“And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.” - Orwell, 1984.
Thanks. My feeling is there is a redundancy or the addressing of the obvious here. They live in a prison, there is no question that everything they are told is a fabrication, Winston himself destroys the past for his job. Musing about historical accuracy at this point in the novel seems, um, beside the point.
He is showing what fascism does to people's thought process.
MAGAts know what they are told is a lie but they like the lie, much like Winston likes his job, so they are able to keep two conflicting thoughts in their heads at the same time. Orwell called it "doublethink", we call it "Cognitive Dissonance".
And this is NOT how you do it. Today’s Post email:
“Trump will deliver his State of the Union address to Congress tonight.
He needs to make an impact: The speech comes at a fragile moment in Trump’s second term. Voters are angry about inflation, and cracks are emerging in his MAGA coalition.”
Needs to make an impact for what? Unleashing ICE in every city? Shooting citizens? Starting war? Blocking Epstein investigation?
After the Supremes tried to take away his tariff toys, Trump broke into an incoherent tantrum that has yet to abate. People who only get their news from the Times would have no idea how infantile, inarticulate and repugnant is this prolonged spasm of rage against the Court that put him in the White House instead of prison. Luckily, the polls indicate that the truth is managing get through despite the Times' efforts to denature it.
And the Times should have reported his incoherent tantrum in full, instead of sanitizing it into seemingly coherent chunks. Pixels are virtually free in the digital edition, so why not do it?
I would add to these a list Prof. Jay Rosen re-posted yesterday:
• Defense of democracy seen as basic to the job
• Symmetrical accounts of asymmetrical realities seen as malpractice
• "Politics as strategic game" frame seen as low quality, downmarket, amateurish - and overmatched.
• Bad actors with a history of misinforming the public seen as unsuitable sources and unwelcome guests
• Internalizing of the 'liberal bias" critique seen as self-crippling, a historic mistake in need of correction.
I'll also add to this my perpetual call for industry self-policing, and that if anyone doesn't follow the above rules, they get banned, blocked, shunned, and generally shut out of the industry.
Folks should produce journalism with integrity, or not at all.
And there's a WHOLE LOT of people who are currently in the industry who should not be.
Regarding Prof. Rosen's fifth point: That has long been one of my greatest frustrations about American culture and the media: the myth of liberal bias in the mainstream press. This has long been fostered by Republicans, but unfortunately accepted as a given by a huge swath of Americans. It's a huge problem when speaking the truth about (often Republican) mistruths--sorry, LIES--is seen as bias and worse (as Ms. Sullivan often points out), when the media is afraid (apparently) to speak the truth plainly for fear of being accused of liberal bias. This dynamic is one of the greatest Republican propaganda victories for several decades. And it's worse now in the D'rump era when the public's assumption of liberal bias in the media inhibits them from seeing how far the mainstream media has succumbed to CONSERVATIVE talking points.
Perhaps the worst part of what Bezos is doing at the Post is the editorials. I have to see headlines (I don't actually read the slop) saying that we can't raise taxes on the rich or that our main problem is over-regulation. The Post's opinion writing was never all that progressive, but it's just reactionary now. Very depressing.
I cancelled my years-log subscription in the spring of 2024 because of the headlines. The actual articles often made sense, but the editors (management) who write the headers often skewed the meaning of the articles. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. It was a recurring theme among the more articulate, observant commenter/readers at that time.
I noticed that too, but here I'm actually talking about the Opinion pages and unsigned editorials. They've gone the way of the WSJ op-ed, and not just the headlines.
I totally agree with Dean Wright. Trump says crazy things every day. yet those with power—in politics, in business, and, yes, in the media—act as if everything is normal. What is going on?
I have two criticisms of this piece. The first is about this gross misapprehension of what the NYT was up to after 9-11:
“The New York Times rose to the occasion with a daily print section called A Nation at War…”
You even commend them for being “creative”, lol. They certainly were! They laundered false claims about Iraq with the end of concocting a casus belli against Iraq through Judith Miller, who had every aspect of being an intelligence agent. The NYT engaged in ghastly war propaganda and it’s amnesia to remember it otherwise.
