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Let's consider everything that was wrong with this article targeting the recent winner of the Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race. It’s a long list.
The sad fact is that there is nothing terribly out of character about the New York Times’s decision to publish a deceptive hit piece about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, based on hacked data supplied by a noted eugenicist to whom they granted anonymity.
The newsroom will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary missions — and one of them, most assuredly, is to take cheap shots at the left.
You can see it almost daily – just this past week alone in a condescending article about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brave defense of democracy, and a celebratory story about Trump’s achievements that likened dissenting views to “asterisks” on his legacy.
Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
And you can trace it back to the very top: to editor Joe Kahn and his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger. As I’ve exhaustively chronicled in my coverage of the New York Times, the newsroom is constantly under pressure from its leaders to prove that it is not taking sides in politics — or democracy, for that matter. And because printing the truth is seen as punching right, that requires expending a lot of effort to punch left. Punching left becomes the holy grail.
I mean think about it. Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
Why else would the Times, which notoriously refuses to respond to critics, have issued a ten-tweet defense of its actions? Why else would Kahn have praised the story in Monday’s morning meeting?
Consider everything that was wrong with the article. It’s a long list.
There’s more about the Mamdani piece in this excellent article by Liam Scott in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Parker Molloy, in her newsletter, points out:
When Times columnist Jamelle Bouie had the temerity to post “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi,” he was apparently forced to delete it for violating the paper’s social media guidelines. Think about that for a moment. The Times will protect the anonymity of a white supremacist, but will silence their own Black columnist for accurately identifying him.
And Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan , who previously worked as the Times' public editor, concludes that “this made-up scandal” — combined with a nasty pre-election editorial – makes the Times look “like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.”
The Times did its own self-serving follow-up article here, reporting that its disclosure had “provoked sharply different reactions.”
It also published — in what the New Republic’s Jason Linkins called an attempt to “reverse-engineer a pretext for their Mamdani piece” — a query asking readers what they think of racial categories.
When a Times article sets off an understandable explosion of media criticism, like this article did, the response would ideally come from a public editor, or ombud, whose job is to explain what happened and independently assess whether the Times was at fault or not. There would ideally be some learning.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking. But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left.
Sadly, The Times eliminated the position of public editor eight years ago. The publisher at the time said “our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”
So on Saturday, the response came from the Times’s hackish “assistant managing editor for standards and trust” Patrick Healy. To say that he does not inspire trust is an understatement.
Healy, who until May was the deputy opinions editor, drove the Times’s excellent columnist Paul Krugman to quit his job. Prior to that, he led a series of right-leaning citizens panels.
He was the newsroom’s politics editor during the 2020 presidential election, and the unapologetic leader of the paper’s “but her emails” coverage.
In short, he seems to revel in trolling the libs.
In his tweets, Healy focused on the article’s “factual accuracy” and he recognized concerns about how the source was identified. But he refused to engage with the concerns that the article was not newsworthy or that its sourcing was repugnant.
“The ultimate source was Columbia admissions data and Mr. Mamdani, who confirmed our reporting,” Healy wrote defensively.
That he is a rising star at the Times – indeed, said to be among the possible successors to Kahn – tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong there.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking.
But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left, no matter the cost to its obligation to accuracy and fairness.
This piece first appeared on Froomkin's website, Press Watch, and appears at Common Dreams with permission.
Voters described universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich as top priorities in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. But they were less likely to believe that party leaders shared those priorities.
Democratic voters want new leadership that will prioritize their day-to-day needs and do more to challenge corporate power, according to a poll published Thursday.
Sixty-two percent of the nearly 1,300 self-identified Democrats who responded to the new Reuters/Ipsos poll agreed with the statement that "the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people," while just 24% wanted to keep the old guard around.
The new data delivers another blow to party leaders such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who have faced growing scrutiny for failing to effectively oppose President Donald Trump in the eyes of their constituents.
The poll, conducted from June 11-16, revealed stark gaps between the agenda Democratic voters would like to see prioritized and what they perceive as party leadership's priorities. Voters overwhelmingly support populist economic policies, according to the data, but doubt that party leaders share those goals—with young voters especially skeptical.
(Graphic: Reuters/Ipsos)
Across all age groups, more than three-quarters of voters described universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich as top priorities. But voters were less likely to believe that party leaders did as well.
Voters between ages 18 to 39 especially had a grim view of leadership. While 81% said they wanted universal healthcare, just 66% said they thought party leadership did too. On limiting money in politics, 62% said it was a priority, compared with just 44% who thought leadership felt the same.
Democrats over 40 were even more inclined to believe in top progressive agenda items. Although they perceived less of a divide between their views and those of party leaders, a significant gap remained.
Following Kamala Harris' defeat in the 2024 election, many corporate-friendly pundits embraced the narrative that voters perceived the Democratic policy agenda as too far left. But the Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests the opposite.
As Sharon Zhang wrote for Truthout, "The majority of federally elected Democrats actually oppose proposals like Medicare for All, and many party leaders have actively worked to sabotage support for such ideas," including Schumer, who declined to support Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill this year.
