“Austere religious scholar”

Got it. Anyone else, or just Trump?

I don't watch Fox News on any regular basis or visit their Web site. So I can't say.

 

He really liked women, and some of them on the younger side.

 

The story high up touched on his academic credentials but no way should it have been in the headline

 

This is good:

Baghdadi Story Reveals Divided — and Broken — News Media

 

Everyone in Trump's klan is protected. The Freedom Caucasians who stormed the SCIF last week were not freedom fighters; they were felons. But Fox would have you believe they are victims.

 

I don't know. Taibbi's takes are largely about carving out a profitable contrarian space for Taibbi.

Almost every Baghdadi story I read opened with 3 or 4 grafs of the very thing Taibbi claimed he didn't see, ie., who Baghdadi was and what he did.

That Trump took the occasion to overplay his TV role as national snarling badass is a Trump problem, not a liberal media problem. It was covered as such.

Trump gets treated like a polarizing singularity in the press because he's a polarizing singularity.

 

Of course not.

And it was in the first or second graf of the original story.

So I'm not sure the weekend overnight junior online desk guy intended mockery in what was probably a middle of the night update.

 

So stories like this: The 41 most shocking lines from Donald Trump's Baghdadi announcement - CNNPolitics

Don't involve any level of the media stoking the fire? 41 shocking things?

Also, I have no idea what the overnight desk jockey at the Washington Post meant by that headline.

 

I'm not sure why we're talking about "stoking the fire." Was that Taibbi's point?

You and I are going to disagree about this CNN link.

It's an opinion piece, on a page clearly designed and labeled as analysis. This version is from Sunday night. That Cillizza fisks the entire statement is within the bounds of internet analysis as we find it in 2019.

If the trouble with 'opinion' pieces is that they express an 'opinion,' we're sunk.

 

Nor do I, but I don't have enough information to ascribe motive, either.

 

We'll agree that Taibbi chases ghosts a little bit.

Taibbi's point in this particular column was that the story shifted very quickly to Trump from a variety of perspectives and that's done to commercialize the media and feed it to the respective consumers. His strongest argument is probably presented against the touchdown-spiking intelligence and military officials used to suggest they did this despite Trump. One of Taibbi's arguments, for awhile, is the media just isn't skeptical enough of a professional class of politicians and careerist governmental officials in intelligence and military operations, and it has burned both sides of the press over the last 20 years.

It's a dance in journalism, we all know that; there have long been good journalists who are still a mite too cynical about every source and every nugget of insight, and there have long been journalists who are a mite too trusting. It starts to get muddier, IMO, when so many sources, on so many stories, get identity protection.

I don't ascribe to all of Taibbi's theories. When he writes that most journalists come from wealthy backgrounds, that surprises me - it's not what I recall - but maybe that's what it's become in political reporting.

 

LOL really?

"Chink" in the armor.

Intent (and giggles) is a helluva drug.