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State Media is the enemy of the People

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by adoo, May 24, 2019.

  1. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  2. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
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  3. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  4. bobrek

    bobrek Politics belong in the D & D

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    Sadly there are thousands of idiots on Facebook who actually believe that.
     
  5. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    CNN readies for town hall at turbulent time

    https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3524775-cnn-readies-for-town-hall-at-turbulent-time/

    excerpt:

    CNN is holding a town-hall meeting on Thursday amid a turbulent two months at the cable news network, which is promising a new direction one month into the tenure of its new President Chris Licht.

    Licht and the leadership at CNN’s new corporate owner, WarnerBros Discovery, have signaled they’d like to make a shift in the company’s direction from former chief Jeff Zucker, who left his post amid controversy.

    The new president has pledged a renewed commitment to centrism while taking a more sober approach when covering breaking news after CNN came under some criticism during the Trump era for a tilt to the left in its commentary and moderation, as well as sensationalism that left the network touting “breaking news” on stories that lacked oomph or had been in the news cycle for hours.

    “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers,” Licht wrote in a memo to staffers this month that was obtained by The Hill. “You’ve already seen far less of the “Breaking News” banner across our programming. The tenor of our voice holistically has to reflect that.”

    The town hall isn’t likely to be a wholly happy event for Licht and the company.

    Some staffers at the network have grown frustrated with Licht’s slow start in making key decisions and hires, as well as his more hands-off approach to management, a vast departure from Zucker, who was known for dealing directly with staff to execute his vision for what coverage should look like.

    Some inside the network have described a general feeling of uneasiness at the cable news giant, accentuated by the shuttering of its heavily promoted streaming service CNN+ — a major embarrassment for the company.

    But there also have been voices of support for Licht, with some expressing optimism about the direction of the company and praising Licht’s transparency.
    more at the link
     
  6. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    related

    Scoop: New CNN Boss Chris Licht Wants Staff to Stop Calling Trump’s Election Claims ‘The Big Lie’

    https://www.mediaite.com/tv/scoop-n...t-wants-staff-to-stop-calling-it-the-big-lie/

    excerpt:

    New CNN president Chris Licht discouraged staff from using “the big lie” to refer to former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, Mediaite has learned.

    On a Tuesday conference call with management and show executive producers, Licht was asked for his thoughts on “the big lie,” and said he preferred that staff avoid the term. He made clear this was a preference, not a mandate, but staffers have taken it as a clear directive from the new boss.

    He encouraged producers to instead use the terms “Trump election lie” or “election lies” in banners and graphics.

    According to a source, Licht argued that using “the big lie” makes the mistake of adopting branding used by the Democratic Party, thereby weakening the objectivity of the network.

    The term, which was first coined by Adolf Hitler and later used to describe Nazi propaganda efforts, was recently adopted by critics of Trump in response to his relentless promotion of the false claim he won the 2020 election.

    The term has become ubiquitous on CNN. “Big lie” has been mentioned on the network 168 times this month, according to media monitoring service TVEyes.

    The guidance, which comes as a House select committee holds hearings investigating Trump’s election lies and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol they inspired, has rankled some at the network.

    “It’s worrisome that we’re being told how to talk about one of the worst things that ever happened to American democracy,” a CNN insider told Mediaite. “We have to call lies, lies, whether they’re small lies or big lies. Is there any lie bigger than that lie?”

    They speculated that the directive could be coming from Warner Bros. Discovery board member John Malone, who has criticized CNN’s approach to news under former boss Zucker.

    “It seems to indicate where things are headed,” they added. “We didn’t have this problem until John Malone was sitting on the board of this company.”

    A veteran television producer with a resume that includes a well-regarded stint with MSNBC’s Morning Joe and most recently at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Licht was tapped to take the helm at CNN after the ouster of Jeff Zucker during the tumultuous months before the merger of CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia with Discovery.

    Licht’s “big lie” guidance came a few weeks after he told CNN staff to cut back on their use of the (long-abused) “breaking news” banner, signaling the Licht era would take a more subtle approach to coverage.

    “Its impact has become lost on the audience,” Licht wrote in a memo urging staff to be more judicious in declaring “breaking” news. “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers.”
    more at the link
     
  7. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Cnn would gain more cred if they focused more on middle lower class (urban and rural) perspectives all the time rather than doing one and done exposes that do nothing but give a five minute snapshot to coastal audiences.

    It only belies the lack of understanding, empathy, or insight that typifies that kind of reporting.

    Mid lower income Middle America thinks they're being ignored and gaslighted. They are, but they'll believe what we tell them to believe...until they vote in a Trump to upend primaries.

