Ah, but it's not the same thing at all, not by a long shot, because in the real
world, not on Blind Democracy, nor in your mind or mine, the New York Times has
a lot of influence over what a large number of people, particularly, Democrats,
think. And our lives, all of our lives, are affected by what the elites do. And
part of the reason that they have the power to do what they do is that people
believe what they say.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2019 7:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New York Times Has It in for Bernie Sanders
So now we can all jump up and down, point fingers at the New York Times and
Sydney Ember, for their not-so-subtle attacks on Bernie Sanders. Like somehow
we believed that the New York Times was a Liberal Paper? If the New York Times
is anything at all, it is a big fat Liar with printers ink on its lips.
It took me some time to figure out that nothing changes when we get upset over
our adversaries calling us hateful names.
In my days as a seventh grader one of my schoolmates, a girl named Marilyn,
decided to hate me. I have no idea to this day as to why she picked me to
bestow her hatred on. Maybe it was because I was a lanky, geeky, poor kid
wearing last years clothes, and she fancied herself as one of the Lord
Fauntleroy's chosen daughters.
But I tried everything to win this girl over, without success. She spread
unkind lies about me, and finally told her teacher that I'd threatened her with
a pocket knife.
The teacher reported this story to the principal. He called me into his
office, where I immediately burst into a sniveling ball of snot.
"I don't own a pocket knife", I blubbered.
"Wait here," he told me, and left the room. When he returned he had a wry
smile on his face. "Do you own a rusty nail?" he asked.
I could go on by the hour with stories of how Marilyn trashed me, but the point
is that I discovered that it didn't matter what she thought, or what she said.
Those kids who believed her were kids I would not want for friends. And those
kids who gathered around me and supported me were kids I wanted as friends. I
have no idea how Marilyn's life turned out, and I don't care.
The same is true of writers such as Sydney Ember and the New York Times.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/2/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The author has a program on Pacifica's NYC station, WBAI, which is
also a podcast. She has some terrific people on there.
Miriam
The New York Times Has It in for Bernie Sanders Katie Halper The New
York Times Has It in for Bernie Sanders Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
(Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
New York Times reporter Sydney Ember has a problem with Bernie
Sanders—which may be why the paper has her cover him.
Ember is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she
consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament,
history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen
pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’
documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and
reporters alike.
The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging
them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up: It changed
the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via
Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie
Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a
campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the
paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as
stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they
“thought [the article] should say more about his realistic chances.”
In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’
viability and ability to govern, in other words.
Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and
marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started
covering politics in May 2018, and immediately got the enviable
assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020
Democratic nomination. Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé
limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the
biggest global investment management corporation, and the largest
investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike
Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate
consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)
Ember has a multi-prong approach to undermining Sanders: She went to
great lengths to avoid calling him the frontrunner until he was “no
longer” one; she attributes his political positions to
attention-getting, self-serving ulterior motives; frames even his
victories and the popularity of his ideas as weaknesses; cherry-picks
polls; presents opinions as facts (claiming he’s “outflanked on the
left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley
and Beto O’Rourke”); and creates false equivalency between Sanders and
Donald Trump.
But for the sake of time and length, this piece focuses on her
selection and misrepresentation of sources, which have already drawn
scrutiny. Brad Johnson, a political analyst with a background in
climate science pointed out that Ember quoted a source without
mentioning that she’s a corporate lobbyist; journalist Zaid Jilani
noted that Ember failed to disclose that another source was a senior
advisor for a Hillary Clinton Super PAC.
Education scholar Diane Ravitch devoted a blog post to the reporter’s
“shameful” reporting on Sanders’ education policy, questioning the
authority of her sources.
Ember’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times
reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on
the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding
antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective. Moreover, many of
these “experts”
are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided
by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the
economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the
identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.
Sefl is hardly a disinterested authority; she’s a paid political
consultant and media specialist who worked as a surrogate and senior
advisor for Hillary Clinton. Other outlets mention Sefl’s experience
working for Clinton when they cite her, including the New York Times,
which has identified her as someone “supporting Mrs. Clinton,” someone
who “worked for Mrs.
Clinton,”
and a “Democratic consultant and Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.”
