The anatomy of a media smear - "Videos circulating online show Gesualdi and Masterson holding up their signs and shouting pro-Chappelle slogans, and infuriating the Netflix protesters in the process. It was light-hearted and cheeky. But that’s not how the Associated Press (AP) reported it. Its article about the protest featured a picture showing Gesualdi along with a misleading caption: ‘Comedian and vlogger Vito Gesualdi screams profanities as he engages with peaceful protesters begging him to leave.’ It was a stock caption, meaning that numerous other sites repeated its content verbatim. This description of events was partisan and unfair. As writer Jesse Singal has highlighted on Twitter, there is no evidence that Gesualdi was shouting any profanities at the protest. Anyone who has watched the videos of what happened will know that he was not remotely aggressive. All the aggression came from the protesters who, far from ‘begging him to leave’, were extremely unpleasant towards Gesualdi. One shook a tambourine in his face while shouting ‘repent, motherfucker’. Another grabbed and destroyed his ‘We like Dave’ sign, before handing him back the stick the sign was attached to and accusing him of carrying a ‘weapon’. Following Singal’s intervention, AP changed the caption. It now reads: ‘Comedian and videographer Vito Gesualdi shouts at people protesting against Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special.’ Which is still pretty inaccurate, painting Gesualdi as some kind of malicious invader when really he was just having some fun. It wasn’t just AP that engaged in this truth-twisting. Variety tweeted an image of Gesualdi at the protest with the caption: ‘At times, the #NetflixWalkout situation threatened to devolve, as counter-protesters pushed against trans speakers.’ But Gesualdi was not pushing anyone. He did not use force of any kind. According to Gesualdi, Masterson actually ended up in hospital after having his head smacked against a concrete ball, seemingly after being shoved by one of the Netflix protesters. Variety ended up having to delete the tweet and post a correction. All news journalists make mistakes from time to time. Sometimes bias creeps in unwittingly. But where the culture war is concerned it seems some outlets have no qualms about making it abundantly clear which side they are on. And then they wonder why people distrust the mainstream news media."
Watch–Alex Marlow on Newsmax TV: CorpMedia Defining ‘Normative Conservative Viewpoints as Violence' - "the media are “owning up to the fact that they’re going to disenfranchise half the country.”... “They’re trying to portray people with normative conservative viewpoints as violence. In the meantime, they’re ignoring widespread left-wing violence”"
Daily Caller on X - "NBC’s Lester Holt declares that “fairness is overrated” and that “the idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in.”"
Brit Hume on X - "This argument rests on the proposition that the media always know the truth. But they don’t, as his own network’s coverage of the bogus — and implausible — Russia collusion tale illustrates. Not to mention the media’s reporting of early Covid 19 advice that turned out wrong. Obviously if one side says the White House is made of powdered milk, and the other disagrees, we can safely ignore the milk claim. But political disputes are rarely so cut and dried. So we report what both sides are saying and let viewers and readers make up their own minds."
This is why the left hate Fox News so much
The ‘Trump point’ was proved by media coverage of Biden’s stumbles - YouTube - "Sky News host Alan Jones says the “Trump point” about media bias and protection of Joe Biden was proved after American news sites had “no mention” of the incident. It comes after US President Joe Biden stumbled and fell several times while running up the stairs of Air Force One. The 78-year-old gripped onto the railing as he tripped twice and fell over a third time when boarding the aircraft. “After the stumble, the websites of MSNBC, CBS News, the Washington Post, Lost Angeles Times and the New York Times all had no mention of Biden’s stumbling incident,” Mr Jones said. “To prove the Trump point, when it came to airtime on television, CNN devoted 15 seconds to the incident”. “But when Trump walked slowly down a ramp after he delivered a graduation address last June, CNN devoted 22 minutes to Trump’s walk, the media pushing the line that Trump – 74 – was facing serious health question.”"
