Time To Ring In Some Changes
By Mitch Berg
Back when conservative blogging was a large, signfiicant force in the 2004 elections, many of us pointed out consistently and clearly that the mainstream media’s consistent, overwhelming bias was going to render it irrelevant.
It didn’t happen right away – although the 2007 recession gutted ad revenues, which certainly accelerated the process – but this past election proved us right; even some parts of what we used to call the “MSM” are finally starting to figure it out:
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doingwhen he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
Read the whole thing.
The PR Agency Of Record: And Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the NYTimes, sent out a memo last week. After an entire cycle carrying water for Hillary Clinton and getting pretty much absolutely everything wrong, they are “rededicating” themselves to…
…accurate and honest reporting.
Is it “journalistic ethics”, or is it watching non-liberals turning off and unsubscribing in droves?
You be the judge.
BONUS QUESTION : Think you’ll see a similar memo from the Star/Tribune’s publishers?
Hah. I made myself laugh.
November 14th, 2016 at 7:02 am
I really don’t think accurate and honest reporting can exist without a top to bottom housecleaning. Especially of anyone with a journalism degree.
It would be great to read the news though, and not have to search for other articles to see what likely happened.
November 14th, 2016 at 8:49 am
No, I’m not going down that road, sorry.
I do not “hate” the media, hell, I don’t “hate” the Democrat party. I despise the behavior of both of them.
I save hatred for people that have repeatedly injured me personally in some way. For the most part (but not always) that requires some personal contact.
I follow the wisdom of MLK Jr. I judge people by the content of their character.
Hatred is personal; despising bad behavior is just good business.
November 14th, 2016 at 10:10 am
Watching Meet the (de)Press(ed) yesterday, there was a moment of self-awareness when the host (F. Chuck Todd) and David (Pants Crease) Brooks recognized that this short hand they’ve been using; “Educated” People versus Uneducated People might be insulting to the 70% of people who don’t have college degrees.
If there was one lesson that I would have thought our Democrat Party Dominated Media Culture received from 2004’s Rathergate debacle, it was don’t doubt people with expertise in the field they know best – ie: themselves. We had eight years of balloon juice from a media that defended and promoted every bad idea from Obama and declaring his opposition as racist. It should have been no surprise that the people who voted for Trump had turned off their receivers long ago.
November 14th, 2016 at 10:27 am
We long ago found out what the Red Star and Sickle will do when faced with non-liberal drop-outs from their subscriptions. They continue to feed their rabid bubble-bunnies, becoming more and more “niche” to the market for radically biased “news.”
November 14th, 2016 at 10:41 am
Made another trip into Wisconsin this weekend. The Eau Claire Leader Telegram devoted much of their A section on Saturday to bashing Trump. (its actually a pretty good paper if you ignore their anti-Republican stories and editorials).
Will MSM change? Probably note. The Milwaukee Journal, EC Leader and La Crosse Tribune are 6 years into their anti-Scott Waker jihad. Yet Walker and Wisconsin Republicans just keep winning.
Its like asking the gender studies department of Big Education to change. How can you change when “everyone I know hates Republicans”.
November 14th, 2016 at 10:47 am
Just to give an example of how MSM tries to control the narrative. They are all running stories of rampant racial attacks since Tuesday, even though the facts behind these stories are anonymous anecdotal stories. Yet we have several videos out there of Trump supports being beaten. Which are all but ignored. The Chicago sr citizen attack, and the high school near San Fran are especially brutal. But if MSM doesn’t report these, its like they never happened.
November 15th, 2016 at 12:26 am
Well, well, well.
Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites
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Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome.
On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources.
Google kicked off the action on Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its ad policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.
“We have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”
Taken together, the decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.
Facebook has been at the epicenter of that debate, accused by some commentators of swinging some voters in favor of President-elect Donald J. Trump through misleading and outright wrong stories that spread quickly via the social network. One such false story claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed Mr. Trump.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/technology/google-will-ban-websites-that-host-fake-news-from-using-its-ad-service.html?_r=0
Note that the NY Times explicitly identifies a pro-Trump story as problematic.
Google and Facebook are now in the business of deciding which new is ‘real’ and which news is ‘fake’.