Présidentielle américaine: Quels débats biaisés et déséquilibrés ? (What if for a change questions were NOT primarily aimed at asking Trump about things that paint him poorly, then asking Biden how he would fix it ?)

Soudain, Norman se sentit fier. Tout s’imposait à lui, avec force. Il était fier. Dans ce monde imparfait, les citoyens souverains de la première et de la plus grande Démocratie Electronique avaient, par l’intermédiaire de Norman Muller (par lui), exercé une fois de plus leur libre et inaliénable droit de vote. Le Votant (Isaac Asimov, 1955)

Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To name a few. Jim Roberts (New York Times, 2016)

The first episode of Caliphate appeared on April 19, 2018, marking a major step toward The Times’s realization of its multimedia ambitions. It was promoted with a glossy marketing campaign that featured an arresting image, with the rubble of Mosul on one side and Ms. Callimachi’s face on the other. The series was 10 parts in all, including a new, sixth episode released on May 24 of that year detailing doubts about Abu Huzayfah’s story and The Times’s efforts to confirm it. The presentation carried an obvious, if implicit assumption: the central character of the narrative wasn’t making the whole story up. That assumption appeared to blow up a couple of weeks ago, on Sept. 25, when the Canadian police announced that they had arrested the man who called himself Abu Huzayfah, whose real name is Shehroze Chaudhry, under the country’s hoax law. The details of the Canadian investigation aren’t yet public. But the recriminations were swift among those who worked with Ms. Callimachi at The Times in the Middle East. “Maybe the solution is to change the podcast name to #hoax?” tweeted Margaret Coker, who left as The Times’s Iraq bureau chief in 2018 after a bitter dispute with Ms. Callimachi and now runs an investigative journalism start-up in Georgia. The Times has assigned a top editor, Dean Murphy, who heads the investigations reporting group, to review the reporting and editing process behind Caliphate and some of Ms. Callimachi’s other stories, and has also assigned an investigative correspondent with deep experience in national security reporting, Mark Mazzetti, to determine whether Mr. Chaudhry ever set foot in Syria and other questions opened by the arrest in Canada. The crisis now surrounding the podcast is as much about The Times as it is about Ms. Callimachi. She is, in many ways, the new model of a New York Times reporter. She combines the old school bravado of the parachuting, big foot reporter of the past, with a more modern savvy for surfing Twitter’s narrative waves and spotting the sorts of stories that will explode on the internet. She embraced audio as it became a key new business for the paper, and linked her identity and her own story of fleeing Romania as a child to her work. And she told the story of ISIS through the eyes of its members. Ms. Callimachi’s approach and her stories won her the support of some of the most powerful figures at The Times: early on, from Joe Kahn, who was foreign editor when Ms. Callimachi arrived and is now managing editor and viewed internally as the likely successor to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; and later, an assistant managing editor, Sam Dolnick, who oversees the paper’s successful audio team and is a member of the family that controls The Times. She was seen as a star — a standing that helped her survive a series of questions raised over the last six years by colleagues in the Middle East, including the bureau chiefs in Beirut, Anne Barnard, and Iraq, Ms. Coker, as well as the Syrian journalist who interpreted for her on a particularly contentious story about American hostages in 2014, Karam Shoumali. And it helped her weather criticism of specific stories from Arabic-speaking academics and other journalists. Many of those arguments have been re-examined in recent days in The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. C.J. Chivers, an experienced war correspondent, clashed particularly bitterly with Mr. Kahn over Ms. Callimachi’s work, objecting to her approach to reporting on Western hostages taken by Islamic militants. Mr. Chivers warned editors of what he saw as her sensationalism and inaccuracy, and told Mr. Slackman, three Times people said, that turning a blind eye to problems with her work would “burn this place down.” Ms. Callimachi’s approach to storytelling aligned with a more profound shift underway at The Times. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services. And Ms. Callimachi’s success has been due, in part, to her ability to turn distant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East into irresistibly accessible stories. She was hired in 2014 from The Associated Press after she obtained internal Al Qaeda documents in Mali and shaped them into a darkly funny account of a penny-pinching terrorist bureaucracy. But the terror beat lends itself particularly well to the seductions of narrative journalism. Reporters looking for a terrifying yarn will find terrorist sources eager to help terrify. And journalists often find themselves relying on murderous and untrustworthy sources in situations where the facts are ambiguous. If you get something wrong, you probably won’t get a call from the ISIS press office seeking a correction. “If you scrutinized anyone’s record on reporting at Syria, everyone made grave, grave errors,” said Theo Padnos, a freelance journalist held hostage for two years and now working on a book, who said that The Times’s coverage of his cellmate’s escape alerted his captors to his complicity in it. “Rukmini is on the hot seat at the moment, but the sins were so general.” Terrorism coverage can also play easily into popular American hostility toward Muslims. Ms. Callimachi at times depicted terrorist supersoldiers, rather than the alienated and dangerous young men common in many cultures. That hype shows up in details like The Times’s description of the Charlie Hebdo shooters acting with “military precision.” By contrast, The Washington Post’s story suggested that the killers were, in fact, untrained, and noted a video showing them “cross each other’s paths as they advance up the street — a type of movement that professional military personnel are trained to avoid.” On Twitter, where she has nearly 400,000 followers, Ms. Callimachi speculated on possible ISIS involvement in high-profile attacks, including the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, which has not been attributed to the group. At one moment in the Caliphate podcast, Ms. Callimachi hears the doorbell ring at home and panics that ISIS has come for her, an effective dramatic flourish but not something American suburbanites had any reason to fear. Ms. Callimachi told me in an email that she’d received warnings from the F.B.I. of credible threats against her, and that in any event, that moment in the podcast “is not about ISIS or its presence in the suburbs, but about how deeply they had seeped into my mind.” Her work had impact at the highest levels. A former Trump aide, Sebastian Gorka, a leading voice for the White House’s early anti-Muslim immigration policies, quoted Ms. Callimachi’s work to reporters to predict a wave of ISIS attacks in the United States. Two Canadian national security experts wrote in Slate that the podcast “profoundly influenced the policy debate” and pushed Canada to leave the wives and children of ISIS fighters in Kurdish refugee camps. The haziness of the terrorism beat also raises the question of why The Times chose to pull this particular tale out of the chaotic canvas of Syria’s collapse. “The narrative her work perpetuates sensationalizes violence committed by Arabs or Muslims by focusing almost exclusively on — even pathologizing — their culture and religion,” said Alia Malek, the director of international reporting at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the author of a book about Syria. That narrative, she said, often ignores individuals’ motives and a geopolitical context that includes decades of American policy. “That might make for much more uncomfortable listening, but definitely more worthwhile.” Ms. Callimachi told me that she has been focused on “just how ordinary ISIS members are” and that her work “has always made a hard distinction between the faith practiced by over a billion people and the ideology of extremism.” Mr. Baquet declined to comment on the specifics of Ms. Callimachi’s reporting or the internal complaints about it, but he defended the sweep of her work on ISIS. “I don’t think there’s any question that ISIS was a major important player in terrorism,” he said, “and if you look at all of The Times’s reporting over many years, I think it’s a mix of reporting that helps you understand what gives rise to this.” (Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn, I should note here, are my boss’s boss’s boss and my boss’s boss, respectively, and my writing about The Times while on its payroll brings with it all sorts of potential conflicts of interest and is generally a bit of a nightmare.) While some of her colleagues in the Middle East and Washington found Ms. Callimachi’s approach to ISIS coverage overzealous, others admired her relentless work ethic. “Is she aggressive? Yes, and so are the best reporters,” said Adam Goldman, who covers the F.B.I. for The Times and has argued in favor of the kind of reporting on hostages that alienated Ms. Callimachi from other colleagues like Mr. Chivers. “None of us are infallible.” What is clear is that The Times should have been alert to the possibility that, in its signature audio documentary, it was listening too hard for the story it wanted to hear — “rooting for the story,” as The Post’s Erik Wemple put it on Friday. And while Mr. Baquet emphasized in an interview last week that the internal review would examine whether The Times wasn’t keeping to its standards in the audio department, the troubling patterns surrounding Ms. Callimachi’s reporting were clear before Caliphate. (…) Last month, that same cloud of doubt descended on Caliphate. And Ms. Callimachi now faces intense criticism from inside The Times and out — for her style of reporting, for the cinematic narratives in her writing and for The Times’s place in larger arguments about portrayals of terrorism. But while some of the coverage has portrayed her as a kind of rogue actor at The Times, my reporting suggests that she was delivering what the senior-most leaders of the news organization asked for, with their support. Ben Smith

La reporter Rukmini Callimachi, spécialiste de Daech, voit sa déontologie journalistique contestée. Son employeur, le New York Times, lance une enquête interne. (…) C’est un article d’un format très rare, que publiait hier le grand quotidien new-yorkais, puisqu’il émet des doutes sur certains articles et podcasts de Rukmini Callimachi, une pointure dans le journalisme international cette dernière décennie, particulièrement réputée pour sa couverture du groupe Etat islamique en Syrie et en Irak. « Il y a bien un problème Callimachi, et c’est un problème qui met en cause directement le New York Times », reconnaît donc son collègue Ben Smith qui signe l’article d’hier dont on sent bien que chaque mot a été savamment pesé. Rukmini Callimachi est contestée suite à l’arrestation au Canada d’un homme, un Canadien, qui prétendait avoir été combattant de Daech en Syrie et dont le témoignage avait alimenté le podcast de la journaliste du Times diffusé depuis deux ans, 10 épisodes de reportage audio intitulé « Califat » centrés justement sur des récits d’anciens djihadistes. Sauf que la justice canadienne a de bonnes raisons de croire que l’homme qu’elle a arrêté est un mythomane, qui n’a jamais mis les pieds au Moyen-Orient ni combattu pour le groupe Etat islamique. A partir de là, la question se pose : « Comment une journaliste censée avoir documenté d’aussi près l’horreur de Daech, et connaître son idéologie, son fonctionnement dans les moindres détails, a-t-elle pu se faire piéger par un faux terroriste ? » Cette question est formulée par Jacob Silvermann, dans The New Republic. Loin de conclure que Callimachi a sciemment fait confiance au Canadien malgré les zones d’ombres assez évidentes que présentait son témoignage, il s’interroge sur son rapport à ses sources et à ces histoires, vivantes, humaines, cette quête des récits incarnés au cœur du chaos qui a fait la signature et la gloire de la journaliste ces sept dernières années. Depuis l’arrestation du soi-disant djihadiste au Canada, le New York Times a lancé une enquête interne confiée à l’un de ses plus prestigieux enquêteurs qui va donc disséquer tout le travail de Rukimini Callimachi pour déterminer si elle a pu manquer de prudence et de déontologie sur d’autres reportages. Et si aucune conclusion n’est encore tirée de cette enquête, le quotidien peut faire autrement que d’entendre ce qu’il avait essayé d’ignorer jusque-là, les critiques émises depuis des années déjà par d’autres journalistes spécialistes du Moyen-Orient sur les méthodes de sa reporter-vedette : critiques sur sa quête effrénée et parfois « agressive » de l’histoire la plus édifiante ; critiques pour avoir sorti discrètement d’Irak, en 2018, des tonnes de documents récupérés dans les archives de Daech ; doutes sur le fait qu’elle ne maîtrisait pas la langue arabe ; sur l’hyper-personnalisation de ses reportages qui la mettaient très souvent en scène pour accentuer l’aspect sensationnel des sujets. Autant d’alertes qui n’avaient pas réussi à égratigner à l’époque l’aura de Rukmini Callimachi, mais qui trouvent, forcément, un écho à présent. La réaction du New York Times, qui ne cache rien aujourd’hui de cette crise, nous montre à quel point le journal prend la chose au sérieux et accepte de se remettre en question et notamment sur les travers de ce « journalisme narratif » qui s’impose depuis quelques années mais qui pose de vrais défis en terme de vérification des sources, sur des terrains de conflits complexes et dangereux, face à des personnages et des organisations aux motivations troubles, et connaissant l’habileté perverse avec laquelle Daech détourne nos codes et nos fantasmes journalistiques occidentaux. « Le travail de Rukmini Callimachi perpétue un récit qui sensationnalise la violence commise par des Arabes et des Musulmans, en mettant l’accent presque exclusivement, et maladivement, sur les dimensions religieuses et culturelles de cette violence » : c’est la responsable d’une prestigieuse école de journalisme new-yorkaise qui formule ainsi les reproches fait à la journaliste-star… laquelle, reconnaît enfin le New York Times, a « toujours travaillé avec l’approbation totale de son employeur ». Voilà au moins un quotidien qui n’élude pas (mais certes, a posteriori) sa part de responsabilité dans la tourmente. France Culture

Octobre 2020 restera dans l’histoire du « New York Times », fondé 169 ans plus tôt, comme l’un des mois les plus éprouvants pour la crédibilité de cette institution de la presse américaine. Shehroze Chaudhry, un Canadien de 25 ans qui prétendait avoir combattu dans les rangs de Daech en Syrie sous le surnom d’Abou Huzayfa, a en effet été arrêté par la police fédérale, non loin de Toronto. Mis en examen pour « incitation à craindre des activités terroristes » sur la base d’informations fabriquées (hoax), il risque jusqu’à cinq ans de prison pour ses affabulations. Or Abou Huzayfa a été, avec ses récits glaçants de décapitation et ses témoignages « de l’intérieur » de Daech, une des sources principales de reportages du « New York Times » sur l’organisation alors dirigée par Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi. Rukmini Callimachi est depuis 2014 la spécialiste des enquêtes du « New York Times » sur la mouvance jihadiste. Journaliste expérimentée, elle a débuté sa carrière comme freelance en Inde en 2001 et a, entre autres, dirigé le bureau de l’Associated Press pour l’Afrique occidentale (son travail sur des documents internes à Al-Qaida au Maghreb islamique (AQMI), découverts à Tombouctou en 2013, lui avait alors valu une nomination au prix Pulitzer).  En 2016, elle avait été la première à publier une investigation approfondie sur l’Emni, le service de « sécurité » de Daech, chargé entre autres d’organiser des attentats sur le continent européen. Deux ans plus tard, le podcast « Caliphate » de Callimachi, diffusé sur dix épisodes, est une des émissions-phares censées marquer le tournant du « New York Times » vers de nouveaux supports multimédias. Shehroze Chaudhry, alias Abou Huzayfa, est l’un des témoins les plus retentissants de cette série sur les horreurs perpétrées par Daech. Il est vrai qu’il fournit complaisamment tous les détails qui permettent à l’auditeur américain de mieux se figurer une telle barbarie. L’importance accordée à cette seule source avait conduit la direction du « New York Times », peu avant le lancement de « Caliphate », à mobiliser des ressources conséquentes pour s’assurer de la fiabilité d’Abou Huzayfa. C’est ainsi que le journaliste indépendant Derek Henry Flood fut envoyé dans la ville de Manbij, pourtant libérée de l’emprise jihadiste par les forces kurdes dès 2016, et qu’il y prit la photo ci-dessus. Ni Flood, ni les autres journalistes sollicités ne purent confirmer l’engagement effectif de Chaudhry dans Daech, ce qui n’empêcha pas la série « Caliphate » d’être diffusée et de recueillir un grand succès. Deux ans et demi après le lancement de cette série, la mise en examen de Chaudhry a conduit la direction du « New York Times » à diligenter une enquête interne, toujours en cours. Elle a par ailleurs publié un sévère exercice d’introspection, confié à Ben Smith, un des spécialistes média du quotidien. Smith ne cache pas que « toutes sortes de conflits d’intérêt » sont ouverts par une telle investigation sur son propre journal. Il révèle que des vétérans du terrain moyen-oriental au « New York Times », dont les correspondantes à Beyrouth et à Bagdad, avaient alerté leur hiérarchie sur les méthodes de Callimachi. Un journaliste syrien qui fut son interprète en arabe pour un reportage sur des otages de Daech témoigne: « elle recherchait quelqu’un pour lui dire ce qu’elle croyait déjà ». Forte de ses 400.000 abonnés sur Twitter, Callimachi laisse ainsi planer le doute sur la responsabilité de Daech dans la tuerie de Las Vegas, en 2017, alors que cette revendication est à l’évidence mensongère. Certes, l’officier canadien chargé du suivi de la « déradicalisation » de Chaudhry avoue avoir été, lui aussi, dupe de son imposture. L’immersion du pseudo-repenti dans les réseaux sociaux a apparemment entraîné un tel dédoublement de sa personnalité que le mythe d’Abou Huzayfa en est sorti conforté. Les macabres affabulations de Chaudhry ont même pesé dans le débat public au Canada, où le gouvernement a décidé de refuser tout rapatriement de ses ressortissants liés à Daech au Moyen-Orient, y compris les femmes et les enfants.  Mais c’est bel et bien le « New York Times » qui a permis à Abou Huzayfa d’acquérir une aussi formidable aura médiatique. Et Ben Smith conclut son enquête en refusant de tenir Callimachi pour seule responsable d’avoir « produit (deliver) ce que les plus hauts dirigeants (du « New York Times ») demandaient, avec leur soutien ». Qu’une telle polémique éclate dans la dernière phase d’une campagne présidentielle où Donald Trump et ses partisans ont banalisé les « fake news » n’en est que plus troublant. Jean-Pierre Filiu

