corp mainstream media

this will be legit crit of corp media fails from left; "liberal media lamestream" will be for MEDIA BIAS BS myth of rt

see legacy for positive / moderaTION

see jrnl fail

719 disambig link, at some pt separate legit crit/jrnl fail b/c of media consolidation (here) vs myth of liberal media // academic lamestream

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an 1 24

Home | The mainstream media is full of incompetent idiots

The mainstream media is full of incompetent idiots

D. Earl Stephens

andRaw Story

January 13, 2024}:

Let’s get right to it …

Too many journalists who occupy, or spend their professional lives orbiting the newsrooms of our mainstream media are incompetent, and most likely working in their important jobs for all the wrong reasons.

Worse yet, most of the leaders of these newsrooms are either bought-off corporate tools or dangerous innocents, who have absolutely no idea what they are doing in their crucial jobs, while the end of life as we know it hinges in large part on their ability to sound the alarms and let the world know what is at stake this year.

READ: Behold: Donald Trump the chosen son — and religious con

I am sadly not wrong about this.

At a time when we’ve never needed fair, hard-hitting coverage of the fascist Republican Party’s attack on our Democracy more, our journalists are catastrophically failing us, and the Fourth Estate as a whole is facing a crisis in confidence from the American public that might ultimately lead to its extinction.

The decline of the press and their inability to do the most basic thing in the news business — identify and cover the biggest stories of the day — has hit extreme levels.

How else do you explain the dangerous and shoddy coverage of the most ominous internal threat to the United States of America since the Civil War: the end of our Democracy.

How is it after watching and listening to the anti-American deviant, Donald Trump, and his pathetic minions in the Republican Party recklessly comport themselves can our media forget that one of the first things to go under fascist, authoritarian regimes is their right to conduct their business freely?

These people are inches from losing their professional freedoms because in large part of their blinding incompetence, and we are THIS close to losing our Democracy forever because they seemingly haven’t even gotten as far as identifying this very real threat to us, and their livelihood.

It boggles the mind, and as a veteran of nearly 30 years in newsrooms, 16 of those years in leadership, I am absolutely disgusted.

How DARE they.

Ever since the fatal election of the racist, soulless Trump in 2016, the press has come under fire for how they helped enable one of the darkest days in American history.

This is not breaking news.

Many members of the working press have since acknowledged their mistakes in the run-up to that election. Their failure to call a lie a lie and a racist a racist, for instance, helped normalize the savage, Trump.

Their nonstop coverage of his unhinged, heinous rallies where he insulted the disabled, and our war veterans, and failure to easily draw the stark distinctions between him and the accomplished, decent woman he was running against was journalistic malpractice.

Many of them told us they learned their lesson, and if Trump, or something like him, ever ran again they would be ready.

If only.

They have actually gotten worse.

The examples are many but let’s take a look this past weekend for just one sample of their massive incompetence these days.

Consider what happened on Meet the Press Sunday. This news program used to be the shining example of nonpartisan, hard-hitting journalism. Power was called into account on a weekly basis.

Now it is a complete mess that has no sense of itself. It’s where politicians eagerly go to recite their party’s talking points, and slap back hard at any host who dares to interrupt them.

On Sunday’s episode of ineptitude, Meet the Press host Kristen Walker was interviewing Elise Stefanik, the House Republican chairwoman.

Stefanik is currently steeped in warped, dark MAGA propaganda. Like many woman in her party, she is strutting down every runway she can find, to see if maybe, just maybe she can catch the vulgar Trump’s bloodshot eye, and have the honor of being his ceremonial whipping-girl on his fascist ticket.

It’s disgusting.

Sure as hell, it took Stefanik no time at all to do her Radical Right routine of telling one known lie after another. The doe-eyed Welker tried to politely nudge her back in her lane, before Stefanik knocked her off the road altogether, and took control of the wheel.

Stefanik: “We will see if this (2024 election) is a legal and valid election.”

Welker: “Will you only commit to certifying the results (of the election) if former President Trump wins? Does that mean only if former President Trump wins?”

Stefanik: “No, it means if they’re constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”

I mean, holy shit. In other words, if the election doesn’t work out for us democratically, we’ll just once again move onto some hard-core lawbreaking to change minds.

Short of hitting back with facts, Welker should have just ended the interview about nine times, but didn’t.

Instead, Stefanik just kept backing up and running over her, and was going completely unchallenged when she vomited that the convicted attackers of our Democracy were actually “January 6 hostages" and should be pardoned.

Excuse me?

What in the hell is going on here?

Welker and Meet the Press aren’t the lone offenders of course. The New York Times and The Washington Post can spend three days reporting on completely unreliable polls they paid to conduct, while Trump spends his time literally telling all us “vermin” the new and creative ideas he has come up with for burning everything to the ground around him.

Those newspapers barely even take a sniff at the madman’s unhinged plan of attack, and instead spend their editorial resources wondering how he is polling in some diner in Pennsylvania.

Last month, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on Capitol Hill literally begging for help while his country fights against our shared enemy, Vladimir Putin, the radical right-wing Heritage Foundation decided it was a good time to fly in one of Putin’s greatest allies, Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, for talks with unspecified Republican members of Congress.

You couldn’t ask for a more stark juxtaposition of what the two parties stand for than that. You also couldn’t ask for a better example of how little the press cares for the subject of our Democracy.

Orbán’s visit barely got a sniff in the mainstream media.

Ironically, we only know of this meeting thanks to some tremendous reporting from outside the mainstream media’s toxic bubble by the The Guardian.

In their story about this fascist confab, The Guardian illuminated that:

Hungary has been portrayed by conservative media as an anti-“woke” paradise and model for the United States. Some far-right Republicans, such as Kari Lake and Paul Gosar, said they would like to see the “Hungarian model” transplanted to the US, especially when it comes to immigration and family policies. CPAC went to Hungary for the second time this year, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson shot multiple episodes in Hungary touting Orbán policies.

Orbán has returned the favour by lavishing praising Trump … The Hungarian prime minister has criticized the multiple federal indictments against the former US president and called the judicial procedure a “very communist methodology” in a recent interview with Carlson.

So on December 11, while Democrats were trying to rally support for Ukraine, Republicans in Congress were meeting behind closed doors with a Hungarian dictator, Tucker Carlson bestie, and close Putin ally.

So, I say again: What in the hell is going on here?

I am sympathetic to a point to the argument that the corporate overlords who own too large a percentage of our major media companies are squeezing budgets, and worse, trying to dictate editorial policy in their newsrooms.

I know this is a popular theory, but it doesn’t explain why the alleged journalists who populate these places put up with that. Have they no shame?

I know scores of damn good journalists who were forced out of the business because of the death of newspapers over the past couple of decades, and the ever-shrinking opportunities to apply their journalistic expertise elsewhere.

There’s not one of them I talk to, however, who can believe what they are seeing with the pathetic coverage a majority of the press is giving to our threat to Democracy. There’s not one of them who wouldn’t have walked out the door and sounded the alarm if they had been ordered by management to ignore this threat.

So I’m back to where I started.

I now believe the media’s appalling treatment of the attack on our Democracy is a simple matter of incompetence, and/or lack of guts on the part of too many in the journalism field. Welker’s display on Sunday was the best example you’ll ever see of both.

What are these so-called journalists doing in their editorial meetings each day when they are discussing the news?

Why haven’t they setup Democracy Desks that do nothing but cover the greatest threat to America in 160 years? Why aren’t they breaking down and detailing what is at stake if, God forbid, our Democracy is overrun by a fascist leader who will never leave office and starts jailing them if they don’t toe the party line?

You’ll find some phenomenal reporting on this subject in places like The Atlantic, but we need more than monthly deep dives into this attack if we hope to survive it.

I never thought I’d type this, but the only place I feel I can get accurate reporting these days is when a natural disaster is threatening America. If a hurricane is bearing down on the United States, you can count on mass pandemonium, and all-hands-on-deck treatment in all these newsrooms.

It’s a bit much, but at least there is some real urgency in the way they approach these looming disasters.

They can’t wait to report on all the gory possibilities if we take a direct hit by one of these storms. They remind us what we need to do to be prepared, and where we can go to get help if necessary.

They make sure we understand the stakes.

They do this because they want to protect their readers and viewers. They do this because people are vulnerable. They do this because they never want to be accused of ignoring such an ominous threat. They do this because they know people are watching, and there is some real money to be made ...

If only they were smart enough to approach the catastrophic threat to our Democracy with the same sense of responsibility and vigor.

NOW READ: A 38-year-long Republican scam may soon be over — thanks to women

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

From Your Site Articles

    :{Chris Hedges - Alternet.org ›:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:
    :{The lost boys of Ukraine: How the war abroad attracted American white supremacists ›:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/covering-trumps-coronavirus-response-major-newspapers-barely-mention-he-fired officials 2018

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richer ppl in primary vote ~ bernie

several FAIR media reports on corp media

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/hell-hath-no-fury-like-corporate-power-scorned-the-escalating-class-war-against-bernie-sanders

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[also doing socmed end run?]

corporate media is happy to take Bloomberg’s ad money, but they’re not holding him accountable

Bob Hennelly / Salon

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/theres-a-corrupt-authoritarian-in-the-white-house-but-the-political-press-keeps-instigating-pointless-fights-among-dems/

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an 120 hjrnl fail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-corporate-press-is-setting-a-dangerous-precedent-by-giving-biden-a-pass-on-his-support-for-iraq-war/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/corporate-media-pushes-bogus-sanders-and-warren-trash-talk-narrative-which-only-serves-biden-buttigieg-and-their-billionaire-supporters

no lnx

Corporate media pushes bogus Sanders and Warren ‘trash talk’ narrative — which only serves Biden, Buttigieg and their billionaire supporters

Written by Norman Solomon / Common Dreams January 13, 2020

Corporate Democrats got a jolt at the end of last week when the highly regarded Iowa Poll showed Bernie Sanders surging into first place among Iowans likely to vote in the state’s Feb. 3 caucuses. The other big change was a steep drop for the previous Iowa frontrunner, Pete Buttigieg, who—along with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden—came in a few percent behind Sanders. The latest poll was bad news for corporate interests, but their prospects brightened a bit over the weekend when Politico reported: “The nonaggression pact between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is seriously fraying.”

