RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2024/06/american-medias-lethal-self-inflicted-wounds/

Perhaps it still does, but 40-odd years ago the US Information Agency would take reporters newly arrived from overseas on little junkets to show how America worked. The Wall had yet to fall, the Cold War continued and Washington wished to put the benefits of democracy and free enterprise on display. I went on only one such trip, in early 1980, which is some time ago, so if what I recall of our stop at the Los Angeles Times is fogged by the years, please forgive a memory perhaps a little blurred at the edges.

What I do recall is being herded, our troupe of international freeloaders — black faces, white and asian, the only genders then on offer, plus some colourful headgear and a robe or two — through a vast acreage of newsrooms until finally, having also inspected loading bays and presses, we were assembled before the vacant desk of the editor-in-chief. A tall, athletic man with a beaky countenance arrived, sat down, delivered some pro forma remarks on the First Amendment, Fourth Estate and the vital role his newspaper played in the lives of Los Angelos and, indeed, the nation and world. The chap with the kente cloth cap asked why Africa received so little attention, and there were questions about November’s presidential election, Carter vs Reagan, and how it would be covered. This is the bit that remains crystal sharp.

“Without fear or favour and in pursuit of the facts,” said the LA Times/Mirror group’s supreme editor, Otis Chandler, the fourth generation of the family that had owned and run the LA Times for more than a century. Like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post, his was a hands-on clan. After the rote boilerplate about the sacred duty of the press, the force of Chandler’s conviction in pledging a thorough, unbiased eye on the looming presidential contest was, well, memorable. The details escape me, except that he went on at some length about the dollar investment that would go into the election coverage, a sum I remember as being in the astonishing multi-millions. The LA Times‘ reputation and that of the Chandlers were as one and worth protecting. Indeed, it was also matter of redemption. Before Otis, the LA Times had been a nakedly biased, right-wing denouncer of all things Democrat, especially unions, which made it the target of a 1910 bombing that left almost two dozen dead.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/22/ethics-and-hypocrisy-turmoil-at-the-washington-post/

For the time being, at least, it appears that the inmates at The Washington Post have gained the upper hand, forcing management to terminate plans to put British journalist Robert Winnett in charge of the asylum. Much to the inmates’ chagrin, one supposes, this entire episode in American journalism has been far less a dramatic battle for the future of one of the nation’s greatest institutions than a modestly entertaining reenactment of the Iran-Iraq War, in which many outside observers are hoping to see both sides lose.

Perhaps the most entertaining—if also somewhat dispiriting—aspect of the Washington Post slap fight has been the insistence by the paper’s old guard that Winnett simply could not be their new editor because he lacks the requisite “ethical” standards to do so. He is, as the Post’s long-timers fear, too morally compromised to be the leader they so richly deserve. For example, NPR reported that David Maraniss, a “highly regarded Post writer and associate editor,” penned a Facebook post in which he “expressed disgust” at Winnett’s lack of character. Maraniss went so far as to say that “the scandal that has erupted this spring around [Post publisher Will] Lewis and Winnett is worse than the revelation that a Pulitzer Prize-winning account was fabricated by Janet Cooke, a junior Post reporter fed by the hunger of her editors to land a story.”

That’s quite a charge from Maraniss, who, as NPR noted, is among The Washington Post’s most respected and beloved longtime employees. It’s also, one might conclude, an invitation to examine other examples of journalistic ethics as they are practiced at the Post by its old guard, perhaps starting with David Maraniss.