Consider
Ember’s March 1 article, which opened with the kind of unflattering
headline her stories often bear: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for
2020, but His Desire for Control Remains.” (Headlines, of course, are
chosen by editors, not reporters, but in these stories they reflect
the slant of the text.) The piece ended on a typically ominous note:
“Even if Mr. Sanders does talk more about himself, his competition
presents a new set of challenges that his own biography may only
compound,” Ember wrote. She brings in an expert to prove her point:
“‘At the end of the day, he is still an old white man,’ said Tracy
Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist.”
A New York Times story (10/22/07) on the 2008 Clinton campaign’s
relationship with the right-wing Drudge Report identified Sefl as
someone “who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr.
Drudge—and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly
to open a line of communication.” The paper also noted that her
“fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.” Sefl admitted in an interview
(Chicago, 7/13/15):
“
My solo consultancy doesn’t have a name, quite purposely so. I do
often collaborate with other consultants, including Republicans—within
reason—when the work warrants it.
Reporter Zaid Jilani caught Ember’s omission, tweeting that she didn’t
“note [Sefl] was senior adviser to Ready for Hillary Super PAC or that
she was a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.” The
piece has since been updated—without notice—to describe Sefl as “a
veteran Democratic strategist and formerly a senior adviser to the
Super PAC Ready for Hillary.”
Sefl’s choice of phrase, “an old white man,” is surely a crude
description for someone who, as he has explained, has a strong Jewish
identity, shaped in part by his father’s side of the family having
been “wiped out” in the Holocaust, and growing up a working-class Jew
in Brooklyn. If successful, Sanders would be the first Jewish
president of the United States. But Sefl’s dismissive description is
consistent with the way Clinton campaign loyalists and much of
corporate media continue to weaponize identity politics against
Sanders, erasing not only his Jewish identitty, but also his
anti-racist record and his supporters of color.
Ember’s February 17 article, “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black
Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?,” published two days before
Sanders announced his candidacy, predicted that “his weak track record
with black voters — a vital base in the Democratic Party — could be a
potential threat to his candidacy.” Echoing the conventional wisdom of
the 2016 campaign, the piece made no mention of the CNN poll issued
two months earlier that found Sanders had a higher approval rating
with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate.
Ember’s March 29 article, “Bernie Sanders Says ‘No’ to Incrementalism,
Highlighting Divide Among Democrats,” started with a neutral enough
headline, but ended with a harsh critique by a fierce Sanders
opponent, whose politics the reporter misrepresents:
“
“The path to the White House and to majorities has to be in a
pragmatic, progressive area,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice
president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If you
go too far left, Donald Trump gets re-elected and Republicans control both
houses of Congress.”
“Our heads are in the clouds, but our feet are also on the ground at
the same time,” he added. He cited his group’s universal healthcare
plan, which he said was “just as ambitious” as Mr. Sanders’ proposed
“Medicare for all.”
There was, however, a key difference.
“It just doesn’t blow up the system,” Mr. Kessler said. “It builds on
the existing system.”
But Third Way is a fiscally conservative, not a “center left,” think tank.
Given the state of public opinion, a group that pushes to cut Social
Security and Medicare, and calls raising taxes on billionaires
“soaking the rich,” is to the right of centrist. In 2013, of 29
trustees on Third Way’s board, 20 were investment bankers, three were
CEOs and two were corporate lawyers.
Third Way’s “about” section reads, “Our work is grounded in the
mainstream American values of opportunity, freedom and security.” They
continue, “But we identify as center-left, because we see that space
in US politics as offering the only real path for advancing those
ideals in the century ahead.” For Third Way, identifying as
“center-left” is lip service, a strategic necessity in a nation that
has moved to the left and whose demographics promise a more diverse and left
electorate to come.
Ember chooses the label that Third Way uses for itself, because if she
accurately identified its corporatist mission and positions, she could
not use one of its leaders as an objective authority on the efficacy
of Bernie Sanders’ proposal of free healthcare for all. It would be
obvious that Third Way’s healthcare plan was in no way as ambitious as
Sanders’, and that it was using the term “universal” to undermine
single payer.
Reflecting its function as a corporate advocate for moving the
Democratic Party to the right, Third Way has consistently disparaged
Sanders and progressive politics in general. In a 2013 Wall Street
Journal op-ed (12/2/13), Kessler (and Third Way co-founder and
president Jon Cowan) declared that “economic populism is dead,” urging
Democrats not to follow Elizabeth Warren and Bill deBlasio “over the
populist cliff.” Kessler singled out Sanders in a USA Today op-ed
(12/15/17), declaring, “Take It From Voters, Democrats Don’t Want a Bernie
Sanders.”