The reason for that conclusion? While speaking with voters, some Sanders volunteers were using a script saying that Warren supporters “are highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what” and that “she’s bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.”

At last, mainstream journalists could begin to report the kind of conflict that many had long been yearning for.As Politico mentioned in the same article, Sanders and Warren “have largely abstained from attacking one another despite regular prodding from reporters.”

That “regular prodding from reporters” should be understood in an ideological context. Overall, far-reaching progressive proposals like Medicare for All have received negative coverage from corporate media. Yet during debates, Sanders and Warren have been an effective tag team while defending such proposals. The media establishment would love to see Sanders and Warren clashing instead of cooperating.

For progressives, the need for a Sanders-Warren united front is crucial. Yes, there are some significant differences between the two candidates, especially on foreign policy (which is one of the reasons that I actively support Sanders). Those differences should be aired in the open, while maintaining a tactical alliance.

Sustaining progressive momentum for both Sanders and Warren is essential for preventing the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination from going to the likes of Biden or Buttigieg—a grim outcome that would certainly gratify the 44 billionaires and their spouses who’ve donated to Biden, the 40 billionaires and their spouses who’ve donated to Buttigieg, and the oligarchic interests they represent.

It would be a serious error for progressives to buy into corporate media portrayals of the Sanders and Warren campaigns as destined to play a traditional zero-sum political game.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-can-be-progressive-and-practical-some-of-the-candidates-get-that/2019/12/21/d4b7ff3a-235c-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html

The chances are high that by the time the primaries end this spring, Sanders and Warren—as well as their supporters—will need to join forces so one of them can become the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in mid-July.

In the meantime, during the next few months, top corporate Democrats certainly hope to see a lot more headlines like one that greeted New York Times readers Monday morning: “Elizabeth Warren Says Bernie Sanders Sent Volunteers ‘Out to Trash Me’.”

(Sanders tried to defuse what he called a “media blow up” on Sunday, saying: “We have hundreds of employees. Elizabeth Warren has hundreds of employees. And people sometimes say things that they shouldn’t.” And: “Elizabeth Warren is a very good friend of mine. No one is going to trash Elizabeth Warren.”)

Keeping eyes on the prize this year will require a united front that can strengthen progressive forces, prevent any corporate Democrat from winning the party’s presidential nomination, and then go on to defeat Donald Trump.

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.” He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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an salon 120

no lnx

Major study finds no ‘liberal bias’ in media If anything, journalists have become too cautious

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon January 5, 2020

These are tough times for independent journalism. If you value Salon’s original reporting and commentary, we urge you to support it — by supporting our writers directly. Right here, right now, you can make a financial contribution to help make Paul Rosenberg’s work possible. All donations go directly to writers.

Complaints about press bias are as old as the press itself, but in recent decades, conservatives have pushed one complaint above all other: The media is biased against them because it is overwhelmingly staffed by liberal journalists. A new study, forthcoming in Science Advances, provides the strongest evidence ever that they’re half-right — but only the least important half: Yes, reporters overall are significantly more liberal than the general population. In fact, almost one in six are more liberal than Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, based on who they follow on Twitter. But no, that doesn’t matter — even for the most liberal cohort of them. The title of the study says it all: “There is No Liberal Media Bias in the News Political Journalists Choose to Cover.”

Even though “journalists are dominantly liberal and often fall far to the left of Americans,” the paper itself was emphatically clear in its conclusion:

In short, despite being dominantly liberals/Democrats, journalists do not seem to be exhibiting liberal media bias (or conservative media bias) in what they choose to cover. This null is vitally important — showing that overall, journalists do not display political gatekeeping bias in the stories they choose to cover.

In a way, that’s not that surprising: Journalists place a high value on objectivity and balance. Avoiding ideological bias “rates very high” among journalists, lead author Hans Hassell told Salon — 8.5 on scale of 10 in the survey these researchers conducted. But as Hassell acknowledged, “A response you give to a survey may be very different from the actual behaviors that you express in the things that you do.”

So the authors turned to a correspondence experiment, which Hassell said was “essentially an experiment to test for biases that individuals may not be willing to explicitly state, because it may be socially unacceptable to be biased in a certain way, or they may even be unintentionally biased.”

Historically, these kinds of experiments are “commonly used to detect racial bias,” Hassell said. (It’s primarily been used in employment studies, where it can detect gender bias as well.) Using this technique to detect ideological bias among journalists broke new ground.

“We created a fake state legislative campaign,” Hassell explained. “We created an email account that purported to be from an individual in the community who was going to announce his candidacy for state legislature. Then we posed as a staffer for that campaign and sent an email to every single individual asked to participate in the survey,” Hassell explained.

The email provided basic candidate information and asked whether reporters they “would be interested in sitting down with the candidates and talking about their positions with regard to state government.” Crucially, researchers randomized whether employees of a given publication“received an email that indicated whether the candidate was a strong conservative, a moderate conservative, a moderate progressive or a strong progressive.”

The texts of the emails were the same in all cases, with the only differences being the candidate biographies included at the bottom of the emails. “We might expect progressives to be more interested in covering progressives and conservatives more interested in covering conservatives,” Hassell said, with a liberal bias predominating, simply because there are more liberals in the population at large. Instead, they found no significant evidence of bias, either for the respondents as a whole, or broken down by ideology or by the partisan leaning of the counties they served. In short, the premise that the profession still has governing standards was fully borne out by the experiment.

The overall results are shown in the following figure:

The paper explains:

As can be seen, there is no statistical or substantive difference in the probability of a journalist responding to the email based solely on the treatment conditions. Comparing the two poles, strong conservative candidates are, on average, a mere 0.4 percentage points less likely to get a response than strong progressive candidates. This effect is minuscule (being equivalent to 0.47% of a standard deviation) and is far from significantly different from 0 (p=0.87).

One possible explanation for the lack of bias might simply be journalists responding to the marketplace they serve — giving more coverage to conservatives in counties that voted for Trump, for example, and more coverage to progressives in counties that voted for Clinton. But in fact that wasn’t the case:

[W]e find that a journalist working for a newspaper in a county that voted for Trump is just as likely to respond to a request for an interview with a progressive candidate as they are to a request from a conservative candidate. This shows that even in spite of powerful economic incentives from the readership of one’s newspapers, journalists still show no signs of ideological gatekeeping bias in what they choose to cover.

The authors also divided journalists into three ideological categories — exploring the possibility that “we might not see evidence of bias overall, but, instead, we would see polarized coverage” — but the differences observed were barely perceptible, and even those minimal variations didn’t fall into a clear pattern:“[W]e find that journalists — regardless of their own ideology — treat candidates from different ideological backgrounds the same.”

These findings are all the more striking, given how liberal journalists as a whole were found to be. First, the authors conducted an extensive survey, emailing a list of just over 13,500 journalists with working email addresses. “We got about a 13% response rate, which is about in line with most surveys of political elites, and about double that of surveys of journalists that have been published in recent years,” Hassell said. There are two significant problems: First, a large number of journalists report being independents and/or report no ideology, and second, a large majority don’t respond to surveys. “So the question is, ‘Are the journalists who are not part of the online response going to be different in some ways?’”

To address these two problems, a team of eight undergraduates gathered all the Twitter handles they could find — about half the 13,500 journalists originally identified. Then the accounts were analyzed using a technique developed and validated by Pablo Barberá in a 2015 paper, “Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data.” As the paper explains:

The logic of this methodological technique is that individuals display their preferences (in this case, for ideological homogeneity) through their actions (in this case, who they follow on Twitter), just as they do with many revealed preferences.

Barberá showed that this method produces ideology measures that are strongly correlated with other measures — both self-reported ideology and party registration records — among both the public and elites in the U.S. and five European countries. Hassell’s team found they correlated strongly with self-reports of those who responded to their survey, as well. Thus, there’s high confidence in the validity of this measure, the results of are summarized visually here:

So if journalists actually reflecting their own views in covering the news, conservatives would have a strong case for bias. But as we’ve just seen, that’s not what Hassell’s team found: There was no significant bias at all.

Because these results are both surprising (even unbelievable) to some, and significant, it’s worth explaining a bit more about what the experiment reveals, and the thinking that went into it. Identifying gatekeeping bias is difficult, the paper notes, “because identifying the full population of news from which journalists could select stories is difficult.” As Hassell put it, “It could be that there aren’t an even number of liberal and conservative stories available” for journalists to choose from. The correspondence experiment responds to that difficulty by ensuring balance, and presenting a simplified representation, where the potential for bias is well-defined and measurable.

