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The Jaundiced Eyeball

Columns

Race to the Bottom
March 02, 2017
One might well ask, amid this new chorus of pundit swooning, why is it that so many of the Trump administration’s policies are explicitly designed to foment hate and evil? The painfully obvious M.O. of the Trump White House is to deny basic civil protections to the vast ...

Follow the Mendacity
February 16, 2017
The key directive for the media, now that the Post’s reporting has claimed its first White House casualty, is not to let up on its side of its battle with the Trump White House for a moment. After all, the Flynn saga shows in stark relief that the preferred operating procedure ...

Odd Time to be Evenhanded
February 02, 2017
One of the rarely acknowledged liabilities of a corporate-run media is its diehard resistance to plain speech and direct action. In one of my former, more respectable editing gigs, I was soberly instructed never to use the word “reform” to characterize pending ...

The Ass and the Lap Dogs
December 22, 2016
Like any well-trained lap dog, our national political press is rallying to the unique challenge of covering an incoming American president who is a notoriously truth-averse merchant of social-media make believe by performing the one trick it knows how to do when a new master’s ...

Comedy Gold, Man!
December 15, 2016
How does a decades-old plutocratic convergence of power look to the hometown paper of America’s public-sector ruling class? Why, like a puckish plotline in a high-living thirties comedy of manners, or as fodder for a campy sci-fi horror punchline, that’s how! Here, for your ...

Neutering the News
December 08, 2016
It was pretty much obvious at the outset of Liz Spayd’s tenure as New York Times public editor that the paper had elevated a dangerous simpleton into a position of influence. And now, with Spayd’s tone-deaf chiding of Times reporters for mostly anodyne comments on the empty ...

Faux News Channel
December 01, 2016
In line with venerable liberal tradition, the disaster known as Election ’16 has bred a slew of culprits behind the surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton, all reassuringly distant from the leadership sanctums of the national Democratic Party: James Comey, WikiLeaks, Vladimir ...

Poll Axed
November 17, 2016
As America’s diehard corps of data journalists and omni-explainers wail over the smoldering ruin of their shiny, digital forecasting models, the time seems ripe for the rest of us to ask why the activity of polling is tethered to the news business in the first place. Yes, ...

Con Air
November 03, 2016
It seems entirely fitting that in the final stretch of a presidential campaign militantly indifferent to a host of policy crises, from climate change to wealth inequality, from antitrust prosecutions to affordable housing, the American public is left to gnaw maliciously on a ...

Words Fail
October 27, 2016
While media goliaths continue to merge and recombine, one plucky upstart has lately captured the imagination of the infotainment world. I speak, naturally, of the Facebook-only nightly newscast now airing at the behest of the Donald Trump campaign, “Trump Tower ...

Trump TV?
October 20, 2016
Until very recently, it seemed self-evident that Donald Trump was the biggest raging moron in American public life. But that was before CNN president Jeff Zucker’s star turn before the guardians of establishment wisdom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A full year ...

Battle of the Brands
October 13, 2016
So it’s come to this: the most potentially explosive revelations about America’s Fifth Avenue Mussolini, Donald Trump, are behind an entertainment-industry paywall, one that no mere journalistic enterprise has the power or (in all likelihood) the resources to scale. Reality ...