Joshua Foust 🪖🎮: Jeff Bezos has put a team of corrupt right wing British editors in charge of the Washington Post, whose job it is to “save” the paper by growing conservative readers. They fired their last progressive columnists months ago. Would that be any different with a better debate? I can be convinced but IDK

My only response is: do any of you think the cable news pundits would react any differently had Biden done better? Tons of winning candidates have crappy debate performances. Their purpose is to cultivate media coverage, which was already openly biased toward Trump. What did this change?

This, to me, speaks to the tactical error Team Biden did of thinking this was a good idea. It never was and they have to make up for that, now. But I don’t know that we’d be seeing a different Dana Bash or Nick Kristof take if he’d been good - any slip is fodder for these people to call for a reset.

Like, if you look at the New York Times specifically, there isn’t a meaningful change in tone or substance from Tuesday to this morning. It’s the same petty idiocy AG Sulzberger has been making the newsroom push for months. Jake Tapper is still Jake Tapper. I don’t see where Biden made things worse?

Jeff Bezos has put a team of corrupt right wing British editors in charge of the Washington Post, whose job it is to “save” the paper by growing conservative readers. They fired their last progressive columnists months ago. Would that be any different with a better debate? I can be convinced but IDK

I do think media coverage matters and the disaster last night probably made some of it worse, but we were already in a crisis of normal people encountering journalists who openly long for Trump’s return, hate Biden, and twist their coverage to match. This is a media crisis, not a Biden crisis.

Like, is this meaningfully different from what Joe & Mika were doing before? It isn’t. They’ve been demanding an imaginary white replacement for Joe and Kamala for months. Yeah, it’s more intense maybe but the substance? They’re repeating themselves from last week. I don’t think it’s worth engaging.

‘Morning Joe’ in Full Meltdown: ‘Biden Cannot Beat Trump’www.thedailybeast.com The ‘Morning Joe’ host said that his affection and respect for Joe Biden were not relevant, and insisted the question was, “Would any corporation in America keep him on as CEO?”

The media hate for Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden is really wild.

I think it’s two things. At a high level, they get too wrapped up in insider debates and often respond publicly to things we can’t hear, from bosses or the whisper networks. But they don’t cover it as such. I also think that decades of right wing trolling about bias worked and they overcorrect.

With Clinton especially there was a lot of open misogyny. Like, journalists I know at large outlets would say insane things over Twitter DMs about how she was so secretive it was their duty to publicize the email hack as much as they could, stuff like that. A lot of group think and petulance.

Petulance describes the current NYT approach to Biden perfectly.

I agree with all of that, but also... the way they cover candidates they don't gets clicks. Everyone forgets that despite pretentions of objectivity, these are profit-driven organizations. Of course, they don't consider that it may damage their credibility in the long run.

Yeah I don’t think anyone in charge of these organizations has any strategy for the long run

These are the days I'm glad I stopped doing Mass Communications research and switched back to History.

I also wonder how much weight is given to executive producers (and the journos themselves) who know the ratings were higher when Trump was president and want to get another four-year hit of that to please the executives and investors so actively (passively) put their fingers on the scales

I mean, they’re pretty open about that and say so on the record to their peers, so I don’t know that we need to wonder. This, from around the time CNN gave Trump an uninterrupted 90 minutes of air time to talk on camera, is revealing for the mindset.

Inside the Meltdown at CNNwww.theatlantic.com CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?