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    SaintForLife

    SaintForLife

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    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?
     
    Good read
    ============

    ……Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media.

    It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements.

    That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House.


    What’s more, the media seems finally to have absorbed what should have been blindingly obvious from the beginning: Trump is by no means a normal political figure, and he will never reform into some kind of responsible statesman.

    (Who can forget the perennial predictions that he was becoming “presidential” every time he read from a teleprompter instead of veering off on an insulting rant?)

    Another encouraging development is the decision by a number of major media organizations, including The Post, to form democracy teams or beats, concentrating on efforts to limit voting access, the politicization of election systems and the insidious efforts to instill doubt in the public about legitimate voting results.

    And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

    I’m often reminded of the troubling questions posed by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in multiple interviews late last year about what it would mean to cover Trump if and when he runs for president again.

    He deemed it perhaps the greatest challenge American political reporters will ever face.


    “How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic? How do you cover a candidate who is running both against whoever the Democratic candidate is but also running against the very democratic system that makes all of this possible?” wondered Karl, a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

    His questions hit hard, the more so because of his reputation in the political press corps as a straight shooter.


    The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.


    For the sake of democracy, they must…….

     
    Optimus Prime said:
    Good read
    ============

    ……Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media.

    It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements.

    That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House.


    What’s more, the media seems finally to have absorbed what should have been blindingly obvious from the beginning: Trump is by no means a normal political figure, and he will never reform into some kind of responsible statesman.

    (Who can forget the perennial predictions that he was becoming “presidential” every time he read from a teleprompter instead of veering off on an insulting rant?)

    Another encouraging development is the decision by a number of major media organizations, including The Post, to form democracy teams or beats, concentrating on efforts to limit voting access, the politicization of election systems and the insidious efforts to instill doubt in the public about legitimate voting results.

    And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

    I’m often reminded of the troubling questions posed by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in multiple interviews late last year about what it would mean to cover Trump if and when he runs for president again.

    He deemed it perhaps the greatest challenge American political reporters will ever face.


    “How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic? How do you cover a candidate who is running both against whoever the Democratic candidate is but also running against the very democratic system that makes all of this possible?” wondered Karl, a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

    His questions hit hard, the more so because of his reputation in the political press corps as a straight shooter.


    The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.


    For the sake of democracy, they must…….

    Click to expand...
    You can't be serious. That's a good read? How is showing less unfiltered content from a candidate and more editorializing from journalists who despise one of the two parties a good thing?
     
    SaintForLife said:
    You can't be serious. That's a good read? How is showing less unfiltered content from a candidate and more editorializing from journalists who despise one of the two parties a good thing?
    Click to expand...
    It’s an excellent read. Journalists don’t despise Republicans, lol. That’s a narrative you’re being fed. Almost all MSM has normalized Trump for years in exactly the ways the article describes. This was partly responsible for his election, IMO. That and the Republican FBI Director being willing to editorialize about Clinton’s investigation more than once, while keeping the investigation into Trump a secret.

    Your “programming” is really skewing your perspective here, lol.
     
    SaintForLife said:
    You can't be serious. That's a good read? How is showing less unfiltered content from a candidate and more editorializing from journalists who despise one of the two parties a good thing?
    Click to expand...
    Says they guy who does nothing on here but parrot talking-points I can find in about three seconds of surfing the usual suspects on alt-right social media.
     
    Booker said:
    www.yahoo.com

    Former Fox News editor claims viewers have been 'deceived' and 'coddled' over the years

    Chris Stirewalt claims that Fox News viewers weren't ready to hear the truth about the 2020 election because of narratives pushed on his former network.
    www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

    In other news, water is wet.
    Click to expand...
    Really? I didn’t know that. Is Ice cold and fire hot too? What is the world coming to?

    Now, where the bleep did my sarcasm button go?

    Fox News never was news, it was always agitprop.
     
    good read
    ================
    Given my fervent criticism of mainstream media interviewers for going soft on Republicans carrying water for defeated former president Donald Trump, who is under investigation for possible violation of the Espionage Act, it’s only fair to point out appropriately tough, take-no-prisoners performances.

    On Sunday, that came from George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’s “This Week” in an interview with retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). His upcoming retirement is noteworthy since he should have zero reason to fear Trump’s wrath or prostrate himself in front of the MAGA crowd.

    And yet he did.

