rehearsal for the scene in Rear Window when I wore a sheer nightgown, Hitchcock called for [costume designer] Edith Head. He came over here and said, ‘Look, the bosom is not right, we’re going to have to put something in there.’ He was very sweet about it; he didn't want to upset me, so he spoke quietly to Edith. We went into my dressing room and Edith said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock is worried because there’s a false pleat here. He wants me to put in falsies.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘You can't put falsies in this, it’s going to show—and I'm not going to wear them.’ And she said, ‘What are we going to do?’ So we quickly took it up here, made some adjustments there, and I just did what I could and stood as straight as possible—without falsies. When I walked out onto the set Hitchcock looked at me and at Edith and said, ‘See what a difference they make?’”

And here's a Buzzfeed listicle, "22 People Who Found Jesus In Their Food." Here he is — #16 — in the Marmite:

"After months of trying to move the political needle in favor of Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, American far-right activists..."

"... threw their weight behind a hacking attack against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, hoping to cast doubt on an election that is pivotal to France and the wider world," according to the NYT.

Who are these weighty American righties and what are they doing with the hacking attack? The NYT says "American far-right groups" are "promoting the breach online." The NYT has articles about the hacking, but I guess these articles don't count as "promoting" it, so what are the "groups" doing other than repeating the news that Macron got hacked?

“It’s the anti-globalists trying to go global,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow of the digital forensics research lab at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, who has studied the far right’s recent efforts against Mr. Macron and others in France. “There’s a feeling of trying to export the revolution.”

So they got Nimmo who's at a think tank, and he reports "a feeling."

[W]ithin hours after the hacked documents were made public, the hashtag #MacronLeaks began trending worldwide, aided by online far-right activists in the United States who have been trying to sway the French vote in favor of Ms. Le Pen.

I still don't understand how this is anything more than passing on the news story that there was a hack. The NYT and all the major media are doing that too.

Jack Posobiec, a journalist with the far-right news outlet The Rebel, was the first to use the hashtag with a link to the hacked documents online, which was then shared more widely by WikiLeaks....

So one person showed where to find the documents. 

While there is no evidence that the recent hack against Mr. Macron’s campaign was organized by this loosely connected group of extremist campaigners...

What loosely connected group? Does that refer to something earlier in the article? The sentence continues

... the American activists...

Who?

... have been regularly gathering on sites like 4Chan and Discord, which was previously used to coordinate support for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

The name of websites where people communicate seems to stand in for details identifying the "activist" "groups" the article is talking about.

One popular tactic, according to experts, has been so-called Twitter raids, or efforts to hijack trending hashtag and topics on the social media site and inject far-right and anti-Macron propaganda.

That sounds nefarious — raids! inject! — but what does that say other than that social media exists and works in a certain way?

A week before the second round of the French election, for instance, online activists, many from the United States and other English-speaking countries, flooded Twitter with coordinated anti-Macron memes — online satirical photos with often-biting captions — carrying hashtags like #elysee2017 that were linked to the campaign. That included portraying him as a 21st-century equivalent of Marie Antoinette, the out-of-touch last queen of France, and other memes linked him to false allegations of an extramarital affair.

They used satire!  Wait... was it... The Piranha Brothers?!



ADDED: The "loosely connected group" just doesn't even seem to be a group at all. I can't see how it's anything more than the way social media operates to facilitate reading and writing. It's just free speech. I read this as the NYT agonizing over how MSM isn't filtering everything these days, and yet here it is, demonstrating how badly it filters. I'm giving this post my "fake news" tag. That just means the subject of "fake news" is an issue, not that I'm saying the NYT published a fake news article.

Do you think this NYT article should be called fake news?

Yes. Because it is fake news.

Yes. Because it's fake enough that the NYT deserves to be taunted with the aggravating pejorative.

No. Because it follows the norms of ethical journalism.

No. Because "fake news" is too strong a term. Criticize the article, but don't name-call.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"The NYT's new columnist defends his views on Arabs, Black Lives Matter, campus rape."

"It’s a decision that infuriated many of the paper’s liberal readers. [Bret] Stephens may be a vocal critic of Donald Trump, but his views are firmly right-wing...."

