Tag Archives: journalism in America

Why Almost All Of The News Sounds The Same

Posted on by

On Friday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article about the current state of journalism in America.

The article reports:

Commentary in the liberal press is so uniform that you wonder whether reporters and commentators have coordinated their coverage, down to the word and the phrase. Well, they have, of course. You remember JournoList, where, years ago, reporters would gather to coordinate their pro-Democrat, anti-Republican stories. JournoList supposedly disbanded after it came to light, but I assume it more likely just went underground.

Here we have another instance, JournoList 2. Politico reports: “Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits.”

As the Jan. 6 committee was working on its bombshell investigation into the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, committee staffers took some time out of their seemingly 24-hour jobs one day in 2022 to brief a group of lawyers and legal pundits on a Zoom call.

The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work and learn about what to look for at the hearings.

To “learn what to look for.” That is, to coordinate their news coverage. But that zoom wasn’t a one-off:

The group’s gathering was not a one-time event, but in fact an installment in an exclusive weekly digital salon, whose existence has not been previously reported, for prominent legal analysts and progressive and conservative anti-Trump lawyers and pundits. Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.

The article concludes:

The Politico reporter, while sharing the group’s anti-Trump bias, understood that not everyone would see it that way:

[A]s I was reporting this story, I learned that some members of the group were understandably anxious about its publication. Trump has claimed that there is a legal conspiracy against him, and there is a risk that news of a group such as this could give Trump and his allies an attractive target.

Trump’s claims of an organized conspiracy might be bunk, but there are other potential problems with the Friday Zooms: There is a risk, for instance, that the calls could breed groupthink or perhaps help dubious information spread, where it might then reach people watching the news.

Trump’s claim obviously is not bunk, as the Politico article itself reveals. And the idea that the weekly calls could “breed groupthink” or “help dubious information spread” to “people watching the news”? That is the whole point, obviously.

This is just one more reminder that the legacy press is hopelessly corrupt and wholly unreliable. Happily, hardly anyone pays any attention to these people.

If we are going to save America, we have to learn to listen carefully to both the mainstream media and the alternative media. When almost all of the media uses the same words to describe the same news, something is not right.

 

In Case You Had Doubts

Posted on by

On Thursday, Newsbusters posted an article about a recent comment by CNN’s Don Lemon.

The article reports:

Recently, CNN’s New Day has been on a streak of providing fairly objective reporting. Alas, it was a streak that Don Lemon decided to end this Thursday morning, ambling over from his nightly slots for what seemed to be a monthly Festivus tradition of his: complaining that the media isn’t doing enough to attack Republicans. Essentially openly opposing new CNN boss Chris Licht’s reported desire to bring CNN back to journalism and away from Lemon’s brand of partisanship.

The reason Lemon graced the TV screens at such an early hour was apparently due to an interview on Wednesday evening, where former Proud Boys spokesperson Jason van Tatenhove expressed fears of political extremists rising to prominence in the Republican Party, and NYU History professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat said, “I don’t think a lot of people know that on the local and state level there’s a lot of intermingling and fusion between extremists and the GOP, and I really see the GOP as an extremist entity now.”

The following quote from Don Lemon should leave no doubt in your mind as to what the mainstream media is doing:

We sit around and we talk about these things and we — we want to give this false equivalence to Democrats and Republicans. That is not where we are right now. Republicans are doing something that is very dangerous to our society, and we have to acknowledge that. We have to acknowledge that as Americans, we must acknowledge that as journalists, because if we don’t we’re not doing our jobs. 

Actually, their job as journalists is to report the news as it is–not to inject their opinion and not to (according to them) try to save the country.

The article also mentions Don Lemon’s desire to hold Republicans responsible for overturning Roe vs. Wade. So he believes that the Republicans are dangerous to society because they want to prevent the killing of babies. It seems to me that a society that values life might be less dangerous than a society that supports the killing of unborn babies.

R.I.P. American Journalism

Posted on by

This is a blog. I have never claimed to be objective. The name of the blog ought to be a clue as to my political leanings. I call things according to how I see them. You will notice that there are no ads on this blog. That is for two reasons–first of all, I don’t want to do the bookkeeping, but secondly, and more important, I don’t ever want to be conflicted about posting an article because someone is advertising on my blog. I have no problem with a reporter reporting on an event from a specific viewpoint as long as the reporter is willing to make his viewpoint known to the hearing audience. However, we have wondered away from that concept. As I write this, I am watching a supposedly objective news reporter change the subject every time a Trump supporter makes a valid point. We saw the mainstream media actually do damage to future American security with their lying about the Iran nuclear deal. Why are we surprised when they lie about the candidates for President?

The New York Post posted an article today about what has happened to journalism in the current election campaign.

The article reports:

The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.

The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.

The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.

By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.

Most Americans are not stupid. I also believe that most Americans have a definite sense of fair play. The are noticing the media pile-on that has been aimed at Donald Trump.

The article further states:

The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

If you are still getting your news from the mainstream media, you are not getting the whole story. It’s time to do some investigating on your own.