Journalists On Left-Wing Networks Say ‘Fairness Is Overrated’

Most Americans who were alive remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot. Even if you were very young, you remember watching a visibly shaken and emotional Walter Cronkite struggle to hold back tears as he remained the professional that he was, and delivered the devastating news of Kennedy’s death.

Have we ever wondered aloud, how the events of that tragic day would play out in today’s media landscape with today’s “journalists?” It’s a pretty sure bet the coverage would be wildly different.

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No More Hiding

In Walter Cronkite’s day, you practiced the “5 W’s of journalism.” A reporter’s job was to report the who, what, where, when, why, and perhaps a how of the story. They did not offer up and unwanted opinion for viewers, and more importantly, you didn’t know Walter Cronkite was a liberal until long after he retired, happily ensconced on his boat.

Those days are definitely over. It is not clear what exactly the impetus was, the election of Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, or something else entirely, but those who call themselves journalists on networks like CNN, MSNBC, and NBC have decided all bets are off, and have declared that well, Republicans and conservatives just don’t merit equal and fair coverage with their Democrat counterparts.

As Fox details, MSNBC Host Joy Reid discussed the coverage of Republicans with her guest, fellow lefty traveller Matthew Dowd. The two came to the conclusion that their job was warn that Republicans are a “threat to freedom.” (Since when do leftists care about freedom, anyway?)

But CNN’s Don Lemon beat Joy to the punch. The week before, he promptly dismissed the idea of objectivity, ironically arguing that the media no longer operate in a “Walter Cronkite society.” 

In March, NBC’s Lester Holt said this about “truth”:

Geez Lester, wouldn’t be easier to just volunteer to organize the next book burning?

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Justifiable Homicide Of Journalism

In August of 2016, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg gave his fellow journalists license to break any journalistic rule they pleased. Perhaps Rutenberg was prophetic, and saw what could happen in just three short months, even when no one else did?

Did he see that it just might be possible for Donald Trump to be elected president over their precious Hillary, and therefore, the rules had to change? In his column, he implored his fellow writers to “to throw out the textbook of American journalism,” for a more “oppositional” approach when covering then-candidate Trump.

So Republicans and conservatives, we were duly warned what was coming our way. Oh sure, it didn’t just start with Jim Rutenberg and the rest of his friends at the New York Times. We have seen this coming down the pike. Donald Trump just gave them license to do it.

And rest assured, it will not get any better. The midterm election and 2024 are not looking good for them. But keep it up. Keep calling them on it. They are scared. 

Imagine, being scared of a different point of view. 

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President Trump Slams Washington Post For Now-Corrected ‘Hoax’ Georgia Election Investigation Story

On Monday, former President Donald Trump responded to The Washington Post making multiple massive corrections to their story that accused Trump of tampering with the Georgia elections, calling the Post’s claims a “hoax.”

The damning quotes from an unnamed “source,” that Washington Post now admits Trump did not make, were used by Democrats in his second impeachment trial.

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Washington Post Admits Damning Quotes Were False

The Washington Post corrected their bombshell story that originally claimed Trump pressured Georgia’s top elections investigator, Frances Watson, to “find the fraud” in his state’s election. 

The Post also claimed that the then-president supposedly told her she would be “a national hero” if she found any discrepancies. 

Actual audio of the call was published last week by The Wall Street Journal, which proved the Trump quotes were false.

The quotes were used against Trump during his second impeachment trial.

Obviously this is a major correction and story. This is no mere typo.

The Washington Post, which cited the quotes to one person who was an anonymous source, corrected their story Monday.

Trump’s statement read, “The Washington Post just issued a correction as to the contents of the incorrectly reported phone call I had with respect to voter fraud in the Great State of Georgia.”

“While I appreciate the Washington Post’s correction, which immediately makes the Georgia Witch Hunt a non-story, the original story was a Hoax, right from the very beginning,” Trump blasted.

Trump Pulls No Punches

The former President also noted that media bias seems to “slant one way.”

Trump added, “You will notice that establishment media errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies always slant one way—against me and against Republicans.”

“Meanwhile, stories that hurt Democrats or undermine their narratives are buried, ignored, or delayed until they can do the least harm—for example, after an election is over,” Trump wrote.

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Trump Calls News Outlets ‘Political Entities’

Trump said news coverage of the coronavirus vaccine was part of this bias.