In October 2018, Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennet (who
can be seen in this video refusing to disclose how much money his
think tank gets from Wall Street) disqualified Sanders as a presidential
candidate:
“The exception is Sen. Sanders. We’re open to everybody except for him.”
That would seem to make the organization an odd source to go to to
evaluate Sanders’ policy proposals.
But Ember turned to Kessler again in her April 27 article, “Bernie
Sanders Opens Space for Debate on Voting Rights for Incarcerated
People,” to comment on Sanders’ call to enfranchise the incarcerated:
“
“There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent
offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler,
executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank.
Mr. Sanders’ remarks, he added, “seemed like a bit of a stumble.”
The comment seemed like a bit of a stumble for Kessler, into an area
where he has no evident expertise, and, interestingly, where Third Way
hardly wades.
Ember’s May 17 article, “Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie
Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington,” presented as problematic
and incriminating the senator’s support of Nicaraguan Sandinistas and
his opposition to the CIA-backed Contra rebels trying to overthrow
them—whose systematic pattern of gross human rights violations in the
1980s included death squad assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation
and torture. In a subsequent interview, Ember’s first and apparently
most pressing question to Sanders was whether he had heard an
anti-American chant at a rally he and approximately 499,999 other
people attended. Her second question was whether he would have stayed
at the event if he had heard it.
While NBC’s Meet the Press (5/19/19) and New York’s Jonathan Chait
(5/27/19)
accepted and amplified Ember’s framing, other journalists and
historians familiar with Latin American history condemned the piece as
context-lacking “neo-McCarthyite,” “‘anti-American’ baiting,” “only
slightly more subtle than Fox News.” Calling the piece “fundamentally
ahistorical”
“bothsidesism,” the Long Version’s Jonathan Katz (5/20/19) wrote that
Ember doesn’t “have much experience covering foreign affairs in
general or Latin America in particular. It shows.” Journalist Ryan
Cooper (The Week,
5/29/19)
quipped, “Americans should be very concerned about Bernie Sanders’
record of opposing mass murder.”
For this article on Sanders’ foreign policy past, Ember thought it
would be appropriate to get a quote from a significant player in the
Iran/Contra
scandal:
“
Otto J. Reich, a former special envoy for Latin America who helped
oversee Nicaragua policy for the Reagan administration, said that by
the middle of the 1980s a politician like Mr. Sanders “should have
known better” than to fawn over Mr. Ortega.
Reagan’s “Nicaragua policy” involved illegally funding the terrorist
Contras in an effort to overthrow the elected Sandinista government.
And he oversaw it as director of the now defunct State Department’s
Office of Public Diplomacy, working with CIA propaganda experts and
Army psy-ops specialists, leaking hoaxes, spreading rumors, smearing,
and pressuring and threatening reporters, in order to whitewash the
Contras and demonize the Sandinistas.
Reich’s office was condemned by the U.S. Comptroller General, the
General Accounting Office, the Congressional Iran/Contra Committee and
a House Foreign Affairs committee for conducting “prohibited, covert
propaganda activities,” including psychological operations (psy-ops)
“beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”
Ember, though, offers Reich as an expert witness on Sanders’ Cold War
activities:
“
“He has, by virtue of these travels and associations, joined up with
some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” Mr. Reich said of
Mr. Sanders, alluding to his visit to Nicaragua and subsequent trips
to the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Speaking of travels and associations, as well as Cuba, Ember fails to
mention that Reich has worked as a lobbyist for Bacardi-Martini and
Lockheed Martin, and tried to get an anti-Castro terrorist a US visa.
As historian Greg Grandin told me in an interview (Katie Halper Show,
6/4/19):
“
The Office of Public Diplomacy was one of the most corrupting and
degrading instruments of democracy you can imagine…. It was a
destabilization and disinformation campaign.
“People like Sydney Ember,” he noted, are “the product of that
reeducation.”
Back to domestic issues, Ember ended her May 23 article, “Sanders’
Education
Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation,” on a
predictably down note:
“
But while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr.
Loadholt
said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s expansive
rural areas, where charter schools are rare. “To a hammer, everything is a
nail,”
he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by
millionaires and billionaires.”
