@markjacob
Yes this is outrageous! Hard to believe they haven’t retracted /corrected it - Grrrr.

They did normalized Hitler and covered up the Holodomor — and got a Pulitzer for doing it. God knows what else.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/strip-pulitzer-prize-from-new-york-times-over-cover_b_5a15c588e4b0f401dfa7ecce

@markjacob It seems like our stalwart institutions aren't built to handle extremism. Eg, there were no rules to stop Trump from doing many of the crazy things that he did, but only because no one making the rules could have imagined that someone who got to be president would do those things.

I think media outlets like the NYT suffer from some of the same problems. Their norms are built to be fair to two sides who are living on planet earth.

Which is...a vaaaaaast oversight.

@markjacob
When someone argues a position without stating the logical course of action to follow (eg, one race is destructive to another), maybe there's a reason. Maybe if made explicit, the position's implications would simply break our brains.

I mean, how do you pretend to be a sane and civil person sharing a cup of tea with your interviewee when "mass murder" drops on the table? Emergencies require advance preparation but we don't train for sudden Nazis like we train for CPR.

@markjacob

And it trickles all the way down.

(Appleton, Wisconsin Post-Crescent, July 13, 1934)

@markjacob it was the same with the NY Time’s coverage of the suffrage movement one hundred years ago:

In the final years of the suffrage campaign, from 1913 to 1920, Times editorialists parroted the standard anti-suffrage arguments: Women did not want the vote; they would vote as their menfolk did, doubling the cost of elections; they would be ruled by emotion; they were ill-equipped for the rough-and-tumble of politics. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/new-york-times-suffrage/

@markjacob

"peculiar political cleverness" 😡

@markjacob Trump, whose daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism, is not an antisemite - he's a deceiving fraudster.
And DeSantis is not a fascist, as widely understood - he's a racist white-supremacist wannabe-totalitarian — controlled by his evidently over-ambitious wife.

Notwithstanding the fact that both very much look like backward orifices .

@markjacob I will NEVER forget the white people who are ignoring his bigotry and racism.

Why would anyone support a man willing to erase black and gay people just because he can?

What the actual fuck #newyorktimes 🤬🤬

@markjacob DeSantis brand: anti education

NYT brand: crawling sycophants to fascists everywhere

@markjacob

Money spent on this rag could be better spent helping desperate people get the hell out of Florida. (Yes, I know that's not a long-term solution, but... ugh. Fuck this shit paper and the "good" Liberals who keep it going.)

I guess "racist, fascist pig" could be considered a brand.

@markjacob

@markjacob

As a newspaper (NYT), if you play to "both sides" you lose the trust of respectable, democratic readers and of the public. Perhaps you still make money but your "honorable image" is damaged.

@markjacob

That was precisely what it reminded me of. Hitler would probably be the recipient of the puffiest puff pieces in the NYT these days.

@markjacob
@pluralistic

Posting headlines only with an editorialized summary of the content is the functional equivalent of a quote tweet. Preaching to one's choir instead of encouraging others to read the full context. There's a full article there. Why not encourage your (intelligent) followers to read it?

I get that outrage clickbait gets views, but Mastodon is supposed to be better than Twitter in this regard, right? Let's not repeat our mistakes.

@markjacob Nice post! This kind of “journalism” is not aimed at the left, trying to make fascism seem ok.

Rather, it’s aimed at the vast majority of Republicans who are highly sympathetic with these ideas. They are closet racists and anti-semites. But they are still human enough to need to assuage their moral dissonance. And they need to exist in society. So they need plausible stories they can believe in that will allow them to vote Republican while embracing their secret biases.

@markjacob its dreadful. Obergruppenfuhrer DeSantis is Hitler reincarnated. It would be nice if journalists actually knew something or cared about history and what violent sociopaths like Hitler & Stalin did in the 1930s and early 1940s. They weren’t “building their brands”. They were committing genocide.

That is where DeSantis is headed.