DL Open Thread: Thursday, August 31, 2023

And he’s succeeding.  Read it. Knowledge is power.  If you fight back.

Judge To Rudy:  You’re Gonna Have To Pay Up.  For his disgraceful and inhumane defaming of two poll workers.  Only question is: How much?:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who became the subject of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election that were amplified by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She also ordered him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations.

The ruling means the case will now proceed to a trial purely to determine the amount of damages Giuliani will have to pay the two election workers.

Newsroom Leaders: Read This.  I like this article even more than one that we posted a couple of days ago:

None of our newsroom leaders could possibly have imagined 10 years ago that fascist appeals to violence and racial hatred would be so common and effective, that the political discourse would be so awash in misinformation and disinformation, that homophobia and misogyny would make such a dramatic comeback, or that a con man who engineered a failed coup could be a front-runner for the presidency, posing a dire threat to the country’s future as a democracy.

But even as the nation faces another potentially cataclysmic election in 2024 — arguably the most perilous in American history — the mainstream news industry continues to engage in the same business-as-usual that got us here in the first place.

I write about this all the time on Press Watch. (Read my mission statement.) But for this piece, I decided to survey a few dozen experts — all of them critical readers of the news, many of them journalists – asking them for their suggestions of what our top newsrooms should do differently this time around.

Generally speaking, their answers are not radical. They are simply common sense.

Some call for changes that have been necessary for a long time and are now urgent — existentially so.

But some changes are specific to this moment when one of our two political parties has become so extremist and anti-democratic that both-sides reporting is no longer a safe harbor for political journalism. Indeed, it actively misinforms the public about the stakes of the coming election.

Speaking Of Both-Siderism, Thomas Edsall Flat-Out Sucks.  Equates RWNJ’s with progressives.  Because, you know, they’re exactly alike, they thrive on small contributions, and they endanger the two major political parties:

One of the most important developments driving political polarization over the past two decades is the growth in small-dollar contributions.

Increasing the share of campaign pledges from modest donors has long been a goal of campaign-finance reformers, but it turns out that small donors hold far more ideologically extreme views than those of the average voter.

You can already see where this is going…:

The appeal of extreme candidates well to the right or left of the average voter can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top five members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle:

Bernie Sanders raised $38,310,351, of which $26,913,409, or 70.25 percent, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12,546,634, of which $8,572,027, or 68.32 percent, came from small donors; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12,304,636, of which $8,326,902, or 67.67 percent, came from small donors; Matt Gaetz raised $6,384,832, of which $3,973,659, or 62.24 percent, came from small donors; and Jim Jordan raised a total of $13,975,653, of which $8,113,157, or 58.05 percent, came from small donors.

If what Broockman and his co-authors found about local party leaders is a signal that polarized thinking is gaining strength at all levels of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the prospects for those seeking to restore sanity to American politics — or at least reduce extremism — look increasingly dismal.

Progressive policies are sane.  Armed insurrections are insane.   Edsall’s attempt to equate the two in opposition to, what, just giving money to the Democratic and Republican Parties(?) is obsolete at this point in time.  Might’ve made a good poli sci paper back in the ’80’s. C-plus, maybe.  Utterly insipid.

Best Pope Ever.  He’s not, um, bedeviled by both-siderism:

Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment.

The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision. They refuse, he said, to accept the full breadth of the Church’s mission and the need for changes in doctrine over time.

“I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless,” Francis, 86, told a group of fellow Jesuits early this month in a meeting at World Youth Day celebrations in Lisbon. “Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith.”

‘Ideologies replace faith.’  Catholicism is not the only sect that has replaced faith with ideology.  In league with the Rethuglican Party.

What do you want to talk about?