Peu d’événements façonneront le monde à venir plus que le résultat de la prochaine élection présidentielle des États-Unis. Pour souligner ce moment historique, qui est sans doute une décision comme n’importe lequel d’entre nous l’a jamais prise dans les urnes, nous avons pour la première fois en presque 100 ans remplacé notre logo sur la couverture de notre édition américaine pour faire comprendre qu’il est impératif pour nous tous d’exercer le droit de vote. Edward Felsenthal (rédacteur en chef et président du Time)

Je suis désolé d’être le porteur de mauvaises nouvelles, mais je crois avoir été assez clair l’été dernier lorsque j’ai affirmé que Donald Trump serait le candidat républicain à la présidence des États-Unis. Cette fois, j’ai des nouvelles encore pires à vous annoncer: Donald J. Trump va remporter l’élection du mois de novembre. Ce clown à temps partiel et sociopathe à temps plein va devenir notre prochain président. (…) Jamais de toute ma vie n’ai-je autant voulu me tromper. (…) Voici 5 raisons pour lesquelles Trump va gagner : 1. Le poids électoral du Midwest, ou le Brexit de la Ceinture de rouille 2. Le dernier tour de piste des Hommes blancs en colère 3. Hillary est un problème en elle-même 4. Les partisans désabusés de Bernie Sanders 5. L’effet Jesse Ventura. Michael Moore

Je vous préviens presque 10 semaines à l’avance. Le niveau d’enthousiasme pour les 60 millions de la base de Trump FAIT EXPLOSER TOUS LES COMPTEURS ! Michael Moore (Aug. 28, 2020)

The polls are badly skewed for several reasons. Once adjustments are made for oversampling Democrats and polling ‘all adults’ instead of ‘likely voters’, the polls are actually much closer than the published results. The second part is that polls are a snapshot. We watch the movie. Where we are today does not necessarily bear much resemblance to where things will end up in November. (…) The same is true in the favourability ratings. (…) The Democrats do look stronger in the national average polls. They had a 4.3-point lead in 2016 and today that lead is wider at 7.6 points. Still, it’s important to bear in mind that national polls don’t matter because the US does not have national elections. Instead, it has 51 separate elections in the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. The national poll lead reflects huge voter support for Biden in states like California and New York. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by four million votes in California in 2016. Biden may beat Trump by an even wider amount in California in 2020. The problem is you can’t win California twice. You can only win it once, no matter how many extra votes you receive. Every vote for Biden in California over 50.1% is a wasted vote; the same is true in New York. It does seem highly likely that Biden will win California and New York, but the huge excess popular vote in those states won’t do him any good in battlegrounds like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That’s why national polls don’t matter while battleground state polls matter a lot. Looking just at the battleground states, Trump is polling better today than he was at this stage in the 2016 race. That’s a very good sign for Trump. The other aspect of the polls that is good news for Trump is that the gap between Biden and Trump is narrowing and moving in Trump’s direction. While Biden maintains a lead by most measures, Trump is gaining and is within the margin of error in many of the battleground states where Biden is ahead. This trend towards Trump has been noticeable in the past two weeks. Polls will likely move more in Trump’s favour because polling works with a lag. (…) a well-constructed and valid poll can take two weeks from start to finish. The results may be solid, but they are out of date by the time they are final. This means that polls we are seeing today may have been conducted weeks ago. If the trend was moving in Trump’s direction two weeks ago, don’t be surprised to see much better results for Trump a week or two from now. (…) in October and early November 2016, I predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. (…) My forecast came at a time when Hillary was ahead in all the polls, when betting markets were giving her a 90% chance of winning, and when pundits like Nate Silver and those at The New York Times were giving Hillary odds of winning at 93%. The TV anchors would turn pale or gasp for breath when I gave my predictions, but they were kind enough to give me time to explain why the polls were skewed, why betting markets are not good predictors of political outcomes, and why anecdotal evidence — which I had gathered on road trips in Spokane, Washington, and the Ozark Mountains — all pointed in Trump’s favour. Jim Rickards

Les jours sont comptés pour les sondages politiques traditionnels en Amérique et la divergence entre les votes réels de mardi et ce qui était attendu dans les sondages semble indiquer qu’ils ont probablement fait leur temps. Le fait que les sondages n’ont apparemment pas réussi à repérer les préférences d’une grande partie de l’électorat américain indique un problème plus vaste et plus systématique, qui ne sera probablement pas réglé de sitôt. Le problème fondamental – et la raison pour laquelle les sondeurs sont inquiets à propos de ce type d’échec des sondages à grande échelle – vient des faibles taux de réponse qui ont affecté même les meilleurs sondages depuis l’utilisation généralisée de la technologie d’identification des appelants [dite « présentation du numéro » en France]. L’identification de l’appelant, plus que tout autre facteur unique, signifie que moins d’Américains décrochent le téléphone lorsqu’un sondeur appelle. Cela signifie qu’il faut plus d’appels pour qu’un sondage atteigne suffisamment de répondants pour constituer un échantillon valide, mais cela signifie également que les Américains s’auto-sélectionnent avant de décrocher le téléphone. Ainsi, même si notre capacité à analyser les données s’est améliorée de plus en plus, grâce à l’informatique avancée et à une augmentation de la quantité de données disponibles pour les analystes, notre capacité à collecter des données s’est détériorée. Et si les données d’entrée sont mauvaises, l’analyse ne sera pas non plus bonne. Cette auto-sélectio est extrêmement problématique pour les sondeurs. Un échantillon n’est valide que dans la mesure où les individus atteints sont un échantillon aléatoire de la population globale en question. Il n’est pas du tout problématique pour certaines personnes de refuser de décrocher le téléphone, tant que leur refus est motivé par un processus aléatoire. Si celui-ci est aléatoire, les personnes qui décrochent le téléphone seront toujours un échantillon représentatif de la population globale, et le sondeur devra simplement passer plus d’appels. De même, ce n’est pas un problème sérieux pour les sondeurs si les gens refusent de répondre au téléphone selon des caractéristiques connues. Par exemple, les sondeurs savent que les Afro-Américains sont moins susceptibles de répondre à une enquête que les Américains blancs et que les hommes sont moins susceptibles de décrocher le téléphone que les femmes. Grâce au recensement américain, nous savons quelle proportion de ces groupes est censée être dans notre échantillon, donc lorsque la proportion d’hommes, ou d’Afro-Américains, est insuffisante dans l’échantillon, les sondeurs peuvent utiliser des techniques de pondération pour corriger le déficit. Le vrai problème survient lorsque les répondants potentiels à un sondage refusent systématiquement de décrocher le téléphone en fonction de caractéristiques que les sondeurs ne mesurent ou ne peuvent ajuster pour correspondre à la population. (…) Rien de tout cela ne poserait de problème si les taux de réponse étaient au niveau où ils étaient dans les années 80, voire 90. Mais avec les taux de réponse aux sondages téléphoniques modernes stagnant en dessous de 15%, il devient de plus en plus difficile de déterminer si on a même affaire ou non à des problèmes de non-réponse systématiques. Mais ces problèmes deviennent carrément inquiétants lorsque les caractéristiques qui poussent les gens à s’exclure des sondages sont corrélées avec le principal résultat que le sondage tente de mesurer. Par exemple, si les électeurs de Donald Trump étaient plus susceptibles de décider de ne pas participer aux sondages parce qu’ils sont truqués, et ce d’une manière qui n’était pas corrélée avec des caractéristiques connues comme la race et le sexe, les sondeurs n’auraient aucun moyen de le savoir. Bien sûr, si la non-réponse non observée entraîne des erreurs de sondage, il est nécessaire de se demander comment les sondages se sont si bien déroulés jusqu’à présent. Après tout, les taux de réponse ont été tout aussi bas au moins lors des quatre dernières élections présidentielles, et les sondages se sont assez bien comportés dans ces élections. Une partie du problème, et ce qui rend cette élection différente, est un échec apparent des modèles d’électeurs probables. L’une des tâches les plus difficiles auxquelles doit faire face tout enquêteur électoral est de déterminer qui votera et qui ne votera pas le jour du scrutin. Les gens ayant tendance à dire qu’ils vont voter même quand ils ne le feront pas, il est donc nécessaire de poser plus de questions. Chaque grand institut de sondage a sa propre série de questions pour repérer les électeurs probables, mais elles incluent généralement des éléments sur l’intérêt pour l’élection, le comportement de vote passé et la connaissance de l’emplacement d’un bureau de vote. Utiliser ces questions pour repérer qui votera et qui ne votera pas est une affaire délicate; l’échec d’un modèle d’électeur probable complexe est la raison pour laquelle Gallup a quitté les sondages électoraux. (…) Il se peut que les techniques standard d’échantillonnage et de pondération soient capables de corriger les problèmes d’échantillonnage lors d’une élection normale – une élection dans laquelle les modèles de participation électorale restent prévisibles – mais échouent lorsque les sondages n’arrivent plus à repérer des parties de l’électorat susceptibles de participer à une élection mais pas aux précédentes. Imaginez qu’il existe un groupe d’électeurs qui ne votent généralement pas et qui sont systématiquement moins susceptibles de répondre à un sondage. Tant qu’ils continuent de ne pas voter, il n’y a pas de problème. Mais si un candidat arrive à mobiliser ces électeurs, les sondages sous-estimeront systématiquement le soutien au candidat, ce qui semble s’être passé mardi soir. Dan Cassino (2016)

Alors que Joe Biden est le favori des sondages dans la course à la Maison-Blanche, les commentateurs politiques rivalisent de prudence quatre ans après la victoire surprise de Donald Trump. Pour le Time, l’enjeu est d’abord de préserver la démocratie américaine en appelant au vote et à l’unité nationale. Quatre lettres qui n’avaient pas bougé depuis près de cent ans. “Time”, ancré en haut de la couverture du prestigieux hebdomadaire américain depuis 1923, a été remplacé par “Vote”, quatre autres lettres qui se veulent un rempart à l’effondrement démocratique tant redouté aux États-Unis. Dessous, un immense portrait de femme, bas du visage masqué, regard inquiet, humblement tourné vers le passé. (…) Pour illustrer ce numéro “historique”, le magazine a choisi l’artiste Shepard Fairey. Connu sous le nom d’Obey, il est notamment célèbre pour son affiche Hope, réalisée pour la campagne de Barack Obama en 2008 ou pour sa Marianne réalisée en hommage à la France après les attentats de 2015. Il propose cette fois un portrait de femme aux yeux légèrement bridés, un clin d’œil à l’électorat issu de l’immigration, déterminant dans l’élection en cours. Elle est vêtue d’un débardeur rouge étoilé et masquée d’un bandana bleu. (…) Après plusieurs mois de pandémie, la rédaction du Time présente le moment comme “une occasion de changer de cap comme cela n’arrive qu’une fois tous les vingt ans” et de faire société. Dans une tribune, le journaliste politique Molly Ball espère que “le 3 novembre (ou peu après, espérons-le), nous saurons enfin ce que signifiaient ces quatre années incompréhensibles […] Désireux de se montrer rassembleur en cette période de crise sanitaire et politique, le Time évacue le nom des candidats et des partis pour n’incarner la république qu’à travers son expression démocratique. “Vote” donc, tout simplement. Courrier international

L’heure est grave pour les États-Unis à l’approche de l’élection présidentielle qui aura lieu le 3 novembre prochain. À tel point que pour la première fois en près d’un siècle d’existence, le célèbre magazine Time a décidé de changer son titre en remplaçant « TIME » par « VOTE ». Créé en 1923, le magazine généraliste est devenu une véritable institution dans le monde entier grâce à ses articles fouillés et ses reportages particulièrement bien documentés, mais aussi pour sa Une son titre charismatique. De nos jours, le prestigieux hebdomadaire est également ancré dans l’inconscient collectif pour l’imposant cadre rouge qui entoure sa photo de couverture. Et pour la première fois donc, la rédaction a fait le choix symbolique de changer son titre dans l’objectif d’inciter chaque Américain à voter le mardi 3 novembre prochain, soit dans moins de 10 jours. Si au premier abord cet appel au vote peut sembler dénué de toute orientation politique, à lire entre les lignes, on se rend rapidement compte du candidat que soutient le magazine. En effet, la réponse se cache derrière l’artiste qui a réalisé le visuel présent en couverture. Il s’agit d’une création originale de l’artiste Shepard Fairey, le même qui avait dessiné la très populaire affiche « HOPE » de la campagne d’un certain Barack Obama, candidat démocrate à l’élection présidentielle américaine de 2008. On y voit une femme porter un bandana orné d’une urne accompagnée du message « VOTE! » en guise de masque. Subtilement, le Time affiche donc sa préférence envers Joe Biden (Parti démocrate) qui affrontera le président sortant : Donald Trump (Parti républicain). Pour l’occasion, les lecteurs de ce numéro une édition spéciale sur les derniers rebondissements de cette campagne présidentielle 2020 et un guide pour voter en toute sécurité à l’heure du coronavirus. Démotivateur

Le fait même de poser une question peut inventer un résultat car elle fait appel à l’imaginaire du sondé qui n’y avait pas encore réfléchi. Alain Garrigou

D’après les journaux, les sondages montrent que la plupart des gens croient les journaux qui déclarent que la plupart des gens croient les sondages qui montrent que la plupart des gens ont lu les journaux qui conviennent que les sondages montrent qu’il va gagner. Mark Steyn

Une fois de plus, les médias ont péché par une couverture triviale des débats et une crédulité manifeste face à la propagande de John McCain. La tactique des républicains consiste à taper sans relâche sur la presse sous prétexte qu’elle pencherait « naturellement » à gauche. Cette stratégie d’intimidation explique l’obséquiosité de certains journalistes face à McCain, même si une petite lueur d’espoir est apparue récemment avec les reportages d’investigation publiés sur Sarah Palin, la colistière du candidat républicain. (…) le journalisme bien compris est un militantisme ! En clarifiant le monde, il construit une image sur laquelle les citoyens pourront agir. Todd Gitlin (ancien gauchiste et professeur de sociologie et journalisme à l’université Columbia)

La polarisation sur les sondages est dangereuse. Les sondages ont cet impact insidieux du goutte-à-goutte quotidien. L’effet cumulatif est de créer autant que refléter l’opinion publique. C’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison que certains pays interdisent les sondages dans les deux dernières semaines qui précèdent une élection. (…) Les médias essayent de prouver qu’Obama est tellement en avance que cela l’aide à récolter de l’argent, à obtenir plus de soutiens et démoralise les conservateurs. Ce qui se passe, c’est que les journalistes se servent maintenant des sondages pour conforter leurs articles comme pour dire aux gens: Regardez, 52% du pays votent pour Obama, pourquoi pas vous ? Allez-vous voter contre un homme de couleur ? Allez-vous voter pour un vieux type ? Pourquoi n’êtes-vous pas dans l’air du temps? (…) Ils vous demandent de réagir à une phraséologie bien-pensante au lieu de sonder votre idéologie fondamentale. Ainsi ils posent des questions comme, Etes-vous pour ou contre l’amélioration de la qualité de l’éducation publique ? Etes-vous pour ou contre des soins de santé universels ? Etes-vous pour ou contre la protection de l’environnement? Et vous voyez ces sondages qui indiquent 88 % d’Américains pour la protection de l’environnement. Mais bigre, qui peuvent bien être les 12 autres pour cent ? Autrement dit, qui ne veut pas que tous les enfants aient une éducation de qualité et mangent à leur faim? Et que l’air et l’eau ne soient pas pollués ? Mais alors ces gens-là regardent ces résultats de sondage et disent : vous voyez? Le réchauffement climatique est le problème numéro un. Vous voyez? (…) ACORN et Wright sont des questions plus pertinentes pour les gens qu’Ayers, parce que ACORN, c’est ici et maintenant. Les gens ont vu les images de Wright dénonçant l’Amérique. Les gens seraient incapables de reconnaitre Ayers dans une file de suspects. Les gens n’apprécient pas trop l’idée d’être privés par qui que ce soit de leur droit de vote. La campagne de McCain a gaspillé trois semaines sur Ayers, au lieu de chercher à toucher les électeurs sur l’économie. L’impôt est toujours un gros mot. (…) Joe le plombier et Sarah Palin étaient des moments inattendus et imprévisibles pour la campagne d’Obama. Mais ce que Joe le plombier et Sarah Palin ont en commun, c’est qu’ils ont ce lien intangible avec la plupart des gens qui n’est pas facile à surmonter. Et ils représentent également la classe moyenne qu’Obama dit représenter, mais au sein de laquelle il n’a pas vécu depuis des années. Je crois que cette élection est beaucoup plus serrée que certains dans les médias sont disposés à l’admettre. Les ouvriers blancs, qui tendent à aimer Joe le plombier et Sarah Palin, seront décisifs. Si les conservateurs ne sont pas contents du manque d’équité et d’objectivité de la couverture médiatique, pourquoi regardent-ils ces sondages ? Pourquoi leur permettent-ils de dicter ce qu’ils pensent de l’élection présidentielle avant qu’un seul vote soit déposé dans l’urne? Kellyanne Conway

