Displaying posts categorized under

MEDIA

Harry Stein Don’t Expect Media Apologies—Ever—for the Duke Lacrosse Case The journalists and outlets that helped mobilize the hysteria back in 2006 shrug at Crystal Mangum’s belated admission of the obvious: it was all lies.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-expect-media-apologies-ever-for-the-duke-lacrosse-case

For the legacy media, the recent admission by Crystal Mangum, the accuser in the infamous 2006 Duke lacrosse case, that she had fabricated accusations of rape against three players on the university’s team, was at best a one-day story. While Mangum, a deeply troubled woman serving a long stretch at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women for killing a boyfriend five years after the Duke case, was clearly sincere in her contrition, opining on the podcast Let’s Talk with Kat that “saying that they raped me when they didn’t . . . was wrong” and “I made up a story that was wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God,” it hardly qualified as stop-the-presses news. That the allegation was false had long ago been established beyond question. The boys were fully exonerated and had reached a financial settlement with Duke for the school’s appalling response to the allegation. The hyper-ambitious rogue district attorney who in his zeal to nail them withheld key evidence of their innocence had been disgraced and disbarred.

So in that regard, it makes sense that in most accounts of the belated confession, it would come across as an out-of-the-blue footnote to a half-forgotten story, with a paragraph’s review of the case providing background for the uninitiated. The New York Times’s brief story, by Jenna West of The Athletic, does not even appear in the pages of the paper, just online.

In brief, the coverage conveyed not even a fleeting sense of what the Duke case meant at the time, how fully the story gripped the nation, dividing Americans by race and class; how, indeed, it anticipated much of what was to follow in the Trayvon Martin case; in Ferguson, Missouri; in the furious aftermath of the death of George Floyd; and, hardly least, in exposing the rot at the heart of two of America’s key institutions that has since become ever more apparent—academia and journalism.

All these years later, the media’s perfunctory coverage of Mangum’s admission is telling precisely because of what, given the calamitous mis-coverage of the original story, it so conspicuously lacks: self-awareness and accountability.

Study: Most Cable Networks’ Coverage of Trump’s Cabinet Nominees are ‘Uniformly Negative’ By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/20/study-most-cable-networks-coverage-of-trumps-cabinet-nominees-are-uniformly-negative/

A new study by a right-wing media watchdog group has found that the overwhelming majority of the coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees by major cable news channels has been “almost uniformly negative.”

As Fox News reports, the report was released by the Media Research Center (MRC), detailing the coverage of President-elect Trump’s personnel picks by ABC, CBS, and NBC. Within the timespan of December 1st to December 14th, Trump’s nominees – including FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard – received approximately 60 minutes and 47 seconds of coverage. Of this coverage, 96% was negative.

“Across all three networks, the coverage of Gabbard, Patel, and the handful of other nominees mentioned was entirely negative. Only Pete Hegseth, who received the lion’s share of the airtime, enjoyed a scant four positive evaluative statements, all of which cited his mother describing him as ‘redeemed’ and ‘a changed man,’” said MRC senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino in the report.

“To reiterate: the only positive commentary any Trump nominee received on the broadcast networks was from his own mother,” D’Agostino continued. “In addition to a whopping 96 percent negative tilt across their flagship evening newscasts, these networks also appear to have paid the most attention to Cabinet nominees who appeared to have the highest chances of sinking.”

Of the three channels, CBS spent the most time talking about President-elect Trump’s nominees, with just under 25 minutes; of those 25 minutes, 14 minutes were spent on Hegseth alone. Of that coverage, 96.7% was negative. NBC had the second-highest amount of coverage, with 21 minutes; 94.7% of their coverage was negative. ABC spent 19 minutes on the Cabinet nominees, with 90% of that coverage being negative.

Walter Duranty Would Be Proud Of How The Press Covered For Biden

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/21/walter-duranty-would-be-proud-of-the-way-the-press-covered-for-biden/

Five years too late, the Wall Street Journal finally reports – when it no longer matters – what journalists knew all along but covered up: Joe Biden was not mentally fit to be president.

The mainstream media’s disservice to the public ranks right up there with Walter Duranty’s New York Times reporting, in which he fed Soviet Union propaganda to the U.S. as news and helped cover up the hellscape that was Stalin’s Russia. (The New York Times never returned the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty won for his lies.)

Except in this case, it wasn’t one reporter halfway around the world in a closed society. It was a legion of reporters inside the White House.

