Tag: mainstream media

Journalism or partisanship? The media’s mistakes of 2016 continue in 2020

If there were any doubt left after 2016 as to what too much of the mainstream news media in America has become, it most certainly has been erased in 2020. Too often, many in my industry have revealed themselves as little more than propaganda tools for dueling political sides, no longer reporting the way journalists once did. We compete for the latest anonymous “scoop,” scandalous rumor, or unsupported accusation. We pounce on the supposed “bombshell” du jour and hype it on the news, accompanied by endless round robins with political operatives. Many of us don’t even bother to find and report on stories that powerful people and interests aren’t pushing.

To do this, too many of us have abandoned basic tenets of journalism. We ignore the suspicious timing of the handout “leaks” or scandals — as if nobody notices. We fail to explore or disclose sources’ motivations or conflicts of interest — as if nobody wonders about them. We don’t even pretend to assess the true news value of the “bombshell.” We’re simply happy to be of service to the propagandists; we invite them to use us, and our superiors reward us with admiration. Many of our peers either repeat the reporting, seek to confirm it using equally dubious methods, or discredit it. Rarely do we step back and consider that the whole drama is being orchestrated by political puppet-masters who count their successes by the number of news stories they generate.

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Nearly seven in 10 Americans more concerned about bias in news others consume

Nearly seven in 10 Americans surveyed in a new poll — 69 percent — said they are more concerned about bias in the news others consume than in coverage they view themselves.

Six in seven Americans also said they believe there is at least “a fair amount” of political bias in news coverage in general, according to research from Gallup and the Knight Foundation released Thursday. A majority also agreed that it can be found in “the news source they rely on most.”

Education levels are also a key metric regarding respondents’ perspective on bias, pollsters found. 

“Differences in Americans’ concern about the bias other people are exposed to are particularly striking when viewed by education level, with higher concern seen at each level of educational attainment,” the study finds. “Specifically, whereas 52 percent of Americans with a high school education or less are more concerned about bias in others’ news than in their own, the figure is 64 percent among those with some college education and is even higher among college graduates, 73 percent, and those with postgraduate education, which comes in at 77 percent.” 

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No, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Didn’t Spawn 250,000 Coronavirus Cases

Here’s what we were told: An August motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, helped spread COVID-19 to more than a quarter-million Americans, making it the root of about 20 percent of all new coronavirus cases in the U.S. last month. So said a new white paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, at least. And national news outlets ran with it.

“Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was ‘superspreading event’ that cost public health $12.2 billion,” tweeted The Hill.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held in South Dakota last month may have caused 250,000 new coronavirus cases,” said NBC News.

“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally represents a situation where many of the ‘worst-case scenarios’ for superspreading occurred simultaneously,” the researchers write in the new paper, titled “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19.”

Not so fast. Let’s take a look at what they actually tracked and what’s mere speculation.

According to South Dakota health officials, 124 new cases in the state—including one fatal case—were directly linked to the rally. Overall, COVID-19 cases linked to the Sturgis rally were reported in 11 states as of September 2, to a tune of at least 260 new cases, according to The Washington Post.

There very well may be more cases that have been linked to the early August event, but so far, that’s only 260 confirmed cases—about 0.1 percent of the number the IZA paper offers.

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14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns

Guns can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But so are articles about guns written by people who don’t understand anything about them.

There’s sadly no excuse to be ignorant about firearms. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They’re owned and operated safely by tens of millions of Americans each year. Our Constitution guarantees our individual right to possess guns so that we might be able to defend ourselves from those who would violently take away our freedom. Many gun controllers, however — some of whom have bylines for major media organizations — don’t actually know the first thing about firearms.

Here’s a good example of the kind of self-inflicted injury that can result from weaponizing an ill-informed opinion about guns and gun-related paraphernalia, courtesy of Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post:

I believe these are rubber bullets, can anyone confirm? #Fergurson pic.twitter.com/iCsFi6qoIa

Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 17, 2014

Unfortunately, Reilly is hardly alone in his complete ignorance of how guns work. Our nation is facing an epidemic of gun-related misreporting. As a public service to those who have opinions about guns but don’t really want to spend much time learning anything about them, I’ve compiled a simple list of 14 basic things everyone should understand before writing or talking about guns.

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CNN airs photo of Biden and son with Washington Redskins logo removed from son’s hat

CNN appears to have altered a widely-seen photograph of Joe Biden with his young son to remove the logo of the Washington Redskins.

The Democratic nominee and former vice president initially shared the photo in June to commemorate Father’s Day.

However, when CNN featured the photograph in its Monday night special “Fight for the White House: Joe Biden’s Long Journey,” the Redskins logo was removed from the hat.

CNN did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.

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Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite

IT SEEMS THE SAME MISLEADING TACTIC is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.

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