The abdication of journalistic standards has been one of the self-inflicted casualties of the Trump Era. The meltdown at CBS because a reporter had the temerity to ask difficult questions to Ta-Nahesi Coates is surprising even to a jaded media-watcher like me.
The example of TNC gives about Israel being similar to the Jim Crow south doesn't make sense to me. In order for that analogy to work the oppressed population of the Jim Crow south would need to have areas where they were operating as militia units, armed by a foreign power with the explicit political goal of eradicating all white people (and their predominate christian religions) in the US. Then whatever resolution ended it would be the example to follow (at least in theory) but that's not what happened in the US. It's apples and olives.
I thought about exploring Coates' views more but then I learned that his knowledge was gained from a ten day visit to Israel and the West Bank after which he declared that the situation was simple and nuance and complexity had no place in the debate so I was very grateful to him for freeing me to use that time for more productive purposes like watching reruns of "The Simpsons."
I thought “manufacturing consent” was interesting in the way it approached how business and political interests overlap to create decentralized systems that act like much more centralized systems. It seemed like a reasonable way to look at a lot of Cold War conflict stuff apart from the vast conspiracy messaging of the day. I didn’t agree with a lot of its conclusions but I thought the presentation of problems was pretty good.
It makes me sad, because TNC was one of my favorite writers on the old Atlantic blog-roll, about 15 years ago. He had a questing intellect, along with a beautiful and self-revealing style, and was quite transparently educating himself in public about all sorts of things. I read his first two books with pleasure.
[Edit to say, I hope unnecessarily, that I didn't always agree with him - far from it, sometimes - but I always loved what he called "the beautiful struggle", by which he meant the hard moral work of improving oneself and the world, and the bravery with which he lived that out with his readers.]
At some point - probably not coincidentally along with the collapse of the wider "blogosphere" - something changed. I suppose he came to his conclusions and doesn't feel like he needs to learn much more - or, at least, not to make that part of his intellectual life so public - but I miss reading the old Ta-Nehesi. Miss that so much.
Honestly feel bad for the guy. Charitably, his book is an error in judgement, but the result is a bonfire of all the goodwill he built up over the years with people who maybe didn't see totally eye-to-eye with him but at least respected his intellect and thoughtfulness.
I mainly think *blogs* were a great medium - maybe the best ever invented - for the exchange of ideas. They died - as a driver of conversation, at least; I'm aware that some people keep at it, and I admire their persistentance - because the major internet platforms (Google and especially Facebook) colonized their content without adequate economic exchange, and because moderating them against spam and trolling became an insupportable burden.
Boy, though, that ten years or so was an intellectual paradise. So many people writing so many amazing things, and having so many amazing discussions, in public, with each other and their readers.
Substack - though I'm glad it's solved the existential issues for a few - is but a pale imitation. In fact, the $$ earned by Matt and others on this platform demonstrates the immense public value that the old blogosphere had, and how great a [societal? | technical? | incentives? | policy?] failure its loss has been.
I'd be interested in Matt's insider take on what changes to what, and when, might have saved that intellectual eco-system. (Or, was it itself an unsustainable parasite, dependent on sucking the carcass of the legacy media institutions that it helped to kill?)
They weren’t even tough questions! Just obvious points that someone should think of within the first three seconds of deciding to write a book on the topic.
I hadn't heard about that controversy until yesterday when I saw an article about Coates' interview with Trevor Noah on the subject, and I was flabbergasted when I was reading about it. It highlighted a related point to me, which is the ways in which some corners of the left have become completely incapable of arguing from substance as opposed to caricature.
I've seen so many instances where progressives will listen to someone say "thing A is LIKE thing B" and then turn around and say "OH! So you're saying that thing A is the same as this part of thing B that you never brought up or compared thing A to but is easily characterized as bad, so what you're really saying is ALL A is the same as ALL B, and some of B is terrible so you're a terrible person."
With the Coates interview, Noah was asking about the question that Coates had been asked that boiled down to "if I read your book without knowing who you were and stripped away the titles and accolades and awards of who you are, I could easily see what you're saying as something that would be included in a terrorists handbook of propaganda", and Noah took that question and said "why do they always want to strip away all of the context of what's happening in Israel and Gaza? Why can't they address the context and recognize the reality of the situation?" Which is nowhere near what the question was, but it's framed in such a way that anyone listening to the interview can bat away legitimate objections to Coates' characterizations because the people criticizing it are refusing to address substantive reality. It's an infuriating two step that is constantly used to deflect legitimate counter arguments to positions and serves to ensure that the side that agrees with Coates (and other progressive causes in the other situations I've seen such tactics used) can feel righteous in the moral superiority of their stances. I find it all incredibly frustrating.
And to then see CBS respond the way it has and act as if the questions were out-of-bounds has been truly shocking and disappointing.
I haven't seen the Coates interview, so I can't really comment on that. But what you are describing reminds me of how on sports talk shows you inevitably get terrible exchanges like
Analyst: "This college player is a bit undersized and needs to work harder on defense, but his turnaround jumper from the midrange reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant so there's at least some potential there."
Host: "YOU CAN'T COMPARE THIS COLLEGE KID TO KOBE! HE HASN'T EVEN PLAYED A GAME IN THE NBA!"