Trump said, “Look no further than the negative coverage of the vaccine that preceded the election and the overdue celebration of the vaccine once the election had concluded.”

“A strong democracy requires a fair and honest press,” he continued. “This latest media travesty underscores that legacy media outlets should be regarded as political entities—not journalistic enterprises.”

Donald Trump then “thanked” the Post for its update to their story.

“In any event, I thank the Washington Post for the correction,” Trump wrote.

 

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Journalism 101 fail: NYT article lets Republicans lie and attack, but can’t find Democrat to respond

What the hell is going on at The New York Times? This question has arisen far too often in the past few years, most recently last week after James Bennet, the paper’s now-former editorial page editor, pitched and then published—without reading it first, allegedly—a fascist op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. They were rightly reamed for it, with their own 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner and "The 1619 Project" creator Nikole Hannah-Jones leading the way, saying, “As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.".

So that was a poor decision by the opinion department, but surely the folks in the Times’ news department are doing their level best and practicing solid journalism, right? They’ve learned the hard and necessary lessons from the absurdly irresponsible, obsessive way they covered “her emails” in 2016, while downplaying investigations and actual wrongdoing by The Man Who Ended Up Losing The Popular Vote, right?

Well, from what I saw in a recent Sunday edition, not so much.

Like so many New York stories, we must begin in Central Park. I was sitting on the Great Lawn—appropriately distanced from a few friends, of course—and reading the Sunday Times news section when I started muttering. Then I humphed. Then I just slapped the newspaper with the back of my hand and said, “Sorry to interrupt, guys, but you gotta hear this.”

The article that prompted my outburst was one that I initially figured would be pretty dull. “Trump Wanted a Pre-Virus Convention Crowd, or None At All,” was the print headline (it’s slightly different online). The piece focused on Trump’s threat to move the Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina (we now know that most of the convention activities, including the nomination acceptance speech, will take place in Jacksonville, Florida). The story focused on the impeached president’s dismay with the Tar Heel State’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who wouldn’t guarantee that Republicans could pack people together on the convention floor and party like it was 2019.

The article’s first quote came from Ada Fisher, a national committeewoman for North Carolina’s Republican Party. Unsurprisingly, she blamed Democrats. “There are a lot of liberal, establishment people here who just don’t like the Republican Party. People didn’t want it to happen just because Republicans were involved. But Charlotte can’t stand to lose $200 million in revenue right now.” Standard Republican boilerplate: The Democrats are a bunch of meanies. She even managed to work in both “liberal” and “establishment” as slurs. Well played, Ms. Fisher.

The next quote was from Orange Julius Caesar himself, who’d informed Cooper how stupendously North Carolina had been treated by the White House; he’d sent lots of tests and ventilators, see, as well as the National Guard. “I think we’ve done a good job!” and “We gave you a lot!” and more of the same. About what you’d expect from Trump.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna (don’t call me Romney) McDaniel’s letter to the convention’s host committee was next; essentially, she blamed the Democrats. If you’re wondering if, at any point in this journey so far, the Times offered any response from North Carolina Democrats, you already know the answer to that.

Two more Republicans weighed in before the final quotes came from the Republican state chair from Connecticut, J.R. Romano, who criticized Gov. Cooper’s supposedly over-aggressive requirements regarding wearing masks and social distancing: “We’re adults,” Romano said. “We all know the risks. If someone wants to wear a face mask, they can. If someone doesn’t, they’re taking a risk. I don’t think they had to make this mandatory.”

It is worth noting that Thursday was the fourth day in a row that coronavirus hospitalizations in North Carolina hit a new high.

I couldn’t believe that Romano’s nonsense was the end of the article. I kept waiting for the pushback, a quote from Cooper, or one his aides or allies, about the need to be careful because of the virus, or how decisions on the convention would be governed by science, or how they’d have to see how the outbreak looks in the coming weeks, or that they’d love to host the Republicans, but social distancing rules will still probably be necessary. Anything along those lines would’ve worked. Anything.

Could the authors really not find a Democrat in the entire state or country to go on record here? How did they submit this piece without making sure they at least found one? Did they even notice the imbalance? Where were their editors? There are multiple layers of editorial oversight, one would imagine, for an article on national politics that runs in the main print section of the Sunday New York Times. Did nobody ask, “Hey, can you find a quote from a frickin’ Democrat?” I’ve never worked as an editor at the Gray Lady, but that question came to mind before I was halfway through the piece.