It’s also both sensitive and realistic. They didn’t want to do anything that could violate ethical standards — “presenting a scandal seemed unethical,” Hassell noted. “So we settled on this because we felt it was something that was logical in terms of something that would commonly happen,” and where judgment and discretion were involved. Some stories are “so compelling that everybody has to cover them,” he observed, “and then there are other things that are not news at all, so this is kind of in the middle in the realm of journalistic discretion.” It was also something he knew from the other side, he later told me, which is part of why it was chosen. “As a student, I worked on a couple of election cycles working for a campaign, and I remember the candidates complaining, ‘Why can’t I get coverage? Why won’t the paper cover me? What’s going on?’”

Another factor to consider is that state legislative races are themselves gateways to partisan politics: It’s plausible that someone you’ve never heard of could not just enter, but win such a race, and doing so could have long-term political consequences, depending in their subsequent career. Many state legislators go on to Congress, and a few to the Senate and national prominence. So, this experiment taps into something central to the way American politics works.

Still, experimental evidence is always stronger when support comes from lines of inquiry. In this case, Hassell’s team did some of that themselves. In the original survey, they “presented journalist respondents with two pairs of hypothetical candidates who were announcing their candidacy for governor in the state,” but with a set of limitations, so that only one could be covered. Who would that be? This randomized test also found minimal evidence of bias. “If anything, they are more predisposed to cover Republican candidates,” the paper reported, although the effect was deemed “not statistically significant.”

But a stronger form of supporting evidence would come from asking a different sort of question entirely. I asked about that. “I think absolutely there should be other ways to do this,” Hassell said. Then he described some of the difficulties in doing so, starting with ethics. You don’t want to damage a journalist’s reputation with a false story lead, and you don’t want to waste his or her time and resources “following up a story that really doesn’t exist.” One idea Hassell suggested might work was to pose as a researcher announcing a new study, varying the topic. “Some topics are more conservative or more preferential to liberals,” he said. “That way you’re not forcing the journalist to go out and do any research on it. You can be the researcher.”

From a broader perspective, one can certainly question how adequate this kind of evidence is, however. As I’ve noted before, we can understand this in terms of Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of how the media functions, from his 1986 book “The Uncensored War“:

At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists’ attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.”

In that piece, I went on to discuss the “shoddy fact-checking” directed at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, which reflected “a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.”

All three of Hallin’s spheres can be problematic for journalists.Those rejected in the sphere of deviance might actually have the most accurate, and most important things to say: I cite a number of examples of how this applies to Ocasio-Cortez, but, for historical perspective one could also consider the early feminists who convened at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

The sphere of legitimate debate can be problematic as well: Objectivity and balance can be sharply at odds with one another, as another example I cited pointed out:

As far back as 2004, a study found that “US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse,” and that “the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.”

Another problematic aspect of this sphere was pointed out to me by Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR.org, the website of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:

The traditional model of “objectivity” followed by corporate media uses the two major parties as the two poles that journalists are expected to drive their stories straight between. This “both sides” approach often leaves out several other sides — either to the left or right of the two big parties, or looking at politics from a different angle entirely.

One of the biggest biases we find in political coverage is toward seeing politics as a spectator sport. Sometimes when reporters are covering protests and other grassroots efforts to influence policy, I’m reminded of sports reporters writing about fans running onto the field.

This way of dismissing the very citizens who should be central to a democracy is hardly conducive to a healthy democracy over time. It stands in stark contrast to the kind of active engagement that health require.

Finally, the sphere of consensus at any point in history may be wildly at odds with what it was a generation or two earlier or later. There’s a reason we find past eras unfathomable at times: their spheres of consensus baffle us.

None of this is to question the value of Hassell and his colleagues’ work. But the good news that it reveals — the extent to which journalists are guided by professional standards—strongly suggests the potential power of revising those standards to address the above-noted shortcomings, and other failings, to achieve the kind of objective, reliable reporting to which journalists aspire.

In addition, the innovative combination of approaches used in the study calls out for further breakthroughs that may help us better understand these broader sorts of challenges. I was reminded of a number studies I’ve written about here, such as UNC sociologist Christopher Bail’s book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream” (author interview here), which used big data techniques to understand how factually deficient political actors came to have such disproportionate media and political influence, actually enabled by common media practices. There was also the Columbia Journalism Review study, “Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media” (Salon story here) with this astonishing factoid: “The New York Times ran as many cover stories [10] about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

As these two examples (along with coverage of the climate crisis) suggest, supposedly “neutral” media practices can be heavily tilted toward conservative points of view, regardless of individual journalists’ attitudes. The fact that conservatives have a highly salient, although groundless, narrative of bias surely complicates matters for journalists trying to report the truth. They should take this study to heart as a validation that they are doing exactly what they claim, under extreme duress, and that charges of bias are unfounded at best, and quite likely deliberate attempts to manipulate reporters and shape coverage.

Such problems are especially vivid in matters of religion, where conservatives make a deeper claim: Liberals misunderstand them and thus systematically misrepresent them. In fact, the big problem is arguably the reverse. The media tendency to take the religious right at its word is arguably the greatest barrier to accurate reporting. For some insight on this I contacted author Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates.

“Reporters and editors are often in a tricky spot.” Clarkson said. “Sometimes they lack the knowledge and vocabulary in this dynamic field. This can be particularly challenging when political figures or their prominent supporters are profoundly motivated by their religious views.”

He cited the example of the 2012 Republican primary, the early stages of which featured two candidates, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, “who were unambiguously influenced by overtly theocratic ideas and figures from well-established theocratic camps called Christian Reconstructionism and the Pentecostal, ‘dominionist’ movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.”

Leading figure in NAR, for example, staged a prayer rally of 30,000 people in Houston to launch Perry’s campaign. “Journalists who had written accurately, about all this became the targets of a smear campaign,” Clarkson said. “They were (falsely) said to be tarring evangelicals in the broader sense,” and “media coverage of dominionism collapsed.”

Clarkson continued: “This turning a blind eye to the theocratic politics animating much of public life remains more the rule more than the exception. Even though evangelical historian John Fea described Ted Cruz as a Dominionist in an essay for the Washington Post, reporters did not much follow his lead.”

Such willful blindness is difficult to square with any coherent notion of objectivity, and has contributed significantly to the ongoing state of bewilderment that Trump retains such high levels of support from white evangelicals. The coverage of all American politics directly suffers from this blindness.

This study may help empower the media profession to be less easily intimidated going forward. There is a great deal that needs repair and renewal in American democracy, and journalism has a vital role to play in that process. By recognizing its own strengths, as revealed in this study, and building on them to address its weaknesses, the press can once again perform its democratic duty, and help the American public to navigate dark times.

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mma 1219

Prior to being impeached, Trump sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an unhinged, six-page letter defending his actions as president. The letter was riddled with factual errors ranging from misstating the number of votes he received in the electoral college to falsely stating that the whistleblower’s call was a “false report.”

Subsequently, mainstream media outlets treated the letter as normal. Parker Molloy laid out just how bad mainstream media headlines about Trump have gotten. Molloy explained: “For people not constantly immersed in politics, a newspaper headline may very well be all that they see about any given event. Headlines matterin the age of social media, and right now, they’re serving as bumpers to protect the president.”

Media outlets have a responsibility to dispassionately treat this moment with the significance it deserves and publish headlines that accurately reflect the facts. Molloy continued, “Editors and publishers who insist on running tidy headlines that treat the president just like any other competent head of state have embraced the ‘this is fine’ ethos. Perhaps they believed that if they just treated him as more composed than he actually was, that he’d grow into the presidency. But even if that were true, it’s a dishonest accounting of the world around us.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/its-corporate-media-moderate-democrats-and-the-oligarchy-versus-bernie-sanders-in-2020/

no lnx

It’s corporate media, ‘moderate’ Democrats and the oligarchy versus Bernie Sanders in 2020

Written by Norman Solomon / Common Dreams December 23, 2019

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant—and donkey—in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy—defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes”—can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign—from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity—only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence—with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth—defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who’ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg win the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country—from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis—can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/nyt-columnist-breaks-down-how-corporate-medias-dogmatic-centrism-creates-a-negative-tone-running-through-coverage-of-sanders-and-warren/

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NYT columnist breaks down how corporate media’s dogmatic centrism dictates the ‘negative tone running through’ coverage of Sanders and Warren

Written by Alex Henderson December 23, 2019

For decades, Republicans have been claiming that the mainstream media in the U.S. have a strong liberal bias — while Americans who actually identify as liberal or progressive strongly disagree and would argue that liberal/progressive outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation are crucial because left-of-center ideas don’t receive nearly enough attention from the mainstream media. John F. Harris, the former Washington Post reporter who co-founded Politico in 2007, has asserted that the mainstream media have a “centrist bias” — citing himself as an example. And David Leonhardt, in his column for the New York Times, agrees with Harris but takes the argument a step further by asserting that mainstream media can, at times, be overly dogmatic in their centrism.

“Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism — which is very much an ideology — with objectivity and fairness,” Leonhardt explains. “It is an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties: one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets — national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks — really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.”

But even if mainstream media’s desire to travel straight down the middle politically is well-intended, Leonhardt argues, there are times when those who think they’re trying to be fair can actually become quite unfair — for example, “the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.”

“Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one,” Leonhardt asserts. “If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?”

