'This Could Well Be Game Over' (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/opinion/trump-trials-supreme-court.html

https://archive.ph/p6k7u

‘This Could Well Be Game Over’
March 6, 2024
By Thomas B. Edsall

While the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states cannot bar Donald Trump from appearing on their presidential ballots garnered a lot of attention, the more politically consequential decision came on Feb. 28, when the court set a hearing on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for the week of April 22.

That delay is both a devastating blow to President Biden’s campaign and a major assist to Trump’s multipronged effort to minimize attention to the details of the 91 felony charges against him.

It increases the likelihood that neither of the two federal indictments of Trump will come to trial before the November election. A failure to hold at least one of these trials before Nov. 5 would undermine a key Democratic goal: to expand voters’ awareness of the dangers posed by a second Trump term.

Those trials, should they occur, are very likely to produce a flood of daily headlines and television broadcasts describing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his sequestering of classified government documents in his Mar-a-Lago home — a media onslaught reminiscent of the Senate Watergate hearings, which stretched out over 51 days in 1973.

“Early on, I called the federal election subversion case potentially the most important case in this nation’s history,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote on his Election Law Blog. “And now it may not happen because of timing, timing that is completely in the Supreme Court’s control. This could well be game over.”

...

[Think. Again.]

1. Warning: the article above is from the NYT...

....and claims things like:

"That delay is both a devastating blow to President Biden’s campaign and a major assist to Trump’s multipronged effort to minimize attention to the details of the 91 felony charges against him."

[brooklynite]

2. And as we all know, high-education Times readers will say...

..."I really hated Donald Trump, but a story I read said he's benefit from trial delays, so..."

[Think. Again.]

3. That's a very simplistic view...

...and doesn't really make much sense considering the reach of the NYT.

[Blues Heron]

4. propaganda works on a repetetive, long term basis - the daily tearing down of Biden like the death of a thousand cuts

Its never just one story

[tinrobot]

13. It's a hyperbolic statement that artificially elevates Trump

How a trial delay in one of four trials becomes a "devastating blow" is rather specious.

[shrike3]

18. Yeah, and they had absolutely no impact at all on Hillary's campaign, Bill's fortunes.

Last edited Thu Mar 7, 2024, 02:17 PM - Edit history (1)

Everyone ignores them.

Oh, and Judith Miller, nobody paid any attention to anything she wrote.

[senseandsensibility]

37. Good points

Why some are in denial about this is a mystery.

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. "That delay is both a devastating blow to President Biden's campaign " BULL SHIT

[bdamomma]

6. I agree

Such BS, piling on the propaganda..

[Silent Type]

29. Didn't see any DUers applauding SC's decision among all the criticism. So, yeah it was a blow. We can land blows too.

[Lovie777]

7. I guess the NYT's can't comprehend that Democrat's can multitask...............

[Basic LA]

8. This is an Op-Ed column.

Columns that appear opposite the editorial page (Op-Eds) are strictly the opinions of the columnists and not the paper at large.
The above columnist, Thomas B. Edsall, is a senior and respected LIBERAL who here is alarmed by the SCOTUS decision to delay TFG's immunity trial, thereby depriving President Biden of the damaging trial publicity against Trump.
This columnist is FOR Biden. And I would recommend reading Edsall's column (which is HIS opinion, not the NYT's) every Wednesday when it appears.

[Voltaire2]

9. The editors of the NYT control their op-ed page.

It is not some public forum where anyone can post their nonsense.

[Basic LA]

10. They control who writes the op-eds

But they don't tell them what to write or what not write. Ever. They can fire & hire opinion columnists, but they can't alter or influence their copy. Not ever. There's a long history for this practice, especially in established publications.

[Voltaire2]

12. They absolutely have editorial control over what gets published.

[Basic LA]

14. They can spike a column, I guess.

And fire the opinion writer. But they can't influence or alter the copy in any way. This goes back to syndication days, when opinion writers would appear in many papers across the country. Any one paper could choose not to print the opinion column and cancel its contract with that columnist. But no one paper could alter or the copy in any way.
Pretty exclusive deal, getting an opinion column.

I for one wish the Times would drop one of their conservatives (all of whom are Never-Trumpers) and hire Charlie Pierce,
now of Esquire.
The newest
Times opinion columnist is Pamela Paul, promoted from her previous position as NYT Book Review editor. A liberal, and someone to watch. I listened to her for years when she hosted the NYT Book Review podcast. And nobody better tell her what to say in her opinion column. It's simply not done.

[Lonestarblue]

11. They decide who to publish and who to ignore.

The Times got a lot of heat a few years ago when they published a Tom Cotton opinion supporting the use of the military to quash peaceful protests. They defended his right to his opinion but were silent on the reason they gave him a national platform to broadcast an opinion that called for the illegal use of the military against mostly black people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

This week, they resurrected Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s with n opinion piece that essentially called on Jill Biden to do what the writer thought Nancy Reagan should have done to convince Joe to step down, with the inference that, like Reagan, Biden is not mentally competent to be president again. The Times chose to give that writer a national platform to once again denigrate Biden. That is deliberate, and I would not be surprised to learn that either they or a Republican group commissioned the piece.