The other criticism is more general, but this trip down memory lane is illustrative—our major media are corporately owned and therefore regime-adjacent. They engage in investigative reporting, yes, but their editors, publishers and owners will always hedge on democracy if dictatorship is what power demands. The Upton Sinclair aphorism applies: “It’s impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
This is a problem with minor media, too, like the Atlantic, which demonstrates agnosticism about what form of government we live under, on one page publishing impassioned denunciations of the Trump dictatorship, on the other Conor Chatterton Williamsdorf…or even Sarah Isgur (this week). Not coincidentally, another Iraq war propagandist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the editor.
Yes, only McClatchey/Knight-Ridder (I’ve lost track of when they changed) challenged the Bush administration story on WMD’s and the wisdom of invading two countries to go after a stateless group. I still remember getting into an argument with a colleague over that.
Not the case! I’m in the DMV and WaPo—Walter Pincus, notably—exposed these WMD lies in real time, though the editors notoriously buried the stories inside. Their Opinions pages, on the other hand, led by the execrable Fred Hiatt, banged the drum for war. So, they were basically the inverse of the NYT, which editorially opposed the invasion while producing the false propaganda used to justify it.
Thank you for clarifying this ongoing problem — I have gone into the NYT archives many times to see how they covered the rise of Hitler (before it was a total crisis) — not well. One thing we can do is share this very important article and tag newspapers, such as the NYT, on platforms like Threads and FB, where they have a presence.
Please read and consider these point I wrote down last February. I began to document (primarily on TikTok at the time) the Times's subtle opposition to the Democrats and democracy in the spring of 2024 when they became unjustifiably critical of Joe Biden and then transferred all their criticisms of him to Harris while always referring to Trump with terms such as "powerful," "a leader," "shows leadership," "popular," etc. For Biden and Harris, their descriptors always were "weak," "unpopular," "not strong."
Trump really is losing it. I do wish mainstream media would print his speeches verbatim instead of sane washing them. From his latest press conference:
“why— why would you do this? and they walk in— nobody even asks for— like, you have an identification? do you have an ID? um— [long pause] it’s so crazy. you know, the Mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person, I, I met him. his ideology is not, not too good. but uhhhh— we’re having a massive snowstorm right now, and I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling. what? what the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you help— [points to a woman in the audience] hello, darling, how are you? [points again] no, right behind you. look. my friend, right? are you okay? yes, you. are you okay? are you okay? [long pause] good. good. are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. lotta money, to get her eyes fixed. that doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”
I agree emphatically with this and other comments here that the mainstream media needs to print D'rump's press conference talk and social media diatribes IN FULL. That way more Americans can see at face value how bonkers this guy is. I generally try to avoid any clips of him speaking (don't want him involuntarily taking up space in my head), but whenever I see a meme on social media that quotes one of the Orange Menace's Truth Social posts IN FULL I am stunned by how obviously rambling and incoherent they are. As Lawrence O'Donnell said on MS Now last night, if he (Lawrence) had written anything like that AS A THIRD GRADER in the private Catholic school he attended, he would be severely reprimanded.
The free press died through corporate ownership. The fake Biden outrage did not age well, and was clearly a move to ensure trump's election. Long live the independent press. We are waiting for them to form an affordable alternative that will form an effective opposition. Meanwhile I call on all of us to unsubscribe from corporate media. It doesn't deserve your support.
"....and an absolute end to the “both sides” coverage...."
"Some stories don't have two sides." --Edward R. Murrow.
Love that Edward R. Murrow quote - very powerful.
“And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.” - Orwell, 1984.
No longer a novel, but a playbook.
So frightening, no? :(
Winston's line here always confused me. It seemed inconsequential.
It's referring to the loss (outlawing) of Epistemic inquiry.
Deriving facts through observation, hypothesis, testing, analysis, and conclusion.
Thanks. My feeling is there is a redundancy or the addressing of the obvious here. They live in a prison, there is no question that everything they are told is a fabrication, Winston himself destroys the past for his job. Musing about historical accuracy at this point in the novel seems, um, beside the point.
He is showing what fascism does to people's thought process.
MAGAts know what they are told is a lie but they like the lie, much like Winston likes his job, so they are able to keep two conflicting thoughts in their heads at the same time. Orwell called it "doublethink", we call it "Cognitive Dissonance".
