Jo_clever_ke: Well it's not like they can just google some of the names in their own story to see what comes up and find much more interesting stories. No let's just go with a soft ball story about people moving.

I know they get rolled all the time but for the Times to get rolled by “actually they just want to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it … with larger families and fewer immigrants” is the Times putting the 14 words in the paper

Well it's not like they can just google some of the names in their own story to see what comes up and find much more interesting stories. No let's just go with a soft ball story about people moving.

The NY Times apparently has forgotten how to use google.

And googling Charles Haywood might have led them to mention that this “provocateur” is preparing for violence against the federal government. www.theguardian.com/world/2023/a...

US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s networkwww.theguardian.com Revealed: Charles Haywood, creator of the Society for American Civic Renewal, has said he might serve as ‘warlord’ at the head of an ‘armed patronage network’

They do this with ALL their "culture war" (read: Christofascist propaganda) stories. Quote a person who seems random but really is deep in far-right activism.

Oh, article is very clear that they're talking to far right activists, they name drop the Claremont Institute immediately, they just present it all in the most innocent way possible. 'Just normal folks looking for like minded people,' that sort of thing, without getting too into what they believe.

Michael Anton is also a fun name to google.

so i did

Ah, so this is truly a pointless highlight of some of the worst people in politics. It's not even remotely interesting that they're moving to red states now that working remotely has been normalized.

I read the first couple paragraphs last night, and that was my immediate take, so I stopped reading. Was there a point other than normalizing terrible people with sinister ambitions?

It would be too much work to find someone random rather than take the name of the person handed them by an organization. When my organization was organizing in support of issues such as HillaryCare, Rx purchasing pool, we had names for folks primed to talk to press. It's standard organizing.

And the press falls for it every time. It's not like we had to mislead. We might have a few members listed at the end of a press release or sometimes a reporter would call up and say they're writing a story about x, do we have someone to tell the story? Of course we did or they would quit calling.

I had a recipe card box with name, address, contact info and their health care, prescription drug story so I could pick the people most appropriate for the story reporters were working on. I had similar cards with people concerned about school funding, proposed Enron merger, bank consolidation, etc.

The organization had a jar to collect money for staff rafting trip in the summer. Any staff person quoted in the press rather than one of our members had to kick in money.

That's fine on the organizing end, but it isn't ethical for articles to exclude whether the person highlighted is say, an organizer themselves.

same playbook oil companies used with scientists. the same few dudes, employed by Big Oil, trotted out to give “the other side” of things

🎯

It's right there in the Times' article! But that's it. No reason to talk any more about it 🤷🏼‍♂️

Yeah, it's not completely ignored, but at the same time it's brushed under the rug really fast in favor of the anodyne.

Just calling Camp of the Saints racist, really really undersells how unbelievably racist it actually is, this isnt a book from 1973 that is now considered racist, this is a profoundly racist book even by the standard of 1973.

“it’s about ethics in journalism” he says

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