Media Tracker (3 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?

 

[MT15]

 

[MT15]

This doesn’t deserve its own thread, but worth posting, I think it fits best here:

 

[MT15]

I hadn’t seen this analysis before, there are more tweets in the thread. (Language warning in the quoted tweet.)

 

[MT15]

Fox News is simply not reality-based. They say whatever they need to say for the narrative that the Murdoch’s want to push. What is really terrible is the number of people that just buy whatever crap they spew:

 

[coldseat]

Fox News is simply not reality-based. They say whatever they need to say for the narrative that the Murdoch’s want to push. What is really terrible is the number of people that just buy whatever crap they spew:

The economy, Ukraine, Roe v Wade, and now Buffalo (that will fade soon) are literally the only 4 stories being covered by the MSM. And the economy/inflation/supply chain/shortages has been covered for the last year nonstop. How are they not covering it?

 

[MT15]

This shows how right wing media uses faked stories to gin up outrage:

 

[Optimus Prime]

Interesting article

My first time hearing about pink slime sites
==================

……This single incident was bad enough; what’s worse is what it shows us about our poisoned news environment.

While fact-based, accountable local newspapers are struggling to survive — many of them facing budget cuts or closure — what’s known as “pink slime” sites are sneakily trying to fill the void.

They traffic in falsehood and exaggeration, paid for by political groups, especially on the right.


“These sites are insidious,” said Alan Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project, the D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works to make students and the public smarter news consumers and better citizens.

Named after a meat-processing byproduct used as filler — in other words, it looks like meat but isn’t — pink slime news sites are often funded through secret and politically motivated “dark money” contributions. And they are growing fast.

In 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School identified at least 1,200 such sites.


With names such as the Des Moines Sun and Illinois Valley Times, they leverage the trust that people have for local newspapers, built up over many decades, to boost their own dubious credibility.

Their content is “rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency,” according to a New York Times investigation that referred to them as “Pay-for-Play” outlets.

Most of them, for example, don’t disclose the funding they get from advocacy groups. Davey Alba, one of the reporters who co-wrote the Times investigation, noted that the “West Cook News” is part of a network of local sites run by Republican operatives.


Meanwhile, of course, local newspapers are shrinking or dying. Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers were closed, as I detailed in my book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.”

And although many legitimate and admirable news sites have sprung up to help fill the gap, it isn’t always easy for news consumers to know the difference.


I asked Miller for his advice to news consumers.


First, he said, take a pause when you see a story that gets your blood pressure jumping: “Don’t let your emotions take over. If something makes us angry, anxious or excited, that’s when we are most vulnerable to being manipulated.”……..

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/05/pink-slime-west-cook-news-school-race-grading/

 

[Optimus Prime]

CNN has long claimed to be “the most trusted name in news” but its recent history has seen the rolling US cable news channel court controversy with a shift to the left as the rise of Donald Trump roiled American politics.

But now the channel – under its newly installed chief executive Chris Licht – is undergoing another rapid change, seeking to row away from some of its well known anchors’ political partisanship and back to a more nuts-and-bolts approach to journalism.

According to a swath of US media reports, CNN has entered high-gear in a reformist effort to phase out overt political partisanship, reduce the frequency of “breaking news” alerts, dissuade non-primetime anchors from airing their views, and broadly to avoid presenting the extremes of political thought of either side, left or right.

“We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers,” newly installed Licht wrote in a memo to employees this month, saying there “needs to be room for nuance”.

“You’ve already seen far less of the “Breaking News” banner across our programming. The tenor of our voice holistically has to reflect that,” Licht added.

Among the reforms, Licht directed network anchors and producers to stop using the phrase “The Big Lie” to describe attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election – in part because it’s a Democratic party catchphrase. He’s said to prefer the more specific “Trump’s lie,” or “lies about the election”.

Set against a post-Trump identity crisis and a slump in viewers – CNN averages 178,000 viewers in the key 25 to 54 demographic, down 63% from a year ago – the reformist spirit comes as the network’s net advertising revenue fell 2% last year due to lower ratings, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan……

Why CNN is shifting tenor from partisanship news to a political center

CNN seeks to shift away from political partisanship news amid identity crisis

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

guess this can go here
===============
Proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen are currently facing a very public reckoning. Millions of Americans are tuning in to watch the January 6 House committee outline evidence of a concerted effort by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election.

But another reckoning, largely out of view until now, may yet take place for the people and institutions that promoted those lies. In the courts, right wing media companies that broadcast false claims about voting machines being rigged are being hit with billion-dollar lawsuits — and they are not going away.

At the centre of these lawsuits are two voting machine companies whose equipment was used in the 2020 election: Dominion and Smartmatic. They are in the process of suing Fox News, Fox News’s parent company, and upstart pro-Trump news outlets Newsmax and One America News (OAN), for billions of dollars collectively.

