NYT’s bias is generally highly anti-left, [to a similar degree to fox] (subclaim retracted); NYT seems to support liberals, as long as they have no [edit: more accurately, have convenient] left views OR are cariacatures basically nobody, including other leftists, would agree with. They paper it over with weird liberal claims that try to appear left but are emphatically nothing of the kind [this one probably holds up]. And any time actual progressive stuff comes up, NYT manages to deeply distort it similar to how they do other topics—if I were to take an intentional stance, I’d be wondering if the NYT exists primarily to be a cariacature that people can use to diss actual progressives. Making a case for this would be a pain [due to being about the average of a large body of work], and it’s a pattern that has exceptions, whereas I imagine quillette doesn’t have exceptions where actually they like progressive stuff sometimes.
But I agree that source reliability should be about predictive accuracy. If anything, source reliability should have eliminated more sources Gerard relies on—such as, for example, NYT. I doubt there are many sources besides the AP that would be left over.
Also, general suggestion that unpacking “woke” into more specific components may produce more clarity.
Edit: lines targeted agree-disagree would be useful here. I maintain NYT seems liberal anti-progressive, I have never known someone progressive to think positively of NYT as a whole.
I think I understand your objection, but “left” and “right” are relative (a source can simultaneously be rightwards from you and leftwards from the average person in the country), one dimension is not enough to capture the nuance, and both “left” and “right” come in various flavors. If you try to sort all existing political orientations into two giant bags, inevitably each bag will contain things very different from each other. (Unless you define one bag as “people who agree with me” and the other one as “everyone else”.)
I didn’t claim that the far-left generally agrees with the NYT, or that the NYT is a far-left outlet. It is a center-left outlet, which makes it cover far-left ideas much more favorably than far-right ideas, while still disagreeing with them.
Ehh, maybe fair ish, but, you said that NYT is left at all; I think that’s wrong, that they’re a similar kind of liberal to eg wapo, and that it’s a misleading image the NYT cultivates as being “The Left’s Voice” in order to damage discourse in ways that seem on brand for the kind of behavior by the NYT described in OP. I find this behavior on NYT’s part frustrating, hence it coming up. In the single dimensional model it’s a centrist outlet, similar to wapo; It’s not “near left” at all, again, it seems to me that even near left progressivism is primarily damaged by NYT. But I don’t think the single dimensional model accurately represents the differences of opinion between these opinion clusters anyway—left is a different direction than liberal, is a different direction than libertarian, is a different direction than right, is a different direction than authoritarian—many of these opinion clusters, if you dot product them with each other, are mildly positive or negative, but there are subsets of them that are intensely resonant. And I think accepting the NYT’s frame on itself is letting an adversarial actor mess up the layout of your game space, such that the groups that ought to be realizing their opinions can resonate well are not. Letting views be overcoupled due to using too-low-dimensional models to represent them seems like a core way memetic attacks on coordination between disagreeing groups work.
The relevant semantic distinction here is that self-identified “leftists” view themselves as distinct from “liberals” in a different clusters sense (some liberals agree), whereas most moderates and conservatives probably think of the political continuum as a line from far-right → right → center → left → far-left.
Words are made by men, and I don’t think there’s a “truth of the matter” to which definitions are more accurate, I’m just noting that different commenters in this thread are using the same words differently, and may not realize that their disagreements are semantic.
In the context of a two-party system where the Democrats are the left party, running Democratic talking points to misinform the public, is acting from a left-wing bias.
That’s true even when you can easily argue that the Biden administration is full of authoritarians who shouldn’t be seen as the real left by European standards.
Elsewhere on the internet, people are complaining vociferously that the NYT’s more recent articles about Biden’s age and alleged cognitive issues show that the NYT is secretly doing the bidding of billionaires who think a different candidate might tax them less. I mention this not because I think those people are right but as an illustration of the way that “such-and-such a media outlet is biased!” is a claim that often says more about the position of the person making the complaint than about the media outlet in question.