The article did summarize the respective positions of Cooper and Trump, as well as their conversations, yet only Trump and Republicans were given space to defend their positions. Republicans’ assertions about the motivations of North Carolina Democrats also went unchallenged by the authors, other than a brief mention—far from any Republican statements—that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended mask-wearing and social distancing.

The article was written by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman. While Karni has not faced significant criticism over her work in the past, Haberman has been called out before for pro-Trump, pro-Republican reporting. Trump has also attacked Haberman, but given that he has attacked the entire journalism profession, such attacks are a badge of honor and don’t mean anyone’s actually been unfair to him or his administration. Haberman’s critics maintain the opposite.

In May 2019, Haberman wrote an article for the Times about Hope Hicks, who had left her position as White House communications director a year earlier, then received a subpoena to testify before the House regarding her former boss and obstruction of justice (remember the Mueller report?). Haberman’s article explored whether Hicks would, you know, actually comply with the law. Yet some folks were concerned that the decision to commit a crime was framed, by Haberman, as “an existential question.”

What gets me is news breaks that this woman is weighing committing a crime before Congress &it�s getting framed by the NYT as some Lifetime drama called �Hope�s Choice.� This is a fmr admin official considering participating in a coverup led by the President. Treat her equally. https://t.co/XcNbSuU4QB

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 26, 2019

Anyway: Here's a dare for @maggieNYT, since she wants to write about what happens when women defy a subpoena. Write a similar story about @xychelsea, who is in jail for defying a subpoena.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 26, 2019

There is nothing for Hope Hicks to �decide.� She got a subpoena from Congress. Were she not white, wealthy, and connected, we wouldn�t be having this conversation. She would appear, or she would face the threat of prison like the rest of us. As she should. https://t.co/giDCcvIxvf

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) May 26, 2019

One Vanity Fair headline referred to Haberman as a “Trump Whisperer,” citing her “closeness—and fairness—to the president.” Fairness is a subjective term, but I have a hard time seeing it as fair to Roy Cooper or North Carolina Democrats that Haberman and Karni’s article quoted five angry Republicans, but not one Democrat.

Beyond the problems with Haberman’s reporting specifically, one of the biggest problems with the so-called mainstream media writ large is something called “bothsidesism,” also known as false equivalency. Bothsidesism occurs when reporters cover an issue simply by presenting the opposing views of Democrats and Republicans as equivalent, irrespective of which side is telling the truth.

Laila Lalami, writing in in The Nation, describes bothsidesism as when journalists “give space to both sides of any story, no matter what the facts show, leaving them open to manipulation by surrogates acting in bad faith and, more worrying, making it harder for ordinary citizens to remain informed and engaged.” Nancy LeTourneau, writing for Washington Monthly, notes that “For those of us who are trying to keep the door to being open-minded cracked at least a little bit, this both-siderism has a kind of gaslighting effect. You begin to question whether what you are witnessing with your own two eyes is real.”

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop went in-depth on bothsidesism and the Times during the impeachment of Donald Trump.

As impeachment has progressed, attacks on the “both sides” approach—and the Times, in particular—have intensified. Over the weekend, critics trained their ire on an article in the paper, headlined “The Breach Widens as Congress Nears a Partisan Impeachment,” about a debate in the Judiciary Committee. Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, noted that the actual words “both sides” appeared four times in the piece. (One of these was in a quotation.) Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, listed 12 more snippets from the article as evidence of the Times’s inability to handle what he calls “asymmetrical polarization.” They included “the different impeachment realities that the two parties are living in,” “both sides engaged in a kind of mutually assured destruction,” and “the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them.”

Rosen is right that this sort of language is inadequate: Democrats, for the most part, are engaging with the factual record; Republicans, for the most part, are not. These positions are manifestly not equivalent. Treating them as such does not serve any useful concept of fairness; instead, it rebounds clearly to the advantage of the one side (Republicans) for whom nonsense being taken seriously is a victory in itself. The Times is far from the only culprit.

The Times also blew it when covering Trump’s remarks after back-to-back mass shootings in August 2019—one of which was carried out by a racist who specifically targeted Latinx Americans. The initial headline—in all caps (something done relatively rarely, as it indicates special importance)—read “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM.” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, among many others, pushed back hard on that framing.