Comme je l’ai dit depuis le début, notre campagne n’en était pas simplement une, mais plutôt un grand mouvement incroyable, composé de millions d’hommes et de femmes qui travaillent dur, qui aiment leur pays, et qui veulent un avenir plus prospère et plus radieux pour eux-mêmes et leur famille. C’est un mouvement composé d’Américains de toutes races, de toutes religions, de toutes origines, qui veulent et attendent que le gouvernement serve le peuple. Ce gouvernement servira le peuple. J’ai passé toute ma vie dans le monde des affaires et j’ai observé le potentiel des projets et des personnes partout dans le monde. Aujourd’hui, c’est ce que je veux faire pour notre pays. Il y a un potentiel énorme, je connais bien notre pays, il y a potentiel incroyable, ce sera magnifique. Chaque Américain aura l’opportunité de vivre pleinement son potentiel. Ces hommes et ces femmes oubliés de notre pays, ces personnes ne seront plus oubliées. Donald Trump (2016)

Je suis désolé d’être le porteur de mauvaises nouvelles, mais je crois avoir été assez clair l’été dernier lorsque j’ai affirmé que Donald Trump serait le candidat républicain à la présidence des États-Unis. Cette fois, j’ai des nouvelles encore pires à vous annoncer: Donald J. Trump va remporter l’élection du mois de novembre. Ce clown à temps partiel et sociopathe à temps plein va devenir notre prochain président. (…) Jamais de toute ma vie n’ai-je autant voulu me tromper. (…) Voici 5 raisons pour lesquelles Trump va gagner : 1. Le poids électoral du Midwest, ou le Brexit de la Ceinture de rouille 2. Le dernier tour de piste des Hommes blancs en colère 3. Hillary est un problème en elle-même 4. Les partisans désabusés de Bernie Sanders 5. L’effet Jesse Ventura. Michael Moore

L’effet Bradley (en anglais Bradley effect) (…) est le nom donné aux États-Unis au décalage souvent observé entre les sondages électoraux et les résultats des élections américaines quand un candidat blanc est opposé à un candidat non blanc (noir, hispanique, latino, asiatique ou océanien). Le nom du phénomène vient de Tom Bradley, un Afro-Américain qui perdit l’élection de 1982 au poste de gouverneur de Californie, à la surprise générale, alors qu’il était largement en tête dans tous les sondages. L’effet Bradley reflète une tendance de la part des votants, noirs aussi bien que blancs, à dire aux sondeurs qu’ils sont indécis ou qu’ils vont probablement voter pour le candidat noir ou issu de la minorité ethnique mais qui, le jour de l’élection, votent pour son opposant blanc. Une des théories pour expliquer l’effet Bradley est que certains électeurs donnent une réponse fausse lors des sondages, de peur qu’en déclarant leur réelle préférence, ils ne prêtent le flanc à la critique d’une motivation raciale de leur vote. Cet effet est similaire à celui d’une personne refusant de discuter de son choix électoral. Si la personne déclare qu’elle est indécise, elle peut ainsi éviter d’être forcée à entrer dans une discussion politique avec une personne partisane. La réticence à donner une réponse exacte s’étend parfois jusqu’aux sondages dits de sortie de bureau de vote. La façon dont les sondeurs conduisent l’interview peut être un déterminant dans la réponse du sondé. Wikipedia

The phenomenon of voters telling pollsters what they think they want to hear, however, actually has a name: the Bradley Effect, a well-studied political phenomenon. In 1982, poll after poll showed Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ first black mayor and a Democrat, with a solid lead over George Deukmejian, a white Republican, in the California gubernatorial race. Instead, Bradley narrowly lost to Deukmejian, a stunning upset that led experts to wonder how the polls got it wrong. Pollsters, and some political scientists, later concluded that voters didn’t want to say they were voting against Bradley, who would have been the nation’s first popularly-elected African-American governor, because they didn’t want to appear to be racist. (…) In December, a Morning Consult poll examined whether Trump supporters were more likely to say they supported him in online polls than in polls conducted by live questioners. Their finding was surprising: « Trump performs about six percentage points better online than via live telephone interviewing, » according to the study. At the same time, « his advantage online is driven by adults with higher levels of education, » the study says, countering data showing Trump’s bedrock support comes from voters without college degrees. « Importantly, the differences between online and live telephone [surveys] persist even when examining only highly engaged, likely voters. » But Galston says while the study examines « a legitimate question, » the methodology is unclear, and « it’s really important to compare apples to apples. You need to be sure that the online community has the same demographic profile » as phone polling. « It may also be the case that people who are online and willing to participate in that study are already, in effect, a self-selected sample » of pro-Trump voters, Galston says. (…) Ultimately, Trump’s claim « is more of a way to try to explain poor polling numbers. Trump is losing at the moment and he’s trying to explain it off, » Skelley says. « This doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. » US News & world report (July 2016)

Silicon Valley these days is a very intolerant place for people who do not hold so called ‘socially liberal’ ideas. In Silicon Valley, because of the high prevalence of highly smart people, there is a general stereotype that voting Republican is for dummies. So many people see considering supporting Republican candidates, particularly Donald Trump, anathema to the whole Silicon Valley ethos that values smarts and merit. A couple of friends thought that me supporting Trump made me unworthy of being part of the Silicon Valley tribe and stopped talking to me. At the end of the day, we choose our politics the way we choose our lovers and our friends — not so much out a rational analysis, but based on impressions and our own personal backgrounds. My main reason for supporting Trump is that I basically agree with the notion that unless the trend is stopped, our country is going to hell … The Silicon Valley elite is highly hypocritical on this matter. One of the reasons, I assume, they don’t like Trump is because on this area, as in many others, he is calling a spade a spade. I believe Trump is right in this case. … supporting Trump only offers [an] upside. Electing Hillary Clinton would keep the status quo. If Trump wins, there’s a whole set of new possibilities that would emerge for the nation. Even if it remains socially liberal, it would be good for it if the president were to be a Republican so that the Valley could recover a little bit of its rebel spirit (that was the case during the Bush years for instance). I believe that the increased relevance in national politics of companies like Google (whose Chairman [Eric] Schmidt has been very cozy with the Obama administration) and Apple (at the center of several political disputes) has been bad for the Valley. A Trump presidency would allow the Valley to focus on what it does best: dreaming and building the technology of the future, leaving politics for DC types. Silicon valley software engineer

Many people are saying to maybe their friends while they’re having a sip of Chardonnay in Washington or Boston, ‘Oh, I would never vote for him, he’s so – not politically correct,’ or whatever, but then they’re going to go and vote for him. Because he’s saying things that they would like to say, but they’re not politically courageous enough to say it and I think that’s the real question in this election. Trump is kind of a combination of the gun referendum, because he’s an emotional energy source for people who want to make sure that they’re voicing their concerns about all these issues – immigration, et cetera – but then I think there’s this other piece. They don’t find it to be correct or acceptable to a lot of their friends, but when push comes to shove, they’re going to vote for him. Gregory Payne (Emerson College)

Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the election. It’s because it’s become socially desirable, if you’re a college educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump. Kellyanne Conway (Trump campaign manager)

They’ll go ahead and vote for that candidate in the privacy of a [voting] booth But they won’t admit to voting for that candidate to somebody who’s calling them for a poll. Joe Bafumi (Dartmouth College)

Trump’s advantage in online polls compared with live telephone polling is eight or nine percentage points among likely voters. Kyle A. Dropp

It’s easier to express potentially ‘unacceptable’ responses on a screen than it is to give them to a person. Kathy Frankovic

This may be due to social desirability bias — people are more willing to express support for this privately than when asked by someone else. Douglas Rivers

In a May 2015 report, Pew Research analyzed the differences between results derived from telephone polling and those from online Internet polling. Pew determined that the biggest differences in answers elicited via these two survey modes were on questions in which social desirability bias — that is, “the desire of respondents to avoid embarrassment and project a favorable image to others” — played a role. In a detailed analysis of phone versus online polling in Republican primaries, Kyle A. Dropp, the executive director of polling and data science at Morning Consult, writes: Trump’s advantage in online polls compared with live telephone polling is eight or nine percentage points among likely voters. This difference, Dropp notes, is driven largely by more educated voters — those who would be most concerned with “social desirability.” These findings suggest that Trump will head into the general election with support from voters who are reluctant to admit their preferences to a live person in a phone survey, but who may well be inclined to cast a ballot for Trump on Election Day. The NYT (May 2016)

Les analystes politiques, les sondeurs et les journalistes ont donné à penser que la victoire d’Hillary Clinton était assurée avant l’élection. En cela, c’est une surprise, car la sphère médiatique n’imaginait pas la victoire du candidat républicain. Elle a eu tort. Si elle avait su observer la société américaine et entendre son malaise, elle n’aurait jamais exclu la possibilité d’une élection de Trump. Pour cette raison, ce n’est pas une surprise. (…) Sans doute, ils ont rejeté Donald Trump car ils le trouvaient – et c’est le cas – démagogue, populiste et vulgaire. Je n’ai d’ailleurs jamais vu une élection américaine avec un tel parti pris médiatique. Même le très réputé hebdomadaire britannique « The Economist » a fait un clin d’oeil à Hillary Clinton. Je pense que la stigmatisation sans précédent de Donald Trump par les médias a favorisé chez les électeurs américains la dissimulation de leur intention de vote auprès des instituts de sondage. En clair, un certain nombre de votants n’a pas osé admettre qu’il soutenait le candidat américain. Ce phénomène est classique en politique. Souvenez du 21 avril 2002 et de la qualification surprise de Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader du Front national, au second tour de l’élection présidentielle française. Dominique Reynié

Biden now has gone full-circle: last year bragging about banning fracking and ending fossil fuels, then in the general campaign denying that, and now reaffirming it. Biden also hurt himself with his base, by blaming Obama for not getting more crime reform for drug sentencing while accusing Bernie Sanders of pushing a socialist health plan and suggesting his own opposition to it had boosted him over his leftwing rivals in the primaries (perhaps true, but not wise to ensure the base turns out). Americans know by now that treatments are improving on COVID-19, that death rates are declining, and that it is true that about 99.8 percent of the infected under 65 will survive the virus. Trump did well in pointing all that out. (…) Trump, then, after four years in the White House, nonetheless successfully returned to his role as the outsider cleanser of Biden’s Augean insider stables. His theme was can-do Americanism, Biden’s was timidity and caution and worries that there is little hope anywhere to be found, an attitude consistent with his own hibernation. Final thoughts on the debate: The moderator Kristen Welker was far better than the prior debate and town-hall moderators, in avoiding the scripted stuff like the Charlottesville distortions and ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ questions. That said, she interrupted Trump far more than she did Biden, and focused more on Biden-friendly questions. But most importantly, Trump kept his cool, was deferential to Welker, and was tough but not cruel to Biden. The final question is not whether Trump won and will be seen to have won bigly by next week, but to what degree Biden’s suicidal talk of ending fossil fuels and denial of the Hunter Biden evidence that cannot be denied implode his campaign early next week or not until Election Day. Victor Davis Hanson

Robert Cahaly, stratège principal du groupe Trafalgar, s’est fait un nom en 2016  pour avoir été le seul sondeur à correctement repérer l’avance de Donald Trump au Michigan et en Pennsylvanie – deux États clés qu’il a emportés – à l’approche du jour du scrutin. (Il n’a pas sondé le Wisconsin, une autre victoire surprenante pour Trump.) Cahaly a également repéré l’avance de Trump en Caroline du Nord et en Floride, qu’il a toutes deux gagnées, assurant sa victoire improbable 304-227 au collège électoral sur Hillary Clinton. Après avoir demandé aux électeurs qui ils soutenaient en 2016, le sondeur a poursuivi en leur demandant qui, selon eux, leurs voisins soutenaient, Trump ou Clinton. Cahaly a constamment constaté un degré élevé de variance entre les personnes pour lesquelles les répondants ont déclaré voter et celles pour lesquelles ils pensaient que leurs voisins votaient, ce qui suggère qu’il y avait en fait un «effet Trump » en jeu. Deux ans plus tard, la méthode de Cahaly s’est une fois de plus révélée solide. Dans l’une des courses les plus sondées du cycle, Trafalgar était la seule société de sondage à montrer correctement une victoire au poste de gouverneur de Ron DeSantis en Floride – ainsi que Rick Scott y remportant la course au Sénat. Real Clear politics

L’enquête est conçue pour être représentative des électeurs inscrits qui ont regardé le débat de mardi, elle ne représente pas les vues de tous les Américains. Les électeurs qui ont regardé le débat étaient plus partisans que les Américains dans leur ensemble – 36% se sont identifiés comme indépendants ou non-partisans contre environ 40% dans le grand public, et le groupe d’observateurs du débat était plus démocrate qu’un sondage typique de tous. adultes, avec 39% s’identifiant comme démocrates et 25% comme républicains. (..) Le sondage post-débat de CNN a été mené par le SSRS par téléphone et comprend des entretiens avec 568 électeurs inscrits qui ont regardé le débat du 29 septembre. Les résultats parmi les observateurs du débat ont une marge d’erreur d’échantillonnage de plus ou moins 6,3 points de pourcentage. CNN

Vous savez quoi? Je suis blanc. Je suis juif. Quand j’étais enfant, ma mère avait aussi « La Conversation » avec moi: ‘Dov, tu dois toujours montrer du respect à un policier, même quand il a tort. Ne leur réponds jamais. Fais ce qu’ils te disent. S’ils se trompent, nous pourrons le dire au juge plus tard. Mais ne t’énerve jamais avec un flic. » Trente ans plus tard, j’ai également eu cette conversation avec mes enfants: ‘Si jamais vous êtes arrêté par un flic dans la circulation et qu’il ou elle vous demande votre immatriculation ou votre assurance auto, n’ouvrez tout simplement pas la boîte à gants ou ne mettez pas la main dans votre veste pour la chercher. Le flic est peut-être fou, peut-être même antisémite, sait-on jamais et peut penser que vous allez chercher une arme. Alors, demandez d’abord au flic: « Officier, puis-je fouiller dans ma poche ou ma boîte à gants parce que c’est là que se trouvent les papiers? » Et puis laissez le flic vous dire quoi faire.  » Si un flic vous dit de rester assis dans la voiture, restez assis. Si un flic vous dit de vous taire, alors taisez-vous. (Il ne m’est jamais venu à l’esprit d’ajouter, comme il faut l’ajouter en cet « Age de Ferguson et de Michael Brown: «Ne luttez pas contre un flic pour son arme. Ne tirez pas avec un pistolet Taser sur un flic.») Dov Fischer

President Trump, before the terrible COVID pandemic arrived from China, you had created the strongest economy with the lowest unemployment numbers in history for Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. How will you return us to the economic powerhouse you brought about before the plague? President Trump, can you share with us how in the heck you ever got two Arab Muslim countries to sign peace deals with Israel, the first in a quarter century, and are any more coming in soon? President Trump, how did you feel when New York’s Governor Cuomo praised your leadership in helping New York fight the coronavirus? What was it like getting those military hospital ships to New York and California, and how did you ever manage to turn our peace-time economy into a war-time footing that got more ventilators manufactured than we ever needed? President Trump, polls are showing that your approval numbers among Black and Hispanic voters are the highest that any Republican president has seen in recent memory. How do you explain that turn-around? President Trump, since you already have fulfilled your pledge to build 400 miles of border wall so far, how has that impacted the efforts to control immigration? Vice President Biden, do you have anything you would like to say to Black voters to apologize for calling their school districts a “jungle,” for working with former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd, for saying that Black mothers do not give their children a working vocabulary, and for telling African Americans that, if they do not vote as you want them to, then they “ain’t Black”? Vice President Biden, the President has released all his medical records. When will you disclose to the American people the state of medical assessment of your cognitive functions and whether you are being treated medically for that purpose? And will you be disclosing to the American people all pharmaceuticals and other medications you take or that have been injected into you during the past twelve months? Dov Fischer

Et si, pour changer, les questions ne visaient PAS principalement à interroger Trump sur des choses qui le montrent sous un mauvais jour, puis à demander à Biden comment il réglerait le problème ?

