Opinions are facts and social media is more reliable than mainstream media. How on earth did we get here?

I got this email Monday from the New York Times alert in my email.  To me it seemed rather astonishing in its blatant departure from reporting, replaced by quite apparent partisan advocacy.  The Old Grey Lady has been a DNC courtesan for a long time but this was pretty transparent.

Click to enlarge.

I did not watch the convention (either the DNC or the RNC).  I have little interest in them.  They are establishment parties saying what they think will get them elected but which has little correlation to what they will actually do.  It is all Kabuki theater.

Trump is somewhat different in that he is not a professional politician, not an establishment party member and not a respecter of establishment traditions and prerogatives.  Hence the bipartisan hatred among establishment nomenklatura.  

The vernacular substance of this paragraph says that the Republican Party convention focused on making the case for President Trump's effectiveness and on highlighting the prospects of a Biden presidency.

That is what political parties do.  Newspapers of record are supposed to report on what happened.  But apparently that is right out the window at the NYT.  Below are the opening paragraphs from the above article, which is supposed to straight reporting, not from the editorial page:

President Trump and his political allies mounted a fierce and misleading defense of his political record on the first night of the Republican convention on Monday, while unleashing a barrage of attacks on Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party that were unrelenting in their bleakness.     

Hours after Republican delegates formally nominated Mr. Trump for a second term, the president and his party made plain that they intended to engage in sweeping revisionism about Mr. Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, his record on race relations and much else. And they laid out a dystopian picture of what the United States would look like under a Biden administration, warning of a “vengeful mob” that would lay waste to suburban communities and turn quiet neighborhoods into war zones.        

At times, the speakers and prerecorded videos appeared to be describing an alternate reality: one in which the nation was not nearing 180,000 deaths from the coronavirus; in which Mr. Trump had not consistently ignored serious warnings about the disease; in which the president had not spent much of his term appealing openly to xenophobia and racial animus; and in which someone other than Mr. Trump had presided over an economy that began crumbling in the spring.

"A fierce and misleading"? - Both of those are opinion adjectives.  Was the defense factually wrong?  The NYT doesn't make that case.

"Unrelenting in their bleakness"? - A convention, or any argument, intended to establish a contrast between one positions and another.  This is another opinion masquerading as reporting.

"Sweeping revisionism"? - The mainstream media which spent three years pushing a Russia-Trump Collusion conspiracy hoax which has been proven an empty and intentional deception is accusing someone else of revisionism?  You have to admire their chutzpah while despising their dishonesty.

"A dystopian picture of . . .  a “vengeful mob” that would lay waste to suburban communities and turn quiet neighborhoods into war zones."? - Wait, is the NYT reporting on the convention or on the violent riots in Seattle, Minneapolis, Tacoma, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Kenosha, St. Louis, Milwaukee, etc.?  Every morning we wake up to more video of rampaging rioters assaulting residents, assaulting police, assaulting one another.  The Republicans don't have to make the case that under Democrats there is a probability that urban centers will go up in smoke and peaceful suburban neighborhoods will be invaded by rioting looters.  The mayors and governors of Democrat governed cities and states are making that reality obvious even as the conventions happen.

An additional striking thing is the difference between the viewership numbers and the social media response to the RNC convention.  By day two, it appears that RNC viewership is several times higher than the DNC viewership.  These numbers are early reports and may change.

More substantively, even DNC blue check reporters in my twitter feed are commenting on the marked volume of policy substance at the RNC compared to the DNC; the greater diversity of voices and stories at the RNC versus the DNC; the greater optimism at the RNC versus the DNC; and the higher quality of the RNC convention versus the DNC.

If DNC reporters are sharing these observations and commentary in social media, why is their reporting in the paper almost the opposite?  It seems as if there is a reality that they comment on in social media and a party line they have to hold in their "reporting".  

We are left in the odd position, at least at this very moment, that social media, for all its weaknesses and flaws, seems to be providing better visibility into the nature of the two conventions than does the traditional mainstream media.

My old empirical head feels like it is about to explode.