The Media Today: Yes, we're doing it all over again

[jayschool2013]

From the Columbia Journalism Review

Since Donald Trump became president, there has been a never-ending series of articles about what the media did to enable his victory. Near the top of that list is the air time and free advertising ($2 billion worth, according to one estimate) given to him by TV networks like CNN, because they knew he would attract a crowd, in much the same way a car accident does. Also near the top of the list is credulous reporting of stories about Hillary Clinton that were fed by hacked and leaked emails, creating the erroneous impression that both sides were equally guilty of political transgressions. Given the sheer volume of these “lessons learned” pieces, you might think it unlikely that something similar would happen this time around. You would be wrong. A blizzard of news on Wednesday showed that some are not only failing to heed those warnings but failing hard.

Take NBC. In the wake of Trump’s refusal to attend a virtual presidential debate, the network offered the president his own town hall event and scheduled it at the same time as Biden’s previously announced town hall (at Trump’s behest). In other words, the network is treating a debate between candidates for president as though it were the finale of a celebrity cooking show. More than one observer was reminded of what former CBS chief executive Les Moonves said about Trump’s presidency in 2016: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” New Yorker writer Sue Halpern called the NBC decision “stunning and shameful”, and Yashar Ali of HuffPost said more than a dozen NBC sources expressed “frustration and anger toward their employer.” As Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan said: “the defining media story of this era is mainstream journalism’s refusal to deny Trump a giant megaphone.”

Meanwhile, in a flashback to the Hillary Clinton email story, the New York Post published a thinly sourced and highly questionable piece alleging that Joe Biden’s son Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian executive whose company was later investigated for fraud. The alleged evidence for this story– by a reporter who has spent almost her entire career as a producer at Fox News—includes emails taken from a laptop that a computer repair shop owner said may have belonged to Hunter Biden (the owner later gave a rambling and disjointed interview in which he contradicted himself repeatedly). And it appears that all the paper has are screenshots of the emails it says it has based the story on. Despite this, the story was breathlessly promoted by the usual suspects, including Rudy Giuliani and Breitbart News, and was even picked up by other outlets, including Bloomberg. The Biden campaign released a statement saying there was no truth to the report, and that the candidate’s calendar shows he was busy when the alleged meeting occurred.

Both Twitter and Facebook to tried to limit the amplification of the Post story, which quickly became a big part of the conversation. A Facebook spokesman said the social network had already started reducing the distribution of the report while it was being fact-checked. This is a reversal of the usual procedure, which typically involves reducing the algorithmic promotion of a story only after it has found to be false. But Facebook’s head of security noted that he had recently warned of the potential for foreign interference, including “hack and leak” operations aimed at destabilizing the election. Twitter took the extra step of preventing users from sharing the link, a decision that triggered immediate cries of censorship and which some said could backfire. Senator Josh Hawley wrote the Federal Election Commission arguing that the blocking amounts to a donation to the Biden campaign and is therefore a rules violation.

[mdbl]

1. It's way past time for a progressive version of infowars and qanon

Isn't trump an alien from anothe planet? I hear he is really green not orange but he is just covering it up.

[Karadeniz]

2. Hadn't thought of that!

[Wounded Bear]

3. Doesn't really work...

Dems/progressives won't fall for it and will think of it as entertainment, which is how it should be. But we won't subscribe to that shit because in the long run it bores us.

It's like conservative comedy, it ends up being an oxymoron.

[mdbl]

5. I was just trying to make honest morons out of the repuglicans

by giving them real fake news since that is what they think is authentic.

[Lonestarblue]

4. WaPo reported the NY Post story on Hunter Biden without calling it utter BS.

The WaPo writer pointed out the lack of conclusive evidence, but failed to go that extra step and call it baseless lies to make Biden look guilty of something. If legitimate media refuses to call out this kind of slander, they are making themselves irrelevant to the truth.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the media to start tearing down a President Biden. The media gave Trump a megaphone for his every inane and false tweet. It took more than two years before the media would even call Trump’s statements lies instead of misinformation. My guess is they’ll pounce on Joe’s every misstatement or gaffe right from the beginning, and Harris will be held to standards Trump never met.

[mdbl]

6. unfortunately, the media has spent too much time on Trump's gaffes

making people numb to it.

[uponit7771]

7. NBC's decision was bad for voters on many fronts