We have been discussing how the media has largely shielded Vice President Joe Biden from serious questions over recent controversies ranging from his refusal to allow his papers to be searched for sexual abuse allegations to his false claim of repeated NAACP endorsements. Times reporter and CNN analyst Lisa Lerer is under fire for a list of probing questions for Tara Reade, who has accused Biden of raping her when she worked for him as one of his Senate aides. Lerer wants answers to questions ranging from past landlord issues to her ex-husband’s legal problems to financial troubles to how she knows three Russians. Imagine if Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was hit with a list of such questions during the Kavanaugh controversy. Conversely, the media has continued to hit Biden with such hard-hitting questions as whether a true leader wears a mask in a recent CNN interview. What is fascinating is that these questions largely went without objection from mainstream media despite the inverse response to questions of the accusers in the Kavanaugh and Thomas confirmations.
Lerer wants answers to such questions as “We heard that after your car was repossessed friends sold you their vehicles and let you pay it with a no interest loan that you struggled to make those payments and they took it back. Is that true?” Some have come forward to cry foul at the scope of such questions as a form of harassment of Reade. Actress-turned-activist Rose McGowan objected to the questions as a hit job on a Biden accuser. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald objected “This whole thing from the @NYTimes is disgusting but the last questions – involving interrogating Tara Reade about whether she committed the crime of “following three Russian individuals on Quora” and demanding an explanation – is just deranged.”
Democratic members and commentators denounced such questions of Dr. Ford and, during the Thomas confirmation, of Professor Anita Hill. Biden has apologized for the questioning of Hill that many called “trashing” a woman who came forward with an allegation of sexual abuse. Hill has objected that through such questions, she and Ford had their “credibility similarly assailed.” Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree, who represented Hill, said he’s still mad about the questions and Biden’s role in asking such questions: “I was shocked and dismayed that Joe Biden was asking questions that didn’t seem appropriate and was not in her corner as a Democrat. The point is that he’s supposed to be neutral, but his questions to Anita Hill were as piercing as anyone’s.”
The questions to Hill and Ford were denounced by many as “a second victimizing the victim.” Yet, there has been no outcry from such advocates over these probative and personal questions of Reade.
The comparison to the treatment of Biden is striking and unsettling. The recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash is an example of the pattern. After days of editing out Biden’s false statement about the NAACP, Bash finally raised the fact that it is clearly false. Biden simply did not respond to the falsity and said that he has never taken black voters for granted. Bash immediately let it go and turned to criticism of Trump and asking Biden whether it is fair to him that there is a double standard that Trump is not expected to apologize. While many of us have criticized Trump for his refusal to apologize, the interview illustrated the double standard in the tenor and content of questions for Biden. It was more than a softball interview. You can miss softballs. It was a beachball interview where Biden could not miss. He was not asked about another Democratic figure (just the day before) announcing that she believes that he is a rapist and continuing to lie about raping a staffer. When he repeated his refusal to consider any males for vice president, he was not asked about a gender-based exclusion that would be unlawful for any company. He was instead asked (repeatedly) about masks and how to deal with loss in one’s family. While Bash did ask about the view that he is a gaffe machine and losing a step, Biden gave a brief soundbite and moved on.
It is the absence of such probing questions for Biden that makes the Lerer list so notable for Reade. There is, as discussed in an earlier column, a sense of papal indulgence when it comes to any transgressions by (or in defense of) Biden. I have no problem with the aggressive questioning of Trump in press conferences. He has made outrageous and reckless comments and the media should not be deter by personal attacks. The Lerer and Dash questions highlight, as Dash referenced, a “double standard” that undermines the credibility of coverage of Trump. Indeed, this bias could be driving some to (rather than away from) Trump.
betua$ states that nobody reads TNYT anymore. So I guess I am one of his nobodies.
Actually, it is the ignoranti which fail to read TNYT.
👓
so arrogant benson thinks his money given to the socalled grey lady buys him esteem?
lol you are typical academic
cutesy little term ignoranti — you might as well say “deplorables”
Yeah Kurtz, because being informed is so elitist!
Get your “I’m with stupid” shirt yet?
I just speak for myself. I aim to get news before the NYT has called it kasher and released it for general use.
and if I want to eat meat boiled in milk, or shrimp wrapped in bacon, I’ll do so
It shows.
No matter how much you critique the media they are unlikely to change. The incentives are too strong.
They’ve mostly all made strategic business decisions to court Democrat voters. On paper, that makes good business sense. Democrat voters, on average, are better educated, younger, and have higher disposable income than Republicans. Those are the demographic traits most appealing to advertisers.