Progressives like Warren and Sanders, according to Leonhardt, are aggressively critiqued from a policy standpoint in the mainstream media — whereas critiques of centrist Democrats like Biden are more about “style” than policy.

“Political and economic journalism,” Leonhardt writes, “too often…. treats the center as inherently sensible. This year’s Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?”

Leonhardt continues, “The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?”

Leonhardt wraps up his column by stressing that while liberal candidates like Warren and Sanders shouldn’t be exempt from “skeptical” coverage, they shouldn’t receive an excessive amount of it either

“The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be,” Leonhardt observes. “Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do — no less, no more.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/why-the-liberal-media-loves-trump-so-much/

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Why the ‘liberal’ media loves Trump so much

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon December 13, 2019

The American mainstream news media made many mistakes in its coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

It treated Donald Trump as a harmless curiosity because he was a reality TV show star and professional (alleged) billionaire.

Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings — both real and perceived — were amplified. Trump’s were downplayed if not largely ignored.

The mainstream media thought Trump was a harmless amusement, and not a demagogue, racial authoritarian or fascist in waiting. He was good for their ratings and profits. This meant the threat he posed to democracy could be overlooked because money apparently matters more than civic duty.

Too many reporters, journalists and other members of the commentariat hoped that Trump would mature into a more “traditional” candidate and then president. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, this foolish hope was the dominant narrative through the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump’s first year in office.

At the end of the third year of Trump’s presidency the American media continues to enable Trump and his party’s assault on democracy and the truth. Few mainstream voices are willing to consistently state the truth that Donald Trump is a fascist, a racist and mentally unwell, and that he is likely beholden to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

In all, the mainstream media cringes in terror before Trump and his supporters’ threats of violence and other and acts of intimidation. It all too often defaults to “fairness” and “balance” and both-sides-ism, elevating Trump’s most outrageous lies into reasonable opinions about “alternative facts.”

Yes, there have been successes, including important investigative reporting on Trump’s corruption, his abusive treatment of nonwhite migrants and refugees, and, of course, the Ukraine scandal. But overall, the mainstream news media has learned few lessons from the many postmortems on how it failed in its responsibilities as guardians of democracy in the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, it now appears ready to repeat the same errors in 2020.

Eric Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who has written for Media Matters, Rolling Stone and Billboard. He was previously a senior writer for Salon. Boehlert is also the author of the books “Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press” and “Lapdog: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.”

In this conversation he explains how the mainstream American news media helped to elect Donald Trump because of a deep dislike for Hillary and Bill Clinton.Boehlert also warns that the media has helped to normalize and protect Donald Trump because of an unwillingness to explain that he is a true aberration in American history. Under Trump’s regime, Boehlert tells me, the United States really does not have a president.

Boehlert also highlights how the American mainstream news media is both cowardly and complicit with Trump’s assault on democracy because of its unwillingness to tell the truth about the threat he and his regime represent to the country and the world.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

We are now approaching the end of the third year of Trump’s regime. Are things better, worse or about how you expected?

I am not surprised. In fact, I think it was the night of the election or the day after when I put up two tweets that I remember quite vividly. One was, “It is going to be so much worse than anyone can imagine.” I also said that the American press is not going to save us from Donald Trump. Unfortunately, both of those observations were true.

Why were so many people in denial?

There was all that chatter about how America’s political institutions were so strong and they would keep Trump in check. People were also saying that we should have a businessman as a president and Hillary Clinton is so conniving and in the end it will all be fine. That was the Beltway conventional wisdom: Trump won’t be able to break anything, this country has been around for so long, we’ll be fine. And then of course the exact opposite happened.

Given all the evidence to the contrary, how were members of the mainstream media able to tell themselves such a thing? By what logic were they operating?

A lot of it was driven by their contempt for Hillary Clinton. There is a hostility towards Hillary among the news media that goes back to the 1990s. There was an attempt to normalize Trump because the mainstream, inside-the-Beltway corporate media types did not like her. Of course, almost everyone was convinced Hillary was going to win. In the fall of 2016, I believe that the American news media saw its job as to make sure her win was as unsatisfying as possible, that it wouldn’t be historic and she would limp across the finish line.

Ultimately, Hillary Clinton would not be able to take a victory lap andtoo many in the American news media miscalculated in the end. By being so relentlessly negative towards Clinton and letting Trump get away with so much stuff, the news media did not calculate that he could ever win. And in the end, that is what happened.

Given their error of overcompensating against Hillary Clinton why didn’t the American news media go after Donald Trump with more zeal?

One would reasonably think that the press would just be chomping at the bit. Trump is corrupt. He’s dishonest. He lies about everything. In theory one would think the press would have a field day with Trump. This is what the press loves to do. They’re going to knock this guy down, they are going to expose him. But exactly the opposite happened. Why? There are many reasons.

Trump effectively bullied the American news media during the campaign. They were shocked that he won. The press felt like they missed a big story. Because Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by 70,000 votes, the American news media felt like there was this huge white middle-class rural movement that they had missed. One fluke election made them feel like they were fundamentally out of touch. The American press is also perpetually afraid of the Republican Party.

The American news media is possessed by a deep fear of Republican hardball. Therefore, they were nervous about being portrayed as out of touch because Trump had won and they missed the story. They’re nervous about being portrayed as part of the “liberal media” and they had never experienced anything like Trump before. They got a taste of it during the campaign with all of Trump’s “fake news” and such things. That knocked the American news media back on their heels and they didn’t have the courage to stand up against Trump. This happened in many different ways and important moments.

The American mainstream press was cowed, and they embraced this timidity. In turn, they decided, particularly the New York Times, that they need to go write a story literally every week for the next two years about white voters in red states and how much they love Donald Trump.

But when Barack Obama was president for eight years, I don’t think there was one story in the New York Times about how black voters in Baltimore love Barack Obama. It wasn’t news. The New York Times didn’t care about love for Obama among black voters. But wow, the New York Times loves to go to those diners and find those white folks who love Donald Trump.

In total, the press has been bending over backwards because they were afraid of Trump. We are almost three years into this administration. Now, recently, the press certainly has shown signs that they’re going to stand up to Trump. This is mostly just because of the facts of the Ukraine scandal — facts which are mind-boggling. Moreover, there is really no other way to portray the facts of what Trump did with Ukraine than as a crisis for Donald Trump. But not calling him a racist, not calling him a liar, not questioning his mental stability? Those should have been basic journalism tasks from March and February of 2017 forward, and it just never happened.

Could it be that there are many people in the American news media, journalists and reporters and others, who have never had to contemplate that their work would put their lives at risk from Trump and his supporters?

Certainly, the American press, for the most part, has never had to deal with this. The American press has no history or tradition of covering authoritarian rule. That is a skill necessary in Eastern Europe and in Third World or developing countries. The idea that the press is under attack in the United States institutionally, by a ruling party or from the president of the United States — and the overall creeping loss of press freedom — has been revelatory for many reporters and journalists.

If you had said four years ago, “There will never be another White House press briefing under the next Republican president,” most people would have looked at you with incredulity. Such a prediction would be viewed as ridiculous.

We’ve been having press briefings televised since the ’90s. We’ve had them at the White House since the Kennedy years.

President Trump is going to come in and cancel the press briefings? The press would never let that happen. That was thought to be inconceivable. But now here we are in America with Trump. It has been almost 250 days since the last press briefing.

Trump hired a new press secretary, and she will likely never host a press briefing in the White House. That is a perfect example of the creep that happened over the first two years of the Trump administration. The press could have done many things in response. To say there was nothing the press could have done is total nonsense. These news organizations did absolutely nothing and they let it happen. These news organizations could have pulled their teams from the White House, for example.

Now we are left with these “chopper talk” sessions where Trump walks from the White House to the helicopter. The blades are whirling, people are shouting questions at him. Trump doesn’t answer follow-ups. That’s the press access. The press in the White House is supposed to be the people’s representative by providing some sort of transparency. Trump has totally rigged the game.

How do we make sense of the dividing line between cowardice and complicity in the press?

Cowardice versus complicity? It’s all the same stew to me. The biggest problem in the last two or three years is just refusing to tell the truth. There are so many examples of Trump and his administration not doing that. There is all this talk about Donald Trump as a “chaos agent” or some type of “disruptor” and things like that. We are so far beyond that description.

We don’t really have a president of the United States anymore.The American press should be talking about that fact. In no traditional or historical sense is Donald Trump filling the role that every other president of the United States has. When America has a foreign policy based on complete incoherence or payoffs to Turkey or Russia, the American press does not really know how to portray those events.

The American press knows that Trump is not a healthy, mentally stable person. The press can see that day in and day out, and yet they are not allowed to put that in their news stories. The news media often has to invent fantasies and narratives to make Trump look cogent.

If we in America were talking about a president being a Manchurian candidate for another county the idea would have been rejected as irresponsible. The president of the United States would never act in the interest of a foreign country. Yet, here we are.

If the American press were to talk about Trump as a racist, a fascist or a pathological liar, or say that he is not mentally well, then it changes the dominant narrative and terrain. Once you start addressing those issues in the news coverage — any one of those — that has to be the only story you cover every day and for the rest of Trump’s presidency. One can’t acknowledge the president of the United States being an open racist and then cover it for two days. It is a defining story in American history.