The most high-profile of those cases targets the heart of the Murdoch dynasty. Dominion has claimed that Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News, allowed false claims about the company to be broadcast on its news outlet, and that Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch allowed that coverage to continue knowing those claims to be false.

Among the many false claims aired in the post-election period were that Dominion is owned by the family of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and that the machines featured software created "at the direction" of the late Chavez. Such claims were floated by Trump surrogates Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, among others.

On Tuesday, a judge rejected Fox Corp’s motion to dismiss the $1.6bn lawsuit, ruling that Dominion had “adequately pleaded actual malice with respect to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch of Fox Corporation.”

The judge pointed to news reports that demonstrated the Murdochs were aware the claims about Dominion Voting Systems were false, including a report that Rupert Murdoch spoke with Trump after the election and informed him that he had lost.

“These allegations support a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion,” said Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M Davis on Tuesday............

Away from Jan 6 hearings, right wing news channels face a reckoning of their own over false election claims

 

[Optimus Prime]

After two years which have seen Fox News lunge even further towards the right wing of US politics, the news channel may now start to suffer the consequences, with the launch of a campaign to strip the news channel’s Foxnews.com website of advertising revenue.

Check Your Ads, an organization run by two former marketing executives, launched its campaign to target Fox News in early June, accusing the news channel and its website of “working overtime to fuel the next insurrection”.

More than 40,000 people signed up in the first five days, forming an increasingly powerful lobbying group which aims to get ad exchanges to drop Foxnews.com.

The campaign comes at a time when prominent Fox News hosts are downplaying the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC as “a forgettably minor outbreak” of “mob violence”, continuing to dabble in election conspiracy theories, and have most recently begun to brand school teachers and drag performers as “groomers”.

Check My Ads was founded by two marketing executives who have a deep understanding of how advertising appears on websites. Despite its record of dabbling in misinformation, adverts for companies like Walgreens and Optimum can still be found on Foxnews.com.

The adverts are largely placed there, Atkin said, by ad exchanges, which handle the distribution of adverts for advertising agencies……..

Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’

Check Your Ads targeting news channel website at a time when its prominent hosts are downplaying January 6 insurrection

www.theguardian.com

 

[MT15]

Headline: Rudy Giuliani attacked by worker in Staten Island grocery store! - NY Post, which shouldn’t be considered a credible source, lol.

Look at this :vicious: attack!

 

[MT15]

Also, just in case anyone thought this guy had any credibility, this tweet didn’t age well

 

[MT15]

Putting this here because this NBC reporter was at best deceived into running a total lie by Trumpers and at worst participated in smearing a courageous young woman who testified under oath. There were plenty of journalists who called it out immediately as very suspect.

 

[MT15]

Good newsletter from Tom Nichols on the danger of Fox News being the default channel on so many military bases. I hope it’s not paywalled.

Should the Military Censor Fox?

Fox News undermines democracy, but censorship is not the answer.

newsletters.theatlantic.com

 

[coldseat]

Good newsletter from Tom Nichols on the danger of Fox News being the default channel on so many military bases. I hope it’s not paywalled.

Should the Military Censor Fox?

Fox News undermines democracy, but censorship is not the answer.

newsletters.theatlantic.com

Fox News is a danger to our country wherever it is viewed. It's pure propaganda meant to elect Republicans who don't care about democracy or fair election and only goal is to obtain power at any cost. That and making money for the Murdoch's are Fox News only purpose.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year.

Its flawed coverage model of politics and government is bad for more than just Biden — it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy. The media needs to find a different way to cover Washington.


One of the sharpest dips in Biden’s approval rating — which has dropped from 55 percent in January 2021 to less than 39 percent today — happened last August, when it declined almost five points in a single month.

There wasn’t a huge surge in gas prices, nor some big legislative failure. What caused Biden’s dip was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — or, rather, the media’s 24/7, highly negative coverage of it.


To be clear, Biden deserved criticism. The early stages of the U.S. exit were tumultuous, with desperate Afghans clinging to U.S. military planes and massing outside the Kabul airport. The Taliban took control far more quickly than the administration anticipated.

But for much of August, the homepages of major newspapers and cable news programs were dominated by Afghanistan coverage, as if the chaotic withdrawal was the only thing happening in the world.

Journalists and outlets tore into the president, with Axios calling the withdrawal “Biden’s stain,” NBC News correspondent Richard Engel declaring that “history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States,” and CNN’s Jake Tapper asking an administration official on his show, “Does President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from Afghanistan?”

Biden’s poll numbers plunged, closely tracking the media hysteria. As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August.

After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants.

Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated — there are many causes of inflation besides Biden’s policies; presidents can’t stop the emergence of coronavirus variants. This anti-Biden coverage pattern remains in place……

Also, the media’s “equally positive and negative to both sides” approach has been challenged by the increasingly radical and antidemocratic Republican Party. Honest coverage of political news often seems anti-GOP.

