Linked List: October 4, 2024

Friday, 4 October 2024

Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story? ★

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire:

It’s worth recalling that a major reason Trump won in 2016 was that, just before the election, news broke about emails related to a closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails being found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

In the end, nothing came of this discovery, but the extensive news coverage of it almost certainly swayed the election. It was the top story in every major newspaper.

But this new evidence presented against Trump wasn’t even the lead story in the New York Times or Washington Post this morning. And it didn’t even make the front page of the Wall Street Journal or USA Today.

It’s true that millions of words have already been written about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. But there was plenty of new information included in this filing which is directly relevant to the biggest news story this month.

This, I think, is entirely explained by the conventional wisdom that the U.S. news media is “liberal”, a decades-long work-the-refs strategy from Republicans. The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. If the truth favors one party over the other, so be it. That’s the job of reporting the news.

The difference between how these same publications treated Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails” nonsense in 2016 compared to Jack Smith’s motion this week could not be more stark.

Update: If you prefer, imagine if a special counsel appointed by the Attorney General submitted a brief alleging any crimes at all committed by Kamala Harris. Let’s say personal tax evasion — crimes, but insignificant compared to multiple attempts to overthrow the results of the last presidential election. The major U.S. newspapers and cable channels would have covered nothing else in the days since. Yet for this brief laying out copious evidence that Trump attempted the worst crime imaginable against U.S. democracy itself, it’s relative crickets chirping and shoulder shrugs. Remember too that Trump is already a convicted felon. If Harris had been convicted of a felony this year, do you think it would be mentioned more frequently in news stories than it actually is for Trump? If you don’t, I have a bridge to sell you.

MLB Sold Ads on Players’ Batting Helmets for the Postseason ★

I missed this announcement from MLB a month ago:

Major League Baseball today announced a new multi-year international partnership with European workwear leader STRAUSS that makes the German company the Official Workwear Partner of MLB. The partnership marks STRAUSS’ first league-wide deal in the United States. STRAUSS entered the U.S. market in late 2023, and American brand awareness is the cornerstone of its marketing efforts. The new partnership also affords STRAUSS marketing rights with MLB across Canada, Mexico and Europe. As part of the deal, STRAUSS’ name and logo will adorn MLB batting helmets during the Postseason and regular season games in Europe, as well as MiLB batting helmets all season long, beginning in 2025.

But I couldn’t miss it watching postseason games on TV this week: there’s a ridiculous-looking “Strauss” on both sides of every player’s batting helmet now, as prominent as the team logo on the front. It looks even more desperate and obsequious on the helmets than it does printed in all-caps in MLB’s bootlicking press release. This is the sort of gimmick you expect from a struggling independent minor league team, not Major League Baseball.

They should’ve put the rights to these on-helmet ads up for public auction. I’d have chipped in for a fan-backed initiative to buy that on-helmet ad space to affix this slogan: “FIRE ROB MANFRED”.

Hodinkee Sold to Watches of Switzerland ★

Victoria Gomelsky, reporting with absurd credulity for The New York Times:

Hodinkee, the watch enthusiast website based in Manhattan that has helped spread the gospel of mechanical watchmaking since its founding in 2008, has a new owner.

On Friday, the Watches of Switzerland Group, one of the world’s largest watch retailers with more than 220 multibrand and brand stores in Britain and the United States, announced that it had acquired the media company, which includes a website, a magazine, a brand partnerships division and an insurance business. Neither company would disclose the terms of the deal. [...]

Both Mr. Clymer and Mr. Hurley said Hodinkee’s staff, which now totals about 35 people, would remain intact and that its editorial team would remain independent of Watches of Switzerland oversight.

“But at a point in time,” Mr. Hurley said, “when you click on the Hodinkee Shop, you will see the full range of the product that WatchesofSwitzerland.com carries. We are going to do some work over the next several months to make that effectively seamless.”

There is a name for a publication that is owned by a retailer: catalog. I’d love to be proven wrong and see Hodinkee return to excellence, but that seemed far more likely as an independent website than as a subsidiary of the world’s largest premium watch retailer. For years I read Hodinkee daily; for the last few years I largely stopped reading it at all. Here’s Clymer’s own column announcing the acquisition (“joining forces”) and his return to day-to-day leadership of the site.