"Far from taxing the rich," she added, "party leaders have also cozied up to billionaires." Tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple all donated millions of dollars to the Harris campaign.
Ben Tulchin, a pollster for Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, told Reuters that Democratic Party had "room for improvement" on showing Americans that they "are the ones standing up for working people."
"It needs to transform itself into a party that everyday people can get excited about," Tulchin said. "That requires a changing of the guard."
How do we transcend our collective awareness beyond the artificial borders we’ve created?
If you want to play the game of politics, here’s step one: Reduce everything to a linear political viewpoint: “right” or “left.” No matter how deep and large and complex that viewpoint is, politicize it, turn it into something that’s either right or wrong. It’s all about winning or losing.
Did U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris lean too far left? Oh gosh. Neither Liz Cheney nor Taylor Swift could save her.
I’m still immersed in my own recovery process—recovery from the election, of course. And yes, I’m feeling pain because “my side” lost, but my emotions are complicated by the fact that I didn’t really have a side in the election. It wasn’t simply that I was frustrated with the campaigns and claims of both major parties (the only ones that mattered, right?). I’ve apparently reached a point in my life where the entire political game feels problematic; it minimizes our world in a way I can no longer tolerate.
I feel the need to embrace and transcend this paradox: the reduction of our deepest values to a “cause,” which then frees us from actually having to honor those values and reduces the process to winning vs. losing.
How do we transcend our collective awareness beyond the artificial borders we’ve created? I ask this question not from some higher state of awareness, but from the middle of it all. How do we reach a collective state that isn’t competitive? How do we actually live our values rather than simply attempt to impose them—and in the process of doing so, oh so often, completely disregard and violate those values?
Suddenly I’m thinking about the good old Crusades, summarized thus by History.com: “The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions—varying in size, strength, and degree of success—occurred between 1096 and 1291. The costly, violent, and often ruthless conflicts enhanced the status of European Christians, making them major players in the fight for land in the Middle East.”
Now it’s all just history, which is the story we tell about ourselves from one war to the next. But, come on: “violent and often ruthless” battles to reclaim, good God, holy sites? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Actually, that biblical quote sums up the cost of war pretty precisely. But the paradox sits there like an open wound. Love thy neighbor, love thy enemy—but first you’re going to have to kill him. And his children. Charge!
I’m not saying all this simply to point a moral finger at the political leaders of the world. Rather, I feel the need to embrace and transcend this paradox: the reduction of our deepest values to a “cause,” which then frees us from actually having to honor those values and reduces the process to winning vs. losing. Apparently, we can’t have a cause without an enemy, or at least an inconvenience (Palestinians, for example), which... uh, needs to be eliminated.
It always seems to come down to this: some glaring irritation that stands in the way of the good we want to do. And yes, there are many pushbacks against this mindset—many people who, in defiance of the cynics, believe in, practice and, indeed, create loving and courageous approaches to conflict resolution. But such approaches cannot be reduced to simple stories of good vs. evil, and thus lack large social resonance.
So here I am, dealing with my own frustrations in the present moment—the ongoing genocide in Palestine that the U.S. funds, the possibility of President-elect Donald Trump’s increased militarization of our southern border, the ever-intensifying climate crisis, the ongoing possibility of nuclear war... and oh my God, it gets ever more insane. For that reason, I bring back a story I wrote about a decade ago, which remains close to my heart. It’s a small story: a single incident in the midst of the brutal civil war going on in South Sudan.
It involves the international peacekeeping NGO, Nonviolent Peaceforce, which had several of its members in the country to help facilitate communication between the various sides in the conflict. They were unarmed, of course, which gave them credibility and trust among the warring sides. As I wrote at the time:
Being unarmed doesn’t mean being disempowered. This is worth paying attention to. In South Sudan, unarmed, international peacekeepers have credibility. They stand above the local conflict, facilitating communication between the various sides but not taking sides themselves.
What happened was that armed men attacked a United Nations base on the perimeter of the city of Bor, where thousands of civilians had sought refuge. Two Nonviolence Peaceforce representatives found themselves in the middle of the chaos and took refuge inside a mud hut, which was occupied as well by four women and nine children. On three separate occasions, I noted, armed men came and ordered the peacekeepers out so they could kill the women and kids. The peacekeepers refused, holding up their Nonviolent Peaceforce IDs and saying they were unarmed. They were there to protect civilians and would not leave. After the third time, the armed men left for good.
Some 60 people were killed in the assault, but 13 precious lives were saved. As one of the peacekeepers said afterward: “I think if we had a gun we would have been shot immediately.”
The peacekeepers had had intense training in nonviolence and were able to keep their cool. They didn’t panic.
And, crucially, Nonviolent Peaceforce had credibility in South Sudan. They stood beyond the conflict. “We also had a humanitarian mandate,” one of the peacekeepers said. Being unarmed “opens the doors to look for solutions. If we were armed peacekeepers, the solution is you shoot back. Because we were unarmed, we could find other ways.”
This story transcends the moment of its occurrence. I wish I could multiply it by a million. All I can do is repeat: Being unarmed opens the door to look for solutions.