There’s nothing misleading about the video of how Obama lead Biden of the stage at the fundraiser. There’s no reason to use the “cheap fake” term for it. Updates from seeing it help people be less surprised by the debate performance or managing to call Zelensky Putin at the same day he calls Kamela Trump.
As far as the NYT doing the bidding of Democratic megadonors even when that conflicts with the party line of the Democratic party I don’t think that matters to the left-right axis.
As far as the question of taxation goes, tax laws are still passed by Congress and the Senate. Polling does suggest that Biden running makes a Republican-controlled Congress and Senate more likely which makes tax cuts more likely. Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom don’t seem to hold different positions regarding taxation than Biden. Both are centrist Democrats just the way Joe Biden is.
Unfortunately, not being a NYT subscriber I think I can’t see the specific video you mention (the only one with Biden allegedly being led anywhere that I can see before the nag message has his wife doing the alleged leading, and the point of it seems to have been not that someone was leading him somewhere but that he walked off instead of greeting veterans at a D-Day event, and there isn’t anything in the text I can see that calls anything a cheap fake).
(Obviously my lack of an NYT subscription isn’t your problem, but unless there’s another source for what they’re claiming I can’t actually tell whether I agree with your take on it or not.)
Again, I wasn’t claiming that the people spinning conspiracy theories about the NYT wanting Biden out of the way to lower billionaires’ taxes are right. (I think they’re almost certainly wrong.) But when I see, within a week of one another, one claim that you can tell the NYT is politically biased because of how they went out of their way to defend Biden from claims about his age/frailty/… and another claim that you can tell the NYT is politically biased because of how they went out of their way to propagate and dramatize claims about Biden’s age/frailty/..., my instinctive reaction is to be skeptical about both those claims.
… Ah, I’ve found what I think is the text of the NYT article. What it actually says about “cheap fakes” is this:
Some of the videos of Mr. Biden circulating during this year’s campaign are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused. Others cut out vital context to portray him in a negative light, a process sometimes known as a “cheap fake” because it requires little expense or technological skill to create.
(Which is not at all what I assumed “cheap fake” meant on reading your comment, for what it’s worth.) But that text doesn’t say anything about Obama and doesn’t use the word “fundraiser” (and doesn’t include any of the videos) so I still can’t tell what video it is you’re saying isn’t misleading and therefore have no opinion on whether or not it actually is.
I had a look at a YouTube video from “Sky News AU” which was about the D-Day thing and it looked to me like a mixture of places where Biden’s behaviour was genuinely troubling and short clips of the sort that I’m pretty sure you could find for anyone of his age whether or not there was anything much wrong with them, if you did a bit of cherry-picking. The latter seems like the sort of thing the NYT article called “cheap fakes” and whatever Biden’s current state it seems pretty clear to me that there was some of that going on in the (pretty mainstream, I take it) video I looked at.
Again, I don’t know exactly what video you’re talking about or what the NYT said about it, since in what looks like a copy of the article’s text there’s nothing about Obama leading him anywhere at any fundraiser. But from what I’ve looked at so far, I’m not seeing how the NYT article is misinformation.
(As for the actual question of Biden’s current state of physical and/or cognitive health, which is somewhat relevant to this, I’m not sure what to think. The very worst things look pretty alarming; on the other hand, I took a sort of random sampling of short segments from That Debate and I thought that in them Trump was significantly more incoherent than Biden. And I know that Biden is a lifelong stutterer which will make any sort of slowness look more alarming, and which is a fact that never seems to be mentioned in any of the articles about how decrepit he allegedly is. It’s not relevant to all the things that people are making noise about—e.g., if he calls someone by the wrong name, that’s probably nothing to do with his stutter. On the other hand, calling people by the wrong name happens all the time and e.g. Trump does it a lot too.)