Andrew Sullivan on X - "“Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines,social posts,photos—you name it—that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.” If you're not chilled by a NYT editor urging staffers to report each other for wrongthink, you don't know history."
Watch Your Tongue: Media and Advocacy In The Age of Wrongthink - "The progressive group didn’t just say that the op-ed was wrong and shouldn’t have been published. They stated directly that publishing it undermined their personal safety. Their choice of phrasing was deliberate—part of an effort to gird their opposition to the op-ed in the language of workplace safety... This is quite obviously nonsense: Cotton’s words placed no one in imminent danger. Sadly, it’s becoming distressingly common for progressive employees who wish to silence a dissident view to cite workplace safety as a pretext. To take just one example, this was how conservative writer Kevin Williamson got fired from The Atlantic. This is a disturbing trend that ought to concern everyone—liberals included. It’s an insult to actual workplace safety issues, for one thing. For another, it makes the office a dangerous place to express a potentially unpopular opinion. Journalistic institutions shouldn’t live in fear of difficult conversations, or of provoking offense. But the necessary consequence of this new regime of safetyism will be everybody walking on eggshells... The concept of freedom of speech is designed to specifically protect unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t need protection — it’s popular. And freedom of speech recognizes that unpopular speech has great value... "“American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment,” he tweeted of the Times debacle. “We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”" Whom would you elect as the guardian of moral clarity? An editor or journalist at The New York Times? Tony Rios at AVN? Riley Reyes, or bestiality promoter Andi Rye/Zoe Sparx, or promoter of false rape accusations Nikki Hearts of APAC? Some faceless Social Justice apparatchik at Twitter who will unverify and “unperson” you for not toeing the party line?"
Speech that the left hate is violence. Violence that the left love is speech
The lost meaning of ‘objectivity’ - "One of the great confusions about journalism, write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, is the concept of objectivity. When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear as part of journalism after the turn of the 20th century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work... Journalists who select sources to express what is really their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in a form of deception. This damages the credibility of the craft by making it seem unprincipled, dishonest, and biased."
A Test of the News - Wikipedia - "A Test of the News is a study of the objectivity and neutrality of press coverage, written by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, later editor of The New York Times... The study concluded that the Times' reporting was neither unbiased nor accurate. The newspaper's news stories were not based on facts, but "were determined by the hopes of the men who made up the news organisations." The newspaper referred to events that had not taken place, atrocities that did not exist, and reported no fewer than 91 times that the Bolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse. Lippmann's biographer Ronald Steel sums it up: "The news about Russia is an example of what people wanted to see, not what happened," Lippmann and Merz noted critically. "The main censor and the main propagandist was the hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.""
Plus ça change...
What the public expects from the press (and what journalists think) - "What do people want from journalists? Above all, the public says it wants accuracy — for the media to verify and get the facts right. Fully 87 percent rank that as extremely or very important, higher than any other item. People also want journalists to be fair to all sides (78 percent), to be neutral (68 percent), and to provide diverse points of view (61 percent). A majority (54 percent) also say it is extremely or very important for the press to be a watchdog over the powerful. Thirty percent consider that somewhat important, and another 15 percent not very important... 6 in 10 people consider most news reports accurate enough that they can trust them and don’t have to check multiple sources to verify information. Four in 10 have the opposite view — that news reports are pretty inaccurate, so much so that they feel they need to check multiple sources to verify information before they know what to believe... by and large, the public doesn’t think the media is giving them mostly facts with only some background analysis. When we asked people what best describes most of the news content they see — putting aside pure commentary and opinion pieces — only 33 percent describe most of the news coverage they see as providing mostly facts with just some background and analysis. Only 7 percent say most of the news they see is just the facts. Instead, the largest group of people consider most news coverage they see as far more opinionated. Forty‑two percent of adults think most news seems like commentary and opinion, posing as news. And another 17 percent think most news coverage includes too much analysis. In other words, people want context and background in their news coverage — and journalists want to provide it. But the majority of the public thinks the press has veered too far toward opinion... the press clearly needs to do more to clarify what is news, what is opinion, and what is analysis. The public wants it. The press wants to provide it, but has failed to make those distinctions clear enough for the public to understand."
