I don't think this is a MAGAtards issue. It's a media issue. The media is focusing on Bidens performance while he was quite apparently ill but ignoring the lies spewed by TFG.
It makes me wonder if they really want Trump to win because he brings eyes and ears to their platforms which means more money for them. That'll do them a lot of good when Trump tries to have the "fake media" shut down with his new Supreme Court granted powers.
Having worked in journalism since I was sixteen years old, and having worked for three major daily newspapers, I feel I can speak with some authority on some of the things some people are saying in various threads.
Someone recently characterized journalists as “a pack of lazy cunts,” or some such nicety. In all my years in journalism I have known only two such. One guy wrote a review of a play he never saw, which made it into print. His duplicity was discovered when it developed that the play had been cancelled for some reason.
The other guy became world famous for a while, because of the paper that he (and I) worked for. A foreign correspondent, it turned out that he was filing stories that he made up while sitting in his apartment. I knew him well. He was a great, fun guy. Many a night we drank together at the bar around the corner. I was shocked and saddened to discover what he had done, and it certainly was not covered up. It produced a journalistic earthquake.
And that’s it. Some reporters, editors, photographers, etc., were better than others, but all of us were hard working and passionate about our work because we were devoted to telling the public the truth about the world as near as we could discern it.
Another reporter I worked closely with was held hostage by the Taliban for a long time. He was in Afghanistan reporting on the war. Journalists have died on duty. They put their lives on the line to inform the people. These are not “lazy cunts.” Right now we have a Wall Street Journal reporter languishing in a Russian jail because he was doing his job. I’m sure Barbos is very happy about that.
People certainly don’t go into journalism for money, because there is a lot more to be made elsewhere. They go into it for love.
It’s really wrong to lump “the media” together as if it were some monolith. It’s highly varied. You also have to distinguish between TV journalism and newsprint. What we have seen is the rise of right-wing media, like Fox News, which is really not about journalism but propaganda. I suspect sone of the shoe-leather journalists who work there are embarrassed to do so. Unlike Fox News, most mainstream news outlets, especially in print, strive for accuracy and for holding public officials accountable. An old saw by journalists is that their mission is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Since “the media” is not a monolith, it’s impossible for them to “want” Trump to win. But what is also true is that the vast majority of rank-and-file reporters that I have worked with have been politically liberal. A generation of journos, including myself, were inspired by the way Woodward and Bernstein nailed Nixon.
The New York Times, the Washington Post and many other news outlets have been striving avidly to nail Trump for years. It can’t be done, because the country has changed. Half the country has fallen under the hypnotic spell of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber. This is no longer the nation that turned to Walter Cronkite virtually as one for their TV news.
What should worry everyone is the changing economics of journalism. Small, independent dailies are vanishing all over the country, being bought up, downsized, and ultimately vanished by rapacious conglomerates. The internet is doing its part to destroy daily print journalism as well. But although many publishers are conservative, it does not follow that they influence news coverage. If they tried, their liberal staff would bite back hard. Most mainstream papers maintain a firm separation between publishers and the newsroom, and between the advertising department and the newsroom. And the functions of the editorial board are also kept separate from the newsroom, and from the op-ed columnists.
A lot of people complain about “both siderism,” the so-called “he said/she said” school of reporting. But it’s important that this be done. It’s often said the daily journalists are writing “the first draft of history,” and because it is the first draft, reporters can get things wrong. They have to get both sides of the story because it takes time to dig out the truth, and you can’t just favor one side over the other at the risk of getting it wrong.
But this “both siderism” is deeply misunderstood in so many ways. An example: over at Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers has been complaining for years about a Times reporter who, in the early 2000s, had a front-page piece published about young-earth creationist tours of the Grand Canyon. The creationists were telling tourists how the canyon was the product of a planet 6,000 years old.
He claimed, and still claims to this very day, that The Times was employing “both siderism,” in the piece, placing an old earth and a young, creationist earth on equal footing. He was and is flat wrong. As I tried to explain to him on his blog, the article was not a science piece. It was a sociological piece, examining the phenomenon of the increasing infiltration of YECs into the public and private sphere to spread their nonsense. The writer of the article explicitly stated that geologists all agree that the earth is some 4.6 billion years old. P.Z. was, and is, having none of that, and he has continued to personally attack the reporter, to the extent of even doxing her.
There’s a lot more to be said, but I’ll stop here.
www.salon.com
www.bu.edu
www.latimes.com
www.nbcnews.com