Meet your newest conservative NYT columnist, joining Ross Douthat and David Brooks.

I have to add the tag Bret Stephens and publish this post so I can click on it and see what I've said about him over the years. Hang on a sec....

ADDED: I've got 2 old posts tagged Bret Stephens:

1. April 28, 2015: I posted about a column of his that was called " "Hillary’s Cynical Song of Self/The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat." I said:

Does Stephens's analogy function properly? He isn't saying Americans will be able to do the equivalent of slowly digesting the a goat, only imagining that Clinton's people must be hoping that will happen. But the slow digesting can only occur if the goat is swallowed. The python performs 2 tricks: swallowing the goat and digesting the goat. The swallowing must come first. Without the swallowing, the devastating evidence is preserved....

2. April 15, 2014: I just quote something he writes and call it "very sarcastic." It's:

No, what we need as the Republican nominee in 2016 is a man of more glaring disqualifications. Someone so nakedly unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of sane Americans that only the GOP could think of nominating him. This man is Rand Paul....

"White House officials said Mr. Trump took a personal interest in her case.... 'He just said, "Let’s bring her home."'"

From the NYT report, "American Aid Worker, Release Secured by Trump Officials, Leaves Egypt."

This article, new today, appears in the print edition not on the front page, but on page 10. On the home page of the web edition, it's hard to find. I did a search for the woman's name and found nothing, then for "Egypt," and found the headline tucked away... do you see it?



It's not under "World" or "U.S." but "Politics" — politics? — sandwiched between "Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss" and "Jeff Sessions Dismisses Hawaii as ‘an Island in the Pacific.’"

By contrast, the Washington Post home page has the story at the top of the home page, with the woman's name, Aya Hijazi, in clear print:



The visual effect is a triad of bold females challenging the powers that be: 1. There's "Aya Hijazi, a charity worker... incarcerated without trial on charges that were widely derided." 2. There's that "Fearless Girl" sculpture we've been talking about. (It's not a new story, so it seems especially conscious to put the story front and center today. (The article has an interesting feminist angle: The male artist expresses pain that his bull — against his original intent — has become a symbol of male chauvinism.)) 3. There's Marie Le Pen, boosted by the latest Paris terrorist attack.

It's hard — isn't it? — for the liberal media to give President Trump credit for anything, but they should gracefully give him the credit he genuinely deserves. Imagine what the NYT would look like if President Obama had brought Aya Hijazi home! Trump was portrayed in a negative light for cozying up to Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, but the Obama administration tried and failed to bring Hijazi home. From WaPo:

It was not until Trump moved to reset U.S. relations with Egypt by embracing Sissi at the White House on April 3 — he publicly hailed the autocrat’s leadership as “fantastic” and offered the U.S. government’s “strong backing” — that Egypt’s posture changed. Last Sunday, a court in Cairo dropped all charges against Hijazi and the others.

Let's talk about which is better, Obama's words or Trump's words? Do Trump's words seem ridiculous and clownish — calling Sissi "fantastic" — when we see that Trump got results?

WaPo prods us to think of the Trump administration in terms of "confusion" (it's the old "chaos" template, that alternates with "evil" in the elite media's coverage of Trump):

What the White House plans to celebrate as vindication of its early diplomacy comes at the end of a week in which the administration has combated charges of foreign policy confusion. Although the president received wide praise for his decision to punish Syria for its presumed chemical weapons attack with a barrage of cruise missiles, the administration has been criticized for contradictions over policy toward Syria and Turkey, and misstatements on the U.S. response to North Korea’s weapons activity.

Successful action is camouflaged in verbiage about things that have been said. Some of his words may sound like confusion, but that doesn't mean Trump is confused about what he is saying. Maybe he knows how to use words. There's an awful lot of evidence that he does. You can look down on him and call him confused, but when the results come in, you ought to question your analysis of what he is doing with words.

Toward the end of the WaPo article:

The senior Trump administration official said the agreement for Hijazi’s release was the product of Trump’s “discreet diplomacy” — meaning the president’s efforts to cultivate warm relations with strongmen such as Sissi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in part by avoiding public pronouncements on human rights that might alienate the foreign governments.