No wonder trust in the US media is at an all-time low
Anti-elitism and the Internet are a problematic combination - The Washington Post
From 2022. When the left wing media defend elitism. Ironically, it talks about covid, and non-left wingers know how that turned out. And of course the author invokes Dunning-Kruger (and gets it wrong). Ironic.
Why the 'doxxing' of ‘Libs of TikTok’ creator is justified (aka "There’s a proper term for what happened to the ‘Libs of TikTok’ creator. It’s not ‘doxxing.’") - "Exposing people who post hateful content like this woman could help change that and make our online discourse more civil and respectful... One of the most important functions of journalism is to hold the powerful to account and expose bad behavior like Raichik’s. Lorenz’s story is no different from any other political exposé that holds the people shaping public policy up to public scrutiny."
Reporter slammed as hypocrite for 'doxxing' Libs of TikTok Twitter account - "Lorenz also complained that her critics began involving members of her family in the online ridicule. Lorenz’s admonishers accused her of hypocrisy after it was discovered she showed up at the houses of relatives belonging to the individual allegedly behind Libs of TikTok. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald was one of many who castigated Lorenz and her supporters for a double standard. “The same people who – just 2 weeks ago – were insisting that criticizing Taylor Lorenz is wrong because it generates ‘harassment’ toward her are now cheering as she shows up at the homes of the relatives of Twitter users to dox them”... Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit and co-founder of The Daily Wire, challenged Lorenz’s framing. “Targeting a Twitter account that literally just posts Leftists owning themselves because that account damages the Left is pure Lorenz”"
Naturally, "accountability" is only for those who oppose the left wing agenda, and their family members. Accountability for those who push it is "harassment" and "hate speech"
Having a Twitter account makes you "powerful". But being a journalist published in a top-tier newspaper doesn't, of course
Meme Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "The largest news sources that have picked up the Chinese mutant virus story are all right-wing. Where is the mainstream press on this?"
It's racist to criticise China
i/o on X - "How far into a newspaper article do you have to read before the race of a murderer is mentioned? If the murderer is white: Usually it's going to appear right away. If the murderer is black: Usually it's going to be buried toward the bottom."
Inside the free speech meltdown at The New York Times - "Bennet tells me that America needs a “counter-revolution” to root out the “illiberal liberalism” that he argues threatens its democracy... For many years, Bennet was the golden boy of liberal American media. His father, Douglas, was a senior government official and president of National Public Radio. His brother, Michael, is the Democratic senator for Colorado. Bennet himself rose rapidly through The New York Times, serving as White House correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief, before moving to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. He returned to The New York Times in 2016 to run its opinion section and, when Trump shocked the blue half of America by winning the presidency, was charged with broadening the liberal paper’s world view and exposing its readers to a wider range of opinions, which included hiring provocative columnists such as Bari Weiss, the firebrand anti-woke writer turned budding media mogul... Bennet had intended to make The Economist essay his final word on this matter, but has decided to speak further after the furore over the refusal by the presidents of three US universities, Harvard, Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to agree that calls for the genocide of Jewish people constitute bullying or harassment on campus. (The Pennsylvania University president, Liz Magill, has since resigned over her comments.) “It’s insane, and I hope it prompts a reckoning,” says Bennet. “People need to step back and say: ‘How have we allowed ourselves to get to this point?’” America, it seems, is a country where senior university presidents seem unsure whether calling for genocide constitutes bullying or harassment, but publishing an opinion piece by a senator arguing for a crackdown against looters costs a top newspaper editor his job. What is Bennet’s explanation? He thinks college leaders “have fallen prey to ideas that have been percolating in academia since the 1970s — that there’s no such thing as objective truth. All that matters is who dictates ‘the power narrative’ that shapes society.” These notions, whipped up and propagated on social media, “encourage groupthink that focuses on identity, on marginalised groups and their oppressor, and do not allow for discussion of alternative views”. This shift explains why many college leaders “have only selectively defended free speech. There have been so many examples of right-leaning speakers getting hounded off campus. But now in the context of Palestine/Israel, universities suddenly care about free speech again and have been caught defending the rights of ‘progressive’ students to say the most hateful things imaginable. The universities’ double standard is exposed.”