The Journal report reads as though it’s the result of hard investigative work. “This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations,” it says.

Bullsh-t.

The Journal’s story is just a catalog of what reporters knew – or must have known – all along but refused to tell the public.

After the Biden Revelations, of What Value Is the Mainstream Political Media?y Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/after-the-biden-revelations-of-what-value-is-the-mainstream-political-media/

When did you first figure out that something was wrong with Joe Biden — seriously wrong, not just in the “bit older, bit slower” way, but in that genuine “oh man, this guy ain’t gonna make it” way? I know many of our readers will be eager to claim the earliest date possible, because we’ve all heartily loathed the man as president for four years, and I doubt any of us liked his vice presidency either. (A tip of the cap to any keen-memoried old-timer who nominates 1987 as the year when Joe Biden actually first truly “lost it.”)

For my part, it came as an instantaneous, shuddering revelation when I saw him address the nation on August 16, 2021, as he inattentively slurred through his eagerly awaited Afghanistan withdrawal speech. I’ve already told this story once — in one of the most alarmingly Cassandra-like pieces I will ever write, one I specifically recall being laughed off by many of my more left-leaning acquaintances as “right-wing fever-swamp nonsense.” Permit me an excerpt:

Instead it was Biden’s demeanor that shocked me: slurred words, a sleepy and distracted tone suggesting periodic loss of mental focus, and his visibly withered face and slump-shouldered bearing. The whole time, I was cringing with an embarrassed empathy that comes not from politics but rather from that human reserve of mercy and shame we all share. He’d already looked slow and out of it during the (abbreviated) 2020 campaign, but his rapid slide since only a year before jarred me. It was ugly and unfortunate to see him looking lost and frail during the speech — the ricketiness of our president revealed to the world, sacrificing not only his own dignity but our national dignity as well. I wanted to turn away, to turn it off. It hurt to watch. It was at that moment that I concluded Joe Biden wasn’t going to be his party’s nominee for president in 2024.

Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem

https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-threat-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

ABC Pays the Price for George Stephanopoulos’s Partisan Irresponsibility Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/abc-pays-the-price-for-george-stephanopouloss-partisan-irresponsibility/

The fickle gods of irony are at work on this one.

As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.

Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.

It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library! (To complete the victory, ABC will also cover Donald Trump’s attorneys’ fees, a concession that surely occasioned an enormous sigh of relief from Donald Trump’s attorneys.)

The instigating event actually took place on March 10, when South Carolina representative Nancy Mace appeared on ABC’s This Week, a show that, while I was growing up in the D.C. area, was distinguished by the precise, elegantly patrician demeanor of its host, David Brinkley. Brinkley was famous as one of the last news anchors to insist on writing all of his own copy, which is why it bore such a distinct tone.

Nowadays This Week is the province of diminutive ex–hatchet man George Stephanopoulos, a nasty little Dökkálfr who graduated from slandering groped women on behalf of Bill Clinton and his “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign to gently condescending to the nation in a grizzled sneer on Good Morning America — and did all this so quickly that nobody ever stopped to point out that he simulates genuine human warmth as convincingly as AI depicts floor gymnastics. Stephanopoulos has never pretended to be a journalist: He is a Democratic partisan who holds his position because of his unthreatening height and professional connections with establishment power brokers, not his insight or tendency to ask probing questions.

Whatever The Atlantic Is Paying Jonathan Chait, It’s Too Much

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/12/whatever-the-atlantic-is-paying-jonathan-chait-its-too-much/

We are not in the habit of reading Jonathan Chait’s bloated regurgitations, but the headline on his latest column in The Atlantic — “The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0” — intrigued us because only a leftist could describe the orderly and upbeat transition that is happening right now as “bizarre.”

To Chait, what’s bizarre is that people on the left aren’t freaking out more because “what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing.”

A prime example, Chait says, is Trump’s appointment of Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department, which, he says, highlights “the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.”

What he says next is one of the purest, most unadulterated forms of projection we’ve ever come across.

Here’s what he writes about Anton:

Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic — that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise — is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology. (emphasis added)

Say what?

Why the media keep underestimating Israel Israel’s military successes are a repudiation of the pundit class’s worldview. Michael Murphy

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/07/why-the-media-keep-underestimating-israel/

As a boy in Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, future historian Sebastian Haffner devoured daily army bulletins. At just seven years old, he was already a ‘fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior’, meticulously tallying troop strengths. He was confident that the Kaiser’s army would soon triumph.