En ces temps étranges …

Où avec l’aide de la censure ouverte des réseaux sociaux …

A l’image du magazine Time qui pour la première fois de son histoire bientôt centenaire …

Fait pour sa couverture de la semaine de l’élection une entorse à sa règle et change en « VOTE » son légendaire logo …

Via, on ne peut plus subtilement, le portrait par le créateur des célébrissimes affiches « Hope » et « Change » de la première campagne Obama d’une jeune membre des minorités dûment encagoulé d’un bandana à la antifa …

Ou du prétendu quotidien de référence américain, réécrivant, entre un faux reportage et un dessin antisémite, rien de moins que l’histoire américaine …

Le journalisme bien compris est, désormais ouvertement, devenu un militantisme …

Et au lendemain, après le premier débat très controversé que l’on sait, d’un brillant débat du Président Trump …

Où, surprise selon un sondage d’après débat CNN repris par la plupart de nos médias …

Si Trump améliore son score de 11 points (de 28 à 39), Biden est à nouveau donné large gagnant et améliore même son score …

Comment ne pas s’étonner que personne ne semble s’étonner …

Sans compter leur effet « ventriloque » par leur goutte à goutte permanent tout au long de la campagne …

Que de tels sondages puissent être repris comme véritable information par tous les médias américains comme internationaux …

Quand on sait que comme le précise la chaine elle-même en bas de ses articles que personne ne lit …

Ils sont fondés sur une surdistribution de Démocrates dans l’échantillon (39% contre 25%) …

Et que leur marge d’erreur sur un échantillon de moins de 600 personnes, dépasse, excusez du peu, les 6% pour le  premier et 5% pour le dernier …

Comment ne pas s’étonner …

Que parmi les prétendus historiens ou spécialistes des Etats-Unis invités d’une émission d’information dite de qualité comme C dans l’air composée …

Tous étrangement, quand une rare vraie professionnelle comme Laure Mandeville n’est pas disponible, alignés à gauche …

Personne ne tique quand l’une d’entre eux observe cette remarquable continuité de résultats entre les deux débats …

Que bien sûr personne ne prenne la peine de mentionner ces problèmes d’échantillon …

Que, relayant allègrement les accusations démocrates de prétendues tentatives de suppression du votre noir par les Républicains, personne ne rappelle que nombre d’états américains n’exigent même pas de pièce d’identité avec photo pour voter …

Que, dénonçant régulièrement le système du Collège électoral, personne ne signale que sans celui-ci, les candidats n’auraient même plus besoin de se déplacer dans les petits états …

Que, ramenant systématiquement les accusations démocrates de non-paiement d’impôts du président Trump, personne ne tente non plus d’expliquer, notamment dans l’immobilier, le système des impôts pré-payés  …

Que, minimisant tout aussi systématiquement les inquiétudes républicaines par rapport au vote massif par correspondance, personne ne mentionne que l’autorisation, par la Cour suprême,  des dépouillements de votes plusieurs jours APRES le jour du scrutin dans nombre d’états, ne peut qu’augmenter les risques de contestations …

Que, nous rebattant les oreilles avec des écarts invraisemblables dans les sondages offiiciels (de 0 à 14 points !) …

Malgré les avertissements à nouveau du réalisateur Michael Moore …

Personne ne rappelle même l’existence d’instituts de sondage moins connus (Zogby, Trafalgar, Democracy Institute ou Rasmussen) mais qui notamment en 2016 s’étaient beaucoup moins trompés …

Et qui aujourd’hui ont des écarts bien plus raisonnables (mais qui prendra la peine d’expliquer l’effet Bradley, autrement dit, dissimulation d’intention de vote pour cause de pression sociale oblige, de la question des « électeurs cachés » de Trump ?) voire pour certains une prédiction de victoire du président américain …

Et enfin, sans parler le silence radio sur l’immense mensonge de Biden sur la fracturation hydraulique …

Que personne ne s’inquiète, sans compter l’éviction pour le moins inhabituelle de la politique étrangère, de l’incroyable biais, la plupart du temps, des questions du débat elles-mêmes …

Alors qu’il suffirait d’imaginer pour s’en convaincre …

Comme le fait brillamment l’avocat Dov Fischer dans l’American Spectator …

Ce que pourraient donner des questions comme les suivantes :

– Président Trump, avant l’arrivée de la terrible pandémie COVID de Chine, vous aviez créé l’économie la plus forte avec le taux de chômage le plus bas de l’histoire pour les Noirs, les Latinos et les Américains d’origine asiatique. Comment allez-vous nous ramener à la puissance économique que vous avez créée avant la peste?

– Président Trump, pouvez-vous nous dire comment diable vous êtes-vous arrivé à ce que deux pays arabo-musulmans signent des accords de paix avec Israël, le premier depuis un quart de siècle, et que d’autres arriveront bientôt?

– Président Trump, qu’avez-vous ressenti lorsque le gouverneur de New York Cuomo a salué votre leadership pour aider New York à lutter contre le coronavirus? Comment était-ce de déplacer ces navires-hôpitaux militaires à New York et en Californie, et comment avez-vous réussi à transformer notre économie en temps de paix en une base de guerre qui a fabriqué plus de respirateurs que nous n’en avions jamais besoin?

– Président Trump, les sondages montrent que votre taux d’approbation parmi les électeurs noirs et hispaniques est le plus élevé que tout président républicain a jamais vu de mémoire récente. Comment expliquez-vous ce revirement?

– Président Trump, puisque vous avez déjà rempli votre promesse de construire jusqu’à présent 600 km de mur frontalier, comment cela a-t-il eu un impact sur les efforts de contrôle de l’immigration?

– Vice-président Biden, avez-vous quelque chose à dire aux électeurs noirs pour vous excuser d’avoir qualifié leurs districts scolaires de « jungle », d’avoir travaillé avec l’ancien chef exalté du Ku Klux Klan, Robert Byrd, pour avoir dit que les mères noires ne donnent pas à leurs enfants un vocabulaire fonctionnel, et pour avoir dit aux Afro-Américains que s’ils ne votent pas comme vous le souhaitez, alors ils « ne sont pas noirs »?

– Vice-président Biden, le président a publié tous ses dossiers médicaux. Quand allez-vous divulguer au peuple américain l’état de l’évaluation médicale de vos fonctions cognitives et si vous êtes traité médicalement à cette fin? Et allez-vous divulguer au peuple américain tous les produits pharmaceutiques et autres médicaments que vous prenez ou qui vous ont été injectés au cours des douze derniers mois?

Trump’s Best Presidential Debate Ever

Biden is just lucky his answers didn’t have to go on for four minutes at a time.
Dov Fischer
The American Spectator
October 23, 2020

This was Donald Trump’s best presidential debate ever. His GOP primary debates in 2016 were of a different sort, for different purposes, with different targets. But this was a fabulous presidential debate for him. His best. It also was a pretty decent night for Joe Biden. Like so many others, I have no idea how sharply accurate or wildly inaccurate the polls are. Unlike people polled about anything else, the one polling topic that is dangerous for many is to say that one supports Trump for President. You might get suspended from your job. You might get fired. There may be a Twitter storm aimed at destroying you. You may get thrown off Facebook or Instagram or even from LinkedIn. Pollsters never before have conducted polls under Stalinist Russia circumstances, where people are terrified even to whisper “I back … Trump” or to wear a red MAGA hat or to affix a bumper sticker. Indeed, one of the best (or worst) ways to hurt someone you hate is to put a “Make America Great Again” bumper sticker on their car — and then to look at the smashed windshield and other vandalism a few hours later. So it is impossible to know what the polls mean. Like many, I believe Trump will do at least three percent, if not six or seven percent, better in the election than what the polls prognosticate. Beyond that, there also is absolutely no way to know how the massive shift to mail-in voting will play out, especially in states that mail unsolicited ballots to everyone. Regardless, I suspect that the Thursday night final debate moved the needle two or three points in Trump’s direction. Here is why:

For the first debate, the question was whether Joe Biden is now so senile that he would implode on stage. Would he call Blacks people of “the jungle” as he has before? Would he speak derisively of people from India as he has before? Would he forget why he was on the stage: Running for U.S. Senate? Trying out for a school play? Lost in space? To his credit, he made it through very coherently, partly because he was not allowed to speak for four minutes straight, his usual implosion point. That ostensible coherence alone boosted his numbers. The thing is, now that he established at the first debate that his senility has not left him unable to speak in two-minute sound-bites, his appearance at the second debate was not as impressive. We knew he could make it through two minutes. And he did have moments of brief faltering, but nothing to move the dial.

By contrast, the President came in with a different question mark lingering on his head: Can this guy engage in a debate with a gentlemanly etiquette? Is he even capable of controlling himself — ever — and especially when insulted? Besides being a so-called blustering blowhard who tries to mow down his opponent, does he have it in him, if push comes to shove, to debate masterfully, to pause, to contemplate, to abide by rules … and nevertheless to beat his opponent by mastering data, history, facts, and polemic — all in a charming tone? If so, can he maintain a focus on the big stuff and not get side-tracked on the petty? That was President Trump’s task, and he could not have done better.

Yes, he missed inserting one or two unplanned solid zingers he might have thrown in, but every debater misses something. I have been in debates and on TV panels for thirty years, and no matter how well I have prepared I always kick myself afterwards for missing something. So when Biden, towards the end, spoke of “growing up in Delaware,” I wanted Trump to ask: “But Joe, I thought you told the Pennsylvania union workers whose jobs you shipped overseas, and whose high-paying energy jobs you have promised to kill, that you grew up in Pennsylvania? So where was it, Joe — Delaware or Pennsylvania? — or are you still changing your life’s fables every day like the time you stole the biography of that Labour Party leader in England and were forced to withdraw from a presidential race because of your constant plagiarizing?”

But Trump was great. I loved that he asked Biden: “Who built the cages, Joe?” And when Biden would not respond, I love that Trump asked it again: “Who built the cages, Joe?” And a third time. And when Biden just would not respond, I loved that Trump asked the moderator to ask Biden who built the cages.

Of course she was not going to put Biden on the spot. Like all the “moderators,” she is a leftist Democrat. But Trump got the point in. As he did, again and again, reminding viewers that Biden had 47 years in Washington to perform the initiatives he now says he will undertake. And Trump likewise pounded in, again and again, that Biden was just recently Vice President for eight years. Just very recently. Indeed, not only did Biden fail to do any of the things he now promises to do, but Trump even brought home that he sought the presidency in 2016 out of disgust over Biden’s failures.

Trump got in that Biden failed on H1N1, a much less devastating illness. He got in that, on the issue of taxes, he may have paid $750 in the last phase of tax filing because he previously had paid tens of millions of dollars in advance tax payments. Americans can understand that; we just had not heard it before. As Biden went after Trump on Putin and on whether Trump profits from hotels in China, the door was opened for Trump to get into the Biden Family Criminal Enterprise: the son and siblings who all have profited in the many millions by leveraging their Biden Family Enterprise connections to extort millions implicitly from China and Russia and Ukraine. He had Biden lying all over the place — denying they had made millions from the wife of the Moscow mayor, from China, and even from Burisma. I listened carefully as Biden denied that he benefited corruptly from Burisma, but did not deny as explicitly that Hunter did. Trump even got Biden to lie about his oft-repeated pledge to kill hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

Biden was good and at times strong, too. He was prepared. He did not shoot whoppers. But Trump had more to prove this time, and Trump aced it. That is why this debate moves the needle in Trump’s direction.

Sure, the debate was tilted and imbalanced. A darned shame, but that is going to happen forever until the GOP standard bearer pays more attention in advance to getting the debates conducted fairly. So the questions primarily were aimed at asking Trump about things that paint him poorly, then asking Biden how he would fix it. And the topics — climate change? Y’know what? If you are so concerned about heat, how about California’s annual forest fires that result from crazy and irresponsible liberal Democrat forestry practices that ban removal of dead leaves, dry branches, and that ban lumber companies from clearing out wide swaths of trees — both to reduce fire spread and to allow sufficient width for emergency fire-fighting vehicles to reach hot points? If you are concerned about heat, what about Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots that see whole neighborhoods set ablaze? That was not on the agenda. Instead, the President was asked what he would tell Black parents who have “The Talk” with their children.

Y’know what? I am White. I am Jewish. When I was a boy, my Mother had “The Talk” with me, too: “Dov, you must always show respect to a police officer, even when they are wrong. Don’t ever talk back to them. Do what they tell you. If they are wrong, then we can tell it to the judge later. But don’t ever start up with a cop.” Thirty years later I had that talk with my kids, too: “If you ever get stopped by a cop in traffic, and he or she asks you for your auto registration or insurance, do not just open the glove compartment or reach into your jacket to get it. The cop may be crazy, maybe even a Jew-hater for all you know, and may think you are going for a gun. So first ask the cop: ‘Officer, may I reach into my pocket or glove compartment because that is where the papers are?’ And then let the cop tell you what to do.” If a cop tells you to stay seated in the car, stay seated. If a cop tells you to shut up, then shut up. (It never occurred to me to add, as should be added in the Age of Ferguson’s Michael Brown: “Don’t wrestle a cop for his gun. Don’t shoot a taser gun at a cop.”)

But this is the Left media, and Trump was asked. He answered exceptionally well. He has done more for Blacks than have most presidents other, maybe, than Lincoln. Could be. Prison reform. Criminal reform. Enterprise zones. Ten-year grants to Historically Black Universities and Colleges. Lowest Black unemployment numbers — ever. Compare that to Biden’s 47 years of incompetence and mediocrity. When Biden responded that he had been hampered by a Republican Congress, I wanted Trump to say: “You had complete Democrat control of the House, the Senate, and the White House for two whole years — how about that, Joe?” But Trump still retorted well: I got criminal reform done by negotiating with the other side; that’s how it’s done, Joe.

Finally, I was glad that, by my count, Trump repeated three times that he will guarantee covering pre-existing conditions in any health-insurance program that emerges. He always says that, just as he always says that he opposes racism, White Supremacists, and neo-Nazis. Indeed, it was refreshing to hear an entire debate go by without a single lie about — or even reference to — Charlottesville.

Sure, I would have loved some questions like these:

President Trump, before the terrible COVID pandemic arrived from China, you had created the strongest economy with the lowest unemployment numbers in history for Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. How will you return us to the economic powerhouse you brought about before the plague?

President Trump, can you share with us how in the heck you ever got two Arab Muslim countries to sign peace deals with Israel, the first in a quarter century, and are any more coming in soon?

President Trump, how did you feel when New York’s Governor Cuomo praised your leadership in helping New York fight the coronavirus? What was it like getting those military hospital ships to New York and California, and how did you ever manage to turn our peace-time economy into a war-time footing that got more ventilators manufactured than we ever needed?

President Trump, polls are showing that your approval numbers among Black and Hispanic voters are the highest that any Republican president has seen in recent memory. How do you explain that turn-around?

President Trump, since you already have fulfilled your pledge to build 400 miles of border wall so far, how has that impacted the efforts to control immigration?

Vice President Biden, do you have anything you would like to say to Black voters to apologize for calling their school districts a “jungle,” for working with former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd, for saying that Black mothers do not give their children a working vocabulary, and for telling African Americans that, if they do not vote as you want them to, then they “ain’t Black”?

Vice President Biden, the President has released all his medical records. When will you disclose to the American people the state of medical assessment of your cognitive functions and whether you are being treated medically for that purpose? And will you be disclosing to the American people all pharmaceuticals and other medications you take or that have been injected into you during the past twelve months?

In the end, Trump occasionally had to grab an extra moment or two, but he did it properly. His mike never had to be cut off. There were falsehoods that had to be corrected. Biden did it also, and that was fair.

Finally, I continue to resent how, every time the two candidates really get into a serious substantive disagreement, laying out two contrasting visions, the moderator always intercedes and says: “I have to get to new questions on a new topic.” Frankly, I suspect that most Americans do not give a rat’s patootie about what next topic the moderator wants to move to. They want to let the two guys talk, debate, and lay out their plans. One of these days…

Voir aussi:

Twitter et Facebook accusés de censurer un article gênant pour Biden, Trump monte au créneau
Depuis mercredi matin, la campagne est agitée par les révélations du New York Post qui publie des emails qu’aurait écrits Hunter Biden, le fils du candidat démocrate Joe Biden.
Julie Cloris
Le Parisien
15 octobre 2020

À chaque élection son affaire de piratage… Quatre ans après la publication de mails de Hillary Clinton, piratés par des hackers russes et diffusés par WikiLeaks – une bourde dont son adversaire Trump avait fait son miel -, c’est au tour de Joe Biden d’être au cœur d’une polémique, à deux semaines et demi de l’élection présidentielle. Des mails qu’aurait écrits son fils ont été publiés par un journal et ils relancent l’affaire ukrainienne, qui a été le cœur de la tentative d’impeachment contre le président Trump.

L’affaire ukrainienne

Pour comprendre, il faut remonter un peu le temps. Été 2019 : Donald Trump s’entretient avec son homologue ukrainien et il conditionne le versement d’une importante aide financière à l’Ukraine de Volodymyr Zelensky : Trump lui demande de trouver des éléments peu reluisants sur Hunter Biden, le fils de Joe Biden, que tous les pronostics annoncent comme son rival de la présidentielle de 2020. Hunter Biden, membre du conseil de surveillance du groupe gazier ukrainien Burisma pendant cinq ans, aurait permis au groupe d’échapper à des enquêtes pour corruption. Les leaders démocrates lancent une procédure de destitution contre le président Trump.

Devant le Congrès, le président est mis en accusation pour abus de pouvoir et entrave à la bonne marche du Congrès. Les auditions de diplomates se succèdent, elles révèlent le fonctionnement de Trump en matière d’affaires étrangères, s’appuyant sur un cercle ultra-restreint, dont son avocat personnel Rudy Giuliani. Début février, le Sénat, en votant contre la destitution, clôt l’affaire.

Le New York Post publie des messages du fils Biden

Mais l’histoire a donc rebondi ce mercredi à l’aube. Le New York Post publie des e-mails récupérés illégalement sur un ordinateur présenté comme celui d’Hunter Biden. Ces messages proviennent du disque dur d’un ordinateur portable saisi en décembre dernier par le FBI chez un réparateur. Il contient des messages, des photos et des vidéos personnelles de Hunter Biden. Un courriel prouverait, selon le quotidien conservateur, que le jeune homme a présenté à son père un responsable du groupe gazier Burisma. Dans un courriel daté du 17 avril 2015, Vadim Pojarskïi, un membre de la direction, remercie Hunter Biden d’une invitation à Washington lui « donnant l’occasion de rencontrer votre père et de passer du temps ensemble ».

« Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. » Vadim Pozharzkyi

L’ancien vice-président a toujours nié avoir discuté avec son fils de ses activités à l’étranger quand il était en poste. Mercredi, un porte-parole de Joe Biden a démenti les allégations du tabloïd, affirmant qu’aucune rencontre avec M. Pojarskïi n’avait eu lieu, selon son programme officiel de l’époque.

Le NY Post raconte aussi avoir découvert que le disque dur contient aussi une vidéo de 12 minutes dans laquelle on voit Hunter Biden fumer du crack tout en ayant une relation sexuelle, et d’autres documents explicites. Il explique aussi comment il a récupéré la copie du disque dur : selon le quotidien, le propriétaire du magasin de réparation d’ordinateurs qui a sollicité le FBI avait, avant de transmettre l’ordinateur, copié le disque dur et donné la copie à Robert Costello, l’avocat de l’ancien maire Rudy Giuliani. Steve Bannon, ancien conseiller sulfureux du président Trump, a parlé au Post de l’existence du disque dur fin septembre et Giuliani en a fourni une copie dimanche.

Twitter bloque le partage de l’article

L’article a été très lu et partagé sur les réseaux sociaux. Mais de nombreux internautes se sont retrouvés sous la menace d’une fermeture de leur compte Twitter. La responsable des relations presse de la Maison Blanche, Kayleigh McEnany, a ainsi été exclue mercredi de son compte Twitter personnel pour avoir partagé l’article. Pour déverrouiller le compte, elle devait supprimer son tweet renvoyant vers le Post. Le compte de Kayleigh McEnany est suivi par plus d’un million d’abonnés.

Après une journée de tempête médiatique, Twitter a expliqué dans la soirée avoir bloqué le partage de l’article parce qu’il contient des documents qui enfreignent deux de ses règles : ne pas publier de données personnelles (e-mails, numéros de téléphone) et ne pas publier d’éléments piratés. « Nous ne voulons pas encourager le piratage en autorisant la diffusion de documents obtenus illégalement », a expliqué l’entreprise via son compte dédié à la sécurité, rappelant que discuter de l’article n’était pas interdit, seulement le partage.

The images contained in the articles include personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules.https://t.co/plPa5SZ3we

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 14, 2020

L’un des dirigeants de Facebook, Andy Stone, a mis en doute la véracité des mails publiés et annoncé que les informations du quotidien allaient faire l’objet d’une vérification. En attendant ses résultats, leur visibilité serait réduite sur la plateforme.

Le New York Post et Trump crient à la censure

Dans un éditorial, le journal, l’un des quotidiens les plus lus dans le pays, dénonce ce jeudi la « censure de Facebook pour aider la campagne de Joe Biden ». « Censurez d’abord, poser les questions après : c’est une attitude scandaleuse pour l’une des plateformes les plus puissantes aux Etats-Unis », poursuit l’éditorial, accusant Facebook d’être devenu « une machine de propagande ».

Cette histoire sert le camp Trump qui peut, dans un même élan, dénoncer les « mensonges » de Joe Biden et la connivence des « médias mainstream » avec lui, deux arguments qui font mouche auprès des partisans de l’actuel président.

« Affreux que Twitter et Facebook aient retiré l’article sur les courriels […] liés à Sleepy Joe Biden et son fils, Hunter, dans le New York Post », s’est indigné Donald Trump sur son réseau favori, avant d’y consacrer de longues minutes lors d’un meeting dans l’Iowa.

So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!! https://t.co/g1RJFpIVUZ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 14, 2020

« Joe Biden doit immédiatement divulguer tous les courriels, réunions, appels téléphoniques, transcriptions et documents liés à sa participation aux affaires de sa famille et au trafic d’influence dans le monde entier – y compris en Chine », a-t-il martelé.

Joe Biden must immediately release all emails, meetings, phone calls, transcripts, and records related to his involvement in his family’s business dealings and influence peddling around the world—including in CHINA!pic.twitter.com/H8RSR1tljV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2020

« Notre communication sur nos actions concernant l’article du New York Post n’a pas été super. Et bloquer le partage de l’adresse Internet de l’article avec zéro contexte expliquant pourquoi : inacceptable », a reconnu Jack Dorsey, le fondateur de Twitter, mercredi soir, pour tenter de calmer l’incendie. Mais les flammes brûlent encore.

Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt

— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020

Voir également:

The Unapologetic Bias of the American Left
Today’s Left sees their efforts bending in a preordained historical arc that ends with ultimate progressive justice—and retributions.
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
October 18, 2020

Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal façades.

An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.

Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

Rejecting Objectivity

What ended liberal dissimulation about slanted reporting is a new pride, or rather an arrogance, about bias itself. The new liberated defiance is something like, “We are biased. Damn proud of it. And what exactly do you plan on doing about it?”

Jim Rutenberg infamously announced in January 2017 his profession’s proud defiance of now ossified norms in a new age in which reporters would “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.” Christiane Amanpour felt she was now released from the old chains of professed “objectivity.” “Much of the media was tying itself in knots trying to differentiate between balance, between objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, the truth,” she said just a few weeks after the 2016 election. “We cannot continue the old paradigm.” Michel Foucault could not have said it any better.

Univision’s Jorge Ramos more or less ridiculed classical journalistic training and embraced the liberation from the old bourgeois idea of “neutrality.”

Saying that reporters should abandon neutrality on certain issues and choose sides may seem at odds with everything that’s taught in journalism school. But there are times when the only way we journalists can fulfill our primary social responsibility—challenging those in power—is by leaving neutrality aside.

Or as the New York Times’ Jim Roberts in 2016 put the new “Walter Durantyism”: “Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To [sic] name a few.”

So said them all. In Orwellian terms, Roberts’ media has now come to adore the omnipresent progressive party line: “You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.”

When early on in the Trump Administration, the liberal Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the first 100 days all news coverage was on average 80 percent anti-Trump—93 percent negative in the case of CNN and NBC—no one seemed embarrassed.

Again, since May 2017, the bias has not merely increased but is now a badge of honor—whether it was the months of “walls or closing in” fake stories of imminent Mueller investigation indictments of the Trump family or the serial “Trump is finished” psychodramas about the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, and the 25th Amendment. No one in the media, to this day, after the Mueller implosion, the findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and the recent releases of Russian intercepts about the Clinton gambit to fabricate a “collusion” election narrative, has ever said “We were wrong”—because they really think they were “right” in pushing even untruth, given their hatred of Trump.

Cooking the Debates

We can see the new arrogance manifested in a variety of ways. In the recent debates and town halls, the moderators were as praised by the media as they were a turn off to many in the public who were disgusted by their arrogance in making no attempt to appear fair.

The most anti-Trump Fox News figure currently is Chris Wallace. Naturally, he was deemed a perfect moderator—not so much in the old style as the token conservative, but in the new liberal hope that more at Fox, too, have come to love Big Brother.

Wallace performed as expected, directing his gotcha questions to Trump and softballs to Biden. When pre-debate observers predicted that Wallace would return to his earlier 2016 debate questioning mantra of “white supremacy”—once more selectively editing the old saw of Trump’s Charlottesville remarks to eliminate his denunciation of white supremacists and the KKK—Wallace not only met but exceeded their expectations with his “When will you stop beating your wife?” hammering.

Susan Page, the vice-presidential debate moderator, also as predicted, adopted the same unbalanced tactic with Vice President Pence and Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). She is currently writing a likely favorable biography of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—apparently no more worrisome a fact than had a debate moderator from American Greatness announced that she was currently at work on a hagiography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

No wonder Trump said “No!” to a town-hall zoomed remote second debate—the medium in which Candy Crowley had hijacked the 2012 debate and joined with Barack Obama and her preselected questioners to advance her own agenda.

The now-canceled second debate moderator Steven Scully, of course, was a former Biden intern. He had tweeted a request to the unhinged, arch-Trump hater Anthony Scaramucci, seeking advice on how to best respond to Trump’s prescient accusations of his bias.

When that request was inadvertently publicly posted on Twitter rather than in an intended private chat, Scully did not just lie by claiming, after Carlos Danger, that he had been “hacked” and never had done such a thing. He also then kept silent in the expectation that the media class, in Joy Reid fashion, would swarm to his defense, prior to any formal investigation of his improbable charges of computer malfeasance. And they did so on spec, from Chris Wallace to C-Span and the federal debate commission itself. Scully is now seen by the Left not as a prevaricator, but as a tragic hero. The subtext of his fall is not that he was biased, but that he was oafishly so. Thereby in his legitimate activist and righteous hatred of Trump, Scully rendered his prejudice politically ineffective.

The two town halls proved that they could have been easily combined into a second debate. Both were live and conducted quite safely. But health concerns were not the criteria that got the town hall debate canceled. Rather, it was legitimate fear for Biden’s ability to appear again on a live stage with an aggressive Trump.

Both separate town halls followed predictable scripts without worry that they were embarrassing themselves. Former key Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos asked questions as if he were conducting an obsequious PBS profile. Savannah Guthrie, the spouse of a former Al Gore campaign traveling chief of staff, Democratic activist, and current liberal lobbyist, Michael Feldman, sought to showboat her left-wing bona fides (given that Guthrie had been criticized by the Left for the crime of appearing on stage with Trump). From the outset she assumed the role of the missing Biden, and heatedly debated Trump—but with the twist of knowing all the questions in advance and adjudicating how much time each would have in answering. All this was considered not just fine, but absolutely necessary by the Left–a fact known in advance by the careerist Guthrie.

Big Tech’s Censorship

In the old days of the early 21st century, Silicon Valley and other tech giants went through the motions that they were more interested in providing social media access, online buying, and internet services than massaging them all to indoctrinate the public. Even during the Obama years, they protested vehemently suggestions that they had given campaign cash inordinately to leftist candidates, or were beginning to massage internet search results or asymmetrically blocking conservative users.

Not now. Big Tech has offered no coherent defense of its censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, or even appeared to worry about the hypocrisy that they had gladly let Trump’s illegally obtained and published tax returns fly through the cyberworld, in the manner that Christopher Steele’s leaked and made-up hoax was freely promulgated online during the late critical days of the 2016 campaign.

Now Twitter, without much worry, just shrugs that it blocks even conservatives in government from posting. White House public health and coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas routinely is censored and shut down by Twitter for referencing scientific studies that have found in a cost-benefit analysis no arguments for lockdowns and blanket mask-wearing by the public.

Facebook couldn’t care less that it has been taken to task for its systematic bias in censoring social media content. Their collective attitude toward government insistence that they not censor oppositional views seems to be something like, “When we were a multibillion-dollar industry, we feared you. Now that we are a multitrillion-dollar business, we despise you.”

Recently Amazon’s many “platforms” temporarily banned access to documentarians Shelby and Eli Steeles’ new film “What Killed Michael Brown?”

Amazon apparently was protecting its high standards so that it can continue to sell and show serious documentaries like “Tickled” (From the show’s description: “The less you know about David Farrier’s descent into the strange world of ‘competitive endurance tickling’ before watching his 2016 documentary, the better. Suffice it to say that the answer to who’s making videos of young men tickling each other while restrained is simultaneously shocking and exactly what you think it is.”)

Yet Amazon considered exploration of what really happened at Ferguson not to meet such high “content quality expectations.” It defiantly added just three days before the documentary was to be shown on Amazon platforms that it would not “be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed.” So there!

One is left wondering whether a content-conscious Amazon will now pull the misogynist “Bang Gang” and “Night Call Nurse” from its online film catalog.

Tainted Popular Culture

The new defiance and the glee that comes from open bias have now saturated our culture, as if the liberated Left in today’s globalized market has no need of half the U.S. population—the supposed loser, unwoke half.

The NBA intensifies both its worship of the Chinese Communist Party and its utter disdain for American democratic culture. When revenues crash from eroding viewership and public criticism of collaboration with a government that institutionalized concentration camps, democracy destruction, and state-sponsored racism and murder, the woke players fire back in defense of China, with “So what?” certainty.

Liberal writers used to warn us of “dark money,” as in the anti-Trump Koch family donations to libertarian causes. Now there is no such thing as money being “dark.” The Left is proud that most of the Fortune 400’s top-20 multibillionaires are generous progressive-giving leftists, and that George Soros and Michael Bloomberg promise to infuse tens of millions of dollars not just to fortify leftist candidates, but to massage the rules of voting itself by reexamining voter eligibilities and methods of voting to enhance progressive agendas.

Pollsters used to highlight moderate liberal leads to jack up enthusiasm. But in the final few days of a race, they began offering more realistic numbers to ensure that if the vote went south, they would not go down with the ship.

Not now. At a time when the Zogby, Trafalgar, Democracy Institute, or Rasmussen polls show Trump’s favorability climbing, and the race tightening in the last three weeks, we are to believe YouGov, Reuters, or Politico that the president fights a 10-15 percent negative favorability gap. Perhaps. But one wonders why, in the context of 2016, we never saw a symmetrical split, half of the polls believing Trump would lose sizably in the Electoral College, and half winning by a substantial number.

Given the similarly asymmetrical record of the Senate in grilling and voting on Supreme Court picks, one would have thought after the Kavanaugh hearing, which cost Democrats a chance to take back the Senate, the Left would have tried to appear respectful and professional in questioning the brilliant, learned, personable, and charismatic Amy Coney Barrett. Such an expectation was not absurd, given that in just a few weeks they bragged that they would recapture the Senate in a way they had failed in 2016 and 2018.

Left unsaid was the tic of the Left to destroy not just the nomination chances of a Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh, but their very characters and careers—while assuming that an Elena Kagan or Sonya Sotomayor deserved overwhelming bipartisan support given they were progressive and enlightened.

Forget the Old Rules

But in the climate of the new defiance, the Left now believes that even the appearance of fairness and empirical objectivity is proof of weakness or lack of revolutionary bona fides and fervor. So they did their best to smear Barrett as a veritable Medieval Catholic monarchist, an unthinking clone of the late but still very much hated Antonin Scalia, a wacko cultist, a veritable murderer who would bring back-alley abortions and cancel health care to those in the throes of cancer.

Behind all this unabashed venom lies a reasonable strategy. There is a long history of conservative and Republican-appointed justices who eventually acquiesce, and, with hands over ears, cry that they cannot take such social ostracism any more. In the manner of Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Lewis Powell, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart, and Earl Warren, many Republican appointees eventually come to accept, and learn to love, the Left.

Add the examples of the dishonest, discredited but very much alive “1619 Project,” or the unapologetic admission of discrimination against Asian-American university applicants, and we can sense not so much a brave new defiance, but a more calculated insolence that the Left is at last soon going to dominate and alter politics as they have the major American cultural and social institutions. They see their efforts bending in a preordained historical arc that ends with ultimate progressive justice—and retributions. And in that context there is no longer any need to play by the rules of fairness, or even to say that such rules need to exist or indeed ever existed.

On November 3, we will see whether they are justifiably arrogant or suicidal.

Voir de même:

Trump Won the Debate—But Won Bigly the Post-Debate

Victor Davis Hanson

National review

October 23, 2020

There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum.

In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate.

He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil.

So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. But far more importantly, the back-and-forth repartee will not matter other than Trump went toe to toe, but in a tough, dignified manner and beat Biden on points.

Biden did not go blank — although he seemed to come close, often especially in the last 20 minutes. Had the debate gone another 30 minutes, his occasional lapses could have become chronic.

What instead counts most are the days after. The debate take-aways, the news clips, the post facto fact checks, and the soundbites to be used in ads over the next ten days all favor Trump. In this regard, Biden did poorly and will suffer continual bleeding in the swing states.

We will know that because by the weekend Biden will be out of his basement and trying to reboot his campaign and actually be forced to campaign.

So we are going to hear over the next week that Biden simply denied the factual evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop computer, the emails, the cell phones, and the testimonies from some of the relevant players as a concocted smear, a Russian disinformation attack. That denial is clearly a lie. It is absolutely unsupportable. And Biden will have to drop that false claim.

Biden will suffer for unequivocally denying what is now a demonstrable fact: there is evidence that his family ran a systematic shake-down operation to peddle inside access and influence for millions of foreign dollars in profits. In the debate, Biden seemed bewildered why anyone could ever conclude the obvious.

Biden lied about his “super-predator” quote. Ditto his flat-out untruth about his opposition to the Trump travel ban and the border cages, and his denial of prior opposition to fracking.

Usually Trump is accused more of exaggerations and fabrications; in this debate Biden will be far more fact checked.

Again, Biden’s sloppy and confused talk on the Green New Deal will not play well in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Voters there know that his abstractions of “transitioning” out of fossil fuels or banning fracking but just on federal lands is a euphemism for renewing the Obama-Biden war on pipelines and gas and oil production. So Biden now has gone full-circle: last year bragging about banning fracking and ending fossil fuels, then in the general campaign denying that, and now reaffirming it.

Biden also hurt himself with his base, by blaming Obama for not getting more crime reform for drug sentencing while accusing Bernie Sanders of pushing a socialist health plan and suggesting his own opposition to it had boosted him over his leftwing rivals in the primaries (perhaps true, but not wise to ensure the base turns out).