I just read the times article and learned that CBS news has an “in house race and culture unit.”. My own views on Palestine are closer to Coates’ than those of the Democratic establishment, but the interviewer was well within the American mainstream and had every right to challenge Coates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is sacred to many people on the left. He is due deference. Clearly none of this happens if the same kind of interview was done with JD Vance.
To cleanse CBS of its unholy act of disrespect a DEI consultant was hired to lead the Sacrament of Struggle. But the DEI clergyman was apparently throwing predictable bombs on Twitter and was unhired.
Coates then told Noah (serendipity for the religious references) that Dokoupil was taking up too much space in the conversation. In fact, he knew this because Gayle told him the tough questions she had planned to ask. Doing this apparently is not aligned with CBS journalistic standards.
Maybe Tony can say 10 hail Ta-Nahesi’s and all can be forgiven. What a tangled web we weave.
I think they were a bit flubbed because they were asked in a way that to me seemed intended to signal allegiance rather than just be challenging questions. To Matt’s point, if that’s what you end up doing, you’re not giving anyone much new information apart from which camp you’re in.
I guess I interpreted it as a warning to potential readers (this was a book promo) that Coates has produced an ahistorical, deeply anti-zionist work of quasi-fiction. I thought the exchange during the interview was excellent and revealing (more like a British news interview with a politician than a US morning show love-fest with an "esteemed author") and I appreciated CBS's chief legal correspondents eminently sensible comments on the kerfuffle.
How is this the flagship example of the "abdication of journalistic standards" in the "Trump Era" when the largest cable news outlet, dozens of online whackjob units and even the WSJ editorial page are fully engaged in publishing and amplifying lies basically 100% of the time?
Nah, compared to other abdications of journalistic standards in other eras of American history this is very much a nothing burger. Honestly on matters like this I wish newsrooms would just fight a bit more about about these sorts of thing, old school shouting matches including, rather than these weird in public "harm" based arguments. That's what's really annoying here.
You are assuming that magazines that endorse particular candidates do so because they hope to convince the undecided to vote that way. What if that is not the main motivation -- the point being, instead, to convince the people who were going to vote that way to buy, renew, or extend a subscription to the magazine?
I would think that being supported by wealthy philanthropists would make you more willing to buck readers’ expectations, rather than feeling a need to cater to them with pointless endorsements.
Yes, but would you buck the philanthropists' expectations? Or do you want to remind them that you are doing your best for the political tribe they favour?
Why would the philanthropists care whether you endorse a politician? Does Bill Gates want to support publications that endorse Kamala Harris? It seems more likely to me that he wants Kamala Harris to win, and that he wants to support publications that do useful things in the world, but why would he care about their endorsement, if it's not useful for either of those goals?
That's a very good question. It's like when I read a lot of left-leaning magazines like Vox and others that like to analyze the philanthropy of billionaires through a critical lens, but somehow they were always dead silent about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire whose philanthropy mostly consists of donating to journalists.
This assumes that editors and journalists hate the idea of making money at the same time print media is dying. They might hate the reader letters they might end up getting, but they would definitely like the money.
the odds of that happening are quite low. the real question is how hard they will push to get school teachers and adjuncts and educated but not exactly prosperous people to subscribe/consume
GrowSF is awesome and I would die for a local news org (at this point, literally just a guy) to give endorsements like they do.
I recently moved to what I thought was a pretty big place and I cannot for the life of me figure out which mayoral candidate is pro-housing. It's brutal.
They are great, especially considering all the work they produce to help one sort through the 10 statewide ballot initiatives and the additional 15 (!) San Francisco ballot propositions, in additional to all the state and local candidates.
Hey Matt, a few days ago on twitter you made a post about how in matters of political strategy, if you go to a campaign and ask why they're doing what they're doing they can usually identify some sort of coherent rationale even if you the reporter don't agree with their reasoning.
You know a lot of people who work for the NYT. When you ask them, "What is the reasoning behind doing endorsements this way?" what can they tell you about the internal decision-making?
I assume it’s something about how they have a duty to do it in big national races, and that because they are nominally a New York publication, but one that has global rather than local ambitions, they shouldn’t do it in other races.
I am perfectly fine with the 2024 Scientific American and 2020 Science endorsements of Harris and Biden, respectively, because I see what they were trying to do there. They were not, qua some ideal notion of scientists, trying to do the most provably efficacious thing they could do to sway the election, and voters.
They were trying to do what they saw as the right thing. More to the point, they were doing what they hoped their kids/grandkids would be proud of them for doing.
This is, of course, where the David Shors of the world would butt in and say "No. NO! The job of scientists, and liberals in general, is NOT to "do the right thing"! It is to do what the data clearly shows is the effective thing--specifically, the effective thing to further liberal goals! Don't you see my data on this? I have it right here."
And fair point. The Harris campaign, specifically, has optimized itself to the point where it is practically a machine of effectiveness, not "doing the right thing"--and that is the sole reason why it is tied with Trump in the Electoral College, and not being bulldozed.
Similar reason why Biden managed to pass more than zero laws, with a 50-50 Senate. Similar reason why Democrats are competitive in nearly all the Senate races in 2024. Etc., etc.