The bulletins, however, were rose-tinted, designed to bolster morale rather than inform. As the front deteriorated, they increasingly resembled a fantasy league, with regiments holding favourable positions only on paper. When defeat finally came, it shocked the nation. Haffner likened the feeling to ‘someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank’ only to discover ‘a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune’.

Today, this experience is all too familiar. Like Germans deceived by rosy war bulletins, educated people are often blindsided by major events, misled by wishful thinking disguised as analysis. From Brexit to the rise and resurgence of Donald Trump, big events are routinely confounding mainstream predictions. Errors are inevitable when discussing the future, but something is amiss when they consistently tilt in the same direction.

Brexit was dismissed as unlikely to happen because few in the media class wanted it to happen. Similarly, before the recent US presidential election, MP turned commentator Rory Stewart proclaimed that Kamala Harris would ‘win comfortably’. Americans, Stewart supposed, surely wouldn’t vote for Trump again. Yet they did – across demographics and states, in greater numbers than before.

It should raise eyebrows that predictive errors so often reflect the broadly liberal worldview of those making them. This worldview esteems international law over sovereign parliaments and has a narrow view of democracy. When voters defy this orthodoxy, their choices are dismissed as mere ‘populism’. However comforting these assumptions may be, they collapse time and again under the weight of reality.

Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.

Journalists Mourn That Jack Smith’s Probes Are Dead When media ethics died. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/journalists-mourn-that-jack-smiths-probes-are-dead/

Democratic attorneys waged legal war on former President Donald Trump on every level of government: federal, state, county and city. Now that he’s been reelected, all that legal wrangling is going to be curtailed. Biden-appointed special counsel Jack Smith had to fold his tent, and on Nov. 25, the networks offered live “breaking news” that just sounded like they were the broken ones.

Start with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, whose third anti-Trump book was aggressively titled “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party.” That’s a little embarrassing for Karl and his publishers now that the GOP controls the White House, Congress and 55% of state legislative seats.

Karl decried the death of accountability for Trump: “He ultimately will not be held to account in the criminal court system for his actions to overturn the presidential election of 2020.” Karl is upset that the Orange Man isn’t in an orange jumpsuit. No jail, no justice!

CBS reporter Scott MacFarlane, whose primary beat for almost four years now has been treating Jan. 6 as worse than 9/11, was also upset: “The historic case against Donald Trump for allegations he tried to conspire to overturn an election and the ties to that horrific attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, that case is dying with a whimper today.”

This pro-prosecutor tone was not the MacFarlane spin when the Bidens were the ones being investigated. He overused the adverb “allegedly” to describe pictures of Hunter Biden’s rampant drug use when he was on trial. He lamented special counsel Robert Hur “controversially” stated President Joe Biden would appear too doddering to be convicted in his classified-documents case. Who was whimpering instead of holding politicians accountable then?

Over a Dozen Current and Former Fox News Employees Shoot Down NBC’s Hit Piece Against Pete Hegseth–on the Record By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/04/over-a-dozen-current-and-former-fox-news-employees-shoot-down-nbcs-hit-piece-against-pete-hegseth-on-the-record/

An NBC News hit piece accusing Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, of habitually coming to work at “Fox and Friends Weekend” hung over and smelling of alcohol has been refuted by over a dozen Fox News personalities and guests who have worked with him, including his two cohosts.

The NBC story, which is based on ten anonymous sources, claims that Hegseth’s drinking “concerned” his colleagues at Fox News.

“Two of those people said that on more than a dozen occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of ‘Fox & Friends Weekend,’ which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air,” the NBC story alleges. “Those same two people, plus another, said that during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.”

According to the story, “one of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall.”

NBC News reporters Chloe Melas, Courtney Kube and Sarah Fitzpatrick claim they spoke with ten current and former employees at Fox News. However, 12 of Hegseth’s colleagues at Fox have gone on the record to strongly dispute the story on social media.  And these employees say they weren’t even contacted by NBC News for comment.

Hegseth’s Fox and Friends Weekend cohost Will Cain fumed on X that NBC’s story is “Bullshit. 100 percent bullshit. Actually…horseshit.”

“Put my name on it. On the record. It’ll be your only on the record source,” Cain wrote. “Signed, The guy who sat next to him for 8 hours every week for five years starting at 6am.”