The press does not want to have to cover those stories every day for the rest of the Trump presidency because they know it would unleash a torrent of attacks from Trump, the Republican Party, conservatives en masse and Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber. The press wants to keep a lid on it all. So the American press says things like “Trump uses ‘racially tinged rhetoric.'” We all know what those euphemisms really mean.

You have had access to editors and newsrooms. How are these decisions being made?...

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Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/corporate-press-doesnt-have-the-proper-language-to-describe-todays-radical-republican-party

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Corporate press doesn’t have the proper language to describe today’s radical Republican Party

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos December 8, 2019

Extreme times call for extreme measures, but the Beltway press just isn’t willing to make that move in the Trump era. As a consequence, the news media fail to accurately capture the radical changes now underway in the country, and how today’s Republican Party has become purposefully untethered from reality.

Donald Trump remains a resolutely radical player who has eviscerated decades of protocols and traditions. Yet so much of the press refuses to cover him that way, opting instead to cling to Beltway traditions for how presidents are normally covered (i.e. We can’t call him a liar!). But as the high-profile impeachment hearings confirm (along with Trump’s recent disastrous and embarrassing trip to the NATO summit), new and bolder language is needed to accurately describe what’s transpiring.

Under Trump, we’re all in uncharted territories, and that includes the press. We have never had a major political party in this country, for instance, that openly condones seeking help from foreign powers in order to win domestic elections, the way Republicans now do. We’ve never had a political party that essentially absolves the president of the United States of all crimes and misdemeanors, simply because he has an ‘R’ next to his name. Meaning: The press has never before faced the challenge of how to cover and describe what was once a mainstream political party but has since evolved into a deeply radical one. For now, much of the news media is simply pretending that historic GOP shift hasn’t taken place, and therefore there’s no need to dramatically adjust the coverage.

But it has, and there is.

The media’s stubborn failure to adjust is now advertised daily. For instance, last week CNN’s John King and a roundtable of Beltway pundits expressed complete shock at anew poll that found 53% of Republicans said that Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln was. If those pundits had closely followed the radical evolution of the GOP in recent years and been honest with news consumers about its descent into cult worship, there’s simply no way they would be utterly bewildered at Republicans’ belief today that Trump’s a better president than Lincoln. But if you’ve strained mightily to pretend Democrats and Republicans are mirror opposites of each other and advocate equally mainstream, fact-based positions, than yes, you’d be shocked by the Lincoln finding.

It’s the same reason that the percentage share of Republicans who say presidents could operate more effectively if they didn’t have to worry about Congress and the courts increased 16 percentage points over the past year, according to the Pew Research Center.

And that’s the challenge for the press: How to describe this unprecedented political movement.

“The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell. It’s a hard sell to make for one very simple reason: It doesn’t have a name, this thing the Republicans are trying to do,” notes Michael Tomasky. “It’s not true democracy that they want. But it’s also a bit much to call them outright authoritarians. And there’s nothing in between.”

The impeachment saga poses the most obvious challenge for the press as virtually the entire Republican Party now backs absurd lies about Ukraine.“The inchoate and unproved nature of the Republican case against Ukraine has not prevented several GOP leaders from taking up the cause,” The Washington Post recently reported, as the paper examined the Republican Party’s embrace of the “incendiary conspiracy” that Ukraine worked to try to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016.

With “inchoate and unproven,” the paper clearly tried to convey the sense that Republicans were peddling untruths— without unequivocally stating that Republicans now lie about almost everything, including the garbage Ukraine claim, which has been pushed publicly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fact: No U.S. intelligence community report has ever accused Ukraine of interfering in the election. Trump, of course, is accused of using $400 million in United States military assistance to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden.

“Some Republican lawmakers continue to misleadingly say that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on the same level as Russia, despite the GOP-led committee looking into the matter and finding little to support the allegation,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently wrote. But again, we’re not talking about Republicans trying to artfully spin a story in their favor by being “misleading.” We’re talking about Republican making stuff up, plain and simple. And the press should say so.

To CNN’s credit, it recently documented all the “falsehoods” Trump spewed during one of his signature incoherent press events while he attended the NATO gathering of world leaders.“Speaking to reporters for more than two hours in total, Trump made at least 21 false claims. That’s our initial count. The total may well grow once we have time to do some deeper fact-checking,” reported CNN’s Daniel Dale. “Embarking on a dishonesty blitz while at a foreign summit would be strange behavior for any other president. For Trump, long impervious to norms of propriety and accuracy, it was just another Tuesday.”

And frankly that’s how much of the coverage portrayed Trump’s latest descent into madness: Just another day on the job. “Trump’s wild NATO display,” read a recent Post headline. But the “wild” merely referred to the political chaos Trump created by making public statements at the global summit that clearly contradicted U.S. policy. Completely omitted from the report was the fact that Trump trafficked in lies nearly nonstop during his bizarre world stage appearance.

Journalists covering Trump need to embrace new language to describe his dangers.

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Why is the media so obsessed with what Wall Street and billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren?

Elizabeth Warren LGBTQ Town Hall Screengrab

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos December 1, 2019

It turns out the media’s obsession with the superrich isn’t confined to the world of celebrity and entertainment. In politics, the press also seems utterly fascinated with how the 0.1% live, and especially what their political leanings are. For the 2020 campaign, that means a barrage of coverage about what Wall Street bankers and billionaires think about Elizabeth Warren and her populist agenda. They don’t trust her! Some like her! Some won’t donate! On and on it goes, as the press scurries to document the opinions of the superwealthy, but there’s no explanation for why they’re supposed to matter so much.

“From corporate boardrooms to breakfast meetings, investor conferences to charity galas, Ms. Warren’s rise in the Democratic primary polls is rattling bankers, investors and their affluent clients, who see in the Massachusetts senator a formidable opponent who could damage not only their industry but their way of life,” read a typical passage from The New York Times recently, as the press continues to be deeply fascinated with what the financial community thinks of the Democratic nominee, and keeps treating financial opinions as important political news.

The headlines keep coming:

“As Warren Gains in Race, Wall Street Sounds the Alarm”

“Wall Street donors are so worried about Elizabeth Warren that they are snubbing Democrats in 2020 Senate races”

“In a Pick-Your-Poison Election, Wall Street Likes Warren Over Trump”

“Warren has a plan for Wall Street — and Wall Street isn’t panicking”

“Elizabeth Warren is winning grudging respect among some on Wall Street”

“Warren Would Take Billionaires Down a Few Billion Pegs”

“The Wall Streeters who actually like Elizabeth Warren”

The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don’t. It’s reminiscent of the media’s 2016 campaign obsession with coal miners, followed close by its obsession with those who have manufacturing jobs, which sent the obvious signal that white working-class male voters were the ones who counted the most.

It’s clear that Warren’s agenda, and her rise in the polls, have gotten the attention of Wall Street. She’s running on a billionaire wealth tax to help pay for her $52 trillion Medicare for All plan. Her wealth tax proposal would also impose a 2% tax on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion. “Our democracy has been hijacked by the rich and the powerful,” Warren often says on the campaign trail.

Buy why is the press so hypersensitive to Wall Street’s take on Warren? Obviously, Democrats have never been the election darlings of Wall Street executives and billionaires, who traditionally vote Republican. So it’s not as if it’s a natural constituency for reporters to focus on during the Democratic primary. Yes, there is a portion of that financial audience that donates to Democrats, and most candidates want to keep receiving that money. But those donations pale in comparison to the small-donor, grassroots money that fuels most Democratic campaigns these days.

Yet again and again, journalists push the premise that it’s a big problem that Wall Street isn’t supporting a prominent Democrat this election. For instance, the Times recently interviewed “more than two dozen hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists” to find out what they thought, and feared, about Warren’s campaign. CNBC also checked in with “hedge fund managers and private equity executives” to chronicle their Warren complaints. And I’m just wondering: On paper, is it possible to find a coalition of voters less likely to support a Democrat than hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists? I seriously doubt it. That’s like doing a news report on how college history professors aren’t supporting Trump in 2020. Yes, and … ?

The press focus reflects the media’s worshipful culture of the superrich and its conviction that of course it matters if they don’t like a Democrat, even though it doesn’t really matter much at all. Billionaire Leon Cooperman made headlines when he posted a whiny open letter to Warren, castigating her policies and claiming she was beating up on the rich. But why does his opinion even constitute news? “The fact that each random billionaire’s thoughts on Elizabeth Warren is a news story is itself a powerful demonstration of the disproportionate political influence of the very rich,” Matthew Yglesias noted on Twitter.

The fact is that financiers are not an integral part of the Warren campaign. Through the first three quarters of the year, she raised just $215,000 from people in the securities and investment industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that’s typical for Democrats who simply don’t pull huge donation numbers from that industry. Through the third quarter, Pete Buttigieg had raised $935,000, trailed by Cory Booker who has raised $927,000 from the finance industry, Joe Biden ($889,000), and Kamala Harris ($765,000), according to figures from the center.

Warren’s populist agenda has clearly sparked concerns from Wall Street financiers and billionaires. But the press shouldn’t pretend that those voices matter more than those of everyday voters in the Democratic election season.

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Corporate media’s mantra is ‘anyone but Sanders or Warren’ — and they’re doing the work of the extremely wealthy

Written by Norman Solomon / Common Dreams December 2, 2019

Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States—owned and sponsored by corporate giants—are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.

Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.

The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.

Critical reporting on debate performances and campaign operations has certainly been common. But the core of the “moderate” agenda routinely gets affirmation from elite journalists who told us in no uncertain terms four years ago that Hillary Clinton was obviously the nominee who could defeat Donald Trump.

