The Press Cries Wolf - "The post office’s journey from America’s most serially-ignored public institution to subject of a massive international sympathy campaign – the U.S.P.S. is currently the world’s largest baby trapped at the bottom of the world’s largest well – is the latest bizarro development of the Trump years, when news coverage has devolved into a never-ending succession of moral panics, some real, some less so... In the Trump years, the news has been covered as an ongoing emergency, borrowing from techniques pioneered by Fox News and perfected through episodes like Benghazi. That story was blown into a frenzy for years, as Fox created the impression that litigating every detail of the Libyan mission narrative was at least 95% of what the average person should be caring about at any given moment. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are now following the same script with the Trump panics. The pattern is consistent... A panic is a panic, and there are only two reportable angles in today’s America, total guilt and total innocence. The problem with all of these round-the-clock, crash-style coverage schemes is that commentators end up reaching for rhetorical extremes early... This type of coverage exhausts audiences, who either become addicted to the cycle of rhetorical highs or repulsed by the relentless maximalist formulations. The same thing is happening now, as there are probably huge pluralities of voters who can’t stand Donald Trump, but flinch at turning on MSNBC to hear about the latest threat to “democracy itself” because it’s such a grueling mental commitment. Worse, once your station reaches for Reichstag metaphors or demands prison time, it becomes harder to work in mitigating information that might pop up. In many of these scandals, even when the balance of information still looks bad or very bad for Trump, news outlets commit to leaving out important background, so as not to complicate the audience response... Apparently, until recently, all decent Americans had bottomless affection for the communal spirit of the Postal Service and supported it without hesitation. Yet in April, 2012, in the middle of the Obama presidency, the Times ran a very different house editorial. The paper argued mounting losses necessitated swift action to reduce costs. The Times worried that “lawmakers in both houses” would “procrastinate as usual,” and blasted the Senate for devising a bill that “timorously aims at part-time ‘downsizing,’ not closing, lightly used post offices.” The paper added that decreased revenue thanks to email could mean losses of “more than $20 billion a year by 2016,” and hoped that, so long as “courage trumps procrastination,” the U.S.P.S. could be granted the “flexibility of a modern business.” If you look back, you’ll find the overwhelming consensus in both the Bush and Obama years was that a fully-staffed post office was a money pit, and “flexibility” was needed to allow the service to budget-slash its way back to relevance in the Internet age... Is this unprecedented corruption, something a little worse than normal, or just the usual undisguised? If press outlets never dial back excesses, and every story is the end of the world, we may miss it when we’re actually supposed to panic."
Cult Nation - "News once targeted parents who feared their children might be radicalized by Satanists or fantasy gamers or cyberporn, but the narratives have changed over time (“Is Your Baby Racist?” from 2009 was one of the all-time Newsweek covers). The most recent crazes are often past manias in reverse. They invite us to wonder if the institutions the press used to warn were under threat from gangsta rap or crack or Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever, have themselves been the actual contaminants all along. Everything from marriage to democracy to school is presented as a potential villain. Nothing symbolized 2020 press trends better than longtime denouncer of “absent fathers” David Brooks writing in the Atlantic that “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”... Throughout the last four years, when legitimately disturbing political news began to be a central feature of the American experience, a lot of the usual coping mechanisms disappeared. Humor and satire all but vanished from pop culture, for the same reason the Soviets suppressed Bulgakov, Voinovich, and Dovlatov: laughter is demystifying in all directions and restores perspective. No fear-based system can tolerate it. We used to love it. Even Republicans got off on Gerald Ford tripping and falling. Now we don’t laugh at ourselves at all"
We Need a New Media System - "The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it... What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end."
Matthew Yglesias on Twitter - "They sincerely should offer the option of subscribing to a special edition of the New York Times that appends (“… and this is bad”) to every headline that’s about the actions of GOP elected officials or conservative activists. A lot of people seem to want this."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Woodward and Bernstein on the US - "‘What this jury found is that not that Trump raped her but that he defamed her and conducted a campaign against her and so much turns on, as president this allegation surfaced. Trump's in the Oval Office and they asked him about it and the first thing he says: she's not my type. And then he says it never happened. Now why, in his mind, is he saying she's not my type? That's irrelevant’...
‘Our job reporting has been and needs to continue to be reporting on his character through his actions’...
‘I think in terms of [Rupert Murdoch’s] legacy, it is going to be evil because he has taken untruth and made it his imprimitar’"
I saw so many liberals crowing that he had been found guilty of rape. So much for that.