Americans know by now that treatments are improving on COVID-19, that death rates are declining, and that it is true that about 99.8 percent of the infected under 65 will survive the virus. Trump did well in pointing all that out.

So gloomy scenarios of 200,000 more dead by New Year’s, or of more national lockdowns, and no vaccination until mid-year 2021 are both unlikely and too doom-and-gloom a scenario for most Americans.

Voters will more likely agree with Trump that they are going to get through and “live” with the virus rather than Biden’s pessimistic forecast of “dying” with it. Trump was right to say that the lockdowns are cumulatively likely to have killed or injured more than the virus itself.

Biden’s immigration meandering will turn off voters by his siding with those who illegally cross the border, are caught, and then released and do not show up for trial (he lied about this too in saying that they almost all show up for their hearings).

Trump, then, after four years in the White House, nonetheless successfully returned to his role as the outsider cleanser of Biden’s Augean insider stables. His theme was can-do Americanism, Biden’s was timidity and caution and worries that there is little hope anywhere to be found, an attitude consistent with his own hibernation.

Final thoughts on the debate: The moderator Kristen Welker was far better than the prior debate and town-hall moderators, in avoiding the scripted stuff like the Charlottesville distortions and ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ questions. That said, she interrupted Trump far more than she did Biden, and focused more on Biden-friendly questions.

But most importantly, Trump kept his cool, was deferential to Welker, and was tough but not cruel to Biden.

The final question is not whether Trump won and will be seen to have won bigly by next week, but to what degree Biden’s suicidal talk of ending fossil fuels and denial of the Hunter Biden evidence that cannot be denied implode his campaign early next week or not until Election Day.

Voir de plus:

Fighting the New Commissars
Caroline Glick
10/23/2020

« The time for a reckoning with the social media giants has arrived, and not only in the United States. Earlier this week, Shibbolet Library, a new Israeli book publisher that specializes in conservative authors launched a sales campaign on Facebook. The company invested approximately a hundred thousand shekels ($34,000) on Facebook ads to promote its book sales. Then suddenly, its account was blocked. The campaign was wrecked. The firm’s investment was lost. Facebook, the corporate giant, replete with its anonymous work force and inscrutable algorithms scuppered the campaign with no prior warning or explanation. Probably no explanation was necessary. This wasn’t Shibbolet’s first rodeo. Last April, Shibbolet Library launched another sales campaign on Facebook, at a cost of tens of thousands of shekels in Facebook ads. Then too, the nameless, faceless overlords of Facebook stopped the campaign in its tracks by freezing the firm’s Facebook account. Shibbolet founder and CEO Rotem Sela recalls that he appealed the move seven times.

“It’s actually a bit Kafkaesque to say I appealed because I was never told what I was appealing. We were just selling books. We’re locked down with the coronavirus. All the book stores were closed. Facebook sales were and remain the most direct way for us to keep our business afloat and sell our books. What legitimate problem could Facebook possibly have with our efforts?”

After Sela’s seventh appeal, he was informed that Facebook had decided to permanently freeze Shibbolet’s account. Why? Why bother asking? No one was answering.

Given Facebook’s dominance of online markets, Shibbolet opened a new account, reluctantly forced to accept that it had lost all the client information stored on its previous, now permanently frozen account.

It was with the new account that Shibbolet launched its new campaign – only to be blocked once again.

Facebook’s action this week against Shibbolet of course did not happen in a vacuum. Facebook shut down Shibbolet at the height of the storm in the U.S. over draconian steps that Facebook and Twitter took to block their users’ access to the blockbuster stories the New York Post published last week detailing the contents of emails from Democratic presidential nominee former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s computer. The emails, many of which have since been authenticated and none of which have been denied by either Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign gave weight to previous allegations that during his tenure as vice president, Biden used his position to enrich his family members through shady deals with Ukrainian and Chinese business interests.

Twitter blocked the New York Post’s account and froze accounts of users who shared the Post’s articles both on their public feed and in private messages. Facebook shadow banned the articles, blocking its users from reading them.

Many observers, particularly in Israel were nonplussed by the shock that greeted Facebook’s and Twitter’s aggressive efforts to censor the New York Post articles. To them, it seemed like business as usual. Israeli right wingers and conservatives have long suffered from viewpoint discrimination whether by the traditional media, the legal fraternity or social media.

After a years’ long campaign of demonization by the Israeli left, in 2002, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the closure of Arutz 7 radio station. At the time, Arutz 7 was the only non-leftist broadcast outlet in Israel. In 2014, 43 members of Knesset voted in favor of the notorious “Israel Hayom Law.” The purpose of the law was to shut down this publication, the largest circulation daily in Israel. Israel Hayom was targeted due to its non-leftist editorial policy. To block passage of the law, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt compelled to dissolve the Knesset and call early elections.

Last year, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit took leftist censorship a giant leap forward. Without legal basis, he redefined bribery to include the proffering of positive coverage to right wing politicians and used this new and unfounded definition of bribery as a basis to indict Netanyahu for bribery.

As for social media giants, for years Israeli conservatives and right wing politicians and activist have shared how Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have limited their reach and their ability to earn money online. Writers, (including this one), and politicians have experienced shadow banning of their posts, demonetizing of their Facebook and YouTube accounts and removal of Google ads from their websites.

But jaded Israeli right wingers are wrong. There is something new – and ominous — happening. The New York Post isn’t a blogger. It is a major newspaper. And for over a week, its Twitter account, with more than a million followers has been shut down. Shibbolet doesn’t organize protests. It publishes books by authors like Peggy Noonan and James Q. Wilson. By targeting them for censorship and deplatforming, Facebook and Twitter made clear that they aren’t worried about public safety or health. They seek to squelch conservativism and all significant challenges to leftist power. And with their commanding dominance of information flow throughout the world, their naked determination to silence these voices manifests a clear and present danger to the freedom of societies.

Although it may go without saying, it bears noting just how disillusioning all of this is.

Since the advent of the internet, and certainly since it became the dominant means of both global and local communications, conservatives greeted its rise with glee and relief. This was nowhere truer than in Israel. Israeli rightists saw the internet and the social media platforms that came to dominate it as their salvation.

True, the broadcast media and the vast majority of print media in the country are dominated by the left. True, all efforts to privatize public broadcasting radio and television stations entirely dominated by the left have failed. But the internet, Israeli conservatives said, would level the playing field, finally.

With platforms like Facebook, everyone from Netanyahu to the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria was convinced that the left’s longstanding stranglehold on the media was finally over. Right wing and conservative Israelis could share their ideas and inform the public of their actions directly without the filter of the hostile media.

But the shocking censorship of the New York Post in America on the one hand, and a little conservative publishing house in Israel on the other are clear signs that the party is over. Regardless of who wins the U.S. presidential election next month, the Rubicon has been crossed. The cat is out of the bag. The mask is off. Unless they are reined in, Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and their subsidiaries will push forwards with more and more draconian limitations on the flow of information that deviates from their ideological and fiduciary interests.

When word got out this week that Facebook had squelched Shibbolet – again – Likud MKs Amit Halevy and Ariel Kelner published posts on Twitter threatening to take legislative action against Facebook. The threats worked. Shibbolet’s account was reinstated. In fact, the account Facebook “permanently” froze in April quickly thawed.

While this is a positive development, it isn’t a business model. Conservative businesses – and business owners — cannot build their commercial model around faith that lawmakers will defend them on Twitter or that the trillion-dollar conglomerates will long care what lawmakers say or do.

Recognizing the dimension of the threat, Wednesday Halevy initiated Knesset action on the issue. He submitted a bill titled, “Social Media Responsibility for Content Published on its Platforms.”

If passed into law, Halevy’s bill will divide social media companies into two categories: those that interfere in content posted on their platforms and those that do not. Currently, both types of companies enjoy immunity from lawsuits related to content posted or blocked on their platforms.

Halevy’s bill would maintain the exemption for social media companies that do not interfere with content on their platforms without a court order or a clear legal obligation to do so. On the other hand, social media companies that interfere with the content on their platforms would no longer enjoy immunity from legal actions by users harmed by the content on their platforms.

Halevy’s bill also requires companies that interfere with the content of its platforms to operate in a transparent way. They would be required to explain precisely what sort of content they censor. And they would be required to publish annual reports delineating precisely which posts they censored and why. Users would be notified before the companies take action against their content and be given an opportunity to defend themselves.

President Donald Trump and prominent Republican lawmakers have pledged to take similar action against Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants after the election. The Department of Justice filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google earlier this week.

These initiatives are critical. And they shouldn’t stand on their own. They should rather be the first shots of concerted campaign to limit the power of these gargantuan companies that control nearly all global information.

Freedom of expression and the free flow of information are the foundations of free societies. Rather than use their unprecedented power to secure both, social media giants are manipulating information and censoring speech with a power that no one could have fathomed just 20 years ago. Optimism and hope for their positive potential blinded many of us to their actual dangers. The time has come to take on this new and pernicious threat to the future of free nations and free people. »

Voir encore:

Censoring the Biden story: How social media becomes state media
Jonathan Turley
The Hill
10/17/20

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Chinese citizens watched President Xi Jinping deliver an important speech this week not far from Hong Kong. Well, not the whole speech: Xi apparently is ill, and every time he went into coughing spasms, China’s state media cut away so that he would be shown only in perfect health.

Xi’s coughs came to mind as Twitter and Facebook prevented Americans from being able to read the New York Post’s explosive allegations of influence-peddling by Hunter Biden. The articles cited material reportedly recovered from a laptop; it purportedly showed requests for Hunter Biden to use his influence on his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, as well as embarrassing photos of Hunter Biden.

Many of us have questioned the sketchy details of how the laptop reportedly was left by Hunter Biden with a nearly blind computer repairman and then revealed just weeks before the presidential election. There are ample reasons to question whether this material was the product of a foreign intelligence operation, which the FBI apparently is investigating.

Yet the funny thing about kompromat — a Russian term for compromising information — is that often it is true. Indeed, it is most damaging and most useful when it is true; otherwise, you deny the allegations and expose the lie. Hunter Biden has yet to deny these were his laptop, his emails, his images. If thousands of emails and images were fabricated, then serious crimes were committed. But if the emails and images are genuine, then the Bidens appear to have lied for years as a raw influence-peddling scheme worth millions stretched from China to Ukraine to Russia. Moreover, these countries likely have had the compromising information all along while the Bidens — and the media — were denying reports of illicit activities.

Either way, this was major news.

The response of Twitter and Facebook, however, was to shut it all down. Major media companies also imposed a virtual blackout on the allegations. It didn’t matter that thousands of emails were available for review or that the Bidens did not directly address the material. It was all declared to be fake news.

The tech companies’ actions are an outrageous example of open censorship and bias. It shows how private companies effectively can become state media working for one party. This, of course, was more serious than deleting coughs, but it was based on the same excuse of “protecting” the public from distractions or distortions. Indeed, it was the realization of political and academic calls that have been building for years.

Democratic leaders from Hillary Clinton to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) have long demanded such private censorship from social media companies, despite objections from some of us in the free speech community; Joe Biden himself demanded that those companies remove President Trump’s statements about voting fraud as fake news. Academics have lined up to support calls for censorship, too. Recently, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods called for Chinese-style internet censorship and declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

It turns out traditional notions of journalism and a free press are outdated, too, and China again appears to be the model for the future. Recently, Stanford communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser publicly denounced the notion of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters seeking “social justice.” In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He said reporters must embrace the role of “activists” and that it is “hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” Problem solved.

Such views make Twitter and Facebook’s censorship of the Post not simply justified but commendable — regardless of whether the alleged Biden material proves to be authentic. As Twitter buckled under criticism of its actions, it shifted its rationale from combating fake news to barring hacked or stolen information. (Putting aside that the information allegedly came from a laptop, not hacking, this rule would block the public from reviewing any story based on, say, whistleblowers revealing nonpublic information, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. Moreover, Twitter seemingly had no qualms about publishing thousands of stories based on the same type of information about the Trump family or campaign.) Twitter now says it will allow hacked information if not posted by the hacker.

Social media companies have long enjoyed protection, under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, from liability over what users post or share. The reason is that those companies are viewed as neutral platforms, a means for people to sign up to read the views or thoughts of other people. Under Section 230, a company such as Twitter was treated as merely providing the means, not the content. Yet for Twitter to tag tweets with warnings or block tweets altogether is akin to the telephone company cutting into a line to say it doesn’t like what two callers are discussing.

Facebook and Twitter have now made the case against themselves for stripping social media companies of immunity. That would be a huge loss not only to these companies but to free speech as well. We would lose the greatest single advance in free speech via an unregulated internet.

At the same time, we are seeing a rejection of journalistic objectivity in favor of activism. The New York Times apologized for publishing a column by a conservative U.S. senator on using national guardsmen to quell rioting — yet it later published a column by a Chinese official called “Beijing’s enforcer” who is crushing protests in Hong Kong. The media spent years publishing every wacky theory of alleged Trump-Russia collusion; thousands of articles detailed allegations from the Steele dossier, which has been not only discredited but also shown to be based on material from a known Russian agent.

When the Steele dossier was revealed, many of us agreed on the need to investigate because, even if it was the work of foreign intelligence, the underlying kompromat could be true. Today, in contrast, the media is not only dismissing the need to investigate the Biden emails, but ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos didn’t ask Biden about the allegations during a two-hour town hall event on Thursday.

This leaves us with a Zen-like question: If social media giants prevent the sharing of a scandal and the media refuses to cover it, did a scandal ever occur? After all, an allegation is a scandal only if it is damaging. No coverage, no damage, no scandal. Just deleted coughs lost in the ether of a controlled media and internet.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates online @JonathanTurley.

Voir aussi:

Google whistleblower says the company IS politically biased and says bosses’ claims that they are neutral are ‘ridiculous’ as he warns ‘algorithms don’t write themselves’

• Greg Coppola, who says he has worked for Google for five years, spoke to Project Veritas 
• Coppola has worked for Google since 2014 and he says it was fine until the 2016 presidential election when the site turned against Trump  
• He says he ‘just knows how algorithms are’ and said it was ‘ridiculous’ to suggest that Google is unbiased
• He says there are people whose jobs are dedicated to promoting certain sites 
• Coppola works on Google Assistant which he insists has no bias 
• He however wanted to speak out, he said, after listening to his company deny that it influences what people see 
• He said it had made his job less ‘fun’ because he does not ‘buy’ that it’s unbiased  

Jennifer Smith

The Daily mail

24 July 2019

A Google whistle blower has spoken out to expose the company’s ‘biased’ algorithms and insist that it is politically motivated despite bosses’ repeated claims that it is neutral.

Greg Coppola spoke to Project Veritas to share his views and said that while he ‘respects’ his manager, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, his comments on bias are inaccurate.

He claims to be based in New York and says he has worked for Google since 2014.

Coppola said that there were a ‘small number’ of people whose jobs were dedicated to promoting certain news sites over others and that the bias is left-leaning, favoring CNN and The New York Times.

‘A small number of people do work on making sure that certain new sites are promoted.  And in fact, I think it would only take a couple out of an organization of 100,000, you know, to make sure that the product is a certain way,’ he said.

Coppola added: ‘I think it’s, you know, ridiculous to say that there’s no bias.

‘I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is,’ he said.

‘I’m very concerned to see big tech and big media merge basically with a political party, with the Democrat party. I know how algorithms are.

‘They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do,’ he said.

‘I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true,’ he said.

‘We are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people…. it’s time to decide – do we run the tech or does the tech run us?

 ‘We are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people…. it’s time to decide – do we run the tech or does the tech run us?’

‘Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?’ he said.

Though he works on Google Assistant – which he insists truly does not have a bias – he said he ‘just knows’ how the algorithms work.

For the last 10 years, he said, the company operated on a fairly unbiased basis however that has changed recently.

‘I started in 2014. 2014 was an amazing time to be at Google. We didn’t talk about politics. No one talked about politics.

‘You know, it was just a chance to work with the best computer scientists in the world, the best facilities, the best computers and free food.

‘I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist…

‘And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.

‘I think we had a long period, of ten years, let’s say, where we had search and social media that didn’t have a political bias and we kind of got used to the idea that the top search results at Google is probably the answer.’

He said what was worrying, given the company’s history for being unbiased, was that now people had come to trust what it pushes to the top of its search results as the most likely to be true.

‘And Robert Epstein who testified before Congress last week, um, looked into it and showed that, you know, the vast majority of people think that if something is higher rated on Google Search than another story, that it would be more important and more correct.

‘And you know, we haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda.

‘I mean, it’s something that we’re only starting to talk about now,’ he said.

Coppola’s credentials could not be immediately verified by DailyMail.com.

He claims to have started working for Google as an engineer in 2014.

His LinkedIn page says he worked before that for Business Objects, in Vancouver.

He studied in the UK in London and Edinburgh, it says.

Google has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over its algorithms and how they select what people see.

CEO Sundar Pichai has been questioned by members of Congress over the company’s systems and insisted that despite what critics say, it does not promote left-leaning, Democratic news over that of more Conservative outlets or merely outlets it does not rate.