Discreet. Consider the notion that Trump is discreet. 

Weirdly feminizing headline about Trump at the NYT.

"A Homebody President Sits Out His Honeymoon Period."

Mr. Trump, who dislikes spending the night away from home and has been adapting to life at the White House, has rarely ventured far from the Executive Mansion or his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida during his first 85 days in office. He has not strayed west of the Mississippi River, appearing at public events in only seven states and eschewing trips overseas. He is planning to travel to Wisconsin on Tuesday, and his first international trip is scheduled for next month, when he is to visit Brussels and Italy for meetings with world leaders.

By contrast, President Barack Obama had made public appearances in nine states and taken three overseas trips by this point in his presidency, and was beginning his fourth journey abroad. And President George W. Bush had stopped in 23 states by mid-April during his first year in office and also visited Canada.

“We are not seeing this president following the norm of going out to the public and making his case in the same way as presidents have for as far back as you want to go,” said James A. McCann, a professor of political science at Purdue University who has studied presidential travel patterns. “Trump is going to his own drummer, as usual. It’s a risky strategy.”

Thanks, professor, but remember how Trump went out all over the country for a year and a half making his case before the election? You know what name doesn't appear in this article? Hillary Clinton. Don't think about how she failed to travel to those blue-wall states she lost, how she never made her case to Americans she took for granted.

Another word I don't see in this article is "yacht." That's the word I think of when I see the comparison to Barack Obama. I was just reading the Daily Mail article "A picture perfect moment! Barack and Michelle Obama pose on billionaire David Geffen's superyacht during day out with Oprah, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks in French Polynesia/Barack and Michelle Obama were guests on David Geffen's 454ft superyacht Rising Sun on Friday/Oprah, Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen were also on board the stunning $300million vessel /The Obamas have been holidaying at the Brando resort in French Polynesia for the past month /Since leaving the White House, they have also visited Palm Springs, Hawaii and toured the Caribbean."

What charming wanderlust, compared to our new "homebody" President.

Top-rated comment at The Daily Mail: "....nothing like hanging out with the poor people....how's your carbon footprint these days Obama?"

I can't get over that word "homebody" in the NYT headline.

1. It's a putdown, but why is it a putdown? The feminist answer is: Staying home, loving home, working within the home are traditionally associated with women, and things associated with women are viewed as inferior. To put "homebody" and "honeymoon" together is, I assert, feminizing. Of course, "honeymoon" is normally used to describe a President's first 100 days, but it's not about traveling. It's about the glow of good opinion that surrounds a new President. The media, especially the NYT, have denied Trump that kind of honeymoon, so it's silly to use that word to refer to Trump. It's only being used here, I infer, because it makes "homebody" sound especially feminine. It's one more way to take a shot at Trump. But there's collateral damage to the feminist cause because it's using the similarity to a woman as an insult.

2. The President's workplace is the White House. A President at the White House is at work. To call him a "homebody" is to act as though he's enjoying the comforts of domesticity. But he's at work. Yes, Trump has a second place, Mar-a-Lago, and he goes there a lot. But it's another work-and-home place. He seems to be working. Is there any news that he's not hard at work? I can understand journalists preferring the visuals and excitement of trips to foreign lands, but that has nothing to do with whether Trump is a "homebody."

ADDED: I publish this post, and I'm about to add some extra words about the use of the phrase "sits out" in the headline, when Meade fixes on a different word, "period." He calls out: "It makes it sound like he got his period."

And that opens up vistas of feminist analysis.

NYT uncovers ATF scandal that began in 2011 and has something to do with Fast and Furious.

" Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used a secret, off-the-books bank account to rent a $21,000 suite at a Nascar race, take a trip to Las Vegas and donate money to the school of one of the agent’s children, according to records and interviews...."

Government spending typically requires a strict audit trail, but the money deposited in the bank account came from an unlikely source. A.T.F. agents told the informants to buy untaxed cigarettes, mark up the cost and sell them at a profit. The sales made millions of dollars, which poured into the account....