I guess my reply to that would be: Politics, realistically, is the intersection of effectiveness and rightness. We all have our threshold, beyond which we will simply not do the wrong thing, out of effectiveness or anything else.
For example, Shor (and Yglesias!) constantly inveigh against liberals calling for gun control in the aftermath of gun massacres, on the basis that doing so not only ultimately decreases the likelihood that guns will ever be controlled, but that conservatives buy more guns in their wake. Therefore, objectively, liberals need to be smart here and. . . I guess, shut their mouths, or something.
(Whether that last thing results from liberals and their big, countereffective mouths or simply knee-jerk gun-nut reaction is an open question, of course. But regardless:)
Shor and Yglesias have a point here, of course. But *my* point is that very few libs are effectiveness mavens, constantly plotting about how to best further their cause. Especially when (as is true, in my case) a gun massacre happens down the street from them. Or, on a milder note, when guys like Trump are planning a mass political purge of scientific institutions nationwide.
Or when, in general, people are looking for a moment to step up and be counted.
Many liberals will want to carefully count their steps and ask "Okay, what's the most effective thing I can do right now to further Kamala Harris's campaign?" In fact, I think most people will be inclined to do something like that. Including most (though definitely, not all!) Slow Boring subscribers. Matt's advice on local candidates and campaign funding certainly has been useful here.
And I'm sure that even as, say, gun-control advocates reject Shor's advice and rile their fellow citizens by calling for restrictions on weapons of war, they'll be looking to see how they can be effective in other ways, by perhaps getting more like-minded people elected to Congress. State legislature. Etc.
But if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted. To do what future generations might otherwise think of you as a coward for not doing.
I don't begrudge them that right. That obligation, even. Others may disagree.
As a scientist, I was extremely perturbed by the "March for Science" in 2017 because I could see quickly where it would lead. And COVID just poured gasoline on the fire. Fortunately, Elon's purchase of twitter has driven a lot of scientists off there, to our great benefit (as well as their own!). I pray when Trump goes away that we can get back to science being a mostly staid, non-partisan affair.
Yeah, I do, partly based on the timing (right after 1/6), partly because of other political comments he’s made, and partly just from the punchline (the speaker seems frantic and upset, rather than self-important or virtue-signaling). I mean I think he’s playing it for something of a joke—part of the idea is that it’s funny for apple folks to be doing this—but the target of the joke is our absurd times, rather than the apple people. Or at least that’s my reading.
"Standing up and being counted" can be brave and admirable, but only in some contexts.
It's courageous when the outcome is uncertain (or guaranteed to be negative): when others are afraid to speak or your peers are against you. But loudly adding your name to the end of a very long list is just vanity, bordering on moral exhibitionism.
There can still be a case for it, but only if it's effective.
It would be an interesting exercise to try to precisely delineate when it's better to do the right thing and when it's better to be strategic. Because it's true that sometimes the argument that you're being strategic can be a self-serving rationalization, the two classic examples of this being (1) I'm going to make money rapaciously so that I can give it to charity, (2) I'm going to support Destructive Political Leader/Movement X so that I can improve things from the inside.
But Matt’s point isn’t really contrary to any of this. He doesn’t deny that people doing this think they’re doing the right thing. The claim is that it’s *not* the right thing and they should do something else. And from the outside I think he’s right: I don’t know why I shouldn’t prefer for them to think about what’s more efficacious and so that, and it seems fair to expect them to use their platforms with care and responsibility.
It seems like when you are saying they want to do "the right thing" you are meaning they want to do the thing that makes them feel good and proud.
Doing the thing that makes you feel better or look better to "future generations" instead of doing the most effective thing to enact good policy doesn't seem like a seizing of the moral high ground.
Or, more to the point, I'll offer a deal: Nature and Scientific American stay out of the endorsement game and in exchange, all the evangelical churches out there utter not a peep about politics.
I think the evangelical churches never had any credibility with the people that would be turned off by their endorsement, and they've decided it doesn't matter if they could get that credibility.
If scientists want to go the same way, they can.
We're not trying to write laws here - we're trying to observe the practicalities, of what cost you may or may not pay if you make political endorsements. If you're already seen as political through and through, there's no cost. But if you had some possibility of being seen as credible by people who disagree with you politically, you have to decide how important that credibility is.
Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that. Conservatives are not obligated by anything to unconditionally surrender to progressives. Therefore, because America is a democracy, progressives can only fundamentally transform America by winning elections. The more effective Democrats are at winning elections the more transformation there will be. If yelling about your moral righteousness makes Democrats less effective at winning elections the less transformation there will be.
Rightists (including JD Vance -- who knows what goes on inside the rotting hairy orange ball) do want to fundamentally transform America. That's their whole thing.
"Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
According to Linker, Kamala and mainstream Democrats are small-c conservative, because they believe that American society is pretty ok as is and they want to focus on preserving the good things we have ("save democracy") and making marginal improvements, like, more housing and cleaner energy. Yes, progressives want radical change, but progressives are politically powerless in this election cycle. At most they can act as spoilers, siphoning a few votes away from Kamala.