In December, he painstakingly testified before Congress that the algorithms were driven by the popularity of things on the internet and not engineers or employees’s personal beliefs.

The company is under a magnifying glass, along with other tech giants, and is facing an antitrust investigation which will examine whether they have too much power.

Voir également:

TIME Replaced Its Logo on the Cover For the First Time in Its Nearly 100-Year History. Here’s Why We Did It

Edward Felsenthal
October 22, 2020
Edward Felsenthal is the Editor-in-Chief and CEO of TIME.

I don’t often use this space to direct your attention to other publications, but I do recommend you check out an article Science published online on Sept. 24. Titled Singing in a Silent Spring, it adds a new entrant to the list of uplifting changes in the natural world that occurred when we humans went into temporary retreat at the start of the pandemic. It appears that in the relative hush of the San Francisco Bay Area this past April and May, the song of the white-crowned sparrow became quieter and sweeter than it had been before.

This has been a year of so much pain, hardship, chaos and loss. And yet as nations around the world begin to rebuild from the pandemic, it is clear that we also have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change our tune. Our issue this week, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, explores that opportunity, which the forum’s chairman, Klaus Schwab, has called “The Great Reset.” How can we seize this moment of disruption to push for a world that is healthier, more resilient, sustainable and just? What do all of us–individuals, businesses and governments–need to do to ensure that we don’t simply revert to what was before?

Election 2020: What Voters Do (and Don’t) Need to Worry About

Schwab, while acknowledging that it’s “hard to be optimistic about the prospect of a brighter global future,” offers some glimmers of hope in the form of companies that are redefining success to be about more than profits. Economist Mariana Mazzucato provides a road map for transforming our financial structures. Danish architect Bjarke Ingels describes his extraordinarily ambitious Masterplanet–a blueprint for a greener earth. Our correspondents around the globe speak with business leaders and policymakers about their more immediate plans–from Tokyo’s Governor Yuriko Koike, currently preparing for the rescheduled Olympic Games in 2021, to Citigroup’s newly appointed CEO, Jane Fraser, the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank. We’ve also included excerpts of conversations from our special TIME100 Talks hosted in October by Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, on how to build a better digital world. You can watch the full program at time.com/time100talks

Few events will shape the world to come more than the result of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. As Americans decide if it’s time to reach for a reset button of our own, this issue includes a special report on the closing days of the 2020 campaign. “On Nov. 3 (or, hopefully, soon after), we will finally get an answer to the question of what these past four discombobulating years have meant,” writes TIME’s national political correspondent Molly Ball. “It is a decision not about what policy proposals to pursue but about what reality we collectively decide to inhabit.”

To mark this historic moment, arguably as consequential a decision as any of us has ever made at the ballot box, we have for the first time in our nearly 100-year history replaced our logo on the cover of our U.S. edition with the imperative for all of us to exercise the right to vote. To help, we’ve provided readers with a guide on how to vote safely during this extraordinary year. The artwork on the cover is by Shepard Fairey, whose work includes two prior TIME covers. “Even though the subject in the portrait knows there are additional challenges to democracy during a pandemic,” Fairey says of the image, the person is determined to use their “voice and power by voting.”

We stand at a rare moment, one that will separate history into before and after for generations. It is the kind of moment in which readers across the country and around the world have always turned to TIME. We thank you for doing so now.

Voir enfin:

Démocratie
À dix jours de la présidentielle américaine, l’appel aux urnes du magazine “Time”
Courrier international
22/10/2020

Alors que Joe Biden est le favori des sondages dans la course à la Maison-Blanche, les commentateurs politiques rivalisent de prudence quatre ans après la victoire surprise de Donald Trump. Pour le Time, l’enjeu est d’abord de préserver la démocratie américaine en appelant au vote et à l’unité nationale.

Quatre lettres qui n’avaient pas bougé depuis près de cent ans. “Time”, ancré en haut de la couverture du prestigieux hebdomadaire américain depuis 1923, a été remplacé par “Vote”, quatre autres lettres qui se veulent un rempart à l’effondrement démocratique tant redouté aux États-Unis. Dessous, un immense portrait de femme, bas du visage masqué, regard inquiet, humblement tourné vers le passé.

Après une année “marquée par tant de souffrance, d’épreuves, de chaos et de deuils​”, le ton de la rédaction du Time est solennel. “Nous vivons un moment hors du commun, une période charnière qui définira l’avant et l’après pendant des générations”, écrit Edward Fesenthal, son rédacteur en chef.

Une femme issue de l’immigration soucieuse et digne

Pour illustrer ce numéro “historique”, le magazine a choisi l’artiste Shepard Fairey. Connu sous le nom d’Obey, il est notamment célèbre pour son affiche Hope, réalisée pour la campagne de Barack Obama en 2008 ou pour sa Marianne réalisée en hommage à la France après les attentats de 2015.

À lire aussi Street art. Une exposition en réalité virtuelle pour redécouvrir Shepard Fairey

Il propose cette fois un portrait de femme aux yeux légèrement bridés, un clin d’œil à l’électorat issu de l’immigration, déterminant dans l’élection en cours. Elle est vêtue d’un débardeur rouge étoilé et masquée d’un bandana bleu. Son visage soucieux mais digne sonne comme un appel à la mobilisation générale. “Même si le sujet du portrait sait que la démocratie traverse d’autres difficultés en temps de pandémie​”, elle est déterminée à utiliser “sa voix et son pouvoir en votant”, explique l’artiste.

La République incarnée par son expression démocratique

Après plusieurs mois de pandémie, la rédaction du Time présente le moment comme “une occasion de changer de cap comme cela n’arrive qu’une fois tous les vingt ans” et de faire société. Dans une tribune, le journaliste politique Molly Ball espère que “le 3 novembre (ou peu après, espérons-le), nous saurons enfin ce que signifiaient ces quatre années incompréhensibles […].

La décision porte non pas sur des orientations politiques, mais sur la réalité que nous voulons collectivement habiter.​”

Désireux de se montrer rassembleur en cette période de crise sanitaire et politique, le Time évacue le nom des candidats et des partis pour n’incarner la république qu’à travers son expression démocratique. “Vote” donc, tout simplement.

Voir par ailleurs:

An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star, and The Times
A top editor is now reviewing Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on terrorism, which turned distant conflicts into accessible stories but drew criticism from colleagues.
Ben Smith
The New York Times
Oct. 11, 2020

Derek Henry Flood wasn’t looking for work in March of 2018, when he sent a direct message to a New York Times reporter he admired, Rukmini Callimachi, to congratulate her on the announcement of her big new podcast about the terror group known as the Islamic State.

By that time, major American news outlets had mostly stopped hiring freelancers like Mr. Flood in Syria, scared off by a wave of kidnappings and murders.

But when Mr. Flood mentioned that he was in the northern city of Manbij, Ms. Callimachi wrote back urgently, and quickly hired him for a curious assignment. She sent him to the local market to ask about a Canadian Islamic State fighter called Abu Huzayfah.

The assignment, Mr. Flood recalled thinking, was both hopeless and quite strange in its specificity, since the extremist group had been forced out of Manbij two years earlier. But he was getting $250 a day, and so he gamely roamed the bazaar, reporting on all he saw and heard. Ms. Callimachi was singularly focused. “She only wanted things that very narrowly supported this kid in Canada’s wild stories,” he told me in a phone interview.

Mr. Flood didn’t know it at the time, but he was part of a frantic effort at The New York Times to salvage the high-profile project the paper had just announced. Days earlier, producers had sent draft scripts of the series, called Caliphate, to the international editor, Michael Slackman, for his input. But Mr. Slackman instead called the podcast team into the office of another top Times editor, Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor who often signs off on investigative projects. The editors warned that the whole story seemed to depend on the credibility of a single character, the Canadian, whose vivid stories of executing men while warm blood “sprayed everywhere” were as lurid as they were uncorroborated. (This scene and others were described to me in interviews with more than two dozen people at The Times, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive internal politics.)

The Times was looking for one thing: evidence that the Canadian’s story was true. In Manbij, Mr. Flood wandered the marketplace until a gold merchant warned him that his questions were attracting dangerous attention, prompting him to quickly board a bus out of town. Across the Middle East, other Times reporters were also asked to find confirmation of the source’s ties to ISIS, and communicated in WhatsApp channels with names like “Brilliant Seekers” and “New emir search.” But instead of finding Abu Huzayfah’s emir, they found that ISIS defectors had never heard of him.

In New York, Malachy Browne, a senior producer of visual investigations at The Times, managed to confirm that an image from Abu Huzayfah’s phone had been taken in Syria — but not that he had traveled there.

Still more Times reporters in Washington tried to find confirmation. And one of them, Eric Schmitt, pulled a thread that appeared to save the project: “What two different officials in the U.S. government at different agencies have told me is that this individual, this Canadian, was a member of ISIS,” he says on the podcast. “They believe that he joined ISIS in Syria.” But Mr. Schmitt and his colleagues, Times journalists told me, never determined why those government officials viewed him as part of ISIS, or if indeed they had any evidence of his ISIS connections other than the professed terrorist’s own social media pronouncements.

A month later, The Times’s audio team moved forward. The first episode of Caliphate appeared on April 19, 2018, marking a major step toward The Times’s realization of its multimedia ambitions. It was promoted with a glossy marketing campaign that featured an arresting image, with the rubble of Mosul on one side and Ms. Callimachi’s face on the other. The series was 10 parts in all, including a new, sixth episode released on May 24 of that year detailing doubts about Abu Huzayfah’s story and The Times’s efforts to confirm it. The presentation carried an obvious, if implicit assumption: the central character of the narrative wasn’t making the whole story up.

That assumption appeared to blow up a couple of weeks ago, on Sept. 25, when the Canadian police announced that they had arrested the man who called himself Abu Huzayfah, whose real name is Shehroze Chaudhry, under the country’s hoax law. The details of the Canadian investigation aren’t yet public. But the recriminations were swift among those who worked with Ms. Callimachi at The Times in the Middle East.

“Maybe the solution is to change the podcast name to #hoax?” tweeted Margaret Coker, who left as The Times’s Iraq bureau chief in 2018 after a bitter dispute with Ms. Callimachi and now runs an investigative journalism start-up in Georgia.

The Times has assigned a top editor, Dean Murphy, who heads the investigations reporting group, to review the reporting and editing process behind Caliphate and some of Ms. Callimachi’s other stories, and has also assigned an investigative correspondent with deep experience in national security reporting, Mark Mazzetti, to determine whether Mr. Chaudhry ever set foot in Syria and other questions opened by the arrest in Canada.

The crisis now surrounding the podcast is as much about The Times as it is about Ms. Callimachi. She is, in many ways, the new model of a New York Times reporter. She combines the old school bravado of the parachuting, big foot reporter of the past, with a more modern savvy for surfing Twitter’s narrative waves and spotting the sorts of stories that will explode on the internet. She embraced audio as it became a key new business for the paper, and linked her identity and her own story of fleeing Romania as a child to her work. And she told the story of ISIS through the eyes of its members.

Ms. Callimachi’s approach and her stories won her the support of some of the most powerful figures at The Times: early on, from Joe Kahn, who was foreign editor when Ms. Callimachi arrived and is now managing editor and viewed internally as the likely successor to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; and later, an assistant managing editor, Sam Dolnick, who oversees the paper’s successful audio team and is a member of the family that controls The Times.

She was seen as a star — a standing that helped her survive a series of questions raised over the last six years by colleagues in the Middle East, including the bureau chiefs in Beirut, Anne Barnard, and Iraq, Ms. Coker, as well as the Syrian journalist who interpreted for her on a particularly contentious story about American hostages in 2014, Karam Shoumali. And it helped her weather criticism of specific stories from Arabic-speaking academics and other journalists. Many of those arguments have been re-examined in recent days in The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. C.J. Chivers, an experienced war correspondent, clashed particularly bitterly with Mr. Kahn over Ms. Callimachi’s work, objecting to her approach to reporting on Western hostages taken by Islamic militants. Mr. Chivers warned editors of what he saw as her sensationalism and inaccuracy, and told Mr. Slackman, three Times people said, that turning a blind eye to problems with her work would “burn this place down.”

Ms. Callimachi’s approach to storytelling aligned with a more profound shift underway at The Times. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services. And Ms. Callimachi’s success has been due, in part, to her ability to turn distant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East into irresistibly accessible stories. She was hired in 2014 from The Associated Press after she obtained internal Al Qaeda documents in Mali and shaped them into a darkly funny account of a penny-pinching terrorist bureaucracy.

But the terror beat lends itself particularly well to the seductions of narrative journalism. Reporters looking for a terrifying yarn will find terrorist sources eager to help terrify. And journalists often find themselves relying on murderous and untrustworthy sources in situations where the facts are ambiguous. If you get something wrong, you probably won’t get a call from the ISIS press office seeking a correction.

“If you scrutinized anyone’s record on reporting at Syria, everyone made grave, grave errors,” said Theo Padnos, a freelance journalist held hostage for two years and now working on a book, who said that The Times’s coverage of his cellmate’s escape alerted his captors to his complicity in it. “Rukmini is on the hot seat at the moment, but the sins were so general.”

Terrorism coverage can also play easily into popular American hostility toward Muslims. Ms. Callimachi at times depicted terrorist supersoldiers, rather than the alienated and dangerous young men common in many cultures. That hype shows up in details like The Times’s description of the Charlie Hebdo shooters acting with “military precision.” By contrast, The Washington Post’s story suggested that the killers were, in fact, untrained, and noted a video showing them “cross each other’s paths as they advance up the street — a type of movement that professional military personnel are trained to avoid.” On Twitter, where she has nearly 400,000 followers, Ms. Callimachi speculated on possible ISIS involvement in high-profile attacks, including the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, which has not been attributed to the group. At one moment in the Caliphate podcast, Ms. Callimachi hears the doorbell ring at home and panics that ISIS has come for her, an effective dramatic flourish but not something American suburbanites had any reason to fear.

Ms. Callimachi told me in an email that she’d received warnings from the F.B.I. of credible threats against her, and that in any event, that moment in the podcast “is not about ISIS or its presence in the suburbs, but about how deeply they had seeped into my mind.”

Her work had impact at the highest levels. A former Trump aide, Sebastian Gorka, a leading voice for the White House’s early anti-Muslim immigration policies, quoted Ms. Callimachi’s work to reporters to predict a wave of ISIS attacks in the United States. Two Canadian national security experts wrote in Slate that the podcast “profoundly influenced the policy debate” and pushed Canada to leave the wives and children of ISIS fighters in Kurdish refugee camps.

The haziness of the terrorism beat also raises the question of why The Times chose to pull this particular tale out of the chaotic canvas of Syria’s collapse.

“The narrative her work perpetuates sensationalizes violence committed by Arabs or Muslims by focusing almost exclusively on — even pathologizing — their culture and religion,” said Alia Malek, the director of international reporting at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the author of a book about Syria. That narrative, she said, often ignores individuals’ motives and a geopolitical context that includes decades of American policy. “That might make for much more uncomfortable listening, but definitely more worthwhile.”

Ms. Callimachi told me that she has been focused on “just how ordinary ISIS members are” and that her work “has always made a hard distinction between the faith practiced by over a billion people and the ideology of extremism.”

Mr. Baquet declined to comment on the specifics of Ms. Callimachi’s reporting or the internal complaints about it, but he defended the sweep of her work on ISIS.

“I don’t think there’s any question that ISIS was a major important player in terrorism,” he said, “and if you look at all of The Times’s reporting over many years, I think it’s a mix of reporting that helps you understand what gives rise to this.” (Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn, I should note here, are my boss’s boss’s boss and my boss’s boss, respectively, and my writing about The Times while on its payroll brings with it all sorts of potential conflicts of interest and is generally a bit of a nightmare.)

While some of her colleagues in the Middle East and Washington found Ms. Callimachi’s approach to ISIS coverage overzealous, others admired her relentless work ethic.

“Is she aggressive? Yes, and so are the best reporters,” said Adam Goldman, who covers the F.B.I. for The Times and has argued in favor of the kind of reporting on hostages that alienated Ms. Callimachi from other colleagues like Mr. Chivers. “None of us are infallible.”

What is clear is that The Times should have been alert to the possibility that, in its signature audio documentary, it was listening too hard for the story it wanted to hear — “rooting for the story,” as The Post’s Erik Wemple put it on Friday. And while Mr. Baquet emphasized in an interview last week that the internal review would examine whether The Times wasn’t keeping to its standards in the audio department, the troubling patterns surrounding Ms. Callimachi’s reporting were clear before Caliphate.

Take, for example, one story from 2014.

The article, which led the front page on Dec. 28, describes a Syrian captive of ISIS, who was going by the name of Louai Abo Aljoud, who “made eye contact with the American hostages being held by the Islamic State militant group” at a prison at an abandoned potato chip factory in Aleppo and tried to report them to an indifferent American government.

“I thought that I had truly important information that could be used to save these people,” Ms. Callimachi quoted him as saying. “But I was deeply disappointed.”

The story is told with verve and confidence. As a reader, you feel as if you were there.

