NY Times: not pro-Trump, yet cautious in their Trump coverage to the point of flattering him relative to reality

Although I wouldn't characterize the New York Times as "pro-Trump," I would say that they consistently soften their language in order to cover him as diplomatically as possible in the hope that they can thereby avoid being labeled as a left-wing paper (which is a futile hope, of course). Meanwhile I was talking with a liberal friend who, because she has through the New York Times come to a negative opinion of Trump, felt that that meant that the New York Times' coverage of him was negative. Of course, it is negative in the sense that it describes what he says and does, which for the most part does not reveal him in a positive light. But I would say that their coverage by and large is shifted away from the negative end of the spectrum because of their aspiration to be respected by the entire public, including conservatives.

I was thinking about this when I read an article today about Alex Jones, which I think illustrates my point. The New York Times coverage of the court case against Alex Jones by the Newtown families seems to me to be reality-based, without any softening of language in order to make Alex Jones fans happy. Compare how they cover him and how they talk about Trump and it is night and day. Yes, I agree that the NYT doesn't like Trump, but they are extremely careful in how they talk about him, generally using very diplomatic language.

So, for example, in the sub headline of the article talking about Alex Jones in the news section -- not the opinion section, but the news section -- the New York Times describes the court case as a "trial to assess the damages done by his Sandy Hook lies". I challenge anyone to find me any headline or sub-headline in a New York Times news article from the last six years which labels Trump's falsehoods as "lies". I don't believe they've ever done it.

Note that in opinion or op-ed or "analysis" articles they sometimes cross this line and call Trump's lies lies. But that's not what I'm talking about here; I'm talking about the New York Times straight news coverage, what is supposed to be their best effort at objectively reporting what is happening in the world. That coverage is twisted by their futile desire not to offend Republicans.

There is a good example in today's paper. If you've followed the court actions surrounding Trump's theft of presidential and government documents, there has been some occasional focus on his claim that he declassified documents which are still labeled "classified" (which would itself constitute a grave discrepancy from established practice that declassified documents are physically modified to indicate that they are no longer classified), and that is why the classified documents that he took home were actually not classified. It is obvious that this is a lie as there is no record that he ever gave such an instruction, and staff members have not corroborated this claim. Some prominent staff members have even publicly contradicted it, including Bill Barr and John Bolton, people whose roles would have without a doubt made them aware of such a policy if it ever existed. There is no objective question that this is a lie, and that is the obvious explanation for the fact that Trump's legal team, although comfortable repeating this lie on TV, have never said it under oath in court where there are penalties for lying. So here are the New York Times' headline and sub-headline for an article reviewing the discrepancy between Trump's claims and what his lawyers say in court:

"Trump claims he declassified documents. Why don't his lawyers say so in court?"

"Judges this week highlighted the gap between Mr. Trump’s public claims that he declassified everything and his lawyers’ reluctance to repeat that claim in a courtroom."

Note the diplomacy of this description. There is a "gap" between what Trump says and what his lawyers say in court. This is classic New York Timesese: if you read through the article all the way to paragraph 57, then you'll understand the gap is because everyone who follows this case closely, including Trump's own lawyers, knows that he's lying about the declassification order. But they won't say it up front because they want to be sure not to rub conservatives the wrong way. And this is how they have covered Trump since the beginning, with great respect, and with reality only optionally available to readers who have the energy to read all the way to the end of their long articles. And this is how Trump is able to successfully obscure his lying from that very large fraction of the public that doesn't pay a whole lot of attention. It's just a loud dispute with people on both sides shouting their points of view, and who's to say what's right? Of course there is a "gap" between what some people say and what other people say. For most people it's too much trouble to figure out the reality, so they just keep on thinking today whatever it is that they thought yesterday, and that is part of how Trump's popularity among his base persists. The New York Times' cowardice comes down to their desire to be the party of record for everyone, right and left. Since they're frequently attacked from the right as being liberal shills, they bend over backwards to avoid the smallest appearance of being left wing, and this comes out in cases like this one where Trump is clearly lying, but they won't say so except in the finest of print.

A thought on the internet and weird extremism like QAnon

The internet has made it possible for mentally ill people with peculiar beliefs to find each other and band together. So if you think chickens are intelligent and working together to kill us all, in the past you would have been the ignored village crank, but now you can go on facebook and find the other 100 people in the U.S. who are convinced of the same thing. Together you can validate each other's thinking and pool your resources to buy weapons to launch a violent crusade against chickens and their dupes in supermarkets. Variations on this theme explain the success of self-evidently dopey theories like QAnon.