So many people believe the spiel about rape being about power that it is apparently irrelevant to a rapist whether his victim is sexually attractive. Presumably you would find gay men mostly raping women too, then (you can come up with some mumbo jumbo feminist logic about how gay men are still misogynistic, so they would choose to rape women)
When you proclaim that your job as a journalist is not to report the news
Given how much fake news the media has been promoting, condemning Rupert Murdoch is rich
Meme - BUSINESS INSIDER: "BILLIONAIRE JEFF BEZOS' WASHINGTON POST BUY MARKS A FASCINATING CULTURAL TRANSITION IN AMERICA
AUGUST 5, 2013"
BUSINESS INSIDER: "ELON MUSK'S ATTEMPT TO BUY TWITTER REPRESENTS A CHILLING NEW THREAT: BILLIONAIRE TROLLS TAKING OVER SOCIAL MEDIA
APRIL 14, 2022"
Mika Brzezinski - Our Job Is to Control Exactly What People Think - YouTube
Ahh... MSNBC!
Meme - Tucker Carison @TuckerCarlson: "Ep. 1" 84M Views
BUSINESS INSIDER: "Tucker Carlson is nothing without Fox News, and his sad Twitter-broadcast debut proves it. Cheryl Teh"
Washington Post’s Business Struggles as Frustrations Mount - The New York Times - "Many news outlets, in addition to The Post, have experienced declining readership since former President Donald J. Trump left office. But two of The Post’s top competitors — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — have added subscriptions since Mr. Trump left office."
Experts Warn Accurate News Articles Are Misinformation if They Support Conservative Views - "The hit piece begins by pointing out how well The Daily Wire does in Facebook engagement compared to more mainstream media outlets, such as The New York Times and the Washington Post. This is a useful corrective to those who think left-wing "Big Tech" companies have scrubbed away the conservative presence online. But that's not the point of Miles Parks' analysis. His point is that The Daily Wire's success on in Facebook is a bad thing because the outlet is using "outrage as a business model." Needless to say, many media outlets do that. It's not even new to the age of social media. Before we had outrage clicks we had gossip columns and "If it bleeds, it leads." But The Daily Wire is different, you see. Because of the site's political leanings, it is framing stories in a certain way to appeal to conservative opinion. NPR doesn't accuse The Daily Wire of publishing false news. But the expert Parks interviews—Jaime Settle, director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at the College of William & Mary—sees the historically common political reframing of the stories of the day as a big problem... The story appears right as the White House is calling for broad coordination between social media platforms to ban users that the government deems to be sources of vaccine misinformation. We've already seen where that approach leads. The U.S. government is not the final arbiter of what COVID-19 claims are accurate. We've already seen platforms, at government urging, classify theories that the virus may have leaked from a Chinese laboratory as misinformation and censor them. But it wasn't "misinformation." It was a theory that may well turn out to be accurate. There is plenty of genuine misinformation out there about COVID-19, but at this point the federal government has, for many Americans, blown the handling of this epidemic with fear-driven responses not backed up by science. As a result, large swathes of people are going to be suspicious about any White House statements about misinformation. Stories like this NPR report perpetuate the divide. Parks says The Daily Wire's stories "don't normally include falsehoods," but then lets Settle (who has a book to sell blaming social media for political polarization) say that sometimes the truth can "become a piece of misinformation.""