This year, Sanders has taken most of the flak from reporters and pundits (often virtually indistinguishable), serving as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren. But as Warren gained ground in polling this fall, the attacks on her escalated—to the point that she now has a corporate media bullseye on her political back.

The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.

The Washington Post, owned by one of the world’s richest people Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren’s recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly—and falsely—referred to Medicare for All as “government-run healthcare” and “a government-run health plan.”

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Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive “Medicare for All Who Want It” slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.

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In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using insurance-industry talking points, he is deliberately confusing the current “choice” of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.

Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they’re routinely purveying such distortions themselves. Warren’s backtracking step on Medicare for All in mid-November was a tribute to media pressure in tandem with attacks from centrist opponents.

The idea of implementing some form of a substantial “wealth tax” has also been denigrated by many corporate-employed journalists. Countless pundits and political beat reporters have warned that proposals like a wealth tax, from Warren and Sanders, risk dragging Democrats down with voters. The truth is that such proposals are unpopular with the punditocracy and the extremely wealthy—while it’s a very different matter for most voters, who strongly favor a wealth tax.

On the same day this fall, the New York Times and the Washington Post published stories on Democratic elites’ “anxiety” about the presidential election.The Post wrote that Democrats “fret” Warren and Sanders “are too liberal to win a general election.” (With disdain, the article made a matter-of-fact reference to “the push for liberal purity.”) The Times similarly wrote of “persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election.” Contrary voices were absent in both news stories.

Assessing those articles, FAIR.org media analyst Julie Hollar pointed out: “The pieces interviewed a number of big donors and centrist party leaders, who fretted about their preferred candidate’s struggles and expressed hope for someone more corporate-friendly than Warren to enter the race and challenge her rise.”

Hollar added: “The thinking of powerful people in the Democratic Party is worth writing about. But it’s crucial not to just take their claims at face value. . . . What establishment Democrats are really worried about, of course, is their own power in the party, which is threatened by a surging left wing. Don’t look to their establishment media counterparts to report on that transparently.”

Part of the problem is the TV network that many Democrats (mistakenly) trust. MSNBC is becoming notorious for its hostility to Bernie Sanders, often expressed through egregious omission or mathematical fib if not direct antipathy.

Ongoing media analysis is crucial, but even more important is activist pushback against the 24/7 onslaught of corporate-minded propaganda, often couched as common sense and incontrovertible reality. Among the needed counterpunches are these:

Support progressive media outlets as they provide independent coverage of the presidential campaign

Widely share, via email forwarding and social media, online pieces that you like. (Hopefully including this one.)

Recognize, challenge, and organize against the corporate-media echo chamber that affects so many voters

You shouldn’t have to be an active supporter of Bernie Sanders (as I am) or of Elizabeth Warren to voice outrage about corporate media biases. What’s at stake includes democracy—the informed consent of the governed—and so much more.

History is unfolding in real time. It’s not a product on the media shelf, to be passively bought and consumed. As Bernie 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner says, “All that we love is on the line.”

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an 1119 jrnl fail msm not symmetry house approve impeach rules

"...nothing of this sort, or even close to it, is going on with the Democrats. On the contrary, the 2018 midterms, in which the newly elected Democrats who helped take the House of Representatives ran the gamut from centrists to socialists, was a reminder of how ideologically diverse the coalition is. The Democratic presidential primary, too, makes that candidates from the center, the left and everywhere in between are getting support in the polls.

The “polarization” framework is profoundly misleading because it suggests that the two parties are like magnets repelling each other with identical force and velocity. But the real story is that while Democrats have moved modestly to the left on some issues, most of the divisions in the country are the result of Republicans becoming both more fascistic and completely untethered to reality.

This isn’t about “both sides” acting in an equal manner. It’s about Republicans losing their minds and everyone else, understandably, reacting against that.

Mainstream media outlets amplified Trump’s lies from his Cabinet meeting

10/22/19 2:55 PM EDT

see media bias

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/trump-administrations-endless-information-security-breaches-show-how-mainstream

Trump administration's endless information security breaches show how mainstream outlets got gamed by the right

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 10/24/19 2:44 PM EDT

Buried in the 12th paragraph of a New York Times story published five days into the Trump administration came the revelation that even as president, Donald Trump was still using “his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides.”

The flippancy of the New York Times’ reporting on Trump’s phone, just months removed from the paper’s unrelenting bombardment of stories about Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state, was just the first of many signs that the emails obsession from the 2016 presidential campaign wasn’t the result of genuine concern for information security -- from Trump or journalists, alike.

Last week, after more than three years, the State Department’s investigation into Clinton’s use of private email came to an extremely quiet close. The Times ran the story on page 16.

“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” read a report released last week by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the email story dominated media coverage, dwarfing any discussion of policy.

In an article published in the Columbia Journalism Review, researcher Duncan J. Watts and economist David M. Rothschild wrote that in the six days following FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 announcement of his decision to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s private email server, The New York Times ran 10 front page stories about Clinton’s emails. Putting that into perspective, the Times ran only 10 front page stories about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.

A Media Matters analysis found that five top newspapers (the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post) published a combined 100 articles about or mentioning Clinton’s emails in a single week before the election.

It was a story the campaign was simply unable to shake, thanks in large part to the overwhelming amount of coverage it garnered, whether there was new information to be reported or not. In the minds of voters, Clinton’s emails defined the 2016 campaign.

And as Harvard professor Thomas E. Patterson wrote in September 2016, “Although Clinton’s email issue was clearly deemed important by the media, relatively few stories provided background to help news consumers make sense of the issue -- what harm was caused by her actions, or how common these actions are among elected officials.”

The Trump administration has routinely made clear it doesn’t actually care about information security.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump argued that Clinton could not be trusted with classified information because “it’s going to get revealed.”

In May 2018, Politico reported that Trump uses "a White House cellphone that isn’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications, according to two senior administration officials — a departure from the practice of his predecessors that potentially exposes him to hacking or surveillance.”

In October 2018, The New York Times wrote that American intelligence reports indicated a belief that Chinese and Russian spies have frequently listened in on Trump’s cell phone calls. “White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them,” reads the article. Calling him “famously indiscreet,” the Times recalled Trump’s May 2017 Oval Office meeting in which he “shared highly sensitive intelligence passed to the United States by Israel” with Russian officials. Additionally, the article revealed that at some point in 2017, Trump left one of his phones in a golf cart at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club.

In addition to his May 2017 disclosure, which contributed to the U.S. having to extract a top spy based in Russia, Trump also recently tweeted a photo of an Iranian launch pad seemingly taken during a classified intelligence briefing. That photo, Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory told Business Insider, may have blown “the cover on a multi-decade, multi-president campaign to disrupt Iranian missile and nuclear development with minimal loss of life.” Responding to criticisms that he released classified information, Trump defended the action by saying, “I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.”

It’s not just Trump, either.

White House adviser Ivanka Trump has used personal email to conduct government business. Her husband and fellow Trump adviser, Jared Kushner, used private email and the messaging application WhatsApp. Additionally, former adviser KT McFarland and former White House strategist Steve Bannon allegedly corresponded through private accounts to discuss the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Aides Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos all also conducted government business over private email. Most recently, it came to light that Kurt Volker and Gordan Sondland, U.S. envoys for Ukraine and the European Union, respectively, had used their personal phones and WhatsApp to conduct official government business.

And just this morning, Politicoreported that the “National Archives and Records Administration has launched an investigation into Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ use of private email for official business.”

In early 2017, Newsweek reported that Kushner, Bannon, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway had active accounts on the Republican National Committee’s email server. This server, author Nina Burleigh noted, “is the same one the George W. Bush administration was accused of using to evade transparency rules after claiming to have ‘lost’ 22 million emails.” Following the report’s publication, their accounts were deleted.

While media haven’t completely ignored these stories, they certainly haven’t treated them like the five-alarm threat they considered Clinton and her emails

Obviously, we know about the Trump administration's phone and email issues because of reporting, but it's impossible to argue information security has of late been treated with the same gravity it was in 2016.

Earlier this week, New Yorker writer and CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin made news when he issued a mea culpa about his own role in hammering the Clinton email story. In a follow-up interview with Politico, Toobin expanded on his thoughts:

In his POLITICO interview, Toobin said he doesn’t regret any specific thing he said about Clinton’s email use, but believes the volume of coverage he gave to the issue was disproportionate to its importance. Toobin said the experience shows you “can make mistakes in news coverage without making factual mistakes.”

“I think I got into the trap of false equivalence during the 2016 campaign,” Toobin said. “Comparing Donald Trump’s record of ethical problems with Hillary’s emails lent a misleading impression. And I have to say, I am determined not to do that again to the extent that I can. I am going to try to look at corruption and ethics issues each on their own rather than trying to create some sort of equivalence that isn’t there.”

Toobin’s comments are notable, both because they’re so clear, but also because few prominent journalists or commentators have acknowledged that the Clinton email server story was overhyped and made clear that they’ve learned lessons to apply to future coverage.

It’s still unclear why that particular story dragged on for years, and it’s worth wondering what coverage might have looked like had Clinton’s server never existed. Would there have been an increase in the amount of policy coverage during the campaign, or would the same people who wrote endlessly about emails have simply found another scandal -- real or imagined -- to latch onto in the name of some sense of balance against Trump’s many campaign scandals?