In contrast, Republicans/Trump are not conservatives; they are trying to appeal to the disaffected "the system f**king sucks, let's burn it to the ground!" segment of the population. They want to RETVRN to a mythical past when men were men, America was mostly white, and there were plentiful well-paying factory jobs for everyone that still somehow magically provided everyone with the living standards of 2024, not 1954.
This election isn't a choice between "radical progress" vs "more of the same;" it's "let's go back to the Good Old Days" vs "We're not going back!"
Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that the Republican party, by adopting the rhetoric and policy postures of the MAGA right, has become become a radical revolutionary movement.
Would it make more sense to call it a radical reactionary/revanchist movement? They want to go back ("Make America Great AGAIN"), whereas I usually think of a revolution as going forward, as bringing into being a radically different future - the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, etc. Or am I just being nitpicky?
I think that's fair. I believe Harari's point is to analogize the MAGA rhetoric about the deep corruption and fundamental illegitimacy of government and cultural institutions to early Communist rhetoric about the need for the "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." It's all about "overthrow" rather than "reform".
I think the idea that Republicans don't *want* major changes is both true and completely incompatible with what they propose.
That being said, the Harris being small-c conservative is hard to accept because I don't really know who she is. I know Trump, and that that's a terrible option, so will choose the unknown over the known terrible. But if you told me that upon winning the presidency, Harris was way more progressive than she is running now - would I be surprised? Not really.
She made some VERY BOLD statements in 2020 and is essentially trying to either walk way from them quietly, or mostly pretend none of it happened. Which may be what happens. But there are some similarities to JD Vance IMO. If he tries to walk away from what he said this election cycle, would you believe him in 2028?
What specific actions are you worried that she might take if, after being elected, she turns out to be way more progressive than she has presented as during the campaign? I'm genuinely curious about what this horror show people are worried about looks like.
In 2016 I remember arguing that Bernie was a useless candidate because all the things he was promising to do were utterly impossible given the structure of American governance. Congress would never abolish private insurance or pass laws that would tax millionaires at 90%, so all the outlandish stuff he was talking about was just useless bluster, and he was a horrible option because he'd spend so much time talking about nonsense that he wouldn't be able to actually achieve the things that are within the President's grasp to achieve. I see no reason to think that electing Harris will somehow result in a progressive dystopia being ushered in for the same reasons that my major concerns about Bernie were how ineffective he would have been.
One of the most frustrating things about being in election season is that the level of hype is really high and the only comparison is to the other candidate. I don't accept that rubric. Just because I don't beat my wife doesn't mean that me screaming at the kids they're stupid is okay.
As for the concerns - if the presidency didn't matter, there wouldn't be all this focus on it. My major concern for her is that she
1) Continues to push progressive spending priorities at a time when we should be getting our fiscal house in order since the economy is good. It won't always be that way and we'll want some debit capacity to do Keynesian stimulus then.
2) Insist on *everything bagel* approach that doesn't prioritize or prioritizes poorly with regards to IRA, CHIPs, etc.
3) I'm extremely pro immigration, but we need to have public support to allow for it. I don't think she abolished ICE, but I could see her doing something like Biden did which was mishandle it for years creating a sizeable backlash.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Notice that I didn't say that Trump was better on any of these issues, just that it wouldn't be shocking to me if we come back in three years and think that her moderate rhetoric didn't really match her approach as president.
The abdication of journalistic standards has been one of the self-inflicted casualties of the Trump Era. The meltdown at CBS because a reporter had the temerity to ask difficult questions to Ta-Nahesi Coates is surprising even to a jaded media-watcher like me.
The example of TNC gives about Israel being similar to the Jim Crow south doesn't make sense to me. In order for that analogy to work the oppressed population of the Jim Crow south would need to have areas where they were operating as militia units, armed by a foreign power with the explicit political goal of eradicating all white people (and their predominate christian religions) in the US. Then whatever resolution ended it would be the example to follow (at least in theory) but that's not what happened in the US. It's apples and olives.
I thought about exploring Coates' views more but then I learned that his knowledge was gained from a ten day visit to Israel and the West Bank after which he declared that the situation was simple and nuance and complexity had no place in the debate so I was very grateful to him for freeing me to use that time for more productive purposes like watching reruns of "The Simpsons."
America's most overrated public intellectual since…?
Noam Chomsky is still alive, so I'm not sure "since" applies.
But at least his linguistics work is very influential in the field, right?
I thought “manufacturing consent” was interesting in the way it approached how business and political interests overlap to create decentralized systems that act like much more centralized systems. It seemed like a reasonable way to look at a lot of Cold War conflict stuff apart from the vast conspiracy messaging of the day. I didn’t agree with a lot of its conclusions but I thought the presentation of problems was pretty good.
I think so, but I don't believe Chomsky's reputation as a "public intellectual" depends primarily on his actual field of study, does it?
His main linguistic theory is incresingly viewed as a wrong turn nowadays.
It makes me sad, because TNC was one of my favorite writers on the old Atlantic blog-roll, about 15 years ago. He had a questing intellect, along with a beautiful and self-revealing style, and was quite transparently educating himself in public about all sorts of things. I read his first two books with pleasure.
