alexshephard.bsky.social
senior editor at the new republic
503 posts
5,802 followers
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Oh I didn't take it that way and didn't mean to come off defensively! I also find the emerging conventional wisdom frustrating (though I admittedly also oscillate between "the current state of affairs is all Biden's fault" and something more nuanced when writing and reporting about the Dems lol)
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I've written about this phenomenon before! I do think it's true that the press moves on from individual Trump scandals quickly, although more often than not they're just moving on to a different Trump scandal. newrepublic.com/article/1750...
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and if my mom had wheels, she'd be a bike! (I hear you, and would also add another wrinkle that I have overlooked in both pieces I've written about this, which is that even if Dems did hold a timely open primary they were still probably cooked because of inflation)
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Every time I write critically about Dems I'm inundated with messages/emails etc that say that, but that's life. It rankles me when I see posts from media critics like the one I QT'd above though, which push the absurd lie that the press is overlooking Trump scandals to report on Biden
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that’s like 95 percent of what we do
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There are a ton of problems with the way the press covers this president and the two parties! But there's a persistent narrative that the media either *isn't* covering Trump scandals or that it's covering Dem scandals at the expense of scrutinizing the GOP. That's just not true
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By the end of 2021—well before the "cover up" began in earnest—most voters had decided Biden was too old to serve another term. Democrats and most mainstream news outlets ignored them newrepublic.com/article/1955...
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high praise!!
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not what I'm saying at all lol
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So much media criticism is infected with Pitchbot Syndrome: The belief that all of this would end immediately if only the press covered Donald Trump the "right" way. Grow up!
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A good faith critique of the media's failure to adequately cover the extremism of the GOP has curdled into something that is myopic and fundamentally opposed to journalism: that any critical reporting about Democrats is bad
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I don’t think Disney makes more money this way
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I am now an assignment editor bsky.app/profile/stat...
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those people are right!!! (in all seriousness, the two of you are uniquely good at choosing interesting subjects and asking interesting questions. much like rebuilding manchester united, it sounds easier than it is!)
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at the risk of overweighting my own experience, the cure to male loneliness is you and caley talking to people who have written books or are smart but otherwise only tangentially connected to soccer
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the Everett one is also pretty good even if it's more Saunders than Everett... the rest, well, Delia Owens and Andy Weir would write some shit like that!
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I spend most of my time trashing the fascists! But it's important to understand how we got here and to hold ourselves and others accountable. It's good to do both so we don't end up here again :)
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don't really get this one tbh. The groceries riff is stupid but people who say it's on par with what Biden was like the last two years are wishcasting. Trump's way worse than before in a whole bunch of ways but it's apples and oranges imo
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Wrote about this a bit in my review of "Original Sin" but even if they hid a cancer diagnosis the problem wasn't really that Biden's health was concealed from the public. It couldn't be. The problem is that no one in power acted on what was already so obvious www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...
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assumed it was because of the Ward LaFrance connection but when I saw "can and bottle drive"....
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It helps that everyone has settled on the narrative that he didn't get really bad until 2023, when it was already probably too late to replace him anyways. This is a big deal now because of the book but I don't know if it will be in a couple years and most Dem primary voters don't care
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it’s almost impressive that he’s been this miserable and myopic for so long. almost!
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if I had known I could more or less make it happen via two midafternoon beers I would have done it years ago
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It was a real pleasure to do this: newrepublic.com/article/1947...
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really enjoyed this one
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send me one funny thing the pitch bot man has ever done
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Then once it was clear that Trump was going to be the nominee, the WH line that he would soar once it became a "splitscreen election" took hold, even though there was literally no data backing it up, and the WH got way more aggressive keeping people in line. Not definitive but plausible!
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My general read from a few conversations is that everyone just assumed it would kind of take care of itself after they got eviscerated in the midterms. When that didn't happen, they lacked the will to do anything coordinated and no one wanted to kill the vibe. So they just kinda... sat around
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always knew you had it in you!!