NYT publishes article by Koch operative -- claims Tea Party was a grassroots movement

[american_ideals]

Last edited Sun Feb 18, 2018, 11:51 PM - Edit history (1)

The NYT needs fact checkers. How can they allow an article like this to be published without discussing Tea Party support from billionaires?

Jennifer Stefano is the author. How can the NYT allow this to be published without mentioning that the Koches supported the Tea Party? And that Fox and Glenn Beck and right wing radio amplified the Tea Party?

Stefano herself is now paid by the Koches.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/opinion/sunday/tea-party-trump-budget.html


The New York Times is getting played by GOP billionaires.



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Also, the article contains actual lies about the tax cut bill. How can the NYT sleep at night allowing a Koch operative to print lies to advance the Koch agenda?

[pbmus]

1. Its an Opinion....like everyone has one....not factual...

Not what nyt believed, just another one...

[american_ideals]

2. False. That's what the right wants you to believe

Here's the New Yorker chief fact checker:

https://www.cjr.org/the_delacorte_lectures/new-yorkers-fact-checker-post-truth-facts-fake-news-trump.php

“People who have never been involved in journalism, in fact-checking, think the world is divided into facts and opinions, and the checkers just deal with facts,” says Canby. “

[pbmus]

7. I am not sure what you are saying ...

To me an opinion piece is titled an opinion and is an opinion....

I do not believe or disbelieve an opinion....it’s just another opinion with an asshole ....

[american_ideals]

8. The division between "news" and "opinion" is mostly a mirage

For some reason over the past 3-4 decades the American media has decided that news should be completely unbiased. Which is impossible, and leads only to encouraging the right to lie like crazy to get their lies covered.

So all news pieces express opinions by nature. There's no way to avoid it. We used to care a LOT about who owned news organizations, because we knew no news could be unbiased.

[pbmus]

9. Again, you divert to encourage my agreement...and I do not agree

Not all news express opinion....

We know certain fake news organizations express opinion and lies to verify bias....therefore they are not news organizations but merely entertainment with opinions....

[american_ideals]

11. I'll be blunt

I agree that the right wing propaganda machine is not news. In fact it is worse than you say. It's not entertainment. It's intentionally constructed propaganda, created by GOP billionaires, whose purpose is to destroy truth so that billionaires can have more control over politics.


As for your first statement, I'll be blunt: if you don't think every paragraph ever written has some slant and thus expresses an opinion, you don't understand how propaganda works.

[american_ideals]

3. The New Yorker even fact-checks CARTOONS

Opinion articles should not be misleading. This one was. And it contained explicit lies, to boot.

Nowadays, Web stories, social media, special projects, and even cartoons get some level of fact-checking treatment. One of Canby’s favorite mistakes ever made in The New Yorker was a cartoon of a penguin sitting on a living room couch and telling its hosts that it preferred to be known as an Arctic-American. “Some biologist wrote in and said, There are no penguins in the Arctic,” he says.

[hedda_foil]

4. So stick with the New Yorker. You've made your point.

[american_ideals]

5. But the NYT's exploitation by the GOP basically got Trump elected.

I'd be happy to ignore the NYT.
Except their errors -- praising Clinton Cash, #butheremails, putting so many negative Hillary stories above the fold while burying Trump's organized crime and Russia connections -- played a huge role in getting Trump elected.

Until we reckon with that, the NYT will be able to unwittingly hurt America. The NYT still does great work - great investigative work, great examination of social issues, a handful of great op-ed columnists: Krugman, Blow, Cohen, Kristof, Goldberg. But their bothsidesism allows them to be exploited by the right. Like for example, this Koch operative.

And I deeply care about that. It's harming the country. Facts and truth are most important. The right doesn't care about facts and truth, they want to destroy journalism and replace it with their propaganda. The NYT has to deal with that problem head-on. Because it affects me, even if I don't read them.

[BigmanPigman]

6. From what I've gathered from Indivisible

Last edited Sat Mar 31, 2018, 11:01 PM - Edit history (1)

The reasoning may be that the Tea Party /Freedom Caucus was considered grassroots due to how they started off by getting people to run at the local level for years and a lot of hitting the pavement and knocking on doors was an effective strategy. They got solid support and moved onto state level campaigns. That is what Indivisible is doing...using the Tea Party tactics, but no big bucks are supporting our efforts (not yet anyway). Tom Steyer is contributing money into anti-moron impeachment ads but it isn't really like the Kochs.

[american_ideals]

10. Nah. Tea Party was kicked off by Beck. The GOP has no grassroots - only astroturf and lies

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICHAUG. 28, 2010


ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.