CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Another Opinion: National media’s credibility continues to tank  Thu Sep 12, 2019 1:28 am | |
| In recent weeks, three episodes have surfaced to demonstrate why the national media’s credibility continues to tank.
Many media figures threw a tantrum after The New York Times reported that Trump ally Arthur Schwartz has stockpiled “dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.”
Schwartz plans to share his files with conservative media to spotlight the bias and bigotry of many who bring us the news. Just days later, Lief Olson, a senior Labor Department official, resigned after Bloomberg News misleadingly labeled some 2016 tweets by Olson as “anti-Semitic” — even though Jewish commentators, including the Anti-Defamation League, understood and accepted the tweets as sarcasm targeting alt-right activists.
So it’s acceptable for the media to dig up such fodder to destroy lives and deprive people of their livelihood, but they don’t want to be accountable for public comments that illustrate their own biases. Got it.
Then, in mid-August, according to Slate.com, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, was grilled during a meeting with his news staff about why the paper didn’t call Trump a racist, or perhaps not call him a racist often enough.
Baquet acknowledged he had “built” The Times’s newsroom to focus on the Russia-collusion story, and when that blew up the Times was “a little tiny bit flat-footed.
“I mean,” he added, “that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?” So, Baquet admitted his paper allowed a chosen narrative — Trump colluded — to drive the coverage, rather than actual events.
He then explained that the Times must pivot. “How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?” Baquet posed to his news staff. Well, he said, “the vision for coverage for the next two years” — right through the 2020 election — would be to “write more deeply about the country, race and other divisions,” as stoked by Trump.
In other words, the “story” will now be that Trump, and presumably his supporters, are racists, or at least exhibit racist tendencies.
A final example involves Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan. In early August, after the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, Sullivan wrote, “there actually is a right or wrong side on the matter of controlling rampant gun violence. Journalists need to be on the right side of that, and not afraid to own it.”
Sullivan wrote, “Part of that [side-choosing] is giving shorter shrift to the rote ‘thoughts and prayers’ reactions of politicians and ... bringing a skeptical eye to the now-customary, largely Republican calls for better mental health care.”
In other words the media must become anti-gun activists, dismiss arguments that actual evil or mental illness might cause such horrific violence, and lump these killers in with millions of law-abiding gun owners.
America’s national media lacks sufficient self-awareness to grasp that many news consumers, especially on the right, believe they have strayed far from their mission.
https://www.dailycommercial.com/opinion/20190911/another-opinion-national-medias-credibility-continues-to-tank
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