Take WaPoo for example. WaPoo his the hometown newspaper for Washington DC. Trump won 4% of the vote in Washington DC. He did 2.5x better in San Francisco – part of Pelosi’s district – where he won 10% of the vote. Washington DC arguably has one of the highest concentrations of Democrat voters than any other city in the universe. What incentive does WaPoo have to select stories and frame them in a way that will anger the vast, overwhelming majority of its customers?
CNN and MSNBC are channels that manufacture content based on national politics. They’ve chosen to appeal to hyper-partisan Democrats because, again, those are the demographics advertisers want to reach.
Yes, manufacturing programming designed to appeal to hyper-partisan Democrats is a niche market. But it’s the cheapest form or original programming to manufacture: no rehearsals; no stunts; no car crashes; no hard scripts. And the hyper-partisan nature of the programming results in a very loyal core base of viewers. And that provides a stable, almost annuity-like revenue stream.
By appealing to hyper-partisans, about the ONLY thing they can do to jeopardize their annuity-like revenue streams is manufacture programming their customers perceive as positive toward Trump/Republicans or negative for Democrats. See how Chris Hayes was raked simply for acknowledging Reade’s allegations against Biden.
Your criticisms will continue to land on deaf ears because the corporate media are pursing logical strategies based on the incentives.
Take WaPoo for example. WaPoo his the hometown newspaper for Washington DC. Trump won 4% of the vote in Washington DC. He did 2.5x better in San Francisco – part of Pelosi’s district – where he won 10% of the vote. Washington DC arguably has one of the highest concentrations of Democrat voters than any other city in the universe. What incentive does WaPoo have to select stories and frame them in a way that will anger the vast, overwhelming majority of its customers?
Once more with feeling. About 15% of those resident in the Washington commuter belt live in DC. In the commuter belt as a whole, somewhere around 25% – 30% vote Republican. Seventy years ago, that would have been sufficient to have supported an alternative to the Post.
You’re argument is inane, of course. In a healthy market, you’d have media outlets courting various constituencies. The purchasing power isn’t so maldistributed that every consequential outlet other than Fox is not only partisan but often rabidly so. Fox has starboard commentary programs, but it’s news division is not friendly.
The WaPo has a national audience and it is questionable whether local readership is equal to that. The WaPo has an incentive to remain one of the best news sources in America – specializing in DC and federal news – for those who want to be informed about events of the day.
Wapoo has an incentive to frame and edit the news in whatever way its ownership Jeff Bezos wants it too
he’s the richest man in the world. he can lose money if he wants for another ten centuries–
watch the whole clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9OUZNicTGU
Citizen Kane, explained all of what you need to know about our vaunted free press. not much has changed including the large majority of Americans who don’t get it
Doesn’t anyone realize that nobody reads the NYT anymore?
Biden is guilty, period – by the party’s own standards. If it is suggested that the NYT suggests otherwise, the People merely accept this as an affirmation of Biden’s perverted proclivities.
Biden, guilty as charged! In the court of public opinion!
The NYTs remains America’s paper of record and it’s circulation has never been higher.
it has good style. that’s the best i can say for it. i like the typeface. that’s 2 things. there it ends.
I thought it interesting, that in a reverse way, as a ‘complaint’ all the accusations leveled against Tara Reade are listed in black and white in the article, and having read it, you know what a dirty lying corrupt little no good… she is.
Bravo for that move. The raging liberals will email secretly, and if they get a response, it will be just that. All Tara Reade’s seedy unerbelly is listed in the article so don’t complain, she was destroyed.
Shakdi, how is your attitude/conclusion any different than in the olden days when the rape victim was put on trial? Oh wait, it isn’t any different…. C B-Ford was given a free pass, plus GoFund Me profits, in comparison. Her little-girl-voice act so fake! Separate door entrances, fear of flying, all lies lies lies.
The thing about this crybaby stuff, Jon, is that the ultimate goal of the strategy is to get voters into this place of ‘oh Biden is just like Trump.’ The thing said strategy is missing is that, even if these allegations are true, Biden is not just like Trump on the swamp meter. Not even remotely close. So the Tara Reade, Hunter, Hillary, Obama ‘yes but’ tact fails on the merits from the jump.
Trump is a manure covered hog. Every minute provides another example. In a full on sleaze off Trumpybear wins, hands down. And the swampification efforts being shuffled toward Biden just put Trump further under the lens…
Tara Reade?>> 24 complaints about Trump instead.