    Urban Black Americans think they're being trivialized and their voices stolen by academics and upper class white woke warriors. They are, but studies are better than going directly to the source... dominoes don't even want to cover those areas.

    Or maybe some program has attempted to do that but we're too self absorbed to care. Has anyone visited propublica recently? So many problems, not enough ****s to give.
     
    #1167 Invisible Fan, Jun 17, 2022
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2022
    TheJuice and mdrowe00 like this.
  8. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    "why are we still being governed by baby boomers?"

    "this is why"

     
  9. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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    PBS NewsHour commentator Mark Shields dies at age 85

    Mark Shields, the longtime PBS News commentator known for his weekly political analysis, died Saturday morning at the age of 85, PBS NewsHour confirmed. Shields died of kidney failure at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., NewsHour spokesman Nick Massella told NPR.
     
    Invisible Fan likes this.
  10. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    RIP Mark.

    Those Friday broadcasts on newshour made the week on what was going on. Not to say either was totally accurate but he certainly debated with conviction and consistency.
     
  11. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Is The New York Times Fake News?

    https://www.allsides.com/blog/new-york-times-fake-news

    excerpt:

    An entire news outlet isn’t “fake news” because it posted one incorrect or false story. Mistakes do happen. Often, good journalists who make a mistake or accidentally publish false information issue apologies and corrections, and try to rectify the situation.

    However, there are some examples of the New York Times publishing what some may say amounts to “fake news.”

    Is the New York Times Fake News?
    The Capitol Riot Fire Extinguisher Story
    The narrative that Capitol Police Offier Brian Sicknick was beaten to death went viral when the New York Times published an anonymously-sourced story on Jan. 8, 2021 under the headline: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then He Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob.”

    The New York Times story described how anonymous law enforcement officials said that on Jan. 6, 2021 “pro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy and overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.”

    Besides the Times’s anonymously-sourced story, no other details supporting this account emerged. And as prosecutors struggled to build a homicide case against those accused of killing Sicknick, the New York Times made limited updates to its original coverage. On Feb. 12, the Times added a brief note to the top of its original story, describing “new information” that “questions” the details originally provided. To date, no other sources have confirmed the original account published by the Times on Jan. 8.

    The Times’s article currently states that "Medical experts have said [Sicknick] did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official. Instead, investigators increasingly believe that a factor may have been an irritant such as mace or bear spray that was sprayed in the face of Mr. Sicknick, the law enforcement official said."

    In mid-April 2021, Washington D.C. chief medical examiner Francisco Diaz announced that Sicknick died at roughly 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 7 of natural causes associated with two strokes. His official cause of death is listed as "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis."

    Despite the examiner’s conclusion and a lack of evidence for the beating, tweets from the Timessaying that Sicknick was hit with a fire extinguisher remain unaddressed.

    The false narrative of a pro-Trump mob beating Sicknick to death subsequently fueled Democratic politicians’ criticisms of former President Donald Trump.

    House Democrats cited the New York Times report in their Feb. 2 trial memorandum to advance their attempt to impeach Trump. As recently as June 2021, President Joe Biden repeated the claimthat the Jan. 6 mob “killed a police officer” — an unsubstantiated claim that very few mainstream fact-checkers addressed.
    more at the link

     
    blue_eyed_devil likes this.
  12. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    democracy dies in dumbness

     
  13. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  14. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    well if that's the case I guess the old dude got what he deserved

     
  15. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  16. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Opinion How media coverage drove Biden’s political plunge

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

    excerpt:

    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.

    ***
    Relentless negative coverage is toxic for politicians. As University of Minnesota policy analyst Will Stancil has argued, U.S. news coverage often has a collective tenor, what he calls a “main signal.” This signal seeps from traditional news sources into social media, with stories shared on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

    Biden’s arc shows what happens if this broad tenor turns against a politician. There seems to be a generalized frustration with him, as opposed to unhappiness over a single issue or two, even among people who don’t closely follow traditional news outlets or are generally supportive of his views.

    The political strategy Team Biden took, focusing on showing the president competently managing the pandemic and the economy and reducing partisanship in Washington, was particularly harmed by the media’s coverage approach. It is difficult for a president to demonstrate competence with a media perpetually looking for something negative. For one thing, when Biden got an issue under control, such as coronavirus vaccine distribution, many journalists simply moved on to a new problem without crediting him much for fixing the old one. By making reduced political gridlock a metric of his success, Biden positioned himself to look bad when congressional Republicans and Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) blocked his proposals.

    Now, Biden is polling worse than Trump was in July 2020, when thousands of people were dying each week of covid, a situation much worse than the real and serious problem of high inflation in the Biden era. You can’t credibly argue that Trump, with his constant inflammatory statements and incompetent management, was a better president than Biden. These poll numbers reflect something gone wrong.

