Media Bias Thread

[Biff Tannen 46192]

15 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

 

Undermining faith in elections is reprehensible no matter who does it.

 

When one instance is based on actual facts and the other is based on lies and completely made up fairy tales, there's a difference.

[Buzzrock 15140]

When one instance is based on actual facts and the other is based on lies and completely made up fairy tales, there's a difference.

If you believe there were no made up fairy tales after 2016 that’s your decision.

Trump is a dangerous psychotic wannabe dictator and his supporters are deluded and often dangerous morons. The lies he has spun have done incredible harm. I would prefer he die suddenly so we don’t have to hope for impeachment or the 25th (neither of which is going to happen). I fear more chaos and violence before he’s out of office.

It doesn’t mean there’s a bunch of good guys on the other side. We have the worst batch of leaders in my lifetime.

[High Plains Drifter 11192]

 

I noticed this morning, perhaps for the first time, that the NPR talking voices on the radio used the word "lie" and "lies" numerous times when talking about doTArD. I think that is the first time that has happened on NPR, which I listen to almost daily in the car. I also can't recall the NYT (which I sometimes read online) ever using the word "lie" in their reporting. (Some editorials have used it, iirc).

NPR also used the words "rioters" and "insurrectionists" and "attempted coup".

 

 

[Biff Tannen 46192]

30 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

 

If you believe there were no made up fairy tales after 2016 that’s your decision.

Trump is a dangerous psychotic wannabe dictator and his supporters are deluded and often dangerous morons. The lies he has spun have done incredible harm. I would prefer he die suddenly so we don’t have to hope for impeachment or the 25th (neither of which is going to happen). I fear more chaos and violence before he’s out of office.

It doesn’t mean there’s a bunch of good guys on the other side. We have the worst batch of leaders in my lifetime.

 

I'm not going to get into a #bothsides argument here (we have @Anastasis for that), but the two are not equivalent.  The end.

[High Plains Drifter 11192]

28 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

 

If you believe there were no made up fairy tales after 2016 that’s your decision.

Trump is a dangerous psychotic wannabe dictator and his supporters are deluded and often dangerous morons. The lies he has spun have done incredible harm. I would prefer he die suddenly so we don’t have to hope for impeachment or the 25th (neither of which is going to happen). I fear more chaos and violence before he’s out of office.

It doesn’t mean there’s a bunch of good guys on the other side. We have the worst batch of leaders in my lifetime.

 

 

This is such fucking horseshit.

You are equating a president who urged his followers to storm the fucking capitol building and attempt a coup of the government of our country (because he can't take the loss) to who exactly? People "on the other side"?

Go fuck yourself.

 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

7 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I'm not going to get into a #bothsides argument here (we have @Anastasis for that), but the two are not equivalent.  The end.

Here here. There were many discussions about the current batch of leaders for the last year or so leading up to the primary and the eventual election and that is the time and place for those discussions and then post election after transfer of power and such like. But right now? Oh hell to the naw.

[Buzzrock 15140]

I'm not going to get into a #bothsides argument here (we have [mention=179]Anastasis[/mention] for that), but the two are not equivalent.  The end.

I agree they are not equivalent. And you’re right we don’t need a rehash.

[SydneyCarton 49520]

40 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

I noticed this morning, perhaps for the first time, that the NPR talking voices on the radio used the word "lie" and "lies" numerous times when talking about doTArD. I think that is the first time that has happened on NPR, which I listen to almost daily in the car. I also can't recall the NYT (which I sometimes read online) ever using the word "lie" in their reporting. (Some editorials have used it, iirc).

NPR also used the words "rioters" and "insurrectionists" and "attempted coup".

 

 

In the last 6 months or so I've started listening exclusively to NPR as well. I've noticed they've been pretty fucking left from the start and in their slants, but you're right, they absolutely were not couching their verbiage choice yesterday and today. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

I don't know if this is the correct place to put this as it relates to First Amendment perhaps? @TwiceHorn you do the Constitutional Law, correct? I mean, what recourse is there when you've got "news" such as this? Any? The retweet is from an account of one of the folks who was at the Capitol yesterday (no idea if she entered the building. Some folks are smart enough not to post pics of that)

 

[elfenix 34760]

new york times asking the important questions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/fashion/mens-style/rolex-biden.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/politics/biden-peloton.html

[UncleSonny 6798]

Didn't see a great place to put this and didn't want to start a new thread, but NFL writer (and TexasEx) Jane Slater is in a twitter dustup today I though was interesting.  Started when she posted what (to her) was a pretty innocuous signal boost for an unpaid intern position: 

People call out the exploitative nature of this type of gig and how it unfairly favors young people from wealthy families and she doubles down:

 

Of course it's pointed out she has a wealthy grandfather who supported her financially while she got her career off the ground and she completely misses the point and makes herself the victim: 

 

And scene! 