NYT’s bias is generally highly anti-left, [
to a similar degree to fox] (subclaim retracted); NYT seems to support liberals, as long as they have no [edit: more accurately, have convenient] left views OR are cariacatures basically nobody, including other leftists, would agree with. They paper it over with weird liberal claims that try to appear left but are emphatically nothing of the kind [this one probably holds up]. And any time actual progressive stuff comes up, NYT manages to deeply distort it similar to how they do other topics—if I were to take an intentional stance, I’d be wondering if the NYT exists primarily to be a cariacature that people can use to diss actual progressives. Making a case for this would be a pain [due to being about the average of a large body of work], and it’s a pattern that has exceptions, whereas I imagine quillette doesn’t have exceptions where actually they like progressive stuff sometimes.But I agree that source reliability should be about predictive accuracy. If anything, source reliability should have eliminated more sources Gerard relies on—such as, for example, NYT. I doubt there are many sources besides the AP that would be left over.
Also, general suggestion that unpacking “woke” into more specific components may produce more clarity.
Edit: lines targeted agree-disagree would be useful here. I maintain NYT seems liberal anti-progressive, I have never known someone progressive to think positively of NYT as a whole.
I think I understand your objection, but “left” and “right” are relative (a source can simultaneously be rightwards from you and leftwards from the average person in the country), one dimension is not enough to capture the nuance, and both “left” and “right” come in various flavors. If you try to sort all existing political orientations into two giant bags, inevitably each bag will contain things very different from each other. (Unless you define one bag as “people who agree with me” and the other one as “everyone else”.)
I didn’t claim that the far-left generally agrees with the NYT, or that the NYT is a far-left outlet. It is a center-left outlet, which makes it cover far-left ideas much more favorably than far-right ideas, while still disagreeing with them.
Ehh, maybe fair ish, but, you said that NYT is left at all; I think that’s wrong, that they’re a similar kind of liberal to eg wapo, and that it’s a misleading image the NYT cultivates as being “The Left’s Voice” in order to damage discourse in ways that seem on brand for the kind of behavior by the NYT described in OP. I find this behavior on NYT’s part frustrating, hence it coming up. In the single dimensional model it’s a centrist outlet, similar to wapo; It’s not “near left” at all, again, it seems to me that even near left progressivism is primarily damaged by NYT. But I don’t think the single dimensional model accurately represents the differences of opinion between these opinion clusters anyway—left is a different direction than liberal, is a different direction than libertarian, is a different direction than right, is a different direction than authoritarian—many of these opinion clusters, if you dot product them with each other, are mildly positive or negative, but there are subsets of them that are intensely resonant. And I think accepting the NYT’s frame on itself is letting an adversarial actor mess up the layout of your game space, such that the groups that ought to be realizing their opinions can resonate well are not. Letting views be overcoupled due to using too-low-dimensional models to represent them seems like a core way memetic attacks on coordination between disagreeing groups work.
The relevant semantic distinction here is that self-identified “leftists” view themselves as distinct from “liberals” in a different clusters sense (some liberals agree), whereas most moderates and conservatives probably think of the political continuum as a line from far-right → right → center → left → far-left.
Words are made by men, and I don’t think there’s a “truth of the matter” to which definitions are more accurate, I’m just noting that different commenters in this thread are using the same words differently, and may not realize that their disagreements are semantic.
The NYT is frame on itself is that they are unbiased and objective. The NYT is not seen as left because they self label that way.
The NYT generally publishes talking points from a Democratic White House without criticism and was willing to publish misinformation like How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.
In the context of a two-party system where the Democrats are the left party, running Democratic talking points to misinform the public, is acting from a left-wing bias.
That’s true even when you can easily argue that the Biden administration is full of authoritarians who shouldn’t be seen as the real left by European standards.
What in that article is misinformation?
