Coop Scoop -- The NYT Can't Tell The Difference Between Suburban Moderates and Militia-linked Extremists

Is Shawn McCreesh the worst campaign reporter in America?

By Marc Cooper

September 3, 2024

The final stretch of the campaign is on and it seems to coincide with somebody putting something very, um, weird in the water fountains inside The New York Times newsroom.  I am not among those who believe, as many of the left do, that if only we could change the media for something better, we would have better political outcomes.  There are just too many historic examples of an organized population going as far as revolution and regime change in spite of a previously existing state monopoly on media.  Russia, Iran, Cuba, and many other examples.

On the other hand, never before in history has a society like ours been so drenched, so marinated in media so it would be foolish to underestimate its effects.  Fox News has clearly built an entire subversive political movement anxious to discard American democracy.

But my focus right now are the extremely strange happenings over at the NYTimes – publishing in the space of one weekend two of the very worst reported, blatantly ignorant, perhaps unwittingly so, but radically biased stories to the point of absurdity for Donald Trump. Alarmingly, they were both written by a very poor excuse for a reporter and someone who comes off as unvarnished Trump campaign dupe who the Times has assigned to write the Campaign Diary.

I am fully aware that Trump readers and probably the “low propensity” (low IQ) voters do not read the Times and are not influenced by it.  Likewise, it’s liberal readership is unlikely to move to Trump because a pinhead reporter and his editors greenlighted what is essentially RAW Trump campaign propaganda just two months before the election.

Here’s the rub: The New York Times serves as the news agenda for most every local TV news outfit as well as the networks.  Producers are up early in the pre-dawn hours to see “the big stories” the Times is running and then see how they can somehow replicate the coverage quick and dirty.  In short, The New York Times sets the national news agenda anew every morning and that is why it’s ongoing normalization and kid glove coverage of a mad man running for president is so aggravating.

That brings to me what I thought was the worst piece I had ever read in the Times until I read the second one a day later.  But let’s start a few days ago, on Sunday September 1^st.  The Times ran a front page story with this fantastic headline.

A story about Trump’s now marked and increasing incoherence on the stump.  There’s a reason why “boat, battery shark, Hanibal Lector” has become a national meme punchline.  It doesn’t take a shrink or neurologist to make an obvious if broad diagnosis of Trump’s speech patterns: he is incoherent, he cannot think straight, he might be clinically impaired but even if he isn’t, his thinking is threadbare, erratic and there is something clearly wrong.

But it just took one extremely poor reporter by the name of Shawn McCreesh to tell us that Trump is actually correct. He is an oratorical genius who indulges in a pathology – oh sorry, a skill--- known as “the weave” which both Trump and the reporter consider an asset. And the reporter affirms Trump’s unique skill:

“You know, I do the weave,” Trump said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris. In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again.

Wait, there’s more!  The reporter digs up a ridiculous expert source in the person of Drew Lichtenburg. A junior faculty member of the podunk Catholic University of America  (that is very Catholic in mission not just in name) who comes up with what has to be a statement that should immediately terminate his academic career (if he wanted to teach somewhere other than a bottom drawer school). Little did we know till know that Trump is actually a towering orator on the scale of the greatest bard of our mother tongue.  Make you are sitting down when you read these graphs from one of the worst reporters at the Times. Writes McGrath:

Drew Lichtenberg, a lecturer at Catholic University of America and an artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, said that “the closest comparison to what Trump is talking about here in Shakespeare — fragments of unrelated subjects that are woven together — is, of course, Lear’s mad scene at Dover.”

The reporter then goes on to favorably compare Trump’s “weave” with no less than James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and of course William Faulkner for their “same” talent of completing multi-narrative works. I am not making this up and you can read the story for yourself.  Mind-boggling it is because this reporter sought out no professional counter point to Trumps’ claim that his verbal madness is some sort of rational “weave.” 

What happened? Did the reporter run out of phone minutes to call a speech pathologist who would have given us a scientific explanation of Trump’s scrambled speech, not some half-assed opinions from a dim wit junior lecturer from a small unremarkable private Chistian college?