[Edit to say, I hope unnecessarily, that I didn't always agree with him - far from it, sometimes - but I always loved what he called "the beautiful struggle", by which he meant the hard moral work of improving oneself and the world, and the bravery with which he lived that out with his readers.]
At some point - probably not coincidentally along with the collapse of the wider "blogosphere" - something changed. I suppose he came to his conclusions and doesn't feel like he needs to learn much more - or, at least, not to make that part of his intellectual life so public - but I miss reading the old Ta-Nehesi. Miss that so much.
Honestly feel bad for the guy. Charitably, his book is an error in judgement, but the result is a bonfire of all the goodwill he built up over the years with people who maybe didn't see totally eye-to-eye with him but at least respected his intellect and thoughtfulness.
Yeah, I thought he was really good as a blogger.
I mainly think *blogs* were a great medium - maybe the best ever invented - for the exchange of ideas. They died - as a driver of conversation, at least; I'm aware that some people keep at it, and I admire their persistentance - because the major internet platforms (Google and especially Facebook) colonized their content without adequate economic exchange, and because moderating them against spam and trolling became an insupportable burden.
Boy, though, that ten years or so was an intellectual paradise. So many people writing so many amazing things, and having so many amazing discussions, in public, with each other and their readers.
Substack - though I'm glad it's solved the existential issues for a few - is but a pale imitation. In fact, the $$ earned by Matt and others on this platform demonstrates the immense public value that the old blogosphere had, and how great a [societal? | technical? | incentives? | policy?] failure its loss has been.
I'd be interested in Matt's insider take on what changes to what, and when, might have saved that intellectual eco-system. (Or, was it itself an unsustainable parasite, dependent on sucking the carcass of the legacy media institutions that it helped to kill?)
I don't know, but I miss that whole era.
They weren’t even tough questions! Just obvious points that someone should think of within the first three seconds of deciding to write a book on the topic.
I’m sure the interview generated more book sales for Coates.
Yes - there is a growing market for works of ahistorical anti-zionism.
I hadn't heard about that controversy until yesterday when I saw an article about Coates' interview with Trevor Noah on the subject, and I was flabbergasted when I was reading about it. It highlighted a related point to me, which is the ways in which some corners of the left have become completely incapable of arguing from substance as opposed to caricature.
I've seen so many instances where progressives will listen to someone say "thing A is LIKE thing B" and then turn around and say "OH! So you're saying that thing A is the same as this part of thing B that you never brought up or compared thing A to but is easily characterized as bad, so what you're really saying is ALL A is the same as ALL B, and some of B is terrible so you're a terrible person."
With the Coates interview, Noah was asking about the question that Coates had been asked that boiled down to "if I read your book without knowing who you were and stripped away the titles and accolades and awards of who you are, I could easily see what you're saying as something that would be included in a terrorists handbook of propaganda", and Noah took that question and said "why do they always want to strip away all of the context of what's happening in Israel and Gaza? Why can't they address the context and recognize the reality of the situation?" Which is nowhere near what the question was, but it's framed in such a way that anyone listening to the interview can bat away legitimate objections to Coates' characterizations because the people criticizing it are refusing to address substantive reality. It's an infuriating two step that is constantly used to deflect legitimate counter arguments to positions and serves to ensure that the side that agrees with Coates (and other progressive causes in the other situations I've seen such tactics used) can feel righteous in the moral superiority of their stances. I find it all incredibly frustrating.
And to then see CBS respond the way it has and act as if the questions were out-of-bounds has been truly shocking and disappointing.
From this description, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of this controversy.
I haven't seen the Coates interview, so I can't really comment on that. But what you are describing reminds me of how on sports talk shows you inevitably get terrible exchanges like
Analyst: "This college player is a bit undersized and needs to work harder on defense, but his turnaround jumper from the midrange reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant so there's at least some potential there."
Host: "YOU CAN'T COMPARE THIS COLLEGE KID TO KOBE! HE HASN'T EVEN PLAYED A GAME IN THE NBA!"
Bingo- that's a great example.
I just read the times article and learned that CBS news has an “in house race and culture unit.”. My own views on Palestine are closer to Coates’ than those of the Democratic establishment, but the interviewer was well within the American mainstream and had every right to challenge Coates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is sacred to many people on the left. He is due deference. Clearly none of this happens if the same kind of interview was done with JD Vance.
To cleanse CBS of its unholy act of disrespect a DEI consultant was hired to lead the Sacrament of Struggle. But the DEI clergyman was apparently throwing predictable bombs on Twitter and was unhired.
Coates then told Noah (serendipity for the religious references) that Dokoupil was taking up too much space in the conversation. In fact, he knew this because Gayle told him the tough questions she had planned to ask. Doing this apparently is not aligned with CBS journalistic standards.
Maybe Tony can say 10 hail Ta-Nahesi’s and all can be forgiven. What a tangled web we weave.
Loved this discussion about the situation from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, especially the latter.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/my-perplexing-response-to-ta-nehisi?r=5h7eb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think they were a bit flubbed because they were asked in a way that to me seemed intended to signal allegiance rather than just be challenging questions. To Matt’s point, if that’s what you end up doing, you’re not giving anyone much new information apart from which camp you’re in.
