Media Tracker (2 Viewers)

[SaintForLife]

I figured we needed a thread specifically about the media.

There was a very big correction recently by the Washington Post.


That story was supposedly "independently confirmed" by CNN, NBC News, USA Today, ABC News, & PBS News Hour. How could they all have gotten the quote wrong if they actually independently confirmed the story?






Why do all the errors always go in one political direction and not closer to 50/50?

 

[wardorican]

My 1st paragraph that you responded to answered your question.

Not really. It's why I wrote what I wrote.

This is what you wrote, before.

"Independently verified should mean that the New York Times and the Washington Post both confirmed the story with different sources and/or an additional news outlets did their own investigation."

What different source would they use? Do you mean another contact within the Pentagon? Who else outside of the Pentagon would know?

What kind of 'their own investigation' could they do beyond reaching out to the US government? I doubt the Russian Government would answer (and they may have tried). And like I said, Media members aren't spies, how else would they find out about this?

 

[SaintForLife]

Not really. It's why I wrote what I wrote.

This is what you wrote, before.

"Independently verified should mean that the New York Times and the Washington Post both confirmed the story with different sources and/or an additional news outlets did their own investigation."

What different source would they use? Do you mean another contact within the Pentagon? Who else outside of the Pentagon would know?

What kind of 'their own investigation' could they do beyond reaching out to the US government? I doubt the Russian Government would answer (and they may have tried). And like I said, Media members aren't spies, how else would they find out about this?

There is more than one person that works at the Pentagon that they could have talked to about the story.

So apparently you are okay with reporters running any story that unnamed intelligence or government sources give them no matter how many times they get burned? Look at the 3 articles I posted recently and see if you would keep trusting your sources after they have been wrong so many times in the last 4 years.

 

[MT15]

SFL: It’s just mind numbing that you will swallow just anything that people say when they say what you like, and you are willing to defend them relentlessly; yet you will never believe anything that you disagree with no matter the source or sources.

Confirmation bias.

 

[MT15]

First of all it's funny that you are using an op-ed to try to discredit Taibbi who you claim is just an opinion hawker. One of your favorite criticisms of articles I post is that it's an opinion and not to be taken as true.

O'Brien claims that Taibbi cherry picks things, but O'Brien cherry picks in his article.


I’d take issue with Glenn Greenwald’s worry that flawed reporting about Russians zapping the U.S. embassy in Cuba with a weird microwave weapon really contributed to “exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow.”


That was #6 out of 10 on his list and 1-5 were much more impact full, but I guess it was easier to highlight #6 to fit with O'Brien's narrative. Greenwald article goes into detail on 10 examples of the media getting big Russia stories wrong.

Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story

The most challenging task is choosing the 10 worst embarrassments. The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative.

theintercept.com

Taibbi is a provocative, vivid, gutsy and reckless writer. He once published a book about Trump and the 2016 presidential campaign titled “Insane Clown President,” in which he describes Trump as “one of the world’s most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals,” someone who acts “like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.”

Other than describing the president as a “crook with money,” Taibbi’s book doesn’t detail the sources of Trump’s corruption. He apparently doesn’t think it has anything to do with Russia.


Taibbi’s book Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus was about Trump and the 2016 election. So O'Brien is criticizing Taibbi for not digging into Trump's finances in regards to Russia despite Taibbi stating Trump was corrupt. Yawn

He argues that because Mueller ended his investigation without indicting Trump for collusion, the media’s coverage propagated a myth as ruinous as the weapons of mass destruction reporting that helped launch the Iraq War. (He cautions that he could be proven wrong later, and he writes without the Mueller report in hand, which violates the sober-minded reporting guidelines he accuses the media of violating, but whatever.)

I don't see any comparison to what Taibbi said below compared to what he's criticizing the media for. Taibbi lays out in exhausting detail how the media embarrassed themselves throughout Russiagate. I don't see how O'Brien can claim he's reckless for what he says below.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it

taibbi.substack.com

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.

For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller had a team looking for evidence Cohen had been in Prague. Reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

That sounds completely reasonable to me.

Taibbi is more sophisticated than Davis but he cherry-picks his examples and largely ignores Mueller’s damning indictment of Russian hackers and the great reporting that preceded that. People who should know better have avidly linked to Taibbi’s essay as if it were the Rosetta Stone rather than an entertaining screed laced with mistakes, thematic fault-lines and curious cop-outs.

okay sure

The Justice Department Has Made Clear Its Indictments of Foreign Hackers Are Only for Show

The Trump White House seems even more reluctant than the Obama administration to go after the perpetrators of cyberattacks.

slate.com

I would suggest reading Taibbi’s article I posted above and this one and make your own conclusions. O'Brien doesn't know what he's talking about.

Taibbi: On Russiagate and Our Refusal to Face Why Trump Won

Faulty coverage of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign later made foreign espionage a plausible explanation for his ascent to power

www.rollingstone.com

Your entire house of cards has come down, SFL. We now know there was collusion, just as most reasonable people suspected.

This was completely unprecedented and corrupt by Trump and his entire campaign, and I don’t know how you can just ignore it like you do. Well. Worse than that, you just deny any of it happened.

Greenwald and Taibbi are discredited hacks, IMO. They have completely gone in the bag for this lie that Trump‘s campaign didn’t cooperate with Russia‘s interference in the 2016 campaign. Their credibility is gone, after this. Their articles should be ignored, not read.

 

[wardorican]

There is more than one person that works at the Pentagon that they could have talked to about the story.

So apparently you are okay with reporters running any story that unnamed intelligence or government sources give them no matter how many times they get burned? Look at the 3 articles I posted recently and see if you would keep trusting your sources after they have been wrong so many times in the last 4 years.