Just so you know…. The article does not contain a single use of the word “incoherent” and ends with a quote from Trump once again lying about his declining mental state. “What you do,” he said, “is you get off a subject, to mention another little tidbit. Then you get back onto the subject, and you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”

I am not doing this train wreck justice. It’s much worse than I am depicting it.  Again here’s the link but u might need a sub to read the whole stinking pile of horse shit.

Apparently, this reporter  is on some sort of a roll, pushing out half-baked, minimally reported disinformation with the blessing of his NYT editors.  This same dude, who should be fired for incompetence, published another ass-licking Trump story the day before on Saturday and I did not see it until Monday.  This one is mind bending.

Here’s the headline:

Here’s the idiotic saccharine lede written by this extremely subpar reporter:

It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.

There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.

It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.

Ahh.  Nice conservative ladies, Joyful Warriors, probably with blue hair serving up cupcakes to the nice visitor from New York.  Let me get right to the point: Moms for Liberty are NOT a conservative group. They are an extremist fringe group on the front line of pushing Christian Nationalism into the schools.  They are book banners.  During the pandemic they went to local schools and pulled the masks of off elementary school kids.  They have been repeatedly identified as a “hate group” and they maintain close working relationships with White Supremacist militias.  I know this because 1) there is a nest of these vicious vipers in the next town over and 2) unlike the bozo from The New York Times, I read the news and the news about this extremist fascist-adjacent women’s militia auxiliary has been all over the news for 3 years and properly described as the zealous and often rowdy extremists they exist..  Under what rock was reporter Shawn McCreesh been living? Somewhere on the lawn at Mar-A-Lago?

This feeble minded reporter then goes on to say this dumb-founding line: “The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.”

Really? Too bad because the next day the Times had to run this correction:

Oh, just a tiny mistake, you know. Whether these nice ladies mistakenly or consciously quote Adolph Hitler.  Could not possibly effect the rest of the valentine to the Moms. Could not call into question the credibility of the sloppy reporters by his editors?

Anyway this is the worst piece of reporting on the campaign to date from a reputable outlet this yeat.  What’s really spooky is that the Times has put this goof in charge of the Campaign Diary even though he is strikingly ignorant of the political world and his stuff on “the weave” should send him back to writing pet obituaries.

As to these being the suburbanites Trump is seeking, well, this tells us only that this reporter should be kept far from any “Campaign Diary” as there’s a lot of basic he’s missing.  The suburban women who other NON-stupid reporters and pundits refer to are MODERATES from both parties  or independents. They are not the same group as these militia allies in the Moms for Liberty [sic].  Trump has shown zero interest whatsoever in reaching out to suburbanites or moderates of any sort. His strategy is to double down on his hard core base and try to expand it by luring the least educated voters who are less prone to vote…..he’s consciously scraping the bottom of the barrel.

And what this lazy ass reporter doesn’t get is that this is who Moms for Liberty are…they are wives and sisters and daughters of the hardest core, most extreme part of his base and somehow the guy who writes the Campaign Diary hasn’t a fucking clue. And yes, Moms for Liberty takes no issue with Trump’s misogyny because they also hate most of the same women as much as Trump does —any woman they identify as a Democrat, a Lesbian, a non-binary, a librarian, a school nurse, “Rinos” and of course Radical Left Democrats who according to them run our schools and are grooming our children to go gay or queer or Black or whatever  These are not your apple-cheeked grannies. They are a group of hard-bitten militant virulently anti-abortion, anti-gun safety and anti-vax street fighters. Indeed, they are anti everything.

I have just skimmed the surface of this bomb crater in the Times recent archives.  A much deeper, much more detailed, and much more fun report on this story was published by substacker Parker Molloy who tears the piece apart almost line by line.

I highly recommend you read her piece and sign up for her Substack. 

Hope you had a restful Labor Day weekend. The battle for the future of American democracy goes into Act Three Tuesday morning.  +++

H/T illustration Parker Molloy. ++ My own correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified McCreesh as McGrath.

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