🤔
Fact checkers. Use fact checkers, researchers. Demand accuracy, don't read/subscribe to anything not fact checked.
I, and several fellow fact checkers I've been in contact with, would be honored and happy to take a pay cut to get the truth out there.
Independent journalists -- use us!
I'm happy to connect people -- hmu!
And this is NOT how you do it. Today’s Post email:
“Trump will deliver his State of the Union address to Congress tonight.
He needs to make an impact: The speech comes at a fragile moment in Trump’s second term. Voters are angry about inflation, and cracks are emerging in his MAGA coalition.”
Needs to make an impact for what? Unleashing ICE in every city? Shooting citizens? Starting war? Blocking Epstein investigation?
And he won't do any of that. He never confronts reality or provides context.
He will simply drone on and on and on about how great he is and how unfairly he's being treated by both his "friends" and his enemies.
I will be busy washing my hair.
The behavior isn’t subtle anymore, but the coverage still is. That mismatch is becoming its own kind of crisis.
After the Supremes tried to take away his tariff toys, Trump broke into an incoherent tantrum that has yet to abate. People who only get their news from the Times would have no idea how infantile, inarticulate and repugnant is this prolonged spasm of rage against the Court that put him in the White House instead of prison. Luckily, the polls indicate that the truth is managing get through despite the Times' efforts to denature it.
And the Times should have reported his incoherent tantrum in full, instead of sanitizing it into seemingly coherent chunks. Pixels are virtually free in the digital edition, so why not do it?
Also, let's give props to dear defunded NPR, who came out swinging this morning: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
I would add to these a list Prof. Jay Rosen re-posted yesterday:
• Defense of democracy seen as basic to the job
• Symmetrical accounts of asymmetrical realities seen as malpractice
• "Politics as strategic game" frame seen as low quality, downmarket, amateurish - and overmatched.
• Bad actors with a history of misinforming the public seen as unsuitable sources and unwelcome guests
• Internalizing of the 'liberal bias" critique seen as self-crippling, a historic mistake in need of correction.
I'll also add to this my perpetual call for industry self-policing, and that if anyone doesn't follow the above rules, they get banned, blocked, shunned, and generally shut out of the industry.
Folks should produce journalism with integrity, or not at all.
And there's a WHOLE LOT of people who are currently in the industry who should not be.
Anyway, back to work for me.
Great list by Jay.
And appreciate your additions!
Thanks, Margaret. Appreciate your work too.
Feel free to come by The Politics Bar sometime! ( https://www.thepoliticsbar.com/ )
(And of course, by that, I mean I'm inviting you to be a guest, and we'd love to have you on.)
Regarding Prof. Rosen's fifth point: That has long been one of my greatest frustrations about American culture and the media: the myth of liberal bias in the mainstream press. This has long been fostered by Republicans, but unfortunately accepted as a given by a huge swath of Americans. It's a huge problem when speaking the truth about (often Republican) mistruths--sorry, LIES--is seen as bias and worse (as Ms. Sullivan often points out), when the media is afraid (apparently) to speak the truth plainly for fear of being accused of liberal bias. This dynamic is one of the greatest Republican propaganda victories for several decades. And it's worse now in the D'rump era when the public's assumption of liberal bias in the media inhibits them from seeing how far the mainstream media has succumbed to CONSERVATIVE talking points.
Perhaps the worst part of what Bezos is doing at the Post is the editorials. I have to see headlines (I don't actually read the slop) saying that we can't raise taxes on the rich or that our main problem is over-regulation. The Post's opinion writing was never all that progressive, but it's just reactionary now. Very depressing.
I cancelled my years-log subscription in the spring of 2024 because of the headlines. The actual articles often made sense, but the editors (management) who write the headers often skewed the meaning of the articles. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. It was a recurring theme among the more articulate, observant commenter/readers at that time.
I noticed that too, but here I'm actually talking about the Opinion pages and unsigned editorials. They've gone the way of the WSJ op-ed, and not just the headlines.
I totally agree with Dean Wright. Trump says crazy things every day. yet those with power—in politics, in business, and, yes, in the media—act as if everything is normal. What is going on?
Cowardice and opportunism.
Such rich irony that Bezos who began Amazon as an online book store killed the Post’s book section.
