Tag: media
Want Better Journalism and Less B.S.? Demand Stronger Public Record Laws.
“Even if you despise the media, you should be rooting for more government transparency. Some of the worst journalism happens when no one has hard evidence one way or another and the only sources are government press releases and anonymous officials. Take for example the months of speculation surrounding the death of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, all of which was enabled by erroneous government statements and the fact that Capitol Police records and autopsy reports were confidential. As I wrote then, “In a vacuum of primary sources, bullshit will prevail. If you want faster, more accurate reporting, demand better public record laws and more transparency from officials.”
The power-hungry demagogues and partisan pundits trying to tear this country apart dream of a perfectly fact-free environment where anything can be claimed and nothing can be confirmed. Strong public record laws are the antidote to the farces and tragedies they would inflict.”
Chris Hayes Unearths Tucker Carlson’s ‘Villain Origin Story’ In Old Video
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chris-hayes-unearths-tucker-carlsons-071039078.html
The desperate pandering of Tucker Carlson
““We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”
“I hate him passionately.”
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
Tucker Carlson sent all those texts — newly revealed as exhibits in the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox — on January 4, 2021. (Through the discovery process, many Fox internal emails and documents were provided to Dominion, and the company’s attorneys have made them public by citing them in legal filings.)
Yet Carlson devoted his shows this week to a revisionist history of the attacks on the Capitol two days afterward, omitting Trump’s then-ongoing attempt to steal the election, portraying concerns about a stolen election as reasonable and even vindicated, and minimizing the violence that took place.
But to understand what’s going on here, it’s worth taking a closer look at the bigger narrative Carlson was trying to push this week.
The story of January 6, in Carlson’s extremely selective and misleading telling to his viewers, isn’t about how a mob whipped up by the president of the United States tried to prevent the transfer of power, or how that president tried to steal the election. It’s about how Democrats and the media were mean to Trump supporters.
The story is also about how he, Tucker Carlson, would never do something like that. He loves you, Trump supporters. He respects you. Pay no attention to those texts behind the curtain about how he disdains and disbelieves Donald Trump. He is your loyal champion against your enemies. So please — don’t change the channel.”
Ousted Fox News Politics Editor on Dominion Lawsuit Revelations: ‘It Feels Really Good To Be Vindicated’
Fox News Hosts Knew Election Wasn’t Stolen & White House Bans TikTok on Gov Devices | The Daily Show
Major Media Outlets Condemn Continued Prosecution of Julian Assange
“The editors and publishers of The New York Times and several major European media outlets have released an open letter condemning America’s prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Assange faces 19 federal charges of espionage and hacking for his alleged role in helping Chelsea Manning get access to classified military reports from the Iraq and Afghan wars. Those charges were filed in 2019, but a superseding indictment from the Justice Department filed in June 2020 added more details and accusations (but not new charges), claiming Assange recruited hackers and directed them to targets. The Department of Justice’s position is that Assange is a hacker, not a journalist.”
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“Leaders at The New York Times and The Washington Post have long opposed Assange’s indictment for the potential chilling effect. If Assange can be imprisoned for publishing classified documents, then couldn’t the editors of the Times or the Post or any other media outlet who also published these documents face the same fate?
In order to get around these First Amendment concerns, the justification for Assange’s prosecution is that he doesn’t qualify as a journalist. He is not a “legitimate” journalist. The problem with that argument is that it gives the government the authority to define who does and does not qualify as a journalist, which itself would seem like a violation of the First Amendment’s protections. There is no “legitimacy” distinction in the First Amendment. Journalism is an activity, not just a career. Many, many people have engaged in various forms of journalistic activities without being credentialed reporters for media outlets.”
Opinion | Alex Jones and the Lie Economy
“These damages and those likely in other cases look like backbreakers for Jones. But no, not any more than his banishment from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Apple’s App Store. His business empire, far from scuttled, has an estimated value of between $135 million and $270 million. Jones has profited and is likely to continue to profit from his labors in the Lie Economy, the marketplace where gullible viewers are sorted from the skeptical and delivered to advertisers who make the most of their naïveté. The $49.3 million damages awarded are an eyeful, but no sharp legal knife thinks Jones risks paying much more than a fraction of that in this case and others. Despite the awful headlines the case sent up, Jones’ audience seems steadfast. Jones may have lost here, but he’ll continue to win.