It is not clear whether Obama administration officials authorized the unorthodox account, which was opened at a time when the A.T.F. said it was tightening restrictions on undercover operations. The agency was also moving to improve its management after a botched gun trafficking investigation known as Fast and Furious.

Normally, agents use government-controlled funds known as “churning accounts” to finance tobacco smuggling investigations. The new rules imposed greater oversight over churning accounts. By using the secret bank account, agents in Bristol avoided that oversight....

Why doesn't this NYT article say one word about climate change/global warming?

"Inhabitants of Maldives Atoll Fear a Flood of Saudi Money":

[Some people in the Maldives] are bracing for a life change they fear could be catastrophic, after the Maldivian president’s announcement in January that leaders of Saudi Arabia were planning a $10 billion investment in the group of islands where Mr. Ahmed lives, known as Faafu Atoll....

Saudi Arabia has for decades spread its conservative strand of Islam in the Maldives by sending religious leaders, building mosques and giving scholarships to students to attend its universities. The Saudis are building a new airport terminal, and have pledged tens of millions of dollars in loans and grants for infrastructure and housing on an artificial island near the capital, Malé....

A year later, Prince Mohammed returned to host a week of parties. He and his entourage took over two resorts, said a person familiar with the plans. That person said guests had flown in night after night on private jets to attend the parties, which featured famous entertainers including the rapper Pitbull and the South Korean singer Psy....

Nothing says "conservative strand of Islam" more than Pitbull...



... and Psy...



... unless "conservative Islam" is about rich, louche men mindlessly enjoying themselves.

But when I see the word "Maldives," what I think is: Islands that will be underwater soon. And I think that I think that because of articles I've read mostly in the NYT. Why is Saudi Arabia investing $10 billion in such bad real estate?

Maybe the answer is: For Saudi Arabia, $10 billion is a good price for a few decades of glamorous indulgence.

But I would like some discussion of the topic in The New York Times.* This is a long article. About the Maldives. How can you write about the Maldives and not address the #1 thing about the Maldives that you've been telling me about for years?
____________________________

* Examples: "Threatened U.S. Pullout Might Help, Not Hobble, Global Climate Pact" (published yesterday, "Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim - chair of the Alliance of Small Island States whose members fear they are at risk from rising sea levels - urged continued U.S. participation in Paris"); "At the U.N., a Free-for-All on Setting Global Goals" (May 2014, "Island nations like the Maldives, which lies less than six feet above sea level, worry more about what rising temperatures will do to the sea"); "Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land" (March 2014, "[T]he melting of much of the earth’s ice... is likely to raise sea levels and flood coastal regions. Such a rise will be uneven because of gravitational effects and human intervention, so predicting its outcome in any one place is difficult. But island nations like the Maldives, Kiribati and Fiji may lose much of their land area, and millions of Bangladeshis will be displaced.")

"What you call the 'Abortion Party' I call the only party that protects and defends women's rights."

"Government has no place in the wombs of women, period. As a woman, the only parties I will ever vote for are those that recognize I'm a fully functioning human being with an autonomous right to choose what I do with my own body. Anything else would be stupid and self-defeating. (And it has nothing, really, to do with abortion, which I've never had and don't plan on having either.)"

That is — by a very wide margin — the top-voted comment at a NYT op-ed "To Win Again, Democrats Must Stop Being the Abortion Party." The op-ed, by Thomas Groome, a theology and religion education professor, is not as unsubtle as the headline makes it sound. Here's the last line: "If Democrats want to regain the Catholic vote, they must treat abortion as a moral issue, work for its continued reduction and articulate a more nuanced message than, 'We support Roe v. Wade.'"

The headline is the NYT's responsibility, and it actually is very weird. Groome never uses the expression "the Abortion Party," and his main topic is the Catholic vote, not pro-life voters in general. He uses the word "Catholic" 21 times. Why isn't "Catholic" in the headline?!

"I love the NYT. I have been reading it for 50 years. I'm begging it to go straight."

I say in the comments, half an hour after posting "The NYT struggles to fight off Trump's use of that NYT headline 'Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides.'"

And Original Mike says:

You are in an abusive relationship and you're the enabler. Isn't there a hot line you can call?

