i swear to god. people will spend eight goddamn years complaining about how friendly the new york times is to donald trump and then just... keep accepting their framing. apparently forever. it's a provincial newspaper run by a sixth generation failson. have some self respect
I mostly agree with you about their reach, but when the subject is specifically Donald Trump he was a colorful local character to them for many, many years
Sure. But I think the media’s culpability in 2016 Trump’s a lot more about cable “news” than the elite rag, you know? And Trump was always more Post bait than Times bait IIRC.
We're just stuck at meta-levels, all the same. If Biden is suffering from dementia, it's not going to change anyone's vote here, or on Twitter, or on the NYT Editorial board. Total non-factor.
We also have no way to even say if Biden's brain is good or not, or ever has been!
SO.
We can't talk about the thing because we don't know, and we can't talk about how the thing affects us because we know nothing would change our votes.
That leaves the third level: how will OTHER people react to the thing, but they don't know either bc what even is the thing?
Leaving us as "Will hypothetical undecided voters dislike Biden for his affect SEEMING old and confused, and therefore vote against him or not vote? And how would alternatives work?"
And that's so abstract it's perfect for punditry.
Because the like, genuine, thoughtful answer to all of this is "it literally makes no difference, we have to stop Trump and you should vote for Biden even if we discover he's been dead since 2022."
I don't see the point in complaining that some evil fucks with vested interests are pointing out he's completely decrepit, when the point people "falling for it" make is that evil fucks are well aware he's completely decrepit
Maggie Haberman got a Pulitzer for basically being a stenographer for Javanka and even after it came out she was, at best, friendly with his campaign nothing really changed about her or the NYT in the eyes of a lot of people.
