This week on the insightful side, both top comments come in response to our post about the New York Times bending over backwards to downplay Trump’s criminality and absurdity. In first place it’s Thad thinking about the week in which it happened:
What better way for the New York Times to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 than to act as a propaganda arm for a fascist president?
In second place, it’s Whoever with a broader comment about journalism:
The most corrosive idea in American journalism is the “both sides” idea. It rejects the idea that there is an objective truth and that everything is an opinion. It rejects reporting facts in favor of reporting feelings or reporting the agenda of partisan people.
Sometimes, one cannot get to an objective truth, but many times, one can and should report this.
Yet, we do have several “news” sources that reject the idea of reporting “both sides”: but they don’t replace it with truth. For example Newsmax or Fox news.
But for editor’s choice on the insightful side we’ll start out with a sort of “both sides” comment that does work, from Thad again and on our post about Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon complaining about AI:
On the one hand, headlines like Gizmodo’s and this one that imply Sanders appeared directly with Steve Bannon are misleading, given that what actually happened was they were separate speakers at the same conference.
On the other hand, if you ever accept an invitation to speak at a conference, and then learn that other invited speakers include Steve Bannon, the only correct thing to do in that situation is cancel. Sanders shouldn’t have been there, regardless of whether or not he and Bannon were ever in the same room.
Next, it’s Drew Wilson back on the post about news outlets playing nice with Trump:
The kicker is that the media outlets will still get punished anyway for some reason or another (thanks to Trumps extremely thin skin). I mean, the media spent years sucking up to Trump and the Trump White House, in response, built a webpage devoted to calling the bootlicking media a bunch of liars. Won’t be the last time the Trump admin does something like that, either.
And we’ll remain on that post for a while since it’s also the source of both winning comments on the funny side. Not just that, Thad took first place here too, with a comment replying to a line of riffing that you might be able to figure out or might have to go look at:
I suppose that plan to build a bunker has some potential upsides.
In second place, it’s an anonymous comment taking a look at the legal issues with Trump’s announcement:
“Attempted murder”? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?
But if he can’t actually give the money, how is he guilty of bribery?
Checkmate libs.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from MrWilson about the fact that the problems with the reflecting pool was from a botched repair job, despite the accusations:
Ironically, there are several videos of the “vandalism.” It was the footage of the work the contractors were doing!
Finally, we’ll close it out with one last comment from Thad, this time in response to the assertion that Trump’s damage to public institutions “could end up lasting a generation”:
I never figured you for an optimist.
That’s all for this week, folks!