... Despite his defenestration from the high citadel of American liberalism, Bennet still holds by his left-leaning principles. “I’m sympathetic to ideas around the structural and enduring nature of racism in American society,” he says. The trouble is, “the refusal to confront the other side of an argument, as has happened at The [New York] Times and in our universities, entrenches rival ideological monocultures and deepens divisions. Tucking ourselves into our comfortable cocoons, shutting our ears to the other half of America, makes us stupid.” Worst of all, such an approach can be entirely counterproductive. “Did The New York Times’s opposition to Trump stop him getting elected? No. In fact, I think it probably deepened the divisions that helped to elect Trump and might be about to do the same again.” The problem of illiberal liberalism is not confined to America, but Bennet agrees it is worse there. Things are better in Britain, he believes, because the BBC “does what The New York Times used to do. It helps to create a central repository of facts” that everybody can use to debate. “I know each side complains like hell that the BBC is wildly biased against it, but no one questions the facts it presents.”... he would like to try to help a new generation of journalists recapture the spirit of empathy and open-minded inquiry that he thinks is all too rare these days in many newsrooms. His first piece of advice is get off social media. “It has been terrible for journalism. It started well as a source of ideas — a digital conversation — but it pretty quickly became a weapon for enforcing orthodoxy. On social media you don’t want to endure the punishment of expressing dissent, or, God help you, a heterodox opinion. But originality — revealing something new — is the whole point of the news business.” His second recommendation is: “Do your reporting away from your computer. Get out in the real world, talk to people face to face. Only sit at your computer to write your story.”"
American journalism sounds much more Democratic than Republican - "Public trust in American media has plummeted since the 1990s. Most of this decline is among conservatives, spurred by Republican charges of liberal bias from avowedly non-partisan outlets. Such claims are hard to assess fairly: stories viewed by one party as following the facts are often seen by the other as ideological. Most public estimates of news sources’ partisan leanings rely on subjective ratings. Political scientists seeking an objective approach have used the language in politicians’ speeches to set a baseline and compared stories with that. However, most studies in this vein look at the period before 2016; do not discriminate between politics and other topics; and focus on either tv or written journalism, but not both. In an effort to provide a measure of partisan slant that is comprehensive, impartial and up-to-date, we have applied this academic approach to the output in recent years of a wide range of news sources. We find that there is indeed an affinity between the media and the left, because journalists tend to prefer the language used by Democratic lawmakers. Moreover, this disparity has grown since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. As a result, the number of media sources covering politics in balanced language has dwindled. The first step in our analysis was compiling a partisan “dictionary”. We took all speeches in Congress in 2009-22 and broke them up into two-word phrases. We then filtered this list to terms used by large shares of one party’s lawmakers, but rarely by the other’s. The result was a collection of 428 phrases that reliably distinguish Democratic and Republican speeches, such as “unborn baby” versus “reproductive care” or “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant”. Next, we collected 242,000 articles from news websites in 2016-22, and transcripts of 397,000 prime-time tv segments from 2009-22. We calculated an ideological score for each one by comparing the frequencies of terms on our list... To test whether this method accurately reflected partisanship, we compared our rankings with estimates from AllSides and Media Bias Fact Check, ratings websites that rely on human coders. Overall, it yielded a close match... our method has two advantages. Not only is it free of subjectivity, it also measures ideology in absolute terms, providing answers to questions that mere rankings cannot resolve. Are conservatives right to see the media as a whole, rather than just specific outlets, as hostile