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You keep pointing to Taibbi on this, so I'm going to explain why I think his argument is lame. Basically, he says that the media overplayed the Mueller investigation. He doesn't really deal with what Mueller did find, so let's not dwell on the criminal convictions of the President's National Security Advisor and campaign manager, and the many times the President tried to obstruct justice. When you try to figure out what Taibbi thinks the media actually got wrong, it's very hard to say, because he makes sweeping claims but doesn't quote anybody for more than a few words.
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I'm going to pull the William A. Henry card here (certain views, even though evidence can be adduced to support them, are simply not allowed to compete with others... See: Climate Change debate). We cannot debate whether the media was significantly anti-Trump. There must be a laddering of conclusions on this subject in which the argument that the media is not largely biased against Trump is thrown into or near the sphere of deviancy, many rungs below the obvious reality that, yes, the media is biased against Trump, and most other Republicans, and the only valid issue to debate is to what degree.
And no, that the media helped Trump by giving him free press is not a rebuttal to that issue. The media did assist him, while also detesting him. He was and remains their greatest pinata. Hoist him up, whip him, all roll in the ratings!
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Ah, but you say, he quotes a lot of people in that article! He does, but only for ancillary stuff, not for the stuff he says the media got wrong. And when one bothers to click through, there's no there there.
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Ah, but I didn't say that. Thus your argument that follows is in your head. Decide on that as you like. I'm not pro hac'd in the jurisdiction
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The first "turning point" links to a Vox article (note: not major media by anyone's standards) which contradicts Taibbi.(1)
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Vox is very much major media. It's widely read and widely cited in all sorts of media, both major and small.
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The second "turning point" links to a piece in The Nation (note: not major media, or a news source) which also contradicts Taibbi.(2)
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Agreed. That's not major media. But like Vox, to a lesser extent, however, it is widely cited.
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And then I stopped checking his sources, because life is short. He starts the article by ostentatiously quoting the AP, the NYT and the WaPo as if he is going to deliver the goods on them, but then he hides his sources so that you have to find that his quotes are instead from Vox and The Nation, and they don't even say what he says they said.
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I'll refer you back to my opening statement here. If you argue that WaPo and NYTimes are not biased against Trump (and NYTimes biased against Republicans generally) you're in the sphere of deviancy. Taibbi is not making this argument up out of whole cloth. It's admitted even among the media itself that WaPo is in a cold war with Trump. And the NYTimes punishes Trump in both its OpEd pages and the slant of its news stories almost daily. As it punished Bush II almost daily. (Krugman is a celebrity because he decided to leave economics and bash Bush for eight straight years.) Taibbi does not have the burden of proof. His argument, obvious as it is, holds a position five or six rungs above yours. Using Henry's measurement - that ideas must be scored from elite to lunatic - Taibbi's is within the lower end of the elite category. Yours is in the "we could do just as well to ignore this as humor it" zone.
Taibbi is blunt because he can afford to be, because anyone reading his assessment is aware of the obvious volumes of evidence supporting it. He needn't repeat the obvious. You've had to parse considerably to find a way to attack it.
But I will credit you this criticism of Taibbi. He steps too far when he asserts that Russiagate was a hoax from the start. That's not true. I disagree with him there. The evidence shows Museller's investigation was initiated based on valid concerns. Where Taibbi is unassailable is in stating that the press took this investigation and hyperbolized it more than any other story in recent memory. Which is the same point I've made elsewhere, several times.
Trump will be found in all things he does to be a bungling villain of sorts. He cannot help but be so. It's his essential character. And he is so here. But if we let the press off the hook for pumping this into something it never was, for cynically whipping the easily persuaded into thinking this was Worse than Watergate, we're letting a far more diabolical villain off the hook.