Hunter?>> Don jr., Eric and Vanks with their hands in the til.
It’s just not working, Professor.
JT, is focusing too much on the media. They are just doing what they are supposed to. What he doesn’t seem to get or is willfully ignoring is the changing stories Biden’s accuser has produced. Republicans had no problem questioning the credibility of trump’s accusers. Fox News and other right leaning media did the exact same thing. Crying foul over it now claiming double standards is pointless.
JT has lost any semblance of credibility as a scholar. If he wants to be seen as fair and objective he needs to be far more balanced than he purports to be in his columns.
Increasing insanity. At least there is no ober dicta the way there is in China. Just a madman at the helm of the ship of state…
😲
JT spends hours writing up disagreements between 3rd and now 4th tier media players, ignores national press all over the story, and now thinks looking into the apparently flaky past and pretense of an accuser who has changed her story drastically in the last several months is unfair..
What a Trump stooge.
At least we can put away the “legal scholar” pretense. He’s in competition with Geraldo.
Professor Turley, I recognize all three names from Quora; if you don’t follow them… YOU SHOULD.
They give incredible insight into Russian, and in at least Dima’s case, Soviet, mindset and experience.
Our duly elected president is the best (and worst), thing that has happened to the media. To borrow from Victor Davis Hansen; they are like snails emboldened to leave their shells revealing that they were glorified slugs all along.
nice!!!!
90% of the media is a literal arm of the Democrat party. They all say the same thing bc they are all reading from the same Dem talking points disseminated each day to them. They aren’t a free press but a press shackled to a political party. It’s a sad day when we have Pravda telescreen media operating in the US.
That’s false SBG:
“The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy produced a multi-part research series analyzing news media coverage of candidates and issues during the 2016 presidential election. The reports were authored by Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, with data provided by Media Tenor, a firm that specializes in content analysis of news coverage. The research was partially funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Key findings:
– During 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in an unusual way given his low initial polling numbers—a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump’s rise in polls.
– Trump’s coverage was positive in tone—he received far more “good press” than “bad press,” largely in the context of the “horserace,” centering on his growing crowds and momentum. The coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls.
– The Democratic race in 2015 received less than half the coverage of the Republican race, partly as a result of journalists’ focus on Trump.
– Bernie Sanders’ campaign was largely ignored in the early months but, as he began to get coverage, it was overwhelmingly positive in tone. Sanders’ coverage in 2015 was the most favorable of any of the top candidates, Republican or Democratic.
– Hillary Clinton had by far the most negative coverage of any candidate. In 11 of the 12 months, her “bad news” outpaced her “good news,” usually by a wide margin, contributing to her increasingly unfavorable poll ratings in 2015.
https://shorensteincenter.org/research-media-coverage-2016-election/
I wonder how many stories like this will it take to finally force JT to reach the conclusion that the press is a horrible institution populated by 30-something knownothing ideologues who grovel knee and hand before their equally obnoxious Dim overlords?
What was amusing during the Obama Administration was the occasional commentary you’d see which would list the ‘journalists’ who were married to administration officials or 1st degree relatives of Administration officials. The different components of political Washington are quite incestuous.
The DNC / MSM is on target for committing the same blunders it committed in 2016: alienating Americans particularly those outside of their prized liberal block.
Fly over states rule
I not surprise the MSM And journalist are working for the Democrats party is clear to see how they coordinate together ….
I wish the media would cover Each of the 24 sexual assault and harassment allegations as much as they have covered this single allegation against Biden.
That is the media double standard. There had been so little coverage of the allegations against Trump that the vast majority of people could not even name most of them. While Trump promised to sue each of his accusers for defamation during the campaign, he did not; instead, one has sued him, and Trump has done everything in his power not to have to testify under oath in the matter at least until after the election.
It is Trump who is getting a pass from the media, not Biden.
You fool. the media gave Trump the Presidency and they will do it again in 2020
One can only hope the media continue to do what they did in 2016: piss off americans with their hypocritical bird cage news
You fool. the media gave Trump the Presidency and they will do it again in 2020
______________________________________________________________
That is correct, but only an idiot would believe they did it by accident….
FWIW, two of Trump’s accusers have sued him for defamation: Summer Zervos and E. Jean Carroll (both of whom filed in NY State court, Carroll’s is more recent). Both cases are still working their way through the courts. Trump has tried and failed to get them dismissed.