Do the Democrats see their only hope as getting an investigation going and somehow reliving Watergate?

It's so sad, and so negative. So backward-looking and devoid of promise. But perhaps that is all they've got.

And then there's the media. The NYT and the Washington Post have a motivation to ally with the Democratic Party in its last-ditch effort to Watergatize Trump after Trump's endless criticisms of them. And this anti-Trump approach may get them a spike in readership, even as it repels some readers like me.

I'm missing the sense that I'm getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you'd cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.

I know some journalists argued that the normal approach shouldn't apply to covering Trump, because Trump is not normal, but that's not my idea of professionalism. Even if they were to regard professionalism in those terms — if the object of the news goes low, journalism should go low — they'd still be on the hook to continually maintain the perception that their antagonist really is low, and if they use their pages to strain to portray him as low to justify their continual debased presentation of the news, they're self-dealing and double counting.

The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.

I would prefer for the Democratic Party to find something strong and positive to offer us in the next election and for the national media to play it straight on solid journalistic principles. Maybe they could take Trump's "great again" slogan seriously and personally. Meanwhile, we elected a President, and we deserve to see him have the opportunity to do his job. We all deserve that, whether we are in the segment of America that voted for him or not.

These paragraphs were written after, looking in my usual way for bloggable things, I saw this dominating the front page of the NYT:

Will you still love Trump tomorrow?

I listened to the big speech last night and some of the CNN commentary that followed it — including the strangely ecstatic Van Jones...



And I listened to that crabby former governor grousing from a diner in the hinterlands. I was listening from further into the hinterlands than he was talking from, but I — like my fellow hinterlanders as I imagine them — was yelling "Who the hell are you?" at the TV screen.

And I'm scanning the headlines this morning. Here's how the NYT — of late so hostile to Trump — presents it:



Hopeful? Vision? He didn't just get hopeful or vision. He got hopeful and vision. Well, maybe this is a setup for a later takedown: 

He was so good that one time. All that promise. Crushed. What happened to the man who stirred our hearts? I thought it might be love. I thought we could be so happy together. But it was just a one night stand. He lied to me.

Maybe Van Jones got the same memo. If this is political theater, let's be sharp figuring out who's faking it. I think they're all faking it, and everybody wants something.

As for Carryn Owens, I don't think anyone short of Renee Maria Falconetti in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" can fake emotion like that. But she participated in theater and chose to do it. She put herself in a position where millions would look at her face as the President of the United States bathed her in words about her dead beloved. Real emotion poured forth with melodrama beyond anything I have ever seen on television. It was real emotion appropriated for a political purpose, but there is no necessary connection between the meaning of that emotion for her and the political meaning that found its way into the mind of the people.

Ah, but the ecstasy! It penetrated deep. Grabbed our pussy. What a night! Many words were spoken. Was this a lasting treasure or just a moment's pleasure?



Will you still love Trump tomorrow?

"If you read the New York Times, if you read the New York Times... the intent is so evil and so bad."

 The stories are wrong in many cases, but it’s the overall intent. Look at that paper over the last two years. In fact, they had to write a letter of essentially apology to their subscribers because they got the election so wrong. They did a front page article on women talking about me, and the women went absolutely wild because they said that was not what they said. It was a big front-page article, and the Times wouldn’t even apologize and yet they were wrong.... This was a front page article, almost the entire top half of the New York Times, and it was false. It was false. Did they apologize? No. I call them the failing New York Times and they write lies. They write lies. Nobody would know that. For instance, when people read the story on the women—first of all, the reporter who wrote the story has a website full of hatred of Donald Trump. So, he shouldn’t be allowed to be a reporter because he’s not objective. It’s not all, but it has many negative things about Donald Trump. But he shouldn’t be allowed to write on Donald Trump. And, he writes that story. But that’s one of many. So, when you read the Sunday New York Times, it’s just hit after hit after hit. And honestly, I think people are wise to it because if you look at the approval rating, you see it’s down. You know, it’s gone. There’s very little approval.”

In spite of all the 3rd-person references to Donald Trump, I don't have to tell you that's Donald Trump.