Trump and Covid

My first reason for rejecting Trump is his instability, which, in my opinion, disqualifies him from a position with warmaking powers. But another aspect of his personality is his inability to constructively lead. His response to Covid is the best example. All the reports from his advisers indicate that he cannot handle bad news of any kind and responds with anger or denial. This is not that big of a problem if no crises come up, but it is a fatal flaw for a leader faced with a real problem. He denied the reality of Covid throughout the beginning of the crisis, and then once the crisis was in full swing, he delegated the problem to the states. It's true that in our system the governors control some aspects of disease response, but historically they follow the president's lead on issues like this. He simply hasn't led. This has been especially damaging in the area of marshaling resources: the president is the natural coordinator given his powers to command war production for items of national importance. We are six months into the pandemic and we have not solved the PPE problem. I can't buy an N95 mask on Amazon. This is not a technology problem. Because the companies that produce these products don't believe that the pandemic will go on forever, they are not investing in new production facilities. And so we, and what's worse, first responders, do not have the necessary protective gear needed. Trump is the only one who can solve this problem, and he has chosen to ignore it. Note that because of his inaction, this problem is actually not being solved. There does not appear to be any prospect of new production facilities coming online in this country at scale so long as he is in office. This suggests that we are looking at an additional minimum six-month delay before a solution for this problem. Of course, if he is reelected, then there would be no reason to expect the problem to be solved in the forseeable future. A comparison of our situation with Europe's shows the depth of Trump's failure. Despite getting hit with the infection first, and so having at least a month less of time to prepare, and despite living conditions which make the fight against Covid harder, i.e., many more people living in dense cities using mass transit, Europe is largely done with the pandemic. People who don't deal with foreigners have in many cases dispensed with masks except on trains and buses, and are free to go out to dinner in actual restaurants. Sports leagues are starting up again. The daily death rate over there is two orders of magnitude less than ours. There are several European nations with higher cumulative death rates than ours, e.g., Belgium, but if you look at the graphs is clear that this will not continue. What's happening here is that Belgium went through the entire Covid experience and is done now with a daily death rate close to zero. We are nowhere near done, and it appears from the graphs that by the time we are finished the only competitors for us for the highest death rate will be Brazil and Mexico. No developed country will be anywhere near us. Biden is normal and likely defer to experts on the pandemic like most presidents would. With a typical president I'm sure there would have been mistakes and it would likely not have been a great experience, but we would probably have outperformed Europe's thanks to our car lifestyle which in most cities lends itself better to isolating people from their neighbors.

What does the Trump Phenomenon Tell Us About the U.S.?

One of my Swiss cousins sent me an essay making the claim that Trump and his followers are emblematic of America's decline from greatness. My view of what's happened here is different from that writer's, even if I can understand that point of view. My feeling is that the character of the United States did not change with Trump; rather his arrival has revealed an aspect of our character that has been here for a long time. There is a school of thought that there has for generations been an angry, paranoid strain of American politics, most identified with the historian Richard Hofstadter's writings (cf The Paranoid Style in American Politics) where he connected the conservative right wing politics of 1964 with older movements in American history going back a century. Trump's followers' obsession with nonexistent conspiracies and anger at the "other" carries this tradition forward.

This is not to say that I haven't been shocked by what has happened, just that I think, with hindsight, the signs of this were here already, although only embodied in fringier candidates of the past like George Wallace. But one thing to keep in mind is that Trump ran a completely dishonest populist campaign in 2016, promising at various times to 1.) produce a comprehensive public health plan that would cover more people than Obamacare, 2.) raise taxes on the 1%, and 3.) pursue and punish corporations. So his election was not necessarily a mandate for the policies he revealed only after getting elected. And it's going to be much harder for him to take a populist angle this time, and this is why I think it is unlikely that he will be reelected. My biggest concern in the election to come is the prospect of Russian hacking of the voting apparatus, a prospect the Republican Senate has not been interested in countering.

Another amazing aspect of the American character that has been revealed in the last few years: Americans take their democracy and its institutions for granted, and are completely complacent with respect to the threat of authoritarianism. It is clear that we are working with an honor system here, where the president has way too much power but has traditionally held back from exercising it. Now we have a guy who doesn't care about tradition, and so he is exercising power to a degree which is way beyond our traditional norms, but is in some cases legal, and in other cases illegal but punishable only by impeachment, which seems to be off the table for the moment. This is true on both the left and right -- the anger against Trump is almost all due to his specific policies of the moment, not to his abuse of our institutions. If Americans cared about democracy, then a key issue during the coming election would be how we should restructure our institutions to make it easier to rein in a criminal president. For example, it clearly is a weakness of our institutional architecture that the president directly controls the Department of Justice and has the ability to replace inspectors general. But I don't see people making much of an issue of this. The Republicans love Trump, Democrats hate him, and independents are trending -- for now -- toward dislike for him. But our vulnerability to dictatorship that he has so clearly revealed? That does not seem to be on the radar at all!