terrain? Our results suggest so. Of the 20 most-read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones. The same is true of America’s six leading news sources on tv, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates. This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets. In 2017 cnn used more Republican terms than Democratic ones, while msnbc and the evening news on abc, cbs and nbc had only modestly left-leaning scores of around 1.5 phrases per 10,000. By 2022, the broadcast channels and cnn had Democratic leanings of near 2.5, and msnbc had reached 5.5, putting it twice as far from the centre as Fox. In written journalism the shift has been smaller but in the same direction... In theory, this trend could result from changes either in subject matter—moving from Republicans’ favourite topics, like border security, to those Democrats prefer, such as health care—or in the language used about each topic. The data make clear that most of the shift stems not from what is being talked about, but how. In three “mainstream” websites—the New York Times, Washington Post and cnn—coverage moved left from 2017-18 to 2021-22 on 25 of 29 domestic political topics... our scoring method cannot distinguish between media bias and asymmetric polarisation. Is journalism more left-wing, or have Republicans just sailed further from reality than Democrats? Either could raise the share of Democratic language in media—and in the case of stories describing Mr Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud as “the big lie”, for example, both have probably played a part. Yet journalists can still say that one party’s views are closer to the truth than the other’s without relying on partisan language"
Clearly, this is because reality has a known liberal bias, even though most journalists are on the left and we know from data that the left has radicalised greatly
Robby Soave on X - "Misinformation cops want you to ignore obvious examples of plagiarism committed by Harvard's President Claudine Gay because... reasons? Beware the gatekeepers of misinformation who pretend that it is somehow in everybody's best interest if accurate information is kept quiet—and who disdain other reporters for breaking ranks."
Nate Silver on X - "It's just kinda crazy to me how obviously and self evidently partisan some of these "misinformation reporters" are, in ways that cause tangible harm to journalism."
Glenn Greenwald on X - "The entire "disinformation industry" was manufactured after the 2016 election -- "disinformation expert" is a fake credential -- and its only purpose was to justify censorship of dissent from neoliberal orthodoxies by masquerading such partisan censorship as neutral science
And yes: while it's always been true that national journalists have been accused of being biased in favor of one party or the other, outlets like NBC and the WPost now let their "reporters" be explicit in siding with Democrats: both @oneunderscore__ and @pbump don't hide it."
David Bernstein on X - "I think the current state of much of the media is that Hamas is a great source but @realchrisrufo is beyond the pale."
The New Censors - "After the 1967 summer of riots, journalists, politicians, and sociologists spent many words and dollars trying to find and cure the “root cause” of the racial unrest. They failed, but eventually a solution did emerge. The root cause of riots turned out to be rioters. Peace returned to the streets once police adopted new crowd-control tactics and prosecutors cracked down on lawbreakers. Mob violence came to be recognized not as an indictment of American society but as a failure of policing. That lesson was forgotten last year, when police were lambasted for trying to control violence at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. Journalists disdained tear gas and arrests in favor of addressing the “systemic racism” supposedly responsible for the disorder. After the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some raised questions about police failure to stop the mayhem, but once again, progressive journalists are focusing elsewhere. They’ve identified a new root cause of mob violence: free speech... When I wrote in 2019 about journalists’ new antipathy to free speech, it seemed bad enough that they were targeting rivals in their own profession with advertising boycotts and smear campaigns that led to conservative journalists being fired and banished from social media. But since the Capitol riot, they’ve gone beyond “de-platforming” individual heretics. Now they want to eliminate the platforms, too... the usual solidarity among the press against censorship was missing... Their attitude was nicely captured by the fictional Titania McGrath, the satirically woke character on Twitter created by British comic Andrew Doyle. “If you don’t like our rules, just build your own platform,” she tweeted. “Then when we delete that, just build another one. Then when we delete that, just build your own