Media Tracker (4 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]

There is some evidence that between 400-500 people at the invitation-only Trump election event last night were brought in especially to fill out the crowd. And yet, the NYT is still repeating the lie today that the Trump campaign is telling. Tell me again how media is just a tool of the democrats, though.

 

[SaintForLife]

This kind of dishonest or incompetent reporting plays right into the R’s hands.

Sorry, I totally overlooked that he and others here were talking about the deficit and not the debt. I saw the headline on the tweet said debt and had that in my mind. Totally my fault, but trying to respond to multiple people in multiple threads about multiple subjects too quickly caused me to overlook that.

But, I'm not sure what the DC Petterson is talking about. It doesn't seem like the Washington Post article said what he claimed. I don't see anything in the article that claims that Social Security and Medicare are the main cause of the deficits

Lawmakers in both parties have called for getting serious about the rising federal debt. The shutdown fight ignores its key drivers.​

...But while the far-right rebels in McCarthy’s caucus say the rising national debt is such a threat that it’s worth forcing the government to close down in pursuit of spending cuts, the uncomfortable fiscal reality is that most of what is driving federal borrowing to record levels isn’t even up for discussion this week.

Conservatives want to pare federal discretionary spending back to 2022 levels, which would mean cutting more than $100 billion from agency budgets each year.

That’s a lot of money, but hitting the goal would require severe cuts to a small portion of the federal budget — mostly programs that provide services like education, medical research and aid for families in poverty. The government’s biggest annual expense, though, and the main projected drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare and Social Security. The United States spends more than $6 trillion every year. McCarthy’s caucus is tying itself in knots over how to make cuts from domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for less than one-sixth of that total.

Looking at it another way, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual federal deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion per year by next decade, up from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the conservatives in the House GOP get everything they’re seeking now, that number could drop to about $2.8 trillion per year.

...“It’s a completely symbolic fight that ignores 90 percent of the actual budget,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and is now a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “I think lawmakers would have a lot more credibility if they were taking on the rest of the budget at the same time.”

The fight is over such a small portion of the budget because even Republicans have agreed not to touch the biggest sources of federal spending, including the Social Security and Medicare retirement programs, but also the military, border enforcement and veterans benefits, which Democrats don’t want to cut, either. Republicans have also ruled out higher taxes as part of any deal to lower the deficit. Instead, the GOP has demanded cuts to domestic programs funded annually by Congress, known as “discretionary” spending.

...Slashing just the parts of the budget the House proposals focus on would do little to rein in the deficit as other costs rise. The government is expected to spend $3 trillion more on Social Security and health-care programs alone over the next decade, or more than double the cost reductions achieved from the GOP plan.

...And some budget experts also say that while the GOP proposal wouldn’t erase the debt, more than $100 billion in cuts could lead to $1 trillion in reduced spending over a decade.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/24/government-shutdown-congress-budget/

 

[MT15]

That’s a lot of money, but hitting the goal would require severe cuts to a small portion of the federal budget — mostly programs that provide services like education, medical research and aid for families in poverty. The government’s biggest annual expense, though, and the main projected drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare and Social Security. The United States spends more than $6 trillion every year. McCarthy’s caucus is tying itself in knots over how to make cuts from domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for less than one-sixth of that total.

Looking at it another way, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual federal deficit is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion per year by next decade, up from roughly $2 trillion this year. If the conservatives in the House GOP get everything they’re seeking now, that number could drop to about $2.8 trillion per year.

Thanks for noticing. The shift between the 2 paragraphs above - is what he is talking about, I think. They talk about Social Security and Medicare and debt - then switch seamlessly to deficit preceded by the phrase “looking at it another way” which implies it’s another way of looking at the same issue.

McCarthy’s cuts won’t make any difference at all in a projected SS/Medicare shortfall, nor will cutting SS/Medicare reduce the federal deficit. You would never come to that conclusion by reading this sloppy article, though.

R politicians have for years encouraged people to confuse these two issues as a vehicle to get working class people to support cutting SS/Medicare, because at their core they don’t like the entire idea that retirees from middle and lower classes get this money at all. This article serves their purpose by treating debt and deficit as interchangeable and not acknowledging that any savings from cuts in SS/Medicare cannot be used to pare down the deficit. Two different piles of money.

 

[SaintForLife]

Thanks for noticing. The shift between the 2 paragraphs above - is what he is talking about, I think. They talk about Social Security and Medicare and debt - then switch seamlessly to deficit preceded by the phrase “looking at it another way” which implies it’s another way of looking at the same issue.

McCarthy’s cuts won’t make any difference at all in a projected SS/Medicare shortfall, nor will cutting SS/Medicare reduce the federal deficit. You would never come to that conclusion by reading this sloppy article, though.

R politicians have for years encouraged people to confuse these two issues as a vehicle to get working class people to support cutting SS/Medicare, because at their core they don’t like the entire idea that retirees from middle and lower classes get this money at all. This article serves their purpose by treating debt and deficit as interchangeable and not acknowledging that any savings from cuts in SS/Medicare cannot be used to pare down the deficit. Two different piles of money.

I still don't see what he claimed in those tweets.

 

[SaintForLife]

I know Anne Applebaum and the Atlantic are popular here. I ask if any of yall are aware that Applebaum was involved in all of this?

 

[coldseat]

I know Anne Applebaum and the Atlantic are popular here. I ask if any of yall are aware that Applebaum was involved in all of this?