    Here’s the exchange:
    STEPHANOPOULOS: Was he right to take these documents to Mar-a-Lago?
    SEN. ROY BLUNT (R-MO): Well, I think we need to know more about the documents.
    One of the things I was concerned about when I heard about this so-called raid or seizing of these documents was, why hadn’t the Intelligence Committee that I’ve been on for my time in the Senate and time in the House, why hadn’t we heard anything about this, in fact, if the administration was concerned that there was a national security problem? ...
    STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Senator, that’s --
    BLUNT: -- if there’s a problem, the Oversight Committee should have been told.
    STEPHANOPOULOS: That's a fair point and we'll find out why they weren't or what was going on. It was probably to protect the criminal investigation.
    But setting that aside, whether or not these documents were classified, was it right for the president to take these government documents which he is supposed to turn over to the National Archives down to Mar-a-Lago?
    BLUNT: It was -- you should be careful with classified documents. I’ve had access to documents like that for a long time. I’m incredibly careful.
    I was wondering as I was listening to that discussion if the same things were said when Secretary Clinton had documents, when Director Comey had documents, they had them on the Internet which is much more dangerous than having them in a box somewhere.
    But everybody needs to be more careful about how these documents --
    STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, you're still not answering --
    BLUNT: We need to be sure we don’t characterize them differently.
    STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you’re still not -- you're not answering the question. You were critical of Senator Clinton who actually turned over what she had, turned over all her devices. What we have here is a situation where the president did not turn over these documents.
    Can you say whether that was right -- or right or wrong? Do you believe it was right for the president to take those documents to Mar-a-Lago?
    BLUNT: He should have turned the documents over and apparently had turned a number of documents over, George. What I wonder about is why this could go on for almost two years and less than 100 days before the election, suddenly, we're talking about this rather than the economy or inflation or even the student loan program you and I were going to talk about today?
    STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it went on because the president didn’t turn over the documents, correct? He was asked several times. He didn’t turn them over. He was subpoenaed, he didn’t respond to the subpoena. . . .
    BLUNT: I understand he turned over a lot of documents. He should have turned over all of them. I imagine he knows that very well now as well.
    STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, he hasn’t said that. He said he did nothing wrong.
    Click to expand...

    Several aspects of this deserve attention.

    First, why in the world would a supposedly “mainstream” Republican such as Blunt humiliate himself by going to bat for someone caught with documents allegedly containing some of the nation’s top secrets? It’s incomprehensible enough that any elected official would engage in such behavior, but for someone months from retirement it’s virtually incomprehensible.

    At this stage Trump cannot “do” anything to Blunt, and yet the tribal loyalty, the refusal to level with the base and the contempt for voters’ intelligence remains. Servility becomes an unbreakable habit at some point...........

     
    A White House correspondent for CNN – whose new leader wants the channel to adopt what he considers a more politically neutral voice to its coverage – has departed the network after calling Donald Trump “a dishonest demagogue” on the air.

    John Harwood announced his exit from CNN on his Twitter account Friday, a day after he spoke favorably of a nationally televised speech by Joe Biden in which the president said that Republican forces loyal to his Oval Office predecessor, Trump, imperiled American democracy.

    “The core point [Biden] made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true,” Harwood said on CNN after the address, which was in primetime. “Now that is something that is not easy for us as journalists to say.”

    “We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view, and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we are talking about. These are honest disagreements. The Republican party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue.”

    By midday Friday, the 65-year-old Harwood tweeted that he was out at CNN…….

    www.theguardian.com

    Correspondent abruptly leaves CNN after calling Trump a ‘demagogue’

    John Harwood is out as the company’s new head signals shift away from liberal-leaning political coverage
    www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
     
    That’s….. unsavory

    I hope Jake Tapper would like to take that one back.

    Trying to score political points with the freaking Queen’s funeral isn’t a good look.
     
    People who watch CNN have been absolutely roasting Tapper on Twitter. Best case for him appears to be he is willing to completely pander to keep his job.
     
    Wonder if Tucker will face any erosion among his followers for his spectacularly bad takes on the Russian aggression against Ukraine?

     
    Good article
    =========
    No president has ever been as obsessed with the media as Donald Trump. His top Twitter insult was “fake news,” which he never tired of directing at the “failing New York Times.”

    So consumed was he by his hatred of The Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, that he sought to deny Amazon federal contracts and access to the U.S. Postal Service.