To describe Jones as a Lie Economy worker is not to declare false everything he says and broadcasts. Not even his imagination veers to that polar extreme. But a review of his greatest hits attest to the low truth-value of many of his comments.”
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“Jones isn’t the only entrepreneur working the Lie Economy angle. Fox News Channel and its bastard offspring Newsmax and OAN excel at pushing half-truths that stimulate viewer appetite for more outlandish morsels. Tucker Carlson would have you believe that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. Sean Hannity pushed a baseless conspiracy theory about the murder of Seth Rich. The channel hyped ivermectin as a Covid treatment and drenched its audience in bogus coverage about the “stolen election.” Again, not everything aired on these channels can be dismissed as lies any more than the notion that Jones broadcasts lies only. But the steady stream of spurious segments they do air seems designed to hook accepting viewers whose attention can then be sold to advertisers. Unlike Jones, Fox News commands a more varied advertiser base, including blue-chip companies. But health supplements and pain relief products appear in a recent ranking of its top 10 biggest advertisers. The frequency of ads for gold, testosterone, reverse mortgages and a home-title lock product (pitched by Rudy Giuliani!) on Fox and its neighboring channels remind one that shrewd audiences aren’t the primary target.”
Opinion | You Trust the Media More Than You Say You Do
“any honest assessment would find today’s newspapers more timely and accurate, fairer, and often better-written than the newspapers of 1979.”
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“Citing a near-universal decline in institutional confidence isn’t an attempt to offer an excuse for newspapers. But it illustrates the pervasiveness of public colic over American life and society, and suggests the institutions might not have changed as much as the perceptions of them have. The best explanation for the uniform drops might be that we’re living in an age of heightened criticism and scrutiny that leaves no faults or blemishes unnoticed compared to earlier eras.”
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“Another possible reason the press might have lost confidence: Reporting has not just become more critical in the past 40 years, but it’s also started covering topics it left largely untouched in earlier times. As Matthew Pressman wrote in his 2018 book, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News, as recently as the early 1960s, newspapers largely ignored matters of race, sex, class and inequity, topics that can make some readers squirm. There weren’t many stories about gender or trans issues in 1979. Other sacred cows, like organized religion, get much more scrutiny today than they did yesterday.”
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“Yet does the public really have such a low opinion of newspapers? Gallup’s wording of its question is pretty vague. It didn’t ask respondents to rate the specific newspapers they read but to express their levels of confidence in the newspaper as an institution. They might have gotten a more positive answer if they had asked people how they feel about the daily newspaper they actually read. When the Pew Research Center asked this question in 2005, they found that 80 percent of Americans give favorable ratings to their daily. Local TV news, cable news and network TV news are rated only slightly worse. Granted, that’s data from a 17-year-old survey, but it shows that asking a slightly different question about the press can produce a startlingly different answer.”
The New York Times Belatedly Admits the Emails on Hunter Biden’s Abandoned Laptop Are Real and Newsworthy
“The New York Times published a story that quotes emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The messages reinforce the impression that Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that reportedly paid the younger Biden $50,000 a month to serve on its board, expected him to use his influence with his father for the company’s benefit”
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“None of this necessarily means that Joe Biden himself did anything improper or illegal. While Trump alleged that Biden was doing Burisma’s bidding when he demanded the dismissal of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, for example, Biden plausibly maintained that the motivation was widely shared concerns about Shokin’s corruption.
Nor does Hunter Biden’s unseemly relationship with Burisma mean that Trump was justified in seeking to discredit the Democrat he expected to face in the presidential election by pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the matter. But it surely was a legitimate issue to raise during the presidential campaign, as Guthrie and other journalists unconnected to the Post recognized. The question is why the Times did not, and the answer clearly has more to do with partisan sympathies than the journalistic standards the paper claimed to be defending.”