Reading about our history one sees so much talk about American liberty and freedom, but this talk does not reflect concern or focus of any depth. I think we are lucky for the moment that Trump's political instincts are not very sound, and so he persists with policies which are loved by his base but not the majority of the country. The successful American dictator of the future will craft his policies to appeal to a majority of the people. That man -- or woman -- will rule like a king.

Covid: How to Manage Going Forward?

I would like to see us

• develop a test which is easy to self administer.
• package this test in a kit which includes an electronic component that evaluates the test result and cryptographically generates a key whose value encapsulates the result, the time, and the person's unique ID.
• support incorporating this result into a location aware phone app, which shares the information with a public database.
• present this test status to the network so that other people in the vicinity can see it.

In this way each person has a silent but visible state: infected, not infected, and immune. So there is no document check, but if an infected -- or untested -- person steps onto a subway car, everyone in the car would be alerted through their phones that they are in proximity to this infection threat.

If it is determined that it is possible for a person to be infected but not initially have a positive test result, then this app could automate contact tracing by keeping a rolling buffer of recent locations. Server-side code would trace backwards to the most recent clean test result to see who has been physically close to the infected person during the intervening window of time. People at risk would be given a new state: quarantined. The quarantine could be brief depending on the sensitivity of the test to those early-stage infections.

Anyone not participating in this scheme would be obligated to maintain social distancing and wear an N-95 mask when indoors. (Obviously this is a policy for the future when the N-95 shortage has been resolved.) Obviously people in this category would not be allowed to participate in group events.

Ideally this would not be a permanent scheme, but just a measure taken until covid is definitively eliminated.

Kavanaugh/Ford hearings will be considered historically significant

I didn't watch the hearings because I assumed their content would be predictable and no one's mind would be changed. Reading accounts of what was said it appears there were not many surprises, and I'm not aware of any Senators changing positions, but I'm struck by the forcefulness of many women's reactions to the testimony. I think I was wrong to think these hearings would be a collective non-event; I didn't anticipate such a strong reaction from the public.

If the Russians don't seize control of our electoral apparatus, I expect a Democratic wave in the midterms, with an historically large gap between male and female voting preferences. I think there will be many an end of year analysis proclaiming 2018 to be the year that women took control of the nation.

Privacy versus security

I'm not crazy about discussions of personal privacy which come down to moral positions, e.g., over whether it is right to listen to a personal conversation. We will never have a permanent position on this question, because it will always depend on the perceived threats society faces. This can be illustrated with a pair of hypotheticals:

1.) Suppose a very simple recipe for creating nuclear weapons became public, where the needed physical ingredients were easy to acquire, say, a bit of dirt, a coconut and a microwave oven. If this were the case, we would be much more vulnerable to the whims or anger of any of our citizens, and I think we would be okay with a greatly expanded level of surveillance. There would be a huge effort among image analysis software engineers to automate the process of detecting suspicious activity involving dirt and coconuts, presumably far beyond any kind of surveillance that the security establishment is executing today.

2.) Suppose ISIS and Al Qaeda were decisively destroyed, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amicably resolved, and mild, inward-oriented democracies took root throughout the world. Should such a set of circumstances come about, we would feel more secure as a society, and value our privacy more than we do today.

These two scenarios are extremes, but it is certainly true that the world moves along a continuum of greater or lesser security over time. For this reason, I think we can assume that our sense of the right balance between security and privacy will never be fixed -- rather it will evolve as the world and our perceptions of the world change.

If we accept that our desire for privacy is going to be a changing quantity, then it is important that we arrange our security apparatus so that it can be controlled. In particular, if we allow lower-level engineers in the NSA and their counterparts in communications industries to freely implement surveillance as they see fit, then our decisions about the balance of privacy and security will be driven by the availability of surveillance technology and the group culture of the engineers who are actually designing and implementing these systems. Is this how surveillance is being controlled now? It's hard to say -- we know the NSA hid their activities from Congress. Perhaps the executive chain of command was aware of those activities, but if they weren't it wouldn't necessarily be public knowledge since admitting as much would be embarrassing for the nominal security establishment leadership.

If we are establishing a security apparatus which is driven by its own culture, then we are creating a machine which will be hard to change. Cultures change over time, but it is easy to imagine a scenario where the security establishment had its own culture that became very distinct from the culture of society, and if we have a surveillance apparatus which cannot be adjusted according to society's broader expectations, this could be a cause for our regret.

The way to avoid this is to establish rules for how surveillance will be conducted, and then enforce them. The rules already exist for the most part, but there does not seem to be much desire in Congress or the executive branch to make sure that these rules are followed. If the current rules are not suitable, we should craft new ones. Whatever rules we want to use, they need to be followed if we care about having the ability to reduce -- or expand -- our security apparatus in the future.