Can we not go one day without some new grand conspiracy with buzz words like "Cluster Cell"?

 

[SaintForLife]

Can we not go one day without some new grand conspiracy with buzz words like "Cluster Cell"?

I post things showing that Anne Applebaum works for a CIA cut out and how she worked for MI6 as a supposed journalist and that's your response? Do you not care or do you support what she's been caught doing?

 

[coldseat]

I post things showing that Anne Applebaum works for a CIA cut out and how she worked for MI6 as a supposed journalist and that's your response? Do you not care or do you support what she's been caught doing?

I'm not of the disposition to believe what your sources are saying just because they tweet it. I'd have to actually look for independent sources to try and confirm, which I'm not inclined to do given past experiences with similar grand conspiracies. I don't have an opinion either way on Applebaum.

 

[MT15]

I post things showing that Anne Applebaum works for a CIA cut out and how she worked for MI6 as a supposed journalist and that's your response? Do you not care or do you support what she's been caught doing?

You show a bunch of tweets - like a zillion - that don’t really prove anything but that have breathless accusations and it’s always, always a huge conspiracy against Russia or Putin or Trump.

 

[MT15]

Putting this here because the chyron is absolutely crazy, but then I read what she said: Who wants to tell her?

 

[Optimus Prime]

During a speech on Sunday night, Donald Trump repeatedly spoke as if Barack Obama were the current president. It wasn’t the first time. In recent speeches, Trump has also claimed to have beaten both Obama and George W. Bush in 2016. That’s when he wasn’t promising to use irrigation ditches to bring water to bathrooms or keep California’s forests damp.

It’s not that Trump hasn’t always been an egotistical, vindictive jackass with few concerns for whether his hateful, antisemitic, misogynistic, and racist rants had even a passing encounter with the truth. But this is different. In the 2024 campaign, and in the messages he posts to social media, Trump has been in a confused and addled state, one where he has frequently makes statements that are both incoherent and irreconcilable with reality.

Still, did you hear that President Joe Biden made a “gaffe”? Sure you did. Because the media not only devotes heavy coverage to Biden’s every hesitation or stumble, it goes out of its way to create them even when they don’t exist. All to promote a narrative that Biden is old and losing his grip, while Trump is somehow vigorous. That narrative isn’t just a clear disservice; it’s a signal measure of how willing major media outlets are to coddle Trump, savage Biden, and keep the nation in the dark.

Media Matters has pointed out that despite the barely three-year gap between the two men, Biden’s age gets mentioned almost four times as often. That means it logged 193 mentions on cable news over a four-day period. The media reinforces this with a hawk-like observation of Biden’s every utterance, ready to swoop on any perceived error.

But while the media is razor-focused on how smoothly Biden descends the stairs, this is Donald Trump:



The San Francisco Chronicle’s story about Trump’s speech on Friday focuses first on Trump’s call to shoot shoplifters on sight, but that kind of violent rhetoric is reflective of both Trump and his movement. It’s almost understandable. That’s not true of the points where Trump promises to irrigate bathrooms, claims that electric vehicles make their users “somewhat schizophrenic,” promises to keep the forests wet, or explains why you can’t have electric boats—something that he might want to explain to fishermen who have been using electric trolling motors for decades............

Trump’s recent statements aren’t just mean. They’re not just egotistical and monomaniacal. They are dangerously disconnected from reality. And it should fall on every media outlet to hammer home the senselessness of Trump’s statements. Every bizarre remark should be the focus of heavy media attention that makes clear Trump’s inability to carry on a reasoned conversation that involves real events in the real world.

Instead, we get a Newsweek article called “Joe Biden's Gaffes Are Getting Harder To Ignore,” which covers such huge events as Biden failing to shake someone’s hand at the end of a press conference; Biden saying that he visited the site of the Sept. 11 attacks a day after they occurred, rather than a few days after the attack; and a speech where Biden said nice things about the Congressional Black Caucus even though the event was organized by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

That article is just one of at least three that Newsweek has run in the last month, each one of which has included experts warning against the “perception that [Biden] is too old to be an effective president” and suggestions such as "Perhaps this trend will embolden someone like Gavin Newsom of California to throw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for 2024.”...............

Donald Trump is unraveling, and the media is covering it up

During a speech on Sunday night, Donald Trump repeatedly spoke as if Barack Obama were the current president. It wasn’t the first time. In recent speeches , Trump has also claimed to have beaten ...

www.dailykos.com

 

[MT15]

The media has a bias, it’s just the opposite of what SFL says it is.

 

[MT15]

Exhibit B

 

[MT15]

Lol

 

[MT15]

I do like the way Mehdi cuts through the BS. I wish he would do more interviews, but I can see why people don’t want to have him interview them. Plus the clip is cute…

 

[MT15]

Exhibit C of actual anti-Dem bias

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Exhibit C of actual anti-Dem bias

I wouldn't necessarily call it anti-Dem bias. There is some truth about the high job numbers. Most economists on all sides agree that in order for us to really get a grasp of inflation, we need the job market to slow down. While inflation has gone flat somewhat and started to drop in some areas, it is still high, especially in the areas we need it down the most.

If you saw Biden's press conference yesterday, he stumbled on that question because there's no good answer to address both. It's not bias. It's truth.

 

[MT15]

It’s a double standard. Media generally just doesn’t criticize Republicans the same way they criticize Democrats, IMO.