Who's crazier. https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1245301684596768768

They've been doing this since 2016: maintaining a reportorial template in utter contradiction of the content under report. These supposed sober news stories become parodies of sober news stories.

They're at sea. What gets exposed is the thinness of the template and the writing style (and thus of the thinking): it doesn't take much to render the whole reportorial enterprise visibly absurd.

Even as the strictly limited capabilities of this approach to reporting are so painfully exposed, the org starts branding itself as the one great bulwark against disastrous ignorance.

I know some explain this by taking it that the Times and its reporters are sheer evil, or that there are obvious and easy ways to better handle reporting on Trump. That's not me.

I do however have to say as an experienced consumer of reporting that it seems to me that expressions like "grim-faced president" and "presenting him with a challenge that he seems only now to be seeing more clearly" can't be *that* hard to avoid.

(Oh, btw, yes, I know that this is a "news analysis" piece, thanks. I'm talking about the reportorial template and style of precisely such pieces.)

(as in: "That is a daunting realization for any president, one that left Mr. Trump now anticipating...")

("Yet he could not resist forever.")

I once thought a positive effect of this presidency might be that these kinds of pieces became impossible to write any more. Nope.