I guess I interpreted it as a warning to potential readers (this was a book promo) that Coates has produced an ahistorical, deeply anti-zionist work of quasi-fiction. I thought the exchange during the interview was excellent and revealing (more like a British news interview with a politician than a US morning show love-fest with an "esteemed author") and I appreciated CBS's chief legal correspondents eminently sensible comments on the kerfuffle.
How is this the flagship example of the "abdication of journalistic standards" in the "Trump Era" when the largest cable news outlet, dozens of online whackjob units and even the WSJ editorial page are fully engaged in publishing and amplifying lies basically 100% of the time?
Nah, compared to other abdications of journalistic standards in other eras of American history this is very much a nothing burger. Honestly on matters like this I wish newsrooms would just fight a bit more about about these sorts of thing, old school shouting matches including, rather than these weird in public "harm" based arguments. That's what's really annoying here.
You are assuming that magazines that endorse particular candidates do so because they hope to convince the undecided to vote that way. What if that is not the main motivation -- the point being, instead, to convince the people who were going to vote that way to buy, renew, or extend a subscription to the magazine?
Good point, I suspect tribal signalling by managers is more important than the economic incentive to get more readers in determining endorsements.
Especially when you read things like this article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how Bill Gates and his foundation is funding so many news organisations. https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php
Are wealthy philanthropist patrons being signalled? How can we find out?
I would think that being supported by wealthy philanthropists would make you more willing to buck readers’ expectations, rather than feeling a need to cater to them with pointless endorsements.
Yes, but would you buck the philanthropists' expectations? Or do you want to remind them that you are doing your best for the political tribe they favour?
Why would the philanthropists care whether you endorse a politician? Does Bill Gates want to support publications that endorse Kamala Harris? It seems more likely to me that he wants Kamala Harris to win, and that he wants to support publications that do useful things in the world, but why would he care about their endorsement, if it's not useful for either of those goals?
That's a very good question. It's like when I read a lot of left-leaning magazines like Vox and others that like to analyze the philanthropy of billionaires through a critical lens, but somehow they were always dead silent about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire whose philanthropy mostly consists of donating to journalists.
Spot on.
The New Yorker doesn't want a lot of subscribers in the same way Harvard doesn't want a lot of students.
That’s just false, though the certainly want high end subscribers much more.
I'm sure if hundreds of thousands of rural Appalachians subscribed to The New Yorker all the editors and journalists would freak out.
This assumes that editors and journalists hate the idea of making money at the same time print media is dying. They might hate the reader letters they might end up getting, but they would definitely like the money.
the odds of that happening are quite low. the real question is how hard they will push to get school teachers and adjuncts and educated but not exactly prosperous people to subscribe/consume
Games, apparently.
Harvard's endowment is about 6x the NYT's enterprise value, so if they don't want subscribers, it's for a different reason...
GrowSF is awesome and I would die for a local news org (at this point, literally just a guy) to give endorsements like they do.
I recently moved to what I thought was a pretty big place and I cannot for the life of me figure out which mayoral candidate is pro-housing. It's brutal.
Where you at? If there's a YIMBY Action chapter they should be providing that service, if not I can nudge them. https://new.yimbyaction.org/get-involved/
Not the original poster, but how do I vote YIMBY in New York???
Not a YIMBY Action chapter, but this group is doing aligned work in New York. https://opennewyork.org/endorsements/
Thanks! Sadly my district doesn't seem to appear in the list. (I'm not in NYC proper, and there may simply not be any YIMBYs in my entire county...)
Yup. I've often been forced to pick between a "community character" candidate and an "affordable housing" candidate. It's brutal.
They are great, especially considering all the work they produce to help one sort through the 10 statewide ballot initiatives and the additional 15 (!) San Francisco ballot propositions, in additional to all the state and local candidates.
Hey Matt, a few days ago on twitter you made a post about how in matters of political strategy, if you go to a campaign and ask why they're doing what they're doing they can usually identify some sort of coherent rationale even if you the reporter don't agree with their reasoning.
You know a lot of people who work for the NYT. When you ask them, "What is the reasoning behind doing endorsements this way?" what can they tell you about the internal decision-making?
I assume it’s something about how they have a duty to do it in big national races, and that because they are nominally a New York publication, but one that has global rather than local ambitions, they shouldn’t do it in other races.
I mean, I could guess too, but Matt can actually pick up the phone and ask them.
Time to rile up the Slow Boring comments section.
I am perfectly fine with the 2024 Scientific American and 2020 Science endorsements of Harris and Biden, respectively, because I see what they were trying to do there. They were not, qua some ideal notion of scientists, trying to do the most provably efficacious thing they could do to sway the election, and voters.
They were trying to do what they saw as the right thing. More to the point, they were doing what they hoped their kids/grandkids would be proud of them for doing.
This is, of course, where the David Shors of the world would butt in and say "No. NO! The job of scientists, and liberals in general, is NOT to "do the right thing"! It is to do what the data clearly shows is the effective thing--specifically, the effective thing to further liberal goals! Don't you see my data on this? I have it right here."
And fair point. The Harris campaign, specifically, has optimized itself to the point where it is practically a machine of effectiveness, not "doing the right thing"--and that is the sole reason why it is tied with Trump in the Electoral College, and not being bulldozed.