    And in my view, media coverage is a big factor in those warped polling results. Media commitment to “equal” coverage of both parties has resulted in a year and a half of coverage since Biden entered office that implies both parties are similarly bad, as if the surge of inflation and some of Biden’s policy mistakes rival a Republican Party that is actively undermining democracy in numerous ways, such as continuing to voice baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, passing measures making it harder to vote, and gerrymandering so aggressively in states such as Wisconsin that elections are effectively meaningless.

    Yes, I am calling for the media to cover Biden more positively. Not in the sense of declaring Biden a better man than Trump (though that is obviously true). Instead, political coverage should be grounded in highlighting the wide range of our problems and assessing whether politicians and parties are working toward credible solutions. Such a model would still produce a lot of stories about surging inflation, Afghanistan and other issues where Biden’s policies haven’t worked. But there would also be more stories about other issues important to Americans, even if they were going well under Biden (like the huge job growth during his tenure). Ideally, on every issue, the media would compare the Republican and Democratic solutions. You can see how this model might help Biden — but the bigger benefit would be to readers.
    more at the link



     
  17. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    commentary on this opinion piece:

    Washington Post opinion: The media needs to be nicer to Joe Biden

    https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/07...-media-needs-to-be-nicer-to-joe-biden-n483512
     
  18. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    another good assessment of this WaPo piece:

    The News is Bad for Biden
    The nature of American political reporting distorts our perception of reality.

    https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-news-is-bad-for-biden/

    excerpt:

    Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was an absolute ****-show. I can’t imagine that any President wouldn’t have been hammered for it. It was the culmination of a twenty-year effort and it ended not only disastrously but did so in a visually compelling way.

    Further, the same institutions continued reporting on the story. For those paying attention—which, alas, is a tiny fraction of the mass public—it became clear that the extraction effort rather quickly recovered. To be sure, the Taliban takeover was swift and brutal. But I think most of us understand that, unless we were willing to stay another twenty years, that outcome was inevitable.

    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.

    Oh, for ****’s sake, Perry. Presidents get outsized credit and blame for everything. It’s the way of the world. It ain’t new or specific to Biden.

    Sure, some of it is sloppy and sensationalistic reporting. The very nature of daily news reporting is that we hyper-focus on the question What’s different today than yesterday? and draw overbroad conclusions and try to spot trends from blips.

    But, hell, even seasoned historians do this. We break up our study of American history into presidential terms. It’s a natural, easy organizing construct.

    Is it silly to hyper-analyze off-off-year elections and try to read the tea leaves? Of course it is. But it’s how political reporting has worked as long as I can remember. And I’m old. Moreover, I don’t know what else political reporters and opinion writers are going to do. People who care about politics follow it like a sport and want daily coverage. When there’s very little news, minor happenings get dissected and analyzed to death. That’s just how it is and it’s unreasonable to expect that to change.

    Moreover, none of this is Biden-specific. There’s absolutely reason to criticize the press for “Democrats in disarray” stories that lack broader context. Or for sensationalizing gripes from a handful of backbenchers as though they were representative of the larger party.​

    more at the link
     
  19. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  20. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    Media coverage sucks, but its a shared suck.

    Consolidation or "online restructuring" hasn't solved much in news media. Print subs and TV viewers are still going down. Then you have backdoor players like Sinclair Broadcasting to buy fiefdoms over unsuspecting innocent baby lambs.

    Big Brains use social media and Twitter to aggregate primary sources through shock headlines or photos...which is more or less like killing a shark, ripping off its fin, then throwing whatever's left to the sea (in God's hands now.)

    So people wonder why Fix News or MSNBC editorial uh... programming works. Its just an aggregate of headlines pumped with 30-60 mins worth of rage or disgust.

    No matter the medium, attention is always king.

    Say you don't like the hit of an 80proof cluster**** in your backyard or capital, something like Daily Show or Oliver sprinkles sugar over it like a spiked milkshake. Somehow the nice and smooth delivery has dulled any sense of urgency

    Humans have a reductionist mindset or a habit to simplify models into even simpler piles of rubble. I remember complaining about 30 second soundbytes in cable media 2 decades ago. Now its a headline with 256 characters or less.

    In fairness, we're currently dealing with an exponential (hockey puck?) firehose of daily information. Instead of 2 or 3 things potentially destroying the world (Soviets, Y2K, Global Warming) twenty-thirty years ago, it's like 10+ now. So maybe we're supposed to pay more attention to one important drop than the gallons of water sandblasting your brain.

    Or you can just go into shock, pretend the firehose doesn't exist, and assume everything will turn out fine because someone else will do it.
     

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