But elements of the story were shaky: By the time, in Mr. Abo Aljoud’s telling, that he was trying to alert the U.S. government that he had seen the hostages, the Islamic State no longer controlled the area the prison was said to be in. Mr. Abo Aljoud had told The Wall Street Journal the same story, and The Journal passed on it because journalists there didn’t believe him, two of those involved told me. And the Syrian journalist who assisted Ms. Callimachi on the story and interpreted the interview, Mr. Shoumali, told me that he “warned” her not to trust Mr. Abo Aljoud “before, during and after” the interview, in vain. (Ms. Callimachi said that she didn’t recall the warnings before publication, and noted that they don’t appear in correspondence between her and Mr. Shoumali before publication.)

Mr. Shoumali said he came away from the experience alarmed by her methods.

“I worked for so many reporters, and we were seeking facts. With Rukmini, it felt like the story was pre-reported in her head and she was looking for someone to tell her what she already believed, what she thought would be a great story,” said Mr. Shoumali, who was a reporter for The Times from 2012 to 2019 and had a freelance byline this August. He spoke to me by phone from Berlin, where he is now working on a project for a think tank.

Eight days after the story was published, Mr. Shoumali wrote to Ms. Callimachi and other Times reporters, in an email exchange I obtained, saying that “Syrian contacts are raising more and more questions about the credibility of one of our sources” and that Mr. Abo Aljoud had changed details of the story in a conversation the two men had after the story was published.

Ms. Callimachi emailed back that details of the prison scene were “confirmed independently by European hostages held in the same location or else by the State Department” — a response that seems puzzling, given that the story presented Mr. Abo Aljoud’s observations as his eyewitness account.

The Times was worried enough about that 2014 story to send a different reporter, Tim Arango, back to southern Turkey soon after it was published to re-interview Mr. Abo Aljoud, who gamely repeated his story to him and Mr. Shoumali. I tried again in early October. Like Ms. Callimachi, I don’t speak Arabic and hired another Syrian journalist to ask Mr. Abo Aljoud my questions. In that interview, he told a version of the story that appeared in The Times, but with elements that muddied the clean narrative. He said he had only seen one hostage, not the three The Times suggests. And he said he didn’t realize until after his release that he’d seen any of them — contrary to the impression left by The Times article.

Ms. Callimachi said in an email that she wished that the story had been clearer about the “limitations” of reporting on terrorists. “Looking back, I wish I had added more attribution so that readers could know the steps I took to corroborate details of his account,” she said.

Mr. Kahn, the International editor at the time, continues to stand by the story.

“Questions that were raised about a source in a story Rukmini wrote about American hostages in Syria were thoroughly examined at the time by reporters and editors on the International desk and by The Times’s public editor, and the results of those reviews were published,” he said in an email. “I am not aware of new information that casts doubt on the way it was handled.”

Those questions aside, the article arguably had an impact in Washington, pushing the United States government to reconsider its ban on paying ransom. But the piece itself now rests under an uncomfortable cloud of doubt. It remains on The Times website, with no acknowledgment of the questions surrounding the opening anecdote. The only correction says that the story, when first published, did not make clear that Mr. Abo Aljoud had used a pseudonym.

Last month, that same cloud of doubt descended on Caliphate. And Ms. Callimachi now faces intense criticism from inside The Times and out — for her style of reporting, for the cinematic narratives in her writing and for The Times’s place in larger arguments about portrayals of terrorism.

But while some of the coverage has portrayed her as a kind of rogue actor at The Times, my reporting suggests that she was delivering what the senior-most leaders of the news organization asked for, with their support.

Mousab Alhamadee contributed reporting.

Voir aussi:

Revue de presse internationale

Camille Magnard

France Culture

13.10.2020

La reporter Rukmini Callimachi, spécialiste de Daech, voit sa déontologie journalistique contestée. Son employeur, le New York Times, lance une enquête interne. Au Nigeria, la mobilisation contre les violences policières s’envenime encore. Au Pérou, le Machu Picchu rouvre pour un seul touriste

Aux Etats-Unis, le New York Times confesse des doutes sur le travail d’une de ses journalistes les plus réputées.  

C’est un article d’un format très rare, que publiait hier le grand quotidien new-yorkais, puisqu’il émet des doutes sur certains articles et podcasts de Rukmini Callimachi, une pointure dans le journalisme international cette dernière décennie, particulièrement réputée pour sa couverture du groupe Etat islamique en Syrie et en Irak.

« Il y a bien un problème Callimachi, et c’est un problème qui met en cause directement le New York Times« , reconnaît donc son collègue Ben Smith qui signe l’article d’hier dont on sent bien que chaque mot a été savamment pesé. Rukmini Callimachi est contestée suite à l’arrestation au Canada d’un homme, un Canadien, qui prétendait avoir été combattant de Daech en Syrie et dont le témoignage avait alimenté le podcast de la journaliste du Times diffusé depuis deux ans, 10 épisodes de reportage audio intitulé « Califat » centrés justement sur des récits d’anciens djihadistes.

Sauf que la justice canadienne a de bonnes raisons de croire que l’homme qu’elle a arrêté est un mythomane, qui n’a jamais mis les pieds au Moyen-Orient ni combattu pour le groupe Etat islamique. A partir de là, la question se pose : « Comment une journaliste censée avoir documenté d’aussi près l’horreur de Daech, et connaître son idéologie, son fonctionnement dans les moindres détails, a-t-elle pu se faire piéger par un faux terroriste ? » Cette question est formulée par Jacob Silvermann, dans The New Republic. Loin de conclure que Callimachi a sciemment fait confiance au Canadien malgré les zones d’ombres assez évidentes que présentait son témoignage, il s’interroge sur son rapport à ses sources et à ces histoires, vivantes, humaines, cette quête des récits incarnés au cœur du chaos qui a fait la signature et la gloire de la journaliste ces sept dernières années.

Depuis l’arrestation du soi-disant djihadiste au Canada, le New York Times a lancé une enquête interne confiée à l’un de ses plus prestigieux enquêteurs qui va donc disséquer tout le travail de Rukimini Callimachi pour déterminer si elle a pu manquer de prudence et de déontologie sur d’autres reportages. Et si aucune conclusion n’est encore tirée de cette enquête, le quotidien peut faire autrement que d’entendre ce qu’il avait essayé d’ignorer jusque-là, les critiques émises depuis des années déjà par d’autres journalistes spécialistes du Moyen-Orient sur les méthodes de sa reporter-vedette : critiques sur sa quête effrénée et parfois « agressive » de l’histoire la plus édifiante ; critiques pour avoir sorti discrètement d’Irak, en 2018, des tonnes de documents récupérés dans les archives de Daech ; doutes sur le fait qu’elle ne maîtrisait pas la langue arabe ; sur l’hyper-personnalisation de ses reportages qui la mettaient très souvent en scène pour accentuer l’aspect sensationnel des sujets. Autant d’alertes qui n’avaient pas réussi à égratigner à l’époque l’aura de Rukmini Callimachi, mais qui trouvent, forcément, un écho à présent.

La réaction du New York Times, qui ne cache rien aujourd’hui de cette crise, nous montre à quel point le journal prend la chose au sérieux et accepte de se remettre en question et notamment sur les travers de ce « journalisme narratif » qui s’impose depuis quelques années mais qui pose de vrais défis en terme de vérification des sources, sur des terrains de conflits complexes et dangereux, face à des personnages et des organisations aux motivations troubles, et connaissant l’habileté perverse avec laquelle Daech détourne nos codes et nos fantasmes journalistiques occidentaux.

« Le travail de Rukmini Callimachi perpétue un récit qui sensationnalise la violence commise par des Arabes et des Musulmans, en mettant l’accent presque exclusivement, et maladivement, sur les dimensions religieuses et culturelles de cette violence » : c’est la responsable d’une prestigieuse école de journalisme new-yorkaise qui formule ainsi les reproches fait à la journaliste-star… laquelle, reconnaît enfin le New York Times, a « toujours travaillé avec l’approbation totale de son employeur« . Voilà au moins un quotidien qui n’élude pas (mais certes, a posteriori) sa part de responsabilité dans la tourmente.

COMPLEMENT:

Le « New York Times » et l’affabulateur qui se disait jihadiste
Le quotidien new-yorkais, pourtant référence en matière de fact-checking, admet avoir accrédité les affabulations d’un Canadien qui n’aurait jamais mis les pieds au Moyen-Orient.

Jean-Pierre Filiu

Un si proche orient

25 octobre 2020

Octobre 2020 restera dans l’histoire du « New York Times », fondé 169 ans plus tôt, comme l’un des mois les plus éprouvants pour la crédibilité de cette institution de la presse américaine. Shehroze Chaudhry, un Canadien de 25 ans qui prétendait avoir combattu dans les rangs de Daech en Syrie sous le surnom d’Abou Huzayfa, a en effet été arrêté par la police fédérale, non loin de Toronto. Mis en examen pour « incitation à craindre des activités terroristes » sur la base d’informations fabriquées (hoax), il risque jusqu’à cinq ans de prison pour ses affabulations. Or Abou Huzayfa a été, avec ses récits glaçants de décapitation et ses témoignages « de l’intérieur » de Daech, une des sources principales de reportages du « New York Times » sur l’organisation alors dirigée par Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi.

UNE DERIVE SENSATIONNALISTE

Rukmini Callimachi est depuis 2014 la spécialiste des enquêtes du « New York Times » sur la mouvance jihadiste. Journaliste expérimentée, elle a débuté sa carrière comme freelance en Inde en 2001 et a, entre autres, dirigé le bureau de l’Associated Press pour l’Afrique occidentale (son travail sur des documents internes à Al-Qaida au Maghreb islamique (AQMI), découverts à Tombouctou en 2013, lui avait alors valu une nomination au prix Pulitzer).  En 2016, elle avait été la première à publier une investigation approfondie sur l’Emni, le service de « sécurité » de Daech, chargé entre autres d’organiser des attentats sur le continent européen. Deux ans plus tard, le podcast « Caliphate » de Callimachi, diffusé sur dix épisodes, est une des émissions-phares censées marquer le tournant du « New York Times » vers de nouveaux supports multimédias.

Shehroze Chaudhry, alias Abou Huzayfa, est l’un des témoins les plus retentissants de cette série sur les horreurs perpétrées par Daech. Il est vrai qu’il fournit complaisamment tous les détails qui permettent à l’auditeur américain de mieux se figurer une telle barbarie. L’importance accordée à cette seule source avait conduit la direction du « New York Times », peu avant le lancement de « Caliphate », à mobiliser des ressources conséquentes pour s’assurer de la fiabilité d’Abou Huzayfa. C’est ainsi que le journaliste indépendant Derek Henry Flood fut envoyé dans la ville de Manbij, pourtant libérée de l’emprise jihadiste par les forces kurdes dès 2016, et qu’il y prit la photo ci-dessus. Ni Flood, ni les autres journalistes sollicités ne purent confirmer l’engagement effectif de Chaudhry dans Daech, ce qui n’empêcha pas la série « Caliphate » d’être diffusée et de recueillir un grand succès.

L’AUTO-CRITIQUE DU « NEW YORK TIMES »

Deux ans et demi après le lancement de cette série, la mise en examen de Chaudhry a conduit la direction du « New York Times » à diligenter une enquête interne, toujours en cours. Elle a par ailleurs publié un sévère exercice d’introspection, confié à Ben Smith, un des spécialistes média du quotidien. Smith ne cache pas que « toutes sortes de conflits d’intérêt » sont ouverts par une telle investigation sur son propre journal. Il révèle que des vétérans du terrain moyen-oriental au « New York Times », dont les correspondantes à Beyrouth et à Bagdad, avaient alerté leur hiérarchie sur les méthodes de Callimachi. Un journaliste syrien qui fut son interprète en arabe pour un reportage sur des otages de Daech témoigne: « elle recherchait quelqu’un pour lui dire ce qu’elle croyait déjà ». Forte de ses 400.000 abonnés sur Twitter, Callimachi laisse ainsi planer le doute sur la responsabilité de Daech dans la tuerie de Las Vegas, en 2017, alors que cette revendication est à l’évidence mensongère.

Certes, l’officier canadien chargé du suivi de la « déradicalisation » de Chaudhry avoue avoir été, lui aussi, dupe de son imposture. L’immersion du pseudo-repenti dans les réseaux sociaux a apparemment entraîné un tel dédoublement de sa personnalité que le mythe d’Abou Huzayfa en est sorti conforté. Les macabres affabulations de Chaudhry ont même pesé dans le débat public au Canada, où le gouvernement a décidé de refuser tout rapatriement de ses ressortissants liés à Daech au Moyen-Orient, y compris les femmes et les enfants.  Mais c’est bel et bien le « New York Times » qui a permis à Abou Huzayfa d’acquérir une aussi formidable aura médiatique. Et Ben Smith conclut son enquête en refusant de tenir Callimachi pour seule responsable d’avoir « produit (deliver) ce que les plus hauts dirigeants (du « New York Times ») demandaient, avec leur soutien ».

Qu’une telle polémique éclate dans la dernière phase d’une campagne présidentielle où Donald Trump et ses partisans ont banalisé les « fake news » n’en est que plus troublant.

Voir enfin:

Trump vs Biden, Who Will Win the Election? — More than Meets the Eye

Jim Rickards

The Daily reckoning

September 17, 2020

How can I make a ‘Trump wins’ forecast in the face of overwhelming polling, betting, and favourability data that shows Biden will win? There are two parts to the answer, both explained in more detail below.

The first part is that there’s a lot more than meets the eye in Biden’s polling data. The polls are badly skewed for several reasons. Once adjustments are made for oversampling Democrats and polling ‘all adults’ instead of ‘likely voters’, the polls are actually much closer than the published results.

The second part is that polls are a snapshot. We watch the movie. Where we are today does not necessarily bear much resemblance to where things will end up in November.

To illustrate that point, just compare late August’s 2020 polling data to where things stood at the same time in 2016. In late August 2016, the Democrats led the battleground state polls by 5.3 points. By the end of August, that lead is 4.2 points.

The Democrats were ahead in both cases, but the lead was actually bigger in 2016 than it is today. Of course, Trump won in 2016 despite that lead in August. Trump is in better shape today than he was at this stage of the race in 2016.

The same is true in the favourability ratings. In late August 2016, the Democrats led in favourability by 19.2 points. Today, that lead is 13 points. The Democrats were ahead in 2016 and are ahead in 2020, but the lead is narrower today. If Trump could overcome a 19.2-point lead then he can overcome a 13-point lead also.

You can’t win California twice

The Democrats do look stronger in the national average polls. They had a 4.3-point lead in 2016 and today that lead is wider at 7.6 points. Still, it’s important to bear in mind that national polls don’t matter because the US does not have national elections. Instead, it has 51 separate elections in the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

The national poll lead reflects huge voter support for Biden in states like California and New York. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by four million votes in California in 2016. Biden may beat Trump by an even wider amount in California in 2020.

The problem is you can’t win California twice. You can only win it once, no matter how many extra votes you receive. Every vote for Biden in California over 50.1% is a wasted vote; the same is true in New York.

It does seem highly likely that Biden will win California and New York, but the huge excess popular vote in those states won’t do him any good in battlegrounds like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. That’s why national polls don’t matter while battleground state polls matter a lot.

Looking just at the battleground states, Trump is polling better today than he was at this stage in the 2016 race. That’s a very good sign for Trump.

Polls on the inside

The other aspect of the polls that is good news for Trump is that the gap between Biden and Trump is narrowing and moving in Trump’s direction. While Biden maintains a lead by most measures, Trump is gaining and is within the margin of error in many of the battleground states where Biden is ahead. This trend towards Trump has been noticeable in the past two weeks.

Polls will likely move more in Trump’s favour because polling works with a lag. I have actually commissioned polls for a potential presidential candidate from one of the top polling firms in the business. This gave me an excellent look at what goes on behind the scenes.

It takes days of discussion between the candidate’s advisers and the polling firm to establish just what the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses are. That’s important because, if you don’t ask polling questions on the weaknesses, you create a blind spot your opponent is sure to exploit.

Then the polling firm has to devise the questions, which you review. Next the polling begins, but it’s a laborious process because the pollster has to work hard to get a representative sample of the likely voters.

Many people who are called just hang up or won’t participate, so you make five or six calls for everyone who participates, and you need over 1,000 participants to have a statistically valid sample. Finally, the results are processed by the polling firm and reviewed with the candidate before the poll is considered final.

In short, a well-constructed and valid poll can take two weeks from start to finish. The results may be solid, but they are out of date by the time they are final. This means that polls we are seeing today may have been conducted weeks ago. If the trend was moving in Trump’s direction two weeks ago, don’t be surprised to see much better results for Trump a week or two from now.

Trump versus Biden by the numbers

In a series of television interviews in October and early November 2016, I predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. These were not tentative or wishy-washy forecasts. I was categorical that Trump would win, and I gave the TV anchors specific reasons why this would happen.

My forecast came at a time when Hillary was ahead in all the polls, when betting markets were giving her a 90% chance of winning, and when pundits like Nate Silver and those at The New York Times were giving Hillary odds of winning at 93%.

The TV anchors would turn pale or gasp for breath when I gave my predictions, but they were kind enough to give me time to explain why the polls were skewed, why betting markets are not good predictors of political outcomes, and why anecdotal evidence — which I had gathered on road trips in Spokane, Washington, and the Ozark Mountains — all pointed in Trump’s favour.