Dem
47
GOP
53
The corporate-owned, previously left-leaning media have not exactly been clothing themselves in glory recently. The fourth estate is supposed to keep the politicians honest, but... well, there have been some very disappointing stories on that front this week.
We will start at The Washington Post, where we've been watching for signs that the desire to protect Jeff Bezos and his billions has infected the rest of the paper. Thus far, the news coverage seems to be OK. However, some of the columnists are... a different story. We don't mean Marc Thiessen or Henry Olsen, who are always going to be MAGA apologists. No, we mean folks like, say, Leana Wen.
This week, Wen had a column in which she argued that... maybe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a point about fluoridation of water. The piece is a master class in "lies, damned lies, and statistics," as it takes a "just asking questions" posture, and then discusses a couple of studies that suggest that too much fluoride in water can lead to lower IQ scores. And, observes Wen, brain health is more important than avoiding cavities.
Readers can click on the article for themselves and see if they find more merit in the piece than we did. However, the issues here should be pretty evident, even from our brief summation. First, you can find "a couple of studies" that say almost anything. The question should actually be "What does the overwhelming weight of the scholarly analysis say?" (Hint: It says that fluoridation is safe and worthwhile.) Second, IQ scores are a questionable metric, and lower IQ is not the same as brain damage. Third, if fluoride levels are unsafe in a particular municipality's water supply, then they can always be... lowered. This is not an all-or-none proposition. Even Wen herself acknowledges that over-fluoridated water supplies serve a grand total of about... 3 million people in the United States. This is hardly vindication for RFK.
(Note: We are not going to delve into a fourth obvious critique of Wen's piece, namely that the main study she relies on was conducted in Canada. We simply don't have time to cover all of the concerns THAT raises).
We are not sure exactly what Wen's motivation was here. Was her inner libertarian shining through? Was she trying to be provocative? Does she see a future housecleaning, not unlike the one that's about to happen at The Los Angeles Times, as something she needs to get out ahead of? ("See, Mr. Bezos, I wrote several pieces that I am sure President Trump and his team LOVED!") Whatever is going on, there have been a number of eye-roller opinion pieces in the Post recently, and not all of them from the usual suspects.
Meanwhile, speaking of the Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong continues to run that paper into the ground. His latest "initiative" is that he wants to add a widget to every story on the Times' website. The widget would allow readers to vote on how biased a story is (if you do not know what we are talking about, Newsweek is one of several sites that has this; click on a story, and then scroll down to the bottom and look for the "Fairness Meter").
This is a stupid idea. Here is a definitely not exhaustive list of reasons: (1) Readers tend to be terrible at separating "argument" from "bias"; (2) The most important forms of bias involve what is and is not covered, something not reflected in the content of particular stories; (3) Right-leaning readers, prompted by the right-wing media machine, are more likely to perceive bias, and so will skew the results; (4) Any sort of online "poll" is open to being gamed. In the end, Soon-Shiong cannot seriously believe that a gimmick like this will give people useful information, or will steer coverage in a more productive direction. It's just performative nonsense for the benefit of Donald Trump and his acolytes.
The Times has gone so far off the rails recently that yesterday, one of the paper's longest-serving and best-regarded columnists turned in his resignation. That would be Harry Litman, who has been writing about legal matters for the paper for 15 years. Jumping over to Substack, Litman explained why he quit:
My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper's owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can't be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump's second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.
Soon-Shiong's most notorious action received national attention. The paper's editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates' policies, but that's at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper's professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
Owners participate in setting overall editorial direction. But it's a grave insult to the independence and integrity of an editorial department for an owner to force it to withdraw a considered and drafted opinion. And of course, this was no ordinary opinion. The endorsement of a presidential candidate is an editorial department's most important decision, so the slight was deep.
We commend Litman for having the courage of his convictions, and are glad to see that his voice will just be moving to another platform, as opposed to being silenced.
And finally, at least for now, is MSNBC and its flagship program Morning Joe. Everyone knows, at this point, about the pilgrimage that hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made to Mar-a-Lago, mere weeks after they said that people who make such pilgrimages are cowards and sell-outs. The latest story involves David Frum, who was once a devoted Republican, having served as speechwriter for George W. Bush. He's now a man without a party, having formally left the GOP after this year's election.
Earlier this week, Frum was on Morning Joe to talk about Donald Trump's foreign policy, and he was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth. Frum opined that the nomination was in trouble, and added the joke line that "If you're too drunk for Fox News, you're very, very drunk indeed." During the commercial break immediately following, Frum was warned he better not say that again. Then, after his bit was over and he had departed, Brzezinski read an on-air apology:
A little bit earlier in this block there was a comment made about Fox News, in our coverage about Pete Hegseth and the growing number of allegations about his behavior over the years and possible addiction to alcohol or issues with alcohol. The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we're in. We just want to make that comment as well. We want to make that clear. We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that's a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say there's a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.
After learning of the apology, Frum wrote a piece for The Atlantic (sorry, paywall) in which he described the sequence of events as "ominous" and "unsettling" and said it felt very much like "appeasement."
When we originally heard and wrote about the Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage, we assumed that Scarborough and Brzezinski were just protecting themselves. But when on-air apologies—dashed off in minutes while the duo is still on the air—enter the equation, then it's clearly coming from corporate. So, we suggest operating under the assumption that the entire MSNBC lineup is compromised, until given evidence to the contrary.
The upshot is that Trump isn't even in office again, and he's already been able to ride roughshod over the First Amendment, primarily because it's clear he's willing to abuse the powers of the government to punish his opponents (government contracts in the case of Bezos/The Post and Soon-Shiong/The Times and merger regulation in the case of MSNBC). What other outlets will get sucked into the vortex once he's actually back in power? (Z)