Meme - Forbes @Forbes: "Elon Musk shared a quote supposedly from French philosopher Voltaire on Saturday to make a joke about kids with leukemia. But it's completely fake."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The meme Elon tweeted was using kids with leukemia as an example as to why the quote does not work. Forbes' claim that Elon is making fun of children with leukemia is false and misleading, and is possibly an intentional lie to hurt Elon's character. Elon explains as well:"
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Actually, the meme is showing the absurdity of the statement by noting that, if true, it would apply to kids with leukemia"
Whole Mars Catalog @WholeMarsBlog: "Elon explains memes to journalists"
Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox - The Atlantic - "The journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence... his absence as a staffer (a Vox spokesperson noted that he will continue to host a podcast, The Weeds) will make the publication he co-founded less ideologically diverse at a moment when negative polarization makes that attribute important to the country. Like Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack after parting ways with New York magazine, and Glenn Greenwald, who joined Substack after resigning from The Intercept, which he co-founded, Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues... as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations... Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party... Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview"... One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue... after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.” Yglesias had been personally kind and supportive of her work, she wrote, but as a trans woman, she felt the letter should not have been signed by anyone at Vox, because she believed that it contained “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions,” and that several of its signatories are anti-trans... “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”... “We saw that in the way the New York Times people characterized their opposition to Tom Cotton’s op-ed,” he said, and “we saw it in what Emily VanDerWerff wrote about me––and Vox to its credit has not [been] managed in that way exactly, but it is definitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today, and it makes me feel like it’s a good time to have an independent platform.’ The New York Times’ Opinion editor, James Bennet (a former editor in chief of The Atlantic), was forced out over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. The Times Opinion staffer Bari Weiss left the newspaper soon afterward, alleging in her resignation letter that “if a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.” The two had been charged, in part, with offering Times readers a greater diversity of opinions... I wrote about an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views... Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect. For that reason, ideological outliers within an organization are valuable, especially in journalism... The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate. Substack seems poised to grow because it offers some writers independence and financial benefits. It will arguably function as a corrective against growing intolerance of heterodoxy, even as it accelerates a trend toward ideological outliers parting ways with traditional publications, and makes those publications more monolithic"
Speaking "truth" to "power" is only important when it helps the liberal agenda. Liberals hate substack precisely because it is a platform outside their echo chamber they cannot control
New York Transit Agency Intentionally Slowing Buses to Punish Riders for Fare Evaders
The media spreading fake news again. This is about them not implementing all door boarding - which is not the same as intentionally slowing buses
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "A few days ago, Joe Biden appeared to call Donald Trump “George” in an interview. One of a number of verbal gaffes he’s made lately. Fact checkers stepped in to say that Biden was referencing the host, whose name was also George. The problem with those fact checks is that they don’t have evidence to back up their claim, and it doesn’t necessarily absolve Biden of making a mental error. In issuing their ‘fact checks’ the media wasn’t presenting impartial information but were making a tribalistic argument. They viewed the evidence in a light most favorable to their side."
Meme - "What's this genre of news article called?"
"Wheel Of Time Is Not Doing The numbers that were expected, but that is the idea. The success of the show may be elsewhere according to experts."
"Netflix's 'Cowboy Bebop' Isn't Supposed to Be Good"
Glenn Greenwald on Twitter - "Six years of the corporate media adopting as a core narrative the claim that the Trump-era GOP is full-on racist and "white nationalist," only for Latinos to say they prefer the GOP by 52-39%, and 41% of non-whites saying they intend to vote GOP in 2022. "
Perma Banned - Posts | Facebook - "-Kotaku Journo
-Writes article about how "gamers can't take criticism"
-A guy criticises his article about gamers hating criticism
-Proceeds to respond to the critique by insulting the guy's mother and telling him to "fuck off"
This is like a skit irl"
It's all liberal projection and gaslighting
Glenn Greenwald on Twitter - "I have asked Warm Springs Productions, which produces "Lara Logan Has No Agenda" on Fox Nation, for comment on Logan's comparison of Dr. Fauci to a Nazi doctor."
"Genuinely love that liberals are trying to create a new moral rule that comparing a government official to Nazis is a firing offense. Which journalists *didn’t* do that during the Trump years?"
DermotM on Twitter - "Waukesha Christmas parade attack suspect Darrell Brooks feels 'dehumanized' in jail"
"Because people keep calling him a car"
Andrew Yang Defends Dave Chappelle Over School Visit - "After Politico reported that Chappelle had some tense exchanges with students during a Tuesday visit to his old high school, Yang took to Twitter to describe the coverage as a "press hit job" that ignored the comedian's philanthropic efforts related to the event... "The press hit job on his visiting his high school is awful," Yang tweeted. "Successful alum who fundraises for school returns, speaks to students and gives everyone a free meal for Thanksgiving. But of course in 2021 an obvious positive gesture is framed negatively in the media." Chappelle gave out 600 Thanksgiving meals for students and staff as well as tickets to a screening of his forthcoming documentary, according to Politico. The initial Politico report, which appeared in an edition of the Playbook newsletter, came with a correction by Friday afternoon"
Kyle Griffin on Twitter - "New York Times calls the DeSantis announcement a "fiasco." NBC News calls it a 'melt down.' The Washington Post calls it "awkward." Politico calls it "horrendous.""
Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "Legacy media that’s run by Democrats is attacking Twitter and a Republican candidate? Wow that’s some powerful news! 😂"
Opinion: Government and Big Tech must tackle online harassment against journalists - The Globe and Mail
Only journalists get to hold others "accountable". Holding them accountable is "harassment"
Meme - Media: "*white skin* HATE CRIME
*Trans, LGB or Black Power* DRIVEN TO VIOLENCE"
BuzzFeed News will shut down, 15% of company workforce cut, CEO says
Vice Media bankruptcy: Provocative startup was once valued at $5.7 billion
ESPN anchor Sage Steele is off the air after her comments on vaccines and Obama - "Sports anchor Sage Steele is off the air at ESPN after she called vaccine mandates "sick" and "scary" and questioned why former President Barack Obama identifies as Black even though he was raised by his white mother... "At ESPN, we embrace different points of view - dialogue and discussion makes this place great. That said, we expect that those points of view be expressed respectfully, in a manner consistent with our values, and in line with our internal policies. We are having direct conversations with Sage and those conversations will remain private."... Carron J. Phillips, a senior writer for Deadspin, noted a contrast between how ESPN treated Steele and how it responded when former anchor Jemele Hill called then-President Donald Trump a "white supremacist," characterizing the company's responses as "sooooooo different.""
Questioning the liberal consensus is unacceptable
Opinion | Frank Bruni: A Final Column on What it Means to Be a Columnist - The New York Times - "I worried, and continue to worry, about the degree to which I and other journalists — opinion writers, especially — have contributed to the dynamics we decry: the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all. I worry, too, about how frequently we shove ambivalence and ambiguity aside. Ambivalence and ambiguity aren’t necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events that we don’t yet understand, with outcomes that we can’t predict. But they don’t make for bold sentences or tidy talking points. So we pundits are merchants of certitude in a world where much is in doubt and many questions don’t have one right answer. As such, we may be encouraging arrogance and unyieldingness in our readers, viewers and listeners. And those attributes need no encouragement in America today... Trump’s penchant for mockery gave those of us who covered him a green light to follow suit, and I was among many who seized on that permission. There wasn’t any shame in that, and it afforded us flights of verbal fancy that plenty of readers enjoyed. But there wasn’t any honor in it, either. We sank toward Trump’s level, and he cited that descent as validation of his hostility. The reciprocal ridicule went on and on. Will the vestiges of it pollute post-Trump journalism? My wager is yes. And it’s a sorrowful bet... Too many columnists generalize too broadly. I know I did when I wrote, in August 2019, about the tenacity of hate and I asserted that Americans who still opposed same-sex marriage “cannot bear the likes of me” and other gay people. A reader called me out on it, saying that there’s a difference between disagreeing with a position and detesting a person. He was right. But that distinction was lost in my excited prose."
Meme - Reporters Before: "I will bring the gang's crimes to light even if it risks my life!"
Reporters now: "OMG Cardi B changed her color of dress"
Fearless Truth Teller aka “the J man” on Twitter - "I love that the mainstream media position is “yes the CIA did bad things in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s but nobody was ever prosecuted and there were no reforms so now they don’t do bad things today you conspiracy theorist.”"
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Media criticism isn't always fair, but their lies about violence in this country are truly outrageous. Blacks are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of interracial violence, not its victims. This isn't one of those things you need fancy stats or much sophistication to understand."
End Wokeness @EndWoke...: "Perspective is everything
INTERRACIAL VIOLENT CRIME INCIDENTS 2018
BLACK ON WHITE 547,948
BLACK ON HISPANIC 112,365
WHITE ON BLACK 59.778
WHITE ON HISPANIC 207,104
HISPANIC ON WHITE 265,299
HISPANIC ON BLACK 44,551
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2018 (Table 14)
TV Camera: *focusing on* 59,778 WHITE ON BLACK
Elon Musk: "Odd, why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree?"
Meme - "MEDIA NARRATIVE CHART
for reporting violent crime
ATTACKER - VICTIM - NARRATIVE
Non-white shooter - White - Gun control
White shooter - Non-white - Racism, flags
Non-white - Non-white - Run story about the Kardashions instead
Police officer - Non-white - Police brutality
Non-white shooter - Police officer - Reaction to brutality
Male - Female - Sexism
Female - Male - Reaction to sexism
Female shooter - Female - Gun control
Female - Fraternity - Ban fraternities
Non-Muslim - Muslim - Islamophobia
Muslim - Non-Muslim - Reaction to Islamophobia
Muslim - Muslim - Kardashians
Atheist shooter - Christian - Gun Control
Terrorist - Artist - Need for censorship
Terrorist - Christian - The Crusades"