My advice to journalists covering Trump: contemplate the worst thing he would or could do and prepare for it.
Ms. Sullivan,
I have two criticisms of this piece. The first is about this gross misapprehension of what the NYT was up to after 9-11:
“The New York Times rose to the occasion with a daily print section called A Nation at War…”
You even commend them for being “creative”, lol. They certainly were! They laundered false claims about Iraq with the end of concocting a casus belli against Iraq through Judith Miller, who had every aspect of being an intelligence agent. The NYT engaged in ghastly war propaganda and it’s amnesia to remember it otherwise.
The other criticism is more general, but this trip down memory lane is illustrative—our major media are corporately owned and therefore regime-adjacent. They engage in investigative reporting, yes, but their editors, publishers and owners will always hedge on democracy if dictatorship is what power demands. The Upton Sinclair aphorism applies: “It’s impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
This is a problem with minor media, too, like the Atlantic, which demonstrates agnosticism about what form of government we live under, on one page publishing impassioned denunciations of the Trump dictatorship, on the other Conor Chatterton Williamsdorf…or even Sarah Isgur (this week). Not coincidentally, another Iraq war propagandist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the editor.
Totally fair. I’ll write about it. (And have written and taught about it.)
Yes, only McClatchey/Knight-Ridder (I’ve lost track of when they changed) challenged the Bush administration story on WMD’s and the wisdom of invading two countries to go after a stateless group. I still remember getting into an argument with a colleague over that.
Not the case! I’m in the DMV and WaPo—Walter Pincus, notably—exposed these WMD lies in real time, though the editors notoriously buried the stories inside. Their Opinions pages, on the other hand, led by the execrable Fred Hiatt, banged the drum for war. So, they were basically the inverse of the NYT, which editorially opposed the invasion while producing the false propaganda used to justify it.
Apologies. I wasn’t a WaPo reader at the time.
This is how you do it. This morning’s AP:
FACT FOCUS: A look at Trump’s false and misleading claims ahead of the State of the Union
Thank you for clarifying this ongoing problem — I have gone into the NYT archives many times to see how they covered the rise of Hitler (before it was a total crisis) — not well. One thing we can do is share this very important article and tag newspapers, such as the NYT, on platforms like Threads and FB, where they have a presence.
Please read and consider these point I wrote down last February. I began to document (primarily on TikTok at the time) the Times's subtle opposition to the Democrats and democracy in the spring of 2024 when they became unjustifiably critical of Joe Biden and then transferred all their criticisms of him to Harris while always referring to Trump with terms such as "powerful," "a leader," "shows leadership," "popular," etc. For Biden and Harris, their descriptors always were "weak," "unpopular," "not strong."
https://artistlike.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-new-york-times?r=lje8i&utm_medium=ios
Trump really is losing it. I do wish mainstream media would print his speeches verbatim instead of sane washing them. From his latest press conference:
“why— why would you do this? and they walk in— nobody even asks for— like, you have an identification? do you have an ID? um— [long pause] it’s so crazy. you know, the Mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person, I, I met him. his ideology is not, not too good. but uhhhh— we’re having a massive snowstorm right now, and I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling. what? what the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you help— [points to a woman in the audience] hello, darling, how are you? [points again] no, right behind you. look. my friend, right? are you okay? yes, you. are you okay? are you okay? [long pause] good. good. are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. lotta money, to get her eyes fixed. that doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”
I agree emphatically with this and other comments here that the mainstream media needs to print D'rump's press conference talk and social media diatribes IN FULL. That way more Americans can see at face value how bonkers this guy is. I generally try to avoid any clips of him speaking (don't want him involuntarily taking up space in my head), but whenever I see a meme on social media that quotes one of the Orange Menace's Truth Social posts IN FULL I am stunned by how obviously rambling and incoherent they are. As Lawrence O'Donnell said on MS Now last night, if he (Lawrence) had written anything like that AS A THIRD GRADER in the private Catholic school he attended, he would be severely reprimanded.
The free press died through corporate ownership. The fake Biden outrage did not age well, and was clearly a move to ensure trump's election. Long live the independent press. We are waiting for them to form an affordable alternative that will form an effective opposition. Meanwhile I call on all of us to unsubscribe from corporate media. It doesn't deserve your support.