[Basic LA]

15. That was a Guest Columnist piece.

And the op-ed editor caught holy hell for it and I think was replaced. Still, once accepted, the clearly labeled opinion column wasn't altered.

[shrike3]

16. He's a journalist. He previously covered politics for the Washington Post

Maybe I'm just uninformed as to his creds, but how is he a senior and respected liberal?

[Basic LA]

19. He's had a long distinguished career

As an academic and a writer for many news publications (decades at the Washington Post) and he's a liberal. The man has a history & credentials and is respected in his field. Though I'm sure conservatives probably don't like him.

[shrike3]

20. I've never heard of the guy. Times has some well-known liberals. He's not one of them.

Can you give examples of his liberal opinions?

He was a Media Fellow for the Hoover Institution, "an American public policy think tank which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government."

[Basic LA]

23. I missed that Hoover bit. You're right.

Looking at his Wikipedia page, that item doesn't fit with everything else about him. It's jarring and not good at all. I would've never suspected that by any one of his columns.
Still, we can't take his column as being written by the Times. It's Opinion, written by him.
Now some papers, like the Honolulu Advertiser, used to just have two syndicated opinion columnists, both rabid right wingers.
That's not how it is with the Times or Washington Post or many others.
But again, the Hoover stint for Edsall is a black mark.

[shrike3]

24. I agree completely. It's his opinion. The Times ran it, but it's his opinion.

Papers do that all the time, run opinion pieces by people from all across the political spectrum.

I'm glad you found his association with Hoover jarring as well. I saw that, and went, "Woah."

[Basic LA]

27. And look at everything else. WTH?

Unless he was their house liberal?
But, right, on the larger point, it's easy to disagree with an Opinion column and then yell, "Look what this damn paper is saying!"
Happens here all the time.

[shrike3]

17. The Times sure seems determined to bury Biden

It's almost bizarre. Like they're doubling down in the face of criticism. "We're the New York Times and we can do what we want, so there."

[Mad_Machine76]

21. WTF?!

Republicans nominated a guy (for the third time) who had a disastrous 4 years in office, bungled a pandemic, lost re-election, refused to leave office and plotted to stay in office, and is facing 91 indictments over 4 trials and it's "game over" for President Biden?

[orthoclad]

31. But he made the rich richer

Huge tax breaks for the rich while middle-class mortgagees lost their home interest deduction. Work harder, peons!

Trump did his job.

[Elessar Zappa]

22. Oh, okay.

Guess we should just give up then. Game over, my ass. Donate time, money, and GOTV. That’s how we win this and every election.

[BannonsLiver]

25. Garland waited too long

Just like some of us told our resident legal eagles.

[orthoclad]

32. I wonder why?

[ariadne0614]

26. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread for talking me back from the edge.

Sometimes it takes a village.

[pdxflyboy]

28. I Just Got Off The Phone....

Cancelled my subscription to the New York Times!

[maxsolomon]

36. Was this Op-Ed the final straw?

How many times is that?

[shrike3]

30. "It's not a word we use in The New York Times."

Historian and author Rick Perlstein last month launched a new must-read column for the American Prospect that’s heavy on media criticism. In his first column, he wrote that the tools of political journalism created by “generations of … incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism” are “thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.”

In a two-part column on Jan. 17 and Jan. 18, Perlstein interviewed author and fascism expert Jeff Sharlet, who shared with him an incredible recording of a bookstore talk between Sharlet and a smug, unnamed New York Times reporter (who internet sleuths later identified as Reid Epstein). The reporter responded with scorn to Sharlet’s use of the word “fascist” to describe Trump and the MAGA movement, saying: “It’s not a word we use in The New York Times.”

And yet, as Perlstein argued:

By not naming it “fascism,” when others responsibly name it that, the Times is, effectively, naming it “not fascism.”

https://presswatchers.org/2024/02/critical-readers-are-increasingly-furious-about-the-way-political-journalists-are-doing-their-jobs/

[orthoclad]

33. Yes, why would a rich hereditary publisher,

backed by a board composed of a corporate interlocking jigsaw game, use the word "fascist" to describe another plutocrat?

Fascism is the close cooperation of the rich and government.

[dalton99a]

34. +1. And please don't call Trump a liar

Most politicians obfuscate or exaggerate at times. But I wouldn’t use the word “lie” in a news story in cases like that. I don’t think we should use that word every day in The New York Times.

The word “lie” is very powerful. For one thing, it assumes that someone knew the statement was false. Another reason to use the word judiciously is that our readers could end up focusing more on our use of the word than on what was said. And using “lie” repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role.

- Dean Baquet, NYT executive editor

[shrike3]

35. Aren't they precious?

At least he provided an explanation. I'll pass it along to an acquaintance. "Why won't they just say he lies?" she was railing the other day.