By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Beware the narrative shift. Two stories that have become media obsessions are slowly being recast. One is deadly serious; the other is ridiculous, although it nevertheless says a lot about journalism ethics.
First, the deadly serious story. We are beginning to see the emergence of a narrative that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is in the clear, more or less, as long as he can show that he didn’t order a second attack on that boat in the Caribbean in order to kill two wounded crew members.
For most of his first term and now his second, Donald Trump has been deeply unpopular. Both The New York Times and polling analyst Nate Silver track his approval/disapproval ratings based on an average of polls.
As of Monday, Trump was at 55% disapprove/41% approve using the Times’ methodology. Silver has him at a nearly identical 55.4% disapproval/41% approval. There are others who do the same thing, but the Times and Silver may be the best known.
Yet despite everything, Trump’s numbers don’t move as much as you might think they would given the corrupt and chaotic nature of his presidency. Indeed, on Monday, Trump’s disapproval rating actually nudged down by a statistically insignificant amount, from 56% to 55%. And no matter what, a rock-solid minority of just over 40% sticks with him. How could this be?
This morning I’d like to suggest one possible explanation. I’m not a polling expert, but this is obvious and starting us right in the face. The Times’ average is based on a number of polls, some of which it regards as highly reliable, some of which it doesn’t. And, for the most part, Trump is doing considerably worse when measured solely by highly reliable polls.
For instance, the most recent Gallup poll shows Trump at minus 24, with 60% disapproving of his job performance and just 36% approving. The American Research Group has him at minus 27, with 62% approval/35% disapproval. Beacon Research/Shaw and Co. reports that Trump is at minus 17, Ipsos at minus 22.
Now, as I said, the Times showed Trump’s disapproval rating ticked down slightly on Monday. And when you look at the chart, you see that it’s because a poll from TIPP Insights was added to the mix. TIPP, which does not meet the Times’ criteria for reliability, had Trump at just minus 4, based on 43% approval/47% disapproval.
Some of the less reliable polls, especially YouGov, do show Trump with a disapproval gap as wide as the reliable polls. But when you scan down the list, you see a number of less reliable polls showing that Trump’s disapproval rating is on the narrow side — Morning Consult (minus 7), InsiderAdvantage (minus 5), Big Data Poll (minus 5) and RMG Research (minus 7).
As I said, I’m not a polling expert, and it’s likely that the Times has weighted the reliable polls more heavily than the more dubious surveys. But Gallup, in particular, has been the gold standard for generations, and maybe we ought to take them more seriously than an index that includes both the good and the bad.
Why does it matter? Because if Trump is losing support, then the likelihood increases that House and Senate Republicans will be willing to stand up to him at least occasionally. Until recently, the Republicans have been utterly craven, cheering enthusiastically for Trump’s every incoherent pronouncement.
But now we’re starting to see a little movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one sign. Another is that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker the other day actually referred to Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of defense” rather than his cosplay role as the “secretary of war.”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, Pete Hegseth, our seriously deranged secretary of defense, posted this on Twitter Sunday night. As of this moment, it’s still up.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered that two injured men clinging to a boat in the Caribbean that U.S. forces had just blown apart be killed in a second attack. Experts have already said that Hegseth could be charged with murder, war crimes or both.
As you might expect, Hegseth’s shockingly demented tweet is inspiring a host of memes. Here’s one:
Donald Trump has denied that Hegseth ordered the killings, but we’re starting to see the first stirrings of Republicans Congress demanding accountability. We’ll see how far that goes.
Here we go again. It’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t shared all of my gift links to The New York Times. Use ’em or lose ’em. These should continue to work for some time to come; what matters is when I post them, not when you access them. So here we go.
The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
Media critic Margaret Sullivan made an error recently. No big deal — we all do it. But her account of what happened next is worth thinking about.
First, the error. Sullivan writes in her newsletter, American Crisis, that she recently appeared on economist Paul Krugman’s podcast and said that Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong was among the billionaires who joined Donald Trump at his second inauguration earlier this year, along with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. “I was wrong about that,” she notes, although she adds that Soon-Shiong “has been friendly to Trump in other ways.” Then she writes:
But — how’s this for a cautionary tale about the dubious accuracy of artificial intelligence? — a Google “AI overview,” in response to a search, almost immediately took my error and spread it around: “Yes, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. He was seen there alongside other prominent figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.” It cited Krugman’s and my conversation. Again, I was wrong and I regret the error.
It does appear that the error was corrected fairly quickly. I asked Google this morning and got this from AI: “Patrick Soon-Shiong did not attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Earlier reports and AI overviews that claimed he did were based on an error by a journalist who later issued a correction.” It links to Sullivan’s newsletter.
Unlike Google, Claude makes no mention Sullivan’s original mistake, concluding, accurately: “While the search results don’t show Patrick Soon-Shiong listed among the most prominent billionaires seated in the Capitol Rotunda (such as Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others who received extensive coverage), the evidence suggests he was engaged with the inauguration events and has maintained a relationship with Trump’s administration.”
And here’s the verdict from ChatGPT: “I found no credible public evidence that Patrick Soon-Shiong attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration.”
You might cite my findings as evidence that AI corrects mistakes quickly, and in this case it did. (By the way, the error has not yet been corrected at Krugman’s site.) But a less careful journalist than Sullivan might have let the original error hang out there, and it would soon have become part of the established record of who did and didn’t pay homage to Trump on that particular occasion.
In other words: always follow your queries back to the source.
We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.
More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.
Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.
The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.
The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:
No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.
Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.
Larry Bushart is free, but he didn’t win. It was the forces of oppression that won after Bushart spent a month in jail, held on $2 million bail, for publishing a provocative Facebook post about the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump that Tennessee authorities decided to conflate into the felony of recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
Bushart was released from jail Wednesday after public pressure began to build, reports Rick Rojas in The New York Times. A retired law-enforcement officer who obsessively posts liberal memes, Bushart’s offense was to publish a photo of Trump following Kirk’s murder accompanied by the words “We have to get over it,” which was a statement Trump made in 2024 after a fatal school shooting in Iowa. A line under the photo read “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after,” along with “This seems relevant today …”
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.
Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”
Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.
Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.
Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:
For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.
The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.
Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.
It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.
To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.
But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.