Ember describes Jarrod Loadholt as “a Democratic strategist who has
worked on education policy in South Carolina.” This obfuscating
description was one of the many things that led Diane Ravitch to write
her blog post, “The New York Times vs. Senator Bernie Sanders. ” I’ll
let Ravitch explain:
“
The real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the
writers quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education
activists in South Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod
Loadholt…. I googled. He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, DC,
who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any
involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be
consumer finance. Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’
factual statement that the Waltons, the DeVos family and hedge fund
managers are behind the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made
his statement in South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South
Carolina has dreadful education policy. When did Loadholt work on it
and with what results? To the naked eye, he was called upon as a
Beltway insider to cut Bernie Sanders down with a false statement.
Shameful.
In fact, there are no traces of Loadholt having worked on any
education policy. When I tweeted out Ravitch’s piece, he responded,
“Lol. I guess if you’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, you could at no point
in your life worked on ed policy in SC.” When I asked him if he had
worked on education policy, he replied, “My quote speaks for itself.
And it’s like a month old.” Loadholt has also tweeted that Sanders is “like a
rash.”
Loadholt does have experience as a lobbyist and currently works at
Pine Street Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients include
Anheuser-Busch and the National Bankers Association (NBA). It was in
his capacity as an NBA lobbyist that Loadholt defended a sweeping
rollback of Dodd/Frank banking regulations. Dubbed the Bank Lobbyist
Act by critics, which included the NAACP, the bill made it easier for
banks to discriminate against communities of color. Loadholt, however,
dismissed the concerns: “[Black] banks don’t have the luxury of
waiting on a perfect bill…. If we thought the [bill] did substantial
damage to African-Americans, we would not support it.”
Then there’s the June 12 article, originally headlined “Sanders
Delivers Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy” and later
renamed “Bernie Sanders Calls His Brand of Socialism a Pathway to
Beating Trump,” where Ember quoted as an authority Mary Anne Marsh,
whom she described as “a Democratic strategist in Boston who worked
for Senators Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.” Marsh did not
mince words in her assessment of Sanders’ politics, policies and electability:
“
Most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic
socialism and his economic policies. Ultimately, Bernie Sanders giving
this speech will appeal to his base and no one else, and it gives
fodder to Trump and the Republicans.
But the woman linking Sanders’ socialist rhetoric to a Trump victory
is not just a Democratic strategist. When reporters at places like the
Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Yahoo! Business and Jewish News Services
quote her, they cite her as a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a
lobbying and public relations firm. Dewey Square’s corporate clients
have included Allegiance Healthcare Corporation, Blue Cross/Blue
Shield, Coca-Cola, Collegiate Funding Services, Countrywide Mortgage,
DuPont, General Motors Corporation, Grocery Manufacturers of America
(GMA), Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, Purdue Pharma,
Starbucks, United Health Group. The US Chamber of Commerce hired the
firm to fight for caps on damages that can be paid in lawsuits; the
National Restaurant Association paid them to fight against a law that
made it easier for unions to organize workers and Fix the Debt, to
push its austerity astroturf campaign which to cut Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid.
When Dewey Square was caught (CJR, 2/24/09) tricking senior citizens
into signing letters to the editor on behalf of its client Medicare
Advantage, Marsh tried to blame the hapless victims who had been lured
to events with door prizes and free food and were unaware of what they
were signing, positing, “The time that elapsed between the meetings
when the seniors saw the letters and the letters’ arrival at the
newspaper may have clouded some memories.”
Her career as a lobbyist for many of the industries that would be most
impacted by Sanders’ proposals might explain Marsh’s obvious animus
against the candidate, as displayed in the May 20 edition of her
weekly Fox News column, “Bernie Sanders’ Incredible Shrinking
Candidacy—Why He Won’t Be Dem Nominee.” One of Sanders’ apparent
insurmountable weaknesses, she wrote, is that people “remember Sanders
didn’t support Clinton in the general election against Trump.” People
with better memories recall that Sanders was one of the most energetic
surrogates for Clinton on the campaign trail, campaigning constantly
for her in battleground states (New Yorker, 11/4/16).
Marsh is right when she says that “most Democrats running don’t
subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism,” which is why he’s
seen as a unique threat to those who promote rapacious profiteering in
the areas of finance, health care, education and the military. Third
Way made that clear, once again, at a conference they held last week,
where its co-founder Matt Bennett singled out Sanders’ vision from his
opponents’: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative…. The other is a
socialist narrative,”
notably omitting the “Democratic” descriptor for the latter.
By presenting her sources as objective authorities, instead of paid
lobbyists and austerity ideologues, Ember both conceals and advances
their agenda, undermining the integrity of the