corporate oligopoly. I really can’t see the issue.” In the short term, silencing conservative outlets benefits mainstream journalists in the same way that the Parler shutdown benefits Facebook and Twitter: by eliminating competition. But the zeal for censorship isn’t just cynical self-interest. Progressive journalists have been in an ideological bubble so long that they’ve come to believe their own hype about the right-wing menace—and they’re oblivious to their blatant double standards. They pretended that riots across the United States last year were “mostly peaceful protests,” while the one at the Capitol was a historic “insurrection” and “attempted coup” that put “democracy in peril.” Its symbolism made the Capitol riot a singularly horrifying spectacle on television, but the actual toll in life and property was much smaller than that of last year’s mob violence, which claimed at least 15 lives and caused more than $2 billion in damage... why would any sensible journalist go along with them? Their own profession’s freedom rests on the First Amendment, which allows them to print information no matter how misguided it’s deemed by others, and on landmark Supreme Court decisions protecting even speakers who make generalized calls for violence. That freedom allowed journalists to spend two years promoting a conspiracy theory about Russia collusion, a falsehood that did far more far to cripple the federal government than the Capitol riot. They encouraged last year’s riots by convincing the public, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that black men were being disproportionately killed by white police officers. The promoters of those “Big Lies” assume that they won’t be censored as long as Democrats rule Washington and Silicon Valley, but the precedents being set will give Republicans weapons for payback when they return to power. The eventual result will be bipartisan censorship. Far better to let police and courts deal with rioters—and leave Americans free to say what they want."
From 2021
Tom Elliott on X - "MSNBC's @MilesTaylorUSA: If elected, Trump may "turn off the Internet.""
Of course, they didn't learn, and are trying the same playbook again
Thread by @ggreenwald on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The first 3 paragraphs from the @CJR review of the press's extreme mishandling of Russiagate, by Jeff Gerth, Pulitzer winner for NYT, now retired. In sum, the press was shocked Mueller found "no evidence" to support their core conspiracy theory, but did no self-examination. "The damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists" -- as a result of its Russiagate failures (for which they were pathetically lavished with Pulitzers) and their refusal to engage in any self-examination. It's a long, nuanced review. From @CJR: "Today, the US media has the lowest credibility - 26 % - among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism." Just devastating. No industry except the US media would see failures this grave and do no self-analysis. I have some quibbles with this @CJR story but it's one of the best comprehensive accounts yet of the pervasive lying and deep corruption that drove the media's Russiagate hoax. So amazing how many of these media outlets refuse to comment. Transparency for everyone except them."
Drew Holden on X - "who suggested that the previous president might be a Manchurian candidate put there by Putin, would like you all to stop believing conspiracies about elections now."
Media Outraged That Alex Jones Is Also Allowed To Spread Absurd Conspiracy Theories on X - "The media are up in arms about Elon Musk's reinstatement of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's account on X, formerly Twitter, over the weekend. News outlets warn the move will increase online misinformation, with NBC News calling it Musk's "latest push to amplify and restore conspiratorial, far-right figures to the platform." But if the media are serious about reducing the spread of false conspiracy theories on social media, maybe they should deactivate their accounts. These are outlets, after all, that spent years breathlessly promoting ridiculous, and later debunked, stories about how President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. The media went on to spend years dismissing evidence that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab as "unfounded conspiracy theories" or "debunked Covid-19 myths"—until the U.S. government endorsed the idea. Around the same time, outlets baselessly wrote off Hunter Biden's laptop full of incriminating files as "Russian disinformation," thereby allowing Joe Biden to do the same as he campaigned for the presidency in 2020. As of this week, the corruption documented on Hunter Biden's laptop is at the center of two criminal indictments of the first son and an impeachment inquiry into his father. So, before the media freak out about Musk's promotion of conspiracy theories, they might want to stop doing so themselves."