If Clinton’s emails actually mattered, then stories about Trump’s irresponsible use of technology would theoretically be more than one-off articles that get lost in a sea of larger news. Mainstream news outlets allowed Trump and his right-wing media allies to set the media agenda in 2016. Just over a year out from the 2020 election, it’s worth asking whether those same outlets are equipped to learn from the mistakes of 2016, or if they’re going to find a new story to blow up into 2020’s version of the email server.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/democratic-candidates-are-finally-punching-back-against-corporate-medias-shoddy-press-coverage/

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Democratic candidates are finally punching back against corporate media’s shoddy press coverage

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos October 13, 2019

Democrats running for president have a new message for the news media: We’re not going to take it anymore.

No longer willing to stoically suffer through bad, misleading press coverage, Democrats are borrowing a page from Republicans by going public with their complaints and demanding journalists do better. But unlike Republicans who often “work the refs” by griping about imaginary slights in hopes of better treatment in the future, Democrats are calling out the press with wholly accurate claims of media malpractice.

Last week, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign sent a blistering letter to New York Times editor Dean Baquet, reprimanding the paper for helping spread Donald Trump’s debunked conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. It’s “part of a larger strategy not to let the same coverage that corrupted the 2016 election happen this time around,” a campaign source told CNN’s Brian Stelter.

The stinging critique from Biden came one day after the Times published an opinion column from discredited right-wing author Peter Schweizer, once again hyping the Biden/Ukraine story. Schweizer, who wrote a patently dishonest book about Hillary Clinton in 2015 alleging all sorts of made-up crimes—a book the Times helped market and promote during the campaign—has been peddling the Biden smear all year within the far-right media ecosystem.

It was the Times that trumpeted Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash as the “the most anticipated and feared book” of the 2016 campaign season. And it was the Times that forged an exclusive alliance with the Breitbart-backed book (published by a Rupert Murdoch-owned subsidiary), and used the factually erroneous tome as a guidepost for Hillary Clinton ‘gotcha’ articles.

As for this campaign cycle, even after mainstream news outlets had completely debunked the hollow claims about Biden that Schweizer was peddling, the Times invited the smear’s architect, who has a soft spot for plagiarism, to spread more partisan attacks via the newspaper. Also, note that it was the Times that got caught last May trying to peddle the GOP’s anti-Biden storyline about Ukraine in the first place.

And yes, the right-wing media feasted on the Times’ handiwork last spring, and presented it as confirmation that Biden is corrupt. More recently, the Times often tied Trump’s attempt to get a foreign player to interfere with an American election with the bogus allegations Biden has faced regarding Ukraine, suggesting that both Trump and Biden were being sullied in the process.

The Biden campaign’s aggressive response last week represents a new approach for prominent Democratic candidates. In the past, party stalwarts often ignored press slights, likely feeling that media critiques weren’t why they were running for president and that candidates didn’t want to get distracted from larger, more important issues. But after Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes yet still lost the election thanks to some of the most openly hostile, sexist, and unfair campaign coverage in modern American history, Democratic campaigns are moving faster and much more forcefully to call out bad behavior and pressure news organizations to do better.

My sense is also that for way too long, Beltway Democrats remained wedded to the idea that the press was actually their friend and ally, and that The New York Times for instance, was on the “side” of progressives. But the Times, of course, has been at the forefront of tearing down a long list of Democratic nominees in recent years.

Today, determined not to get ‘Hillary’d,’ or ‘Gore’d,’ or ‘swift boated‘ like previous Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, who all lost extremely closes races after being treated unfairly by the press (led by dubious Times coverage in all three instances), more Democrats are stating up front that they’re not going to politely stand back and ignore what they see as unfair and unprofessional media coverage. In 2016, the press obsessed so much over the phony Clinton email “scandal” that coverage of her policy initiatives got obliterated. In 2000, the press took the GOP bait and spent the entire campaign depicting Gore, previously known as a Boy Scout-like politician, as a craven liar. And Kerry was the subject of a vicious, extended smear campaign as partisan Vietnam War veterans, cheered on by Republicans, lied about his war record while the Beltway press amplified the bogus swift boat claims for weeks on end.

The Biden campaign last week also dispatched letters to both Facebook and Twitter, urging them not to run an ad that spread the debunked theory about Biden and Ukraine. “Whether it originates from the Kremlin or Trump Tower, these lies and conspiracy theories threaten to undermine the integrity of our elections in America,” the campaign stressed.

Biden hasn’t been alone among candidates voicing clear media critiques. In the wake of yet another rash of mass shootings, Beto O’Rourke was asked if he thought Trump’s racist, anti-immigration rhetoric had led to immigrants being targeted. “Like, members of the press, what the fuck?” the Democrat responded. “It’s these questions that you know the answers to.”

Bernie Sanders also recently offered up a blunt critique of the news media.“There are six major media conglomerates, including Time Warner which owns CNN, which control about 90% of the media in this country in terms of what we see, hear and read. Between you and me, that is a very dangerous situation,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation. They have an agenda, and I worry about that, as I do worry about concentration of ownership in agribusiness, in Wall Street and in many other areas.” (Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard has aired critiques of the press this campaign season, but they strike me as being un-serious and often incoherent.)

There’s no question Democrats face in uphill battle on this front, not only because they’re getting a late start in the larger debate, but because the Beltway press responds differently to media critiques coming from the left and the right. Eternally spooked by the conservative claim of “liberal media bias,” journalists tend to be hypersensitive to GOP allegations of malpractice. At the same time, political journalists often ignore criticism, or become extremely defensive when their work is questioned by Democrats and liberals.

Nonetheless, the ongoing media debate is one that Democrats desperately need to part of. And for the 2020 campaign, they will be.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/mainstream-media-is-turning-on-elizabeth-warren/

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Mainstream media is turning on Elizabeth Warren

Written by Julie Hollar / FAIR October 10, 2019

Just two weeks ago, our survey of media coverage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign found a fairly — though not exclusively — positive tenor, with stories often contrasting her favorably to Sen. Bernie Sanders and highlighting her outspoken commitment to capitalism. But with erstwhile frontrunner Joe Biden under fierce attack from Donald Trump and Sanders recovering from a heart attack, establishment Democrats and their big donors are suddenly looking at Warren’s rising poll numbers as a sign that her candidacy has very real potential — and is a very real threat to their power.

As centrist Democratic sources go, so go the media.

Among the “events of the past two weeks [that] have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race,” the Washington Post (10/6/19) lists “persistent doubts among some party leaders” about Elizabeth Warren

Under the headline, “Uncertainty Takes Over the Lead in the Democratic Presidential Race,” the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer and Matt Viser (10/6/19) report that recent events “have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race.” Those recent events? For Sanders, a heart attack; for Biden, an uncomfortable role in the impeachment inquiry; and for Warren, the curiously un-event-like “persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.”

The Democratic Party has many leaders from both its left and right wings; for the Post, the adjective “some” serves to obscure the fact that its sources expressing those doubts are almost exclusively from the right.

People like former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who lost her 2018 re-election campaign (in which she emphasized how often she voted with Trump) by more than 10 percentage points — who better to turn to for an opinion about how to win an election?

Or there’s consultant Donna Bojarsky, who has donated to Sens. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker — all representatives of the corporate wing of the party. How about former Obama adviser David Plouffe, who went on to flack for Uber after his Obama years, and now runs policy for Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy company? Then you have self-described “radical centrist” Mitch Landrieu, who told the Post:

[Warren] says she can do all these things. There’s a thing called political reality…. Aspiration is wonderful, but you can’t eat aspiration for lunch and send your kids to college on it. That’s a fundamental decision that Democratic primary voters need to make a decision on.

The best bits come from anonymous donors, though, who are given cover to sow fear about a candidate whose policy proposals (like a wealth tax and a lobbying tax) would directly impact their own finances and political influence:

As Warren has steadily marched upward in the polls, the reality that she could become the nominee has unsettled some of the party’s top donors, who worry that she would hand the race to Trump. If it starts to look like Warren will win the party’s nomination, a longtime Democratic bundler said, “there will be efforts to stop that.”

Another anonymous donor, who the paper tells us is “seeking a moderate as a nominee,” expressed worries that if Warren is the nominee, her presence would ruin any Democratic chances to win the Senate, because voters would perceive having a Republican majority as “the only way to keep her in check” as president.

To end the hit parade, the Post reminds us that even if Biden falters, we still have centrist choices — calling up Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Tim Ryan, candidates currently polling below 1 percent, for some closing thoughts.

There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty at the moment; it’s just that the Washington Post, relying on its corporate centrist cast of characters, can’t give anything like an honest accounting of it.

Julie Hollar is senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project. She was Extra!’s managing editor from 2008 to 2014.

Corporate media is still waiting for Trump to rob a bank

Jim Naureckas / Common Dreams September 30, 2019

The corporate media establishment is devoted to the peculiar notion of “objectivity”—which, somewhat counterintuitively, rejects the idea that there is an objective reality that journalists can meaningfully describe.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-incredible-belief-that-corporate-ownership-does-not-influence-media-content/

Watch Cardi B Interview Bernie Sanders About Health Care, Minimum Wage and Immigration

Watch Cardi B and Bernie Sanders Discuss Jobs, Minimum Wage, Unions

Perhaps the negativity toward Sanders isn’t over Amazon. After all, Sanders gets similar treatment from the New York Times,CNN, the *Atlantic* and other outlets. Still, the Post’sBernie fixation stands out. The paper humorously once wrote 16 negative pieces about Sanders in the space of 16 hours (e.g. “Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else,” “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals,”etc).

