'This Could Well Be Game Over' (NYT)

[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/