The mainstream media covered Trump very harshly, particularly in the final months of his presidency as he worked to overturn election results.

Some journalists, consciously or unconsciously, were poised to “balance” that negative Trump coverage with criticism of Biden, even if his actions weren’t nearly as deserving of condemnation.

In the post-Trump era, leaders at CNN, the New York Times and other major outlets have emphasized that they don’t want to be perceived as more aligned with the Democrats……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/17/media-bias-role-biden-approval-decline/

 

[Optimus Prime]

It’s one of the 21st century’s evergreen stories: Public confidence in the U.S. media has reached a new low! Such was the announcement from Gallup on Monday, as the company published results of a June poll on Americans’ views of institutions.

A mere 11 percent of U.S. adults have either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in TV news, Gallup found, with the share for newspapers slightly higher, at 16 percent.

The Gallup confidence trend line reflects inexorable momentum toward zero:

Only Congress, at 7 percent, secured less confidence than TV news.


The polling indicates that the partisan gap spanning viewers’ confidence in TV news is closing: In 2020, 33 percent of Democrats had “a great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in TV news, compared to just 7 percent for Republicans (a 26-point gap); in 2021, it was 26 percent of Democrats and 6 percent of Republicans (a 20-point gap).

This year, that gap closed to 12 points, suggesting that dim views of TV news are becoming an across-the-aisle phenomenon, something we can all agree on.

Because the polling doesn’t delve into the reasons behind these trends, the Erik Wemple Blog feels duty-bound to speculate.

Here goes: The Gallup confidence numbers reflect, at least in part, the role of major TV news providers in discrediting their competitors. Turn on Fox News in the prime-time hours, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear the latest blasts against MSNBC and CNN.

“Fake news CNN” is the term that host Sean Hannity frequently uses to introduce the network so despised by his mentee, Donald Trump.

A staple of Fox News programming is a mash-up of voices from CNN, MSNBC and other networks — assembled and packaged for maximum sneering potential.

Most of the criticism is baseless tripe hatched to advance Trump or some other Fox News hobbyhorse, though there have been plenty of legitimate reasons to bash MSNBC and CNN over the years.
For their part, CNN and MSNBC do good work in attacking and debunking the lies, distortions and hatred on Fox News.

There’s a lot to work with, from the segments that promoted the “big lie” after the 2020 presidential election — which triggered two ongoing lawsuits from two voting-technology companies that were attacked on Fox News without basis, they argue — to the credulous coverage of Trump to the racist rantings of host Tucker Carlson……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/19/gallup-poll-confidence-media-new-lows/

 

[el caliente]

The mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year.

Its flawed coverage model of politics and government is bad for more than just Biden — it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy. The media needs to find a different way to cover Washington.


One of the sharpest dips in Biden’s approval rating — which has dropped from 55 percent in January 2021 to less than 39 percent today — happened last August, when it declined almost five points in a single month.

There wasn’t a huge surge in gas prices, nor some big legislative failure. What caused Biden’s dip was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — or, rather, the media’s 24/7, highly negative coverage of it.


To be clear, Biden deserved criticism. The early stages of the U.S. exit were tumultuous, with desperate Afghans clinging to U.S. military planes and massing outside the Kabul airport. The Taliban took control far more quickly than the administration anticipated.

But for much of August, the homepages of major newspapers and cable news programs were dominated by Afghanistan coverage, as if the chaotic withdrawal was the only thing happening in the world.

Journalists and outlets tore into the president, with Axios calling the withdrawal “Biden’s stain,” NBC News correspondent Richard Engel declaring that “history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States,” and CNN’s Jake Tapper asking an administration official on his show, “Does President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from Afghanistan?”

Biden’s poll numbers plunged, closely tracking the media hysteria. As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August.

After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants.

Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated — there are many causes of inflation besides Biden’s policies; presidents can’t stop the emergence of coronavirus variants. This anti-Biden coverage pattern remains in place……

Also, the media’s “equally positive and negative to both sides” approach has been challenged by the increasingly radical and antidemocratic Republican Party. Honest coverage of political news often seems anti-GOP.

The mainstream media covered Trump very harshly, particularly in the final months of his presidency as he worked to overturn election results.

Some journalists, consciously or unconsciously, were poised to “balance” that negative Trump coverage with criticism of Biden, even if his actions weren’t nearly as deserving of condemnation.

In the post-Trump era, leaders at CNN, the New York Times and other major outlets have emphasized that they don’t want to be perceived as more aligned with the Democrats……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/17/media-bias-role-biden-approval-decline/

I love when people give me bacon, but not this Bacon. This Bacon guy’s article would have been better if he didn’t press send.