Similar reason why Biden managed to pass more than zero laws, with a 50-50 Senate. Similar reason why Democrats are competitive in nearly all the Senate races in 2024. Etc., etc.
I guess my reply to that would be: Politics, realistically, is the intersection of effectiveness and rightness. We all have our threshold, beyond which we will simply not do the wrong thing, out of effectiveness or anything else.
For example, Shor (and Yglesias!) constantly inveigh against liberals calling for gun control in the aftermath of gun massacres, on the basis that doing so not only ultimately decreases the likelihood that guns will ever be controlled, but that conservatives buy more guns in their wake. Therefore, objectively, liberals need to be smart here and. . . I guess, shut their mouths, or something.
(Whether that last thing results from liberals and their big, countereffective mouths or simply knee-jerk gun-nut reaction is an open question, of course. But regardless:)
Shor and Yglesias have a point here, of course. But *my* point is that very few libs are effectiveness mavens, constantly plotting about how to best further their cause. Especially when (as is true, in my case) a gun massacre happens down the street from them. Or, on a milder note, when guys like Trump are planning a mass political purge of scientific institutions nationwide.
Or when, in general, people are looking for a moment to step up and be counted.
Many liberals will want to carefully count their steps and ask "Okay, what's the most effective thing I can do right now to further Kamala Harris's campaign?" In fact, I think most people will be inclined to do something like that. Including most (though definitely, not all!) Slow Boring subscribers. Matt's advice on local candidates and campaign funding certainly has been useful here.
And I'm sure that even as, say, gun-control advocates reject Shor's advice and rile their fellow citizens by calling for restrictions on weapons of war, they'll be looking to see how they can be effective in other ways, by perhaps getting more like-minded people elected to Congress. State legislature. Etc.
But if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted. To do what future generations might otherwise think of you as a coward for not doing.
I don't begrudge them that right. That obligation, even. Others may disagree.
As people, I agree with your assessment. Each person is free to post online their endorsement or hang signs all over their yard showing their support.
But as professionals, they have an obligation to their organization and their profession. And in that sense, they made a mistake.
As a scientist, I was extremely perturbed by the "March for Science" in 2017 because I could see quickly where it would lead. And COVID just poured gasoline on the fire. Fortunately, Elon's purchase of twitter has driven a lot of scientists off there, to our great benefit (as well as their own!). I pray when Trump goes away that we can get back to science being a mostly staid, non-partisan affair.
As usual, there's an xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/2410/
Yes but he’s agreeing with the apple folks there.
He, like many scientists, is probably down with Nature and SA doing anti-Trump stuff 😕
My read is that he's making fun of the apple growers. You think he's agreeing with them?
Yeah, I do, partly based on the timing (right after 1/6), partly because of other political comments he’s made, and partly just from the punchline (the speaker seems frantic and upset, rather than self-important or virtue-signaling). I mean I think he’s playing it for something of a joke—part of the idea is that it’s funny for apple folks to be doing this—but the target of the joke is our absurd times, rather than the apple people. Or at least that’s my reading.
"Standing up and being counted" can be brave and admirable, but only in some contexts.
It's courageous when the outcome is uncertain (or guaranteed to be negative): when others are afraid to speak or your peers are against you. But loudly adding your name to the end of a very long list is just vanity, bordering on moral exhibitionism.
There can still be a case for it, but only if it's effective.
It would be an interesting exercise to try to precisely delineate when it's better to do the right thing and when it's better to be strategic. Because it's true that sometimes the argument that you're being strategic can be a self-serving rationalization, the two classic examples of this being (1) I'm going to make money rapaciously so that I can give it to charity, (2) I'm going to support Destructive Political Leader/Movement X so that I can improve things from the inside.
I think we would need to define “the right thing” to make the question meaningful.
But Matt’s point isn’t really contrary to any of this. He doesn’t deny that people doing this think they’re doing the right thing. The claim is that it’s *not* the right thing and they should do something else. And from the outside I think he’s right: I don’t know why I shouldn’t prefer for them to think about what’s more efficacious and so that, and it seems fair to expect them to use their platforms with care and responsibility.
It seems like when you are saying they want to do "the right thing" you are meaning they want to do the thing that makes them feel good and proud.
Doing the thing that makes you feel better or look better to "future generations" instead of doing the most effective thing to enact good policy doesn't seem like a seizing of the moral high ground.
Famous last words from [INSERT REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN HERE].
I hope this made you feel better about yourself, because it certainly didn't contribute anything to the discussion.
I disagree. A lot of never Trumpers switched sides because they want to enact conservative policies and are deluding themselves about Trump.
But that’s a case where opposing Trump might have made a serious difference because, to Matt’s point, it was unexpected.
Exactly.
Disagree. It did both. :D
"...if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted"
Scientific American is supposed to cover science, not politics or public policy. Or at least it was for almost all of its history.
Yeah, shut up and dribble, Scientific American.
Or, more to the point, I'll offer a deal: Nature and Scientific American stay out of the endorsement game and in exchange, all the evangelical churches out there utter not a peep about politics.
