Howard Kurtz

FLASHBACK: Media Bias During 2008 Election (Larry Elder)

Published by Papa Giorgio

*Larry Elder uses a question by CNN’s Dan Lothian to Obama and Salon’s editor and columnist Joan Walsh’s interview with Howard Kurtz regarding the media “swooning” over Obama to make a point about — yep — MEDIA BIAS. (Nov 17, 2011)

*My Vimeo account was terminated; this is a recovered audio from it. (Some will be many years old, as is the case with this audio.)

Dan Lothian question documented by:

Joan Walsh and Howard Kurtz discussing the 2008 media reaction to Obama:

Media Malpractice Becoming the Norm

Published by Papa Giorgio

Sean Hannity deals a decent blow to the Corporate Media Industrial Complex. Enjoy.

Howard Kurtz has a great article (via FOX NEWS)

….BuzzFeed is standing by its story accusing President Trump of urging Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, but it has been substantially discredited by that once-in-a-blue-moon denial from Robert Mueller’s office, saying the information was “not accurate.” Making a charge of that magnitude based on two unnamed sources, without being able to cite a single e-mail, text or document, is very risky business. The story was thin at best, especially when you consider the two reporters didn’t talk to Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress over the Russian Trump Tower project and is facing a three-year prison term on that and other charges.

But the many news outlets that breathlessly promoted the BuzzFeed scoop, until it imploded, with an avalanche of segments and stories also have a black eye. The same goes for the Democrats who raced on the air, and onto Twitter, to talk about impeachment, based on uncorroborated allegations that were not matched by any other journalists.

Throwing in a couple of “if true” disclaimers doesn’t let you off the hook. And some journalists adopted the BuzzFeed allegations as true with even thinner caveats than that. The story, said MSBNC host Lawrence O’Donnell, “essentially” says that “here is the president of the United States in the Oval Office, presumably, on the phone, telling Michael Cohen to commit federal crimes and do it right there in the House of Representatives.”

Keep in mind that BuzzFeed reported that Mueller’s office had evidence and testimony about Trump allegedly suborning perjury, and that is what the special counsel knocked down. We now know, thanks to the reporting of Fox’s John Roberts, that Rudy Giuliani played a role in the denial, since he was on the phone with Mueller’s office Friday and both sides agreed parts of the story were false.

When CNN’s Anderson Cooper said that at least some other news organizations didn’t jump on the bandwagon, New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, to her credit, said: “No, but we all ran with it saying ‘if true.’ That was not that huge an asterisk, frankly.”

All this plays into Trump’s barrage of “fake news” criticism, and he didn’t hesitate to call the Buzzfeed story a “disgrace to journalism.”

Now to the other rush to judgment, involving students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. They were caught up in a confrontation with Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial. It just so happens some of the students were Trump fans wearing red MAGA hats, feeding a certain narrative. And there was a video, that went viral, of student Nick Sandmann smiling as he’s standing right next to Indian activist Nathan Phillips, which some interpreted as mocking.

An online mob took over, calling the students bigots and convicting them without a trial. Unfortunately, this was amplified by the media echo chamber.

But interviews and hours of earlier video made clear the story was more complicated. The students were shouting “school spirit” chants (with the approval of their chaperones) to drown out racially charged chants by a third group of black protestors, the Hebrew Israelites.

Sandmann, rather than inciting the confrontation, was actually approached by Phillips, who says he was being peaceful but whose story has been shifting. Sandmann said he smiled to show he meant no harm.

In a statement, Sandmann said that Philipps “began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face. I never interacted with this protester. I did not speak to him. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors.”

Once the broader context was clear, some journalists began deleting tweets and expressing regrets.

Kara Swisher, the tech writer and New York Times contributor, wrote: “I was a complete dolt to put up this and several other obnoxious tweets yesterday without waiting to see the whole video of the incident and I apologize to the kids from Kentucky unilaterally.”

Swisher had earlier posted her desire to be “finding every one of these s***ty kids and giving them a very large piece of my mind.”

According to a Mediaite roundup, the New Republic’s Jeet Heer deleted a tweet arguing the Trump-supporting students were “racist.” CNN’s Bakari Sellers deleted a tweet suggesting the kids should be “punched in the face.”

CNN’s Ana Navarro deleted one denouncing the “asswipe” parents of the students for teaching them “bigotry” and “racism.”

And CNN host S.E. Cupp posted this yesterday: “Hey guys. Seeing all the additional videos now, and I 100% regret reacting too quickly to the Covington story. I wish I’d had the fuller picture before weighing in, and I’m truly sorry.”……

(READ THE REST)

Former NY Times Chief Calls Out Media’s Bias

Published by Papa Giorgio

FOX NEWS:

…“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson writes, adding that she believes the same is true of the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”

What’s more, she says, citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”

Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes….

Democrats Want 100% Control Over Media and Lifestyles

Published by Papa Giorgio

“The biggest challenge that I think we have right now in terms of this divide is that the country receives information from completely different sources.” — Obama

What is funny is that Obama made this interview partly about “fake news,” which is ironic. THE BLAZE explains why:

…Obama then continued:

Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone. The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It’s making people exaggerate or say what’s most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs. And if we are gonna solve that, it’s not going to be simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media; it’s going to be figuring out how do we organize in a virtual world the same way we organize in the physical world. We have to come up with new models.

Absent from Obama’s take on “fake news” was the fact that the very magazine he was speaking to had just been found guilty of, in fact, publishing fake news. Earlier this month, the very same magazine Obama dubbed as “good journalism” was found guilty of defamation for an article written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Her article titled “A Rape on Campus,” appeared in the December 2014 issue of Rolling Stone and centered around a woman named “Jackie” and an account of a vicious gang rape at the University of Virginia. The story unfortunately turned out to be, well, fake news.  The jury in the case found the story was written with reckless disregard for the truth and that Erdely was guilty of false reporting. Rolling Stone and Erdely were ordered to pay $3 million in damages to an administrator at the school who filed the suit….

(NEWSBUSTERS)

GAY PATRIOT notes the left’s tendency towards control in all realms of life (public and private):

Let’s review how the American Democrat Left regards political disagreement:

It’s like Obama whining yesterday that the reason Hillary lost is because people were able to watch FoxNews in too many public places. Owning 99% of the media isn’t enough; the left must have all of it or it can’t succeed. Is the Democrat Left’s political philosophy so fragile that not even one voice of dissent can be permitted to question it?

[….]

* Love this quote: “Her claims to be a ‘queer Muslim’ are probably part of an act designed to fit into as many victim categories as humanly possible,” Adams elaborates. “Sometimes I wonder whether LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Thespian. So much drama, so few letters in the alphabet.”

Remember these stories?

Howard Kurtz Creates New Term (or, First Time I Heard It At Least): `Punditocracy` [Love It!]

Published by Papa Giorgio

“If Obama somehow manages to lose, it will be a stunning defeat for the nation’s first African-American president. But it will also be a crushing blow for the punditocracy that headed into Election Day filled with confidence that Obama had it in the bag. And Fox News won’t let the mainstream media hear the end of it.”

Read More at NewsBusters