    Trump tried for months to kill a merger that involved another detested media company, CNN, and even encouraged Rupert Murdoch to buy CNN’s parent company (at the fire-sale price his efforts had produced).


    The obsession was mutual — and highly profitable, for the targets of Trump’s ire and admiration alike. Trump threw invective at mainstream media outlets, but readers, subscribers, viewers and advertisers all threw dollars at them.

    Digital subscriptions to the Times and The Post soared during Trump’s presidency. The combined viewership of CNN, MSNBC and Fox more than doubled between 2015 and 2020.

    The biggest beneficiary, of course, was Murdoch’s conservative media empire. While the bottom feeders of right-wing media feasted on the detritus, Fox News became the closest thing to state TV the United States has ever had. In a single year, Trump tweeted about stories on its shows 657 times.

    This last gem comes from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (he of the Times, she of the New Yorker).

    Given Trump’s decision to stuff his post-presidency residence with classified documents, not to mention the potential for a 2024 run, the book is exquisitely timed. A well-paced and engagingly written narrative, “The Divider” shows off the best of big-resource journalism in the Trump era.

    Yet it also makes vivid some of the shortcomings of the industry that Trump repeatedly exploited……

    Trump’s assault on American democracy was also assisted, let us be honest, by the American media — and not just the right-wing sources that glorified his presidency and radicalized his voters.

    Trump would not have gotten into the White House at all were it not for the mainstream media routines that made classified messages on Hillary Clinton’s private email server the biggest character issue of the campaign. (The irony is too thick to cut.)


    Even after Trump took power, journalists struggled to restrain old instincts: to broadcast every tweet, to focus on political fluff rather than policy substance, to give “both sides” equal say.

    Only with time and increased understanding of Trump’s intentions did we see meatier investigations of his finances, policies and manipulations, and how they were abetted by his increasingly cultish party.

    Baker and Glasser compare Trump to the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park” that gradually figure out how to corner their new human prey (the prey in this case being American democracy).

    The metaphor is apt for journalists as well. Under unprecedented attack, those covering Trump had to learn while hunting…….


     
    Not sure if this fits here, but wasn't sure where else to put it. I found this part of the article interesting. Didn't really know this.

    =======================
    ........

    WHAT WE SAY​

    Working-class voters, working people, White working class.​

    WHAT WE MEAN​

    Lower-income voters. Voters without a bachelor’s degree. White voters without four year-degrees. Ideologically centrist and conservative White voters.​

    There are no formal classes in America. There is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a person in the working class, the middle class or the upper class. You could argue that, say, dishwashers in restaurants are clearly in the working class. But we don’t have much data that drills down on the voting preferences of people in specific jobs, to distinguish between, say, dishwashers and factory workers.

    The term “working class” evokes a lower-income person. And we do have data on voters in households with incomes below $50,000 — about 53 percent backed Biden in 2020, compared with 44 percent for Trump, according to Pew.

    You might be surprised to learn that Biden, not Trump, won the votes of more lower-income Americans, because news coverage often describes Democrats as out of step with the working class.

    Where the Republicans have gained ground and Democrats have lost it over the past decade in particular is among White Americans without four-year college degrees, a group that the news media often shorthands as the White working class. But “working-class” and “non-college-educated” are not interchangeable phrases. Many people with college degrees don’t make a lot of money, and some people without degrees do.

    “White without a college degree” isn’t that useful of a description, either. Most Americans are White, and most Americans don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Trump won about 80 percent of White Americans without degrees in Georgia in 2020, but only about half of that bloc in Maine.

    American voters are best understood by looking at ideology, geography and race, not education, income or class. The Republican base is White Americans with conservative views, particularly those who live in the South, not the White working class.

    The voters who have swung the last three campaign cycles are moderate, centrist, liberal on some issues but conservative on others, or not particularly ideological at all, which explains why they back politicians as different as Trump and Barack Obama. Saying that the parties are fighting over “ideologically unmoored” voters isn’t as compelling as talking about class or education, but it is way more accurate.

    I don’t expect politicians, political operatives or pundits with a clear ideological lean to start using this more honest language. In politics, defining the terms is part of the fight. So if you are a Republican, you want to suggest that the Democrats are out of step with “working-class voters,” as opposed to “White and Latino people with centrist or conservative views.” If you are a Biden-aligned Democrat, describing yourself as part of the party’s “mainstream” wing and the Squad as “far-left” is very useful.