The Postin 2017 asked readers how Democrats would “cope” with the Kremlin backing Bernie Sanders with “dirty tricks” in 2020. In April of this year it described the Sanders campaign as a Russian plot to help elect Donald Trump. They’ve run multiple stories about his “$575,000 lake house,” ripping his “socialist hankering” for real estate. “From each according to his ability,” the paper quipped, “to each according to his need for lakefront property…

Apart from being described as a faux-Leninist Russian stooge who wants to elect Trump and mass-release dangerous criminals, what does Sanders have to complain about?

After Bernie’s Wolfeboro speech, other media outlets let out a group howl. CNN called his attack “ridiculous” and “no different from what Trump does.” CBS said Bernie ” in going after the media.

The news media is now loathed in the same way banks, tobacco companies, and health insurance companies are, and it refuses to understand this. Mistakes like WMDs are a problem, but the media’s biggest issue is exactly its bubble-ness, and clubby inability to respond to criticism in any way except to denounce it as misinformation and error. Equating all criticism of media with Trumpism is pouring gasoline on the fire.

The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.

This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving…You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV.

That was too much truth for Correspondents’ Association, who decried Wolf’s lack of “commitment” to a “vigorous and free press” and “civility.” They scrapped the comedy idea, and this year brought in a self-described “boring” speaker, who made light of Trump’s complaints about the press by reading from Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”

Instead of submitting to one annual roasting, attendees got to listen to stale Trump jokes and homilies to their awesomeness in between red carpet poses for people like Andrea Mitchell, Gary Cohn, and Madeline Albright.

Sanders in Wolfeboro went too far when he said no reporter has ever asked him what he’d do about income inequality (hell, I’ve asked him that). But his basic complaint is right.

The Vermont Senator frequently cites a (true) statistic that three families in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the entire population. In an alternate universe that could be a page one headline every day. The three oligarchical figures are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the owner of the Post,Bezos. The trio collectively is worth an absurd $345 billion.

Media companies run by the country’s richest people can’t help but project the mindset of their owners, and they are naturally incompetent when it comes to viewing their own role in society. While we regularly congratulate ourselves for being protectors of democracy, we have difficulty admitting basic embarrassments, like that the news is a profit-driven consumer product that isn’t always good for the customer. The public sees through this with ease. The press is completely in denial about this.

MSNBC’s Brian Williams did a segment showing the Sanders speech. He read a statement from Posteditor Marty Baron:

Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.

Williams then said Sanders later “scaled back” his criticism, as if in response to the all-powerful words of Marty Baron:

Well, today Sanders scaled back his criticism a bit during interview at CNN saying, “My criticism of the corporate media is not that they are anti-Bernie, that they wake up, you know, in the morning and say, what could we do to hurt Bernie Sanders? That’s not the case, that Jeff Bezos gets on the phone to “The Washington Post.”

That’s not “scaling back” criticism. It’s elaborating. Anyone who’s worked in the business (or read Manufacturing Consent)knows nobody calls editors to red-pencil text. The pressure comes at the point of hire. If you’re the type who thinks Jeff Bezos should be thrown out of an airplane, or that it’s a bad look for a DC newspaper to be owned by a major intelligence contractor, you won’t rise. Meanwhile, the Posthas become terrific at promoting Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots.

Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.

Williams brought out two guests. The first was Eliza Collins, politics reporter from the Wall Street Journal(Williams neglected to mention Sanders had also gone after the Journaland its owner Rupert Murdoch in his speech). He then brought on Robert Costa from the Post,for balance.

They considered a tweet by a Twitter rando called “Hoarse Whisperer” complaining that Bernie didn’t work hard enough for Hillary Clinton. This incidentally is also untrue, but that’s an issue for another time (besides, what does this have to do with Amazon and the Washington Post?).

In sum: a $10 million per year anchor for a Comcast subsidiary brings on employees of Bezos and Rupert Murdoch to ask if the press has a problem covering billionaires – and concludes it does not. They confirm the point using a tweet as the modern equivalent of a “man on the street” quote, itself an easily-manipulated device (you can keep asking “men on the street” questions until you get the answer you want), but at least it requires human interaction. That’s circling wagons, not testing hypotheses.

Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward “elites” to his side. The criticism works becausenational media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters.The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/why-bernie-sanders-is-absolutely-correct-about-the-washington-post-and-corporate-media-as-a-whole/

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Why Bernie Sanders is absolutely correct about the Washington Post — and corporate media as a whole

Written by Norman Solomon / Common Dreams August 14, 2019

Many decades ago, the great media critic George Seldes observed: “The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.” That remains true today.

Bernie Sanders set off the latest round of outraged denial from elite media this week when he talked to a crowd in New Hampshire about the tax avoidance of Amazon (which did not pay any federal income tax last year). Sanders went on to say: “I wonder why the Washington Post—which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon—doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection.”

Sanders has fought explicitly and effectively to raise the wages of Amazon workers as well as millions of others. Yet the mass-media pretense is that the financial interests of the Post‘s owner have no effect on the newspaper’s coverage of Sanders.

Corporate denial is the name of that media game. Usually, expressed denials aren’t necessary. But there’s nothing usual about Bernie Sanders, who’s been willing to call out the biases and blind spots of corporate media since he entered politics.

For his latest transgression, Sanders earned purportedly authoritative pushback from the likes of the Post‘s top editor, its media columnist and others with high media visibility. “Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Post executive editor Martin Baron declared, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”

The Post‘s media columnist Margaret Sullivan quickly chimed in with a harmonizing tweet on Tuesday, defending her editor boss along with the owner of the paper: “I’ve never seen or heard a hint of @jeffbezos interfering in @washingtonpost coverage.”

CNN‘s Chris Cillizza, citing his work at the newspaper for a decade, indignantly wrote: “For the last three of my years at the Post, Bezos owned the company. Not once in all of that time—and I wrote multiple pieces a day about politics and politicians (including Sanders and Trump) over that time—was there ever even a whiff of Bezos’ influence in the newsroom.”

As George Seldes commented long ago, “The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, ‘I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'” Seldes noted that reporters routinely “know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do.”

All Baron or Sullivan would need to do to disprove their own current claims would be to write a bunch of pieces denouncing the man who owns the Post—and then see what happens due to their breach of required self-censorship.

On television, a CNN anchor joined with a USA Today columnist to claim that Sanders’s criticism of the Post‘s coverage was free of evidence. The fact that corporate-media employees are vehemently defending corporate media is illustrative of the dynamic. It makes you wonder where career self-interest ends and sincere delusion begins.

Baron, Sullivan, Cillizza and countless other employees of corporate media are well-paid while publicly maintaining their denial in the service of corporate power. So, with the virtues of the Washington Post on parade, Emperor Bezos must be decked out in the journalistic finery of his new clothes, even when the self-interest and implications of billionaire leverage over media are stark naked.

What Bernie Sanders is pointing out is not—and he never said it was—a “conspiracy.” The problems are much deeper and more pernicious, having to do with the financial structures of media institutions that enable profit-driven magnates and enormous corporations to dominate the flow of news and commentary.

The Post‘s Baron is ill-positioned to defend his newspaper against charges of anti-Sanders bias. Such bias has been profuse, and it began well before a pivotal moment in the 2016 campaign on the eve of the high-stakes Michigan primary in early March. Then, as FAIR analyst Adam Johnson showed, “the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours.”

This year, the Post has strained to throw negative light on Sanders’ campaign, whether focusing on Wall Street or Venezuela. Nor is the Post far afield from other powerful media outlets. For instance, the New York Times reportage has taken Sanders to task for alleged sins such as desiring to exercise control over his own campaign and failing to please Democratic critics who are actually corporate lobbyists but not identified as such.

Nor is the AT&T-owned CNNfar afield from the baseline of cable news giants that supposedly provide a liberal alternative to the odious Fox News. Coverage from MSNBC—owned by Comcast,“the world’s largest entertainment company”—has provoked one assessment after another after another documenting the network’s anti-Bernie bias.

“The corporate-owned and corporate-advertiser-funded media of this country are the biggest barriers between Bernie Sanders and the Oval Office,” I wrote five months ago. “Often functioning as propaganda outlets, the major news media serve as an amplification system for corporate power that has long shielded the Democratic Party from the combined ‘threats’ of social movements and progressive populist candidates.” (I continue to actively support Sanders.)

Journalists who have staked their careers on remaining in the good graces of corporate employers are certainly inclined to say in public that billionaire owners and huge corporations don’t constrain their journalistic work. And in their minds, they might be telling the truth. As George Orwell wrote, “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

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corp mainstream media

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corporate media is happy to take Bloomberg’s ad money, but they’re not holding him accountable

Mainstream media outlets amplified Trump’s lies from his Cabinet meeting

Trump administration's endless information security breaches show how mainstream outlets got gamed by the right

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the email story dominated media coverage, dwarfing any discussion of policy.

The Trump administration has routinely made clear it doesn’t actually care about information security.

It’s not just Trump, either.

While media haven’t completely ignored these stories, they certainly haven’t treated them like the five-alarm threat they considered Clinton and her emails

Corporate media is still waiting for Trump to rob a bank

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