Anyway, nothing much to glean here probably. I'm sure Jane did work hard for her career but it was frustrating for me to see her blind to her clear privilege while she lectures about how hard she was grinding. The fact that grandpa was supplementing her rent just shows the great work ethic that he was able to instill. 

 

 

[softlynow 1894]

4 minutes ago, UncleSonny said:

Didn't see a great place to put this and didn't want to start a new thread, but NFL writer (and TexasEx) Jane Slater is in a twitter dustup today I though was interesting.  Started when she posted what (to her) was a pretty innocuous signal boost for an unpaid intern position: 

People call out the exploitative nature of this type of gig and how it unfairly favors young people from wealthy families and she doubles down:

 

Of course it's pointed out she has a wealthy grandfather who supported her financially while she got her career off the ground and she completely misses the point and makes herself the victim: 

 

And scene! 

Anyway, nothing much to glean here probably. I'm sure Jane did work hard for her career but it was frustrating for me to see her blind to her clear privilege while she lectures about how hard she was grinding. The fact that grandpa was supplementing her rent just shows the great work ethic that he was able to instill. 

 

 

That's just an example of people talking past each other. Jane tweet an opportunity, supplements the tweet with her experience and pointing out this is 'how it's done.' Commenters point out that 'how it's done' shuts out people without some level of 3rd party financial support. Jane doesn't get that point, but commenters don't get that she's not justifying the system.

[UncleSonny 6798]

10 minutes ago, softlynow said:

That's just an example of people talking past each other. Jane tweet an opportunity, supplements the tweet with her experience and pointing out this is 'how it's done.' Commenters point out that 'how it's done' shuts out people without some level of 3rd party financial support. Jane doesn't get that point, but commenters don't get that she's not justifying the system.

Eh, there is some of that for sure but she is absolutely justifying the system. She straight up said the career is a grind that's not for everyone while holding herself up as the paradigm of grinding it out for success. 

She probably should have just posted the opportunity and ignored the twitter eggs that came after her but she didn't do that. 

[softlynow 1894]

11 minutes ago, UncleSonny said:

Eh, there is some of that for sure but she is absolutely justifying the system. She straight up said the career is a grind that's not for everyone while holding herself up as the paradigm of grinding it out for success. 

She probably should have just posted the opportunity and ignored the twitter eggs that came after her but she didn't do that. 

I don't see how saying it's tough to break in to the business, and that maybe folks who want to should look to examples of those who've done it is justification. It's simply not the conversation that some in the replies wanted to have.

Lance, on the other hand, is justifying:

 

[Satchel 6983]

This reporter’s actions bothered me:

 

[GRHorn 105]

This could go in a couple threads but I’ll put it here. Not so much bias as media incompetence.

 

[956 Worldwide 35600]

30 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

This could go in a couple threads but I’ll put it here. Not so much bias as media incompetence.

 

That article from NR whines about the “biased media” and then cites the Washington Post as the most authoritative source on one of the topics.

There’s no such thing as “the media”. 

[GRHorn 105]

The Sovietization of the American Press - TK News by Matt Taibbi (substack.com)

Spoiler

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden's historic victory for America

The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:

Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”:

It doesn’t take much looking to find comedians like James Adomian and Anthony Atamaniuk ab-libbing riffs on Biden with ease. He checks almost every box as a comic subject, saying inappropriate things, engaging in wacky Inspector Clouseau-style physical stunts (like biting his wife’s finger), and switching back and forth between outbursts of splenetic certainty and total cluelessness. The parody doesn’t even have to be mean — you could make it endearing cluelessness. But to say nothing’s there to work with is bananas.

The first 50 days of Biden’s administration have been a surprise on multiple fronts. The breadth of his stimulus suggests a real change from the Obama years, while hints that this administration wants to pick a unionization fight with Amazon go against every tendency of