Lives literally depend on you doing better, NYT. Please do. https://t.co/L4CpCb8zLi

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) August 6, 2019

After facing a lot of heat, the headline was changed to “ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS.” A spokesperson for the Times admitted that “The headline was bad and has been changed for the second edition.” Executive editor Dean Baquet also called it a “bad headline.” The final headline, at least online, reads: “Trump Condemns White Supremacy but Stops Short of Major Gun Controls.” The Confederacy’s Biggest Fan, of course, still liked the original headline best, calling it “the correct description” of what he’d said.

What mattered, in the context of the mass shootings, was that Trump had declared a refusal to support any significant new gun control measures, such as universal background checks, or bans on high capacity ammunition magazines. However, the Times’  first instinct was to praise Trump as an anti-racist unifier. Let that choice sink in.

It’s bad enough when reporters at mainstream media outlets are so afraid of being accused of showing “liberal bias” that they engage in bothsidesism and false equivalency. Regarding the Sunday Times article about the RNC, presenting both sides would have been an improvement, as the authors literally only gave us one side of a political story in which Democrats and Republicans disagreed. Yet what the article on the battle over the RNC convention shares with other New York Times pieces that are guilty of bothsidesism is the willingness to bend over backward to help Republicans. And they call that paper the liberal media.

There are no quick fixes here for The Times. As for constructive criticism, journalists at The Times could do a lot worse than to listen to the aforementioned Professor Rosen. Rosen diagnosed the crux of the paper’s problem a couple of years ago (and is as good a media critic as there is), in a long analysis that’s worth reading. One quote in particular hits the nail on the head.

“Remember when the Washington Post came out with its new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness?” It put Post journalism on the side of keeping democracy alive. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, made fun of it. ‘Sounds like the next Batman movie,’ he said.”

You know what they say about the fish rotting from the head down? Perhaps the entire staff, top to bottom, could undergo the kind of training they did at The Telegraph (UK), which Rosen also cited as a way to help mainstream media journalists unlearn some of their worst habits.

To paraphrase Ted “Theodore” Logan, strange things are afoot at The New York Times, and not at all in the cool, “I just met George Carlin outside the Circle K” kind of way. In all seriousness, what The Times did here is reflective of what’s been going on for generations. In 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew drew up the playbook for Republican liars attacking the media in order to intimidate them into providing more favorable coverage; the Koch brothers have kept that tradition alive. In sports, this is called “working the refs,” and Paul Krugman rightly applied the term to the imbalance in how the media covered Trump as compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

To the detriment of American politics, the American people, and our democracy, we’ve had four more years of this media malpractice since then. If mainstream media outlets keep this up, and we end up with four more of Trump as a result, there may not be much of a free media left to cover his second term. It’s on all of us to do our part between now and November to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

CNN Admits Trump Legal Team Success, But Argues a Lack of Diversity

By PoliZette Staff | January 26, 2020

Following a swift and decisive round of opening arguments by the Trump legal team in the Senate impeachment trial, members of the GOP and staunch followers of the President were left encouraged. But they were not the only ones.  Even oft-antagonistic CNN agreed with the sentiment of a strong performance by Trump’s team.

CNN legal analyst and liberal commentator Jeffrey Toobin shocked viewers when he admitted that the Republicans were “winning” the impeachment trial.  Here is what he said.

“Again, I just think the Republicans are winning here. The president is winning here. And as long as they don’t completely fall on their faces, which they’re all competent lawyers, they’re not going to do that, I think that’s fine for them.”

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However, despite his comments acknowledging the GOP’s success, he was quick to point out the lack of diversity on Trump’s legal team. He further stated that “President Trump has too many white men as lawyers,” needing something negative to spin for CNN viewers.

He went on to describe the lack of women and pondered whether or not the Trump team would allow them to speak, in a clear zing meant to further the mainstream media’s narrative that the Trump White House is misogynistic and plump full of bigots.

Of course, as a counterpoint Toobin was certain to highlight diversity within the Democrat party, citing their strong commitment to the cause and equal representation among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics.

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This is all too typical of the Democrat narrative, manipulating the optics and overall message while hiding behind the indefensible claims of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, or whatever the cause du jour may be.

While diversity is certainly welcomed and should be championed on all sides, placing the most qualified people into positions of power, regardless of race or gender, should remain the priority this country.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Crucial Moderate Senators Are ‘Offended’ and ‘Stunned’ After Nadler Accuses Senators of ‘Cover-Up’
Congressional Democrats Add Insult to Injury by Alienating Second Possible Impeachment Trial Swing Vote
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