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?

 

[MT15]

Still today Fox News Twitter account is posting their outright lie that the wreath laying at Arlington was “skipped” by Biden so he could go on vacation. They are one of the worst of the worst. And they got community noted, but still leave it up.

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

Still today Fox News Twitter account is posting their outright lie that the wreath laying at Arlington was “skipped” by Biden so he could go on vacation. They are one of the worst of the worst. And they got community noted, but still leave it up.

I would like it if the "community notes" were visible with embedded tweets.

 

[MT15]

I would like it if the "community notes" were visible with embedded tweets.

Yeah, thanks. I noticed it didn’t come through after I posted it, just too lazy to repost, lol.

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

Yeah, thanks. I noticed it didn’t come through after I posted it, just too lazy to repost, lol.

It was cool to see so many that called out Faux for their bull !

 

[MT15]

Horrible framing from Politico. Just awful.

 

[MT15]

It was cool to see so many that called out Faux for their bull !

It’s worth noting that this lie - that Biden and Harris couldn’t be bothered to attend the event at Arlington was the Trump campaign’s original plan. They arranged for Trump to attend a private event and then smeared Biden and Harris for not being there. It was all over Twitter, too, before the story came out about the assault. Interesting that Fox is still sticking with the lie - even after it has come out that the wreath laying was private.

 

[MT15]

I think we have to consider that the vast majority of the press is intimidated by Trump and his thuggish ways. The Trump campaign was hacked weeks and weeks ago - with the emails provided to at least 2 major outlets - who have both decided to keep them a secret. They ignore Trump’s insane rantings, while they absolutely crucified Biden over his issues. They aren’t following up on the assault at Arlington, even though the Army acknowledged it happened. There is surely a witness who can speak about what happened without naming the employee who was bullied. As a result of no press follow through, MAGAs on Twitter are saying it didn’t happen even though the Army said it did.

From Twitter. I hadn’t thought of it in quite this way. But it makes sense. Just like the majority of elected GOP just keep their heads down and ignore the insanity, our media is largely failing us in the same way.

“Get on the Harris shirt-list, and she wins - you'll be fine.
Get on the Trump shirt-list, and he wins - blacklisted and career over, at best. Wins or loses, you're on some armed MAGA's list.
Easier to say "it's just who he is".
Which could be democracy's epitaph.”

 

[MT15]

Jeff Goldberg on the double standard main steam media is applying to Trump-Harris. It’s just beyond obvious.



Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. I am hopeful that his willingness to call out the double standard will at least get some in media to reconsider their abdication of duty here.

 

[MT15]

This highlights the double standard very succinctly.

 

[LA - L.A.]

Jeff Goldberg on the double standard main steam media is applying to Trump-Harris. It’s just beyond obvious.



Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. I am hopeful that his willingness to call out the double standard will at least get some in media to reconsider their abdication of duty here.

I read the name as Jeff Goldblum and was like, "what the hell?"

 

[MT15]

This isn’t media per se, but I saw it on Twitter. A random younger person posted something about how funny he thought it was that Boomers were so against drugs their entire lives, but are now all about the THC gummies.

I did a double take - and read an entire thread of people who are entirely confused about what happened in the late 60’s-mid 70’s where you couldn’t attend a concert without pervasive weed smell or being offered a joint. Where my college roommate took LSD to attend an outdoors sporting event, and that wasn’t all that uncommon. Nobody in the entire comments really knew what they were talking about. I was amused to read that “hippies” were only a small subset and didn’t really have any real influence and most boomers were having crew cuts and wearing penny loafers.

Which just ignores how pervasive “hippie” values became by the end of the Vietnam War. It also sort of highlights how stupid these generational labels are. Some boomers probably grew up in the time of crew cuts, but by the time I was a teenager - we were mimicking hippie dress and cultural ideals. To say we were all against drugs is pretty naive.

 

[Lapaz]

Jeff Goldberg on the double standard main steam media is applying to Trump-Harris. It’s just beyond obvious.



Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. I am hopeful that his willingness to call out the double standard will at least get some in media to reconsider their abdication of duty here.

Trump is an imbecile with bad intentions that has changed his positions, and was an accomplice in the death of hundreds of thousands due to mismanagement of the Covid crisis, while Kamala is a competent person with good intentions that has changed her positions, but the media is hyper focused on Kamala's change of positions. The dung heap is so huge with Trump, that adding a little more dung goes unnoticed, while adding dung to Kamala is easily noticed. The problem is that Trump's supporters don't care about Trump's dung heap. They seem to want deflation, an authoritarian, allowing Russia and China to take whatever they want, reduce rights for women, increase the wealth gap, loosen protective regulations, privatize all schools, run most agencies into the ground, jail political opponents, etc.

 

[Optimus Prime]

This isn’t media per se, but I saw it on Twitter. A random younger person posted something about how funny he thought it was that Boomers were so against drugs their entire lives, but are now all about the THC gummies.

I did a double take - and read an entire thread of people who are entirely confused about what happened in the late 60’s-mid 70’s where you couldn’t attend a concert without pervasive weed smell or being offered a joint. Where my college roommate took LSD to attend an outdoors sporting event, and that wasn’t all that uncommon. Nobody in the entire comments really knew what they were talking about. I was amused to read that “hippies” were only a small subset and didn’t really have any real influence and most boomers were having crew cuts and wearing penny loafers.

Which just ignores how pervasive “hippie” values became by the end of the Vietnam War. It also sort of highlights how stupid these generational labels are. Some boomers probably grew up in the time of crew cuts, but by the time I was a teenager - we were mimicking hippie dress and cultural ideals. To say we were all against drugs is pretty naive.

 

[bird]

Trump is an imbecile with bad intentions that has changed his positions, and was an accomplice in the death of hundreds of thousands due to mismanagement of the Covid crisis, while Kamala is a competent person with good intentions that has changed her positions, but the media is hyper focused on Kamala's change of positions. The dung heap is so huge with Trump, that adding a little more dung goes unnoticed, while adding dung to Kamala is easily noticed. The problem is that Trump's supporters don't care about Trump's dung heap. They seem to want deflation, an authoritarian, allowing Russia and China to take whatever they want, reduce rights for women, increase the wealth gap, loosen protective regulations, privatize all schools, run most agencies into the ground, jail political opponents, etc.

As long as MAGAs can feel superior to someone else they will happy perform oral ministrations on Trump. Until they get their own mammary glands caught in a wringer and then they will squeal for help. Help that won’t be coming from Trump.

 

[MT15]

Since we have found out about Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and the woman whose name I forget being paid shills for Russia, I just thought we should pour one out in this thread for the “independent media” who so clearly captivated the OP of this thread and whose rants about “corporate media” will be remembered, not fondly, but still remembered as totally delusional.

 

[MT15]

Good challenge to the media:

 

[Optimus Prime]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it.

They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power.

While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”.

Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”……

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over.

They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health.

NBC did reporton this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)………

The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset | Rebecca Solnit

The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.

Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.

Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?


“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.

With that setup, he tried to prove his point.

“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”

The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.

The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.

“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.


“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.…….

The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

Rattled rightwing pundits keep trying out new lines of attack on Harris and Walz. Yet few of them are sticking

www.theguardian.com