First off, I'm not apparently ok with anything. Don't put words in my mouth.

I'm actually thinking you're not sure what you're wanting from the media, because I'm not sure you're thinking through what you're posting on this. I don't say that to be mean, but to illustrate media awareness.

So, you assume they only asked one person in the Pentagon about the Russian Bounty. You assume that one 'source' reached out to everyone. You don't believe that multiple people in the Pentagon would say the same thing, especially early on in the story, before cooler heads have had a chance to investigate or consider this could be false?

Now, let's go back to your original post about this 'bombshell'.

"But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

..According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting” – raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.

Without additional corroboration, such reporting is notoriously unreliable. Detainee reporting from a man known as Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, extracted from torture, infamously and bogusly fueled a Bush administration claim, used to invade Iraq, about Saddam Hussein training al-Qaeda to make poison gas."

So, the issue this person on Twitter had (I don't know who they are or what group they represent), is that the original 'Intelligence' came from a Detainee, who may have just been saying whatever to get released. That information may have leaked more quickly than a thoughtful review of that Intel. Getting multiple Pentagon sources wouldn't change that.

The person then goes on to say, "without additional corroboration, such reporting is notoriously unreliable". Again, what media agency has the ability to corroborate a story that originated from a Military Detainee? There is no US government agency, short of maybe the CIA, who would have to likely blow the cover of a spy to corroborate that, and they may not have any better intel. The only others you could ask, are the Russians or the Afghan criminals. That's not happening. The corroboration desired is supposed to come from the US government. They need to do more than just take a comment from a prisoner. Not the media, the Government.

So, maybe, just maybe, the fault isn't with the Media, who has limited access to truly 'verify' such stories in a truly 'independent' manner, but to the US Military for leaking things before they've been considered. Or, maybe just over time, the US Military realized it was unreliable. Again, that person's example was then about the second Iraq War and how that was based on information via torture, deemed totally unreliable. That's not a critique on the media, that's a critique on the US Military and Government. "Such Reporting..." means Intelligence Reports, not News Reporting.

 

[superchuck500]

Apparently Tucker has been ranting that some unhinged mental person has a copy of a college yearbook with Tucker in it.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

Apparently Tucker has been ranting that some unhinged mental person has a copy of a college yearbook with Tucker in it.

The Jesse Helms Foundation doesn't look too great, either.

 

[RebSaint]

The rot of the southern strategy has hopelessly made the American right wing the ideology of racism and authoritarianism. It's pathetic.

Shame is, I support in many contexts traditional "conservative" ideas.

And the more I think about the concept of "Lugenpresse" the more it makes sense the further right so many have lurched. Eventually they'll land (or have landed) at the most obvious position.

 

[CoolBrees]

Wow. I thought Tucker was just a con-man who was born rich.

Turns out he is a disgusting pig of a con-man who was born rich.

Harvey Milk is an American hero and he isn’t here because of forking small minded shirt stains like this. fork Tucker.

 

[Optimus Prime]

 

[MT15]

On Tucker: Yeah, I am actually surprised. I thought the racism, misogyny, and homophobia were an act to make money from the Fox viewership. He is well and truly a turd even from high school.

 

[DaveXA]

On Tucker: Yeah, I am actually surprised. I thought the racism, misogyny, and homophobia were an act to make money from the Fox viewership. He is well and truly a turd even from high school.

He's in the "I don't give a shirt" stage of his life. Not even pretending anymore.

 

[wardorican]

Even in college he had a very punchable face.

 

[MT15]

 

[Lapaz]

There's quite a big difference between cable tv news shows and NYT/Washington Post, etc right?

Their is a huge difference on Fox between their TV stars and their real news division, but most on the right trust the fake news guys, so their distortions are just as damaging as errors by legit news.

 

[Lapaz]

I know that distinction should matter, but it doesn't. To the general public "Trump said" and "someone said Trump said" is the exact same thing, and the media sources know it.

I think sometimes people get bent into a pretzel trying to defend the media in an opposition mode to the people criticizing it. In the current competitive news environment the media has become insanely sloppy and quite sensationalist.

Sure the media has become sensationalists, but the public has become stupider. The public should understand the difference between people close and actual hard evidence, and when the public doesn’t know, they should be criticized for not being discerning. I would appreciate the occasional discernment primer for the public, but that’s not really the media’s job. Nevertheless, there are media outlets than spend time explaining such nuances. Schools should do more of that.

 

[Optimus Prime]

sounds like some editors should be resigning too
====================================
A longtime New York Post reporter said she has resigned after being “ordered” to write a false story that claimed undocumented minors were being welcomed to the United States with copies of a children’s book authored by Vice President Harris.

“The Kamala Harris story — an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against — was my breaking point,” Laura Italiano tweeted Tuesday afternoon, several hours after her viral article about the books had been deleted from the Post’s website and replaced with corrected versions.

Italiano, who has written for the Post since the 1990s according to news archives, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Since the Post ran the story on its front page Saturday, the conservative mediascape has been in an uproar over the supposed distribution of Harris’ 2019 book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” at migrant shelters. A slew of prominent Republicans expressed outrage over the possibility that taxpayers were funding the program. Even the White House press secretary was grilled about it.

And then on Tuesday, in a one-sentence note at the bottom of the original online article, the Post acknowledged that almost none of it was true........

MSN

 

[MT15]

Their is a huge difference on Fox between their TV stars and their real news division, but most on the right trust the fake news guys, so their distortions are just as damaging as errors by legit news.

I used to think that the Fox actual news division was reasonable, but they are slipping lately, IMO. They got caught pushing the fake Harris book story, a lot of their best talent is gone. I think I remember reading they purged a lot of behind the scenes people not too long ago.