top New York Times editor: ‘defending democracy is not our job’

the Grey Lady shows us once again why she’s not our friend

“JOURNALISM 101 RULE: If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true. — Now more than ever.”
— attributed to many, made famous on twitter by Andrea Junker.

sorry, Andrea — the New York Times would beg to differ. their own version of Journalism 101 goes something like this:

if Democrats say democracy is awesome and Republicans say democracy sucks all ass and Donny Convict should be God-Emperor for Life, it’s not the Times’ job to get involved with “partisan bickering.”

no, seriously. the chief editor of the Times’ newsroom actually said this.

here’s the exact quote:

“To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.”

there’s a lot to unpack here.

topmost, Kahn is right that democracy has become a partisan issue in America. one side is for it. the other side is trying like hell to replace it with permanent fascism — but how fucked up is it that one entire political party has abandoned the principles upon which our country was founded?

isn’t that newsworthy?

the job of a newspaper is to inform its readers, but the Times has washed its hands of that. they’re just going to tell you that one side is for it, one side is against it, and it’s up to you to figure it the fuck out.

horse shit. the Times should be on the front lines with the rest of us, explaining why fascism is bad. we fought a whole war over it, so it must be pretty important, right?

do your fucking job, New York Times, and stop pretending that a battle over America’s bedrock principles is mere “partisan squabbling.”

does Joe Kahn really think the Times is going to be hunky dory if Donny Convict shitcans democracy? does he not know what happens to a free press under fascist rule?

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, Joe, pick up a history book.

secondly: how much fucking nerve does Kahn have to claim that the Times’ political coverage is “impartial”?

does Kahn not read his own paper?

nepo-publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger’s panties are in a permanent twist because Joe Biden continues to refuse to sit down for the interview that Sulz imagines is his newspaper’s “birthright” — and so he’s declared war on Biden. his own staffers are admitting that Sulz told them to go after Biden relentlessly.

One unnamed Times reporter suggested to Politico that “tough reporting” on Biden’s advanced age and lagging poll numbers is “quietly” encouraged by Sulzberger in retaliation for Biden’s unwillingness to sit for an interview.

so fuck off, Joe Kahn. stop trying to gaslight us that the Times’ coverage is “impartial.”

which brings us to the latest New York Times journalistic war crime.

“Breaking News: A Parkinson’s expert visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, according to official visitor logs. The administration has said that President Biden has no signs of the disease.”

an incendiary headline and and the insinuation that the White House is denying that Biden has Parkinson’s Disease was all the entire internet — and the cable shows — needed to explode into a JOE BIDEN HAS PARKINSON’S frenzy.

just what we absolutely do not fucking need right now, more fuel for the Joe Biden is icky and he’s probably already dead fire.

is this where we are? the New York Times is now going through the White House visitor logs with a fine-tooth comb, searching for what they imagine to be incriminating evidence?

remind me, did the press do this with Donny Convict? oh wait, they couldn’t — the Trump White House kept their visitor logs secret.

Washington, D.C., April 14, 2017 – The Trump White House announced today it would no longer disclose the routine visitor logs maintained by the Secret Service and published online by the Obama administration since 2009, and claimed national security and privacy risks.

not only did Donny hide the visitor logs, he had his insurrectionist pals use an un-monitored side entrance so that no one would find out they were cooking up their failed coup during midnight meetings.

but please, do tell me one more time how the Times’ political coverage is impartial. it’s such a good fairy tale.

hey, you know whose name also shows up in the White House visitor logs? mine. what can the press infer from that? that Joe Biden needed a swearing coach? I don’t think so, he does just fine on his own.

last night, the White House medical unit issued a statement — and I want to stress that I am paraphrasing here:

listen up good, you fucknuggets: this doctor is the guy who administers the president’s neurological exam during his twice-yearly checkups. he found nothing wrong. it’s all in the medical report that we post on the our web site for the whole world to see. plus, the doctor has other patients that he sees at the White House. we have a whole medical wing here that attends to the needs of all staff and visitors. how do you not know these things? why don’t you useless jizz stains get over yourselves already?”

ok, I may have made that last sentence up.

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oh look, the Project 2025 apologists are already oozing out of the woodwork.

Brian Stelter: “so ironically, Project 2025, even though it scares a lot of liberals, it’s actually a forward-looking plan.”

huh? Brian, what the fuck does that even mean, that Project 2025 is “forward looking?” rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, is that forward looking? banning birth control, is that forward looking? medical care based the ravings of a 17-century witch-burning misogynist, how the fuck is that forward looking?

by that logic, Mein Kampf was also a forward-looking plan.

hey, if it’s Trump apologists you’re looking for, no better place to start than with Maggie “Plausible Deniability” Haberman.

“‘So, the Biden campaign has decided to frame Project 2025 as a Trump effort,’ Haberman responded. ‘It’s not actually a Trump effort.’”

that was Mags, on CNN last night. she goes on to explain that because there’s a lot of stuff in Project 2025 that Donny doesn’t care about, that’s all the proof you need that he had nothing to do with it.

bullshit. just in case you really need proof that Donny’s freakishly microscopic hands are all over Project 2025, check out this paragraph on page 319 of the 900-page document.

The next Secretary of Energy will similarly have much work to do. Under the next President, the Department of Energy should end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots.”

“oppose eyesore windmills.” hmm, does that sound like anyone we know? maybe someone who threw a shit-fit when Scotland put up windmills near his vermin-infested Aberdeen golf motel?

Donny Convict is probably the only person in America this obsessed with quote-unquote “eyesore” windmills. he’s definitely the only dipshit who believes that windmills cause noise cancer.

and then we get a bunch of bullshit about electric cars. tell me that’s not the work of Donny. it’s surprising that Project 2025 doesn’t devolve into rant about sharks and batteries right there.

but nah, insists Maggie Haberman, Donny had nothing to do with Project 2025.

Donald Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone — and Maggie Haberman would explain that Donny couldn’t have done it, because he says he doesn’t know how guns work.

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.