The media have periodically published efforts at fairly comprehensive lists of the various accusations against Trump, and there’s a bit of attention to the court cases as they slowly wind their way through the courts, but not as much as they deserve / not as much as I expect they’d get with any other president. This is an outcome of Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh*t” approach, where Trump tries to put out so much daily disinformation and other garbage that the media attention to the newest garbage distracts them from focusing on significant ongoing concerns.
they covered trump’s accusers in the past. old news. reade is new news.
i would give biden the edge against her tardy allegations, now that we belatedly heard about them
Most of our media is not a “free press.” It is a captive press, a propaganda arm of the DNC and Democrats in general. This is NOT news. It has been this way for decades. The country has been permeated with Democratic talking points and beliefs, like Institutionalized Racism and man-caused Global Warming, without many people knowing they are being brain-washed.
Most Democrats’ political beliefs have become matters of faith. I posted this yesterday, about , Gleichschaltung, the Nazis way of “coordinating” peoples’ belief systems. It bears repeating:
———
One of the most important steps towards Gleichschaltung of German society was the introduction of the “Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” under Joseph Goebbels in March 1933 and the subsequent steps taken by the Propaganda Ministry to assume full control of the press and all means of social communication. This included oversight of newspapers, magazines, films, books, public meetings and ceremonies, foreign press relations, theater, art and music, radio, and television.[23] To this end, Goebbels said:
[T]he secret of propaganda [is to] permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn’t notice it at all.[24]
This was also the purpose of “co-ordination”: to ensure that every aspect of the lives of German citizens was permeated with the ideas and prejudices of the Nazis. From March to July 1933 and continuing afterwards, the Nazi Party systematically eliminated or co-opted non-Nazi organizations that could potentially influence people. Those critical of Hitler and the Nazis were suppressed, intimidated or murdered.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
——————
If Twitter and Facebook and Google had existed then, you would be seeing exactly what you are seeing now with them. The targeting of all political opposition to the Democrats.
Sooo, why are decent people voting for Democrats???
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Ca. 1998, the Media Research Center’s content analysis indicated that broadcast media were an extension of the Clinton press office, but that print media were continuing to maintain some critical distance and had professional imperatives apart from political-propagandistic ones. That’s gone.
In 1935, you could say you had a situation where editors and publishers favored the Republicans and reporters favored the Democrats. From about 1955 to about 1995, during the Newseum era of American journalism, some papers were run by impersonal and publicly traded corporations who allowed their staff to set the line of the paper, some were run by scions and heirs who allowed their staff to set the line of the paper, and some like the Sulzbergers and the Meyers imposed a liberal line on their papers. The result was the same: more and more stories (and, eventually, all stories) were reported with certain assumptions and frames. The way John Leo put it was that reporters write stories with templates and fill in the blanks.
Still, they weren’t obvious and self-conscious liars and discrete bits of information in the stories might be as correct as they could make them. That hasn’t been true at all the last 12 years, when the function of the media turned to covering up stories which might reflect badly on the Democratic Party. It’s been pointed out also that in the last five years, outlets like CNN have taken on functions which 15 years ago were performed by lunatic blogs like Daily Kos. We used to call it ‘the nutroots’, but now the nutroots is all there is in the Democratic Party.
Gleichschaltung was simply a cunning idea. it is exactly the sort of thing that most advertising campaigns seek to do. goebbels was not really making up something new
failure to execute Gleichschaltung means a failure to communicate to the mass audience
the aim should be success, not failure
in this way Democrat leadership just shows that it has a certain measure of cunning too.
we should not aim for less cunning, we should have and show more.
If the NYT did not have double standards it would have no standards at all. JT, they are all in bed with Biden, just come out and say it. The truth will make you free.
You realize you are asking this man to affirm that his life has been a shame up to this point. Not many dems have the courage or honor to do so.
There’s a double standard alright! Teflon Don can do anything he wants! He is so right he could shoot someone one Fifth Avenue and certain people would find a reason why that’s not so bad because Biden or Clinton or …..
In case you didn’t notice, Biden has gotten a lot of bad press on these accusations and now asking the accuser questions is a double standard. Did you see what has been said about Trumps accusers? No I guess not. Trump can do it because as he put it he’s rich, he’s a star he’s powerful. He admitted it on tape!
If Obama or either Clinton- in reality, 3 Clintons, as Chelsea unlawfully received and spent millions of the Clinton Foundation funds- were subject to one-thousandth of the scrutiny Trump has endured, all 3 would be folding laundry in a Federal Correctional Facility.
On a somewhat related tax question- Can Hillary deduct the cost of her used pantyhose with which she strangled Jeffrey Epstein?
Double Standards! Hypocrisy! The Horror!