    But if you’re a reporter or just a regular voter, you don’t have to speak in code. Say what you actually mean.

    ======================

     
    coldseat said:
    Not sure if this fits here, but wasn't sure where else to put it. I found this part of the article interesting. Didn't really know this.

    =======================
    ........

    WHAT WE SAY​

    Working-class voters, working people, White working class.​

    WHAT WE MEAN​

    Lower-income voters. Voters without a bachelor’s degree. White voters without four year-degrees. Ideologically centrist and conservative White voters.​

    There are no formal classes in America. There is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a person in the working class, the middle class or the upper class. You could argue that, say, dishwashers in restaurants are clearly in the working class. But we don’t have much data that drills down on the voting preferences of people in specific jobs, to distinguish between, say, dishwashers and factory workers.

    The term “working class” evokes a lower-income person. And we do have data on voters in households with incomes below $50,000 — about 53 percent backed Biden in 2020, compared with 44 percent for Trump, according to Pew.

    You might be surprised to learn that Biden, not Trump, won the votes of more lower-income Americans, because news coverage often describes Democrats as out of step with the working class.

    Where the Republicans have gained ground and Democrats have lost it over the past decade in particular is among White Americans without four-year college degrees, a group that the news media often shorthands as the White working class. But “working-class” and “non-college-educated” are not interchangeable phrases. Many people with college degrees don’t make a lot of money, and some people without degrees do.

    “White without a college degree” isn’t that useful of a description, either. Most Americans are White, and most Americans don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Trump won about 80 percent of White Americans without degrees in Georgia in 2020, but only about half of that bloc in Maine.

    American voters are best understood by looking at ideology, geography and race, not education, income or class. The Republican base is White Americans with conservative views, particularly those who live in the South, not the White working class.

    The voters who have swung the last three campaign cycles are moderate, centrist, liberal on some issues but conservative on others, or not particularly ideological at all, which explains why they back politicians as different as Trump and Barack Obama. Saying that the parties are fighting over “ideologically unmoored” voters isn’t as compelling as talking about class or education, but it is way more accurate.

    I don’t expect politicians, political operatives or pundits with a clear ideological lean to start using this more honest language. In politics, defining the terms is part of the fight. So if you are a Republican, you want to suggest that the Democrats are out of step with “working-class voters,” as opposed to “White and Latino people with centrist or conservative views.” If you are a Biden-aligned Democrat, describing yourself as part of the party’s “mainstream” wing and the Squad as “far-left” is very useful.

    But if you’re a reporter or just a regular voter, you don’t have to speak in code. Say what you actually mean.

    ======================

    Click to expand...

    There’s “urban” of course. And urban’s cousin “inner-city.”


    And then there’s “at-risk,” “underserved” and “fatherless” if talking about our children. “Marginalized,” “low-income” and “welfare-dependent” if talking about the parents of those children.


    We live in “Democratic strongholds” like “Chicago,” but we’re also “socialists” and “low-information voters” taught “critical race theory” by “Marxists” so we can be “anti-American.”

    Our neighborhoods are “sketchy” and “depressed” “ghettos” filled with “thugs” and “transient” “Section 8” “renters” employable only through “affirmative action” “diversity” “quotas.”

    If we choose to play a sport, we are “naturally gifted,” “ungrateful,” “intimidating” and somehow both “aggressive” and “lazy.”


    In the decades since I first became aware of the coded language used to indicate Black people, I’ve lost count of how many different euphemisms I’ve read and heard to describe, well, me.

    I even considered creating a drinking game where I’d take a shot each time I’d heard a racist dog whistle during a politician’s speech, but I probably would’ve died.


    The newest addition to this glossary is CRT.

    You have Black teachers, Black administrators or Black school board members? That’s CRT.

    Black authors in your curriculum? CRT.

    You happen to teach a version of American history that doesn’t capitulate to the concept of American exceptionalism? CRT.

    Soon, CRT will be given sentience. It’ll be blamed for sham robberies, phantom murders and the NCAA’s transfer portal. Cops will stop and frisk CRT, and will plant guns on it when the search is clean. Parents will take their children out of schools, fearing that CRT will ask their daughters to the prom……..

     
    Tucker should be known as his generation’s Tokyo Rose:

     

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