I think the evangelical churches never had any credibility with the people that would be turned off by their endorsement, and they've decided it doesn't matter if they could get that credibility.
If scientists want to go the same way, they can.
We're not trying to write laws here - we're trying to observe the practicalities, of what cost you may or may not pay if you make political endorsements. If you're already seen as political through and through, there's no cost. But if you had some possibility of being seen as credible by people who disagree with you politically, you have to decide how important that credibility is.
This would really speed racial realignment!
Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that. Conservatives are not obligated by anything to unconditionally surrender to progressives. Therefore, because America is a democracy, progressives can only fundamentally transform America by winning elections. The more effective Democrats are at winning elections the more transformation there will be. If yelling about your moral righteousness makes Democrats less effective at winning elections the less transformation there will be.
Rightists (including JD Vance -- who knows what goes on inside the rotting hairy orange ball) do want to fundamentally transform America. That's their whole thing.
Correct, see overturning Roe vs Wade.
"Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
You're kidding, right?
"Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
Damon Linker makes the exact opposite argument on his Substack: https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/kamalas-conservative-pitch
According to Linker, Kamala and mainstream Democrats are small-c conservative, because they believe that American society is pretty ok as is and they want to focus on preserving the good things we have ("save democracy") and making marginal improvements, like, more housing and cleaner energy. Yes, progressives want radical change, but progressives are politically powerless in this election cycle. At most they can act as spoilers, siphoning a few votes away from Kamala.
In contrast, Republicans/Trump are not conservatives; they are trying to appeal to the disaffected "the system f**king sucks, let's burn it to the ground!" segment of the population. They want to RETVRN to a mythical past when men were men, America was mostly white, and there were plentiful well-paying factory jobs for everyone that still somehow magically provided everyone with the living standards of 2024, not 1954.
This election isn't a choice between "radical progress" vs "more of the same;" it's "let's go back to the Good Old Days" vs "We're not going back!"
Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that the Republican party, by adopting the rhetoric and policy postures of the MAGA right, has become become a radical revolutionary movement.
Would it make more sense to call it a radical reactionary/revanchist movement? They want to go back ("Make America Great AGAIN"), whereas I usually think of a revolution as going forward, as bringing into being a radically different future - the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, etc. Or am I just being nitpicky?
I think that's fair. I believe Harari's point is to analogize the MAGA rhetoric about the deep corruption and fundamental illegitimacy of government and cultural institutions to early Communist rhetoric about the need for the "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." It's all about "overthrow" rather than "reform".
BTW, Maya Rudolph did a fantastic job as Kamala on SNL:
"As I said to my husband, Doug, when he told me he'd left his phone at Chili's: WE'RE NOT GOING BACK!"
Oof the choice of Chili’s might make me reconsider Kamala’s decision-making abilities. Thank goodness it was SNL
I think the idea that Republicans don't *want* major changes is both true and completely incompatible with what they propose.
That being said, the Harris being small-c conservative is hard to accept because I don't really know who she is. I know Trump, and that that's a terrible option, so will choose the unknown over the known terrible. But if you told me that upon winning the presidency, Harris was way more progressive than she is running now - would I be surprised? Not really.
She made some VERY BOLD statements in 2020 and is essentially trying to either walk way from them quietly, or mostly pretend none of it happened. Which may be what happens. But there are some similarities to JD Vance IMO. If he tries to walk away from what he said this election cycle, would you believe him in 2028?
What specific actions are you worried that she might take if, after being elected, she turns out to be way more progressive than she has presented as during the campaign? I'm genuinely curious about what this horror show people are worried about looks like.
In 2016 I remember arguing that Bernie was a useless candidate because all the things he was promising to do were utterly impossible given the structure of American governance. Congress would never abolish private insurance or pass laws that would tax millionaires at 90%, so all the outlandish stuff he was talking about was just useless bluster, and he was a horrible option because he'd spend so much time talking about nonsense that he wouldn't be able to actually achieve the things that are within the President's grasp to achieve. I see no reason to think that electing Harris will somehow result in a progressive dystopia being ushered in for the same reasons that my major concerns about Bernie were how ineffective he would have been.
Who said anything about a progressive dystopia?
One of the most frustrating things about being in election season is that the level of hype is really high and the only comparison is to the other candidate. I don't accept that rubric. Just because I don't beat my wife doesn't mean that me screaming at the kids they're stupid is okay.
As for the concerns - if the presidency didn't matter, there wouldn't be all this focus on it. My major concern for her is that she
1) Continues to push progressive spending priorities at a time when we should be getting our fiscal house in order since the economy is good. It won't always be that way and we'll want some debit capacity to do Keynesian stimulus then.
2) Insist on *everything bagel* approach that doesn't prioritize or prioritizes poorly with regards to IRA, CHIPs, etc.
3) I'm extremely pro immigration, but we need to have public support to allow for it. I don't think she abolished ICE, but I could see her doing something like Biden did which was mishandle it for years creating a sizeable backlash.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Notice that I didn't say that Trump was better on any of these issues, just that it wouldn't be shocking to me if we come back in three years and think that her moderate rhetoric didn't really match her approach as president.
They want to deport a quarter of the population! JD Vance says a quarter of people in the US are here in questionable immigration circumstances.