https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased

Executive Summary
This work aims to determine whether there is evidence of political bias in English-language Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular domains on the World Wide Web, with hundreds of millions of unique users per month. Wikipedia content is also routinely employed in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs).
To study political bias in Wikipedia content, we analyze the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) with which a set of target terms (N=1,628) with political connotations (e.g., names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. congressmembers, U.S. Supreme Court justices, or prime ministers of Western countries) are used in Wikipedia articles.
We do not cherry-pick the set of terms to be included in the analysis but rather use publicly available preexisting lists of terms from Wikipedia and other sources.
We find a mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.
These prevailing associations are apparent for names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. Supreme Court justices, U.S. senators, U.S. House of Representatives congressmembers, U.S. state governors, Western countries’ prime ministers, and prominent U.S.-based journalists and media organizations.
This trend is common but not ubiquitous. We find no evidence of it in the sentiment with which names of U.K. MPs and U.S.-based think tanks are used in Wikipedia articles.
We also find prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures.
These trends constitute suggestive evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.
We find some of the aforementioned political associations embedded in Wikipedia articles popping up in OpenAI’s language models. This is suggestive of the potential for biases in Wikipedia content percolating into widely used AI systems.Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy aims for articles in Wikipedia to be written in an impartial and unbiased tone. Our results suggest that Wikipedia’s NPOV policy is not achieving its stated goal of political-viewpoint neutrality in Wikipedia articles.
This report highlights areas where Wikipedia can improve in how it presents political information. Nonetheless, we want to acknowledge Wikipedia’s significant and valuable role as a public resource. We hope this work inspires efforts to uphold and strengthen Wikipedia’s principles of neutrality and impartiality.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/17/the-medias-great-awokening-is-alienating-the-masses/

When I was a cub reporter working at the Washington Post a half-century ago, being a journalist was first and foremost a craft. I once tried to slip my opinion into an article, but my editor wrote on the copy that ‘nobody gives a shit what you think’.

It was harsh, but good training. Our primary job as journalists was not to indoctrinate but to inform. Even when writing an opinion piece, you would try backing up assertions with facts and leave room for the possibility that your point of view may not be the only permissible one.

All this may seem quaint today, as the news media – television, print, magazines and online blogs – now serve increasingly as ideological provocateurs. Overall, the whole industry is losing the trust of the public. This has now reached a nadir. In 2005, 50 per cent of Americans had confidence in the mass media. Barely a third do today, notes Gallup. Trust has also been dropping among all age groups, according to Pew.

One might have thought that the internet revolution and the growth of the ‘demassified media’ would benefit the customer, as futurist Alvin Toffler optimistically predicted. But today, just a handful of companies control the information pipelines and they largely follow the same script. Nearly two-thirds of US young adults now get their news through the big social-media platforms, like Facebook, X and TikTok.

These platforms use the content of the traditional media, largely without paying for it. Meanwhile, newspaper subscriptions, online and otherwise, have dropped from over 60million to barely 20million in three decades. ‘When you look at what’s evolved’, says Alan Fisco, president of the Seattle Times, ‘and the amount of revenue that’s going to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are getting the crumbs off the table’.

Like the barbarians who conquered Rome, the oligarchs have developed a taste for the vestigial print world they helped to destroy. Since the 2010s, tech moguls and their relatives have bought the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times and the long-distressed Time magazine.

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

The Democratic Party is now irretrievably the party of Leftwing radicals, the so-called progressives whose behavior should better be described as fatally regressive.

What once united Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals has disappeared. Gone are the days when secure borders, national sovereignty, religious freedom along with national pride were a shared American value, instead all came under a sustained and deliberate attack during the eight long years of the Barack Hussein Obama regime. He proclaimed that he had come to transform America and so many cheered loudly.

Our tragedy now is that there is not enough conservative media to combat the tidal wave of misinformation and deception which enslaves the minds of millions of our ill-informed citizens.

If good people know too little about what is going on it is because they are fooled by watching ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC or by reading the New York Times and the Washington Post. How tragic that the great profession of journalism, with a few honorable exceptions, has become the propaganda arm of the Democrat Socialist party led by the same Obama as dire puppet master pulling Joe Biden’s strings.

President Trump was not acting as a dictator as some liberal friends of mine shamefully suggested. No, he was fulfilling his Constitutional duty to prevent the burning down of Federal buildings and protecting American citizens from the violence of Antifa and BLM because left wing Democrat mayors told their police to stand down.

We must ask ourselves if viewers of the nightly news truly believe what the Mainstream Media is telling them is the truth. If they still do, then we have reached the terrifying reality of how easily and how far good fellow Americans can be manipulated and deceived.

We are thus being put into the same position that existed in 1776 where Americans were being forced to fight for the continuing existence of freedom and liberty. Political Correctness is the enemy of free speech. Historical Correctness is thus constantly betrayed.