Elsewhere on the internet, people are complaining vociferously that the NYT’s more recent articles about Biden’s age and alleged cognitive issues show that the NYT is secretly doing the bidding of billionaires who think a different candidate might tax them less. I mention this not because I think those people are right but as an illustration of the way that “such-and-such a media outlet is biased!” is a claim that often says more about the position of the person making the complaint than about the media outlet in question.
There’s nothing misleading about the video of how Obama lead Biden of the stage at the fundraiser. There’s no reason to use the “cheap fake” term for it. Updates from seeing it help people be less surprised by the debate performance or managing to call Zelensky Putin at the same day he calls Kamela Trump.
As far as the NYT doing the bidding of Democratic megadonors even when that conflicts with the party line of the Democratic party I don’t think that matters to the left-right axis.
As far as the question of taxation goes, tax laws are still passed by Congress and the Senate. Polling does suggest that Biden running makes a Republican-controlled Congress and Senate more likely which makes tax cuts more likely. Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom don’t seem to hold different positions regarding taxation than Biden. Both are centrist Democrats just the way Joe Biden is.
Unfortunately, not being a NYT subscriber I think I can’t see the specific video you mention (the only one with Biden allegedly being led anywhere that I can see before the nag message has his wife doing the alleged leading, and the point of it seems to have been not that someone was leading him somewhere but that he walked off instead of greeting veterans at a D-Day event, and there isn’t anything in the text I can see that calls anything a cheap fake).
(Obviously my lack of an NYT subscription isn’t your problem, but unless there’s another source for what they’re claiming I can’t actually tell whether I agree with your take on it or not.)
Again, I wasn’t claiming that the people spinning conspiracy theories about the NYT wanting Biden out of the way to lower billionaires’ taxes are right. (I think they’re almost certainly wrong.) But when I see, within a week of one another, one claim that you can tell the NYT is politically biased because of how they went out of their way to defend Biden from claims about his age/frailty/… and another claim that you can tell the NYT is politically biased because of how they went out of their way to propagate and dramatize claims about Biden’s age/frailty/..., my instinctive reaction is to be skeptical about both those claims.
… Ah, I’ve found what I think is the text of the NYT article. What it actually says about “cheap fakes” is this:
(Which is not at all what I assumed “cheap fake” meant on reading your comment, for what it’s worth.) But that text doesn’t say anything about Obama and doesn’t use the word “fundraiser” (and doesn’t include any of the videos) so I still can’t tell what video it is you’re saying isn’t misleading and therefore have no opinion on whether or not it actually is.
I had a look at a YouTube video from “Sky News AU” which was about the D-Day thing and it looked to me like a mixture of places where Biden’s behaviour was genuinely troubling and short clips of the sort that I’m pretty sure you could find for anyone of his age whether or not there was anything much wrong with them, if you did a bit of cherry-picking. The latter seems like the sort of thing the NYT article called “cheap fakes” and whatever Biden’s current state it seems pretty clear to me that there was some of that going on in the (pretty mainstream, I take it) video I looked at.
Again, I don’t know exactly what video you’re talking about or what the NYT said about it, since in what looks like a copy of the article’s text there’s nothing about Obama leading him anywhere at any fundraiser. But from what I’ve looked at so far, I’m not seeing how the NYT article is misinformation.
(As for the actual question of Biden’s current state of physical and/or cognitive health, which is somewhat relevant to this, I’m not sure what to think. The very worst things look pretty alarming; on the other hand, I took a sort of random sampling of short segments from That Debate and I thought that in them Trump was significantly more incoherent than Biden. And I know that Biden is a lifelong stutterer which will make any sort of slowness look more alarming, and which is a fact that never seems to be mentioned in any of the articles about how decrepit he allegedly is. It’s not relevant to all the things that people are making noise about—e.g., if he calls someone by the wrong name, that’s probably nothing to do with his stutter. On the other hand, calling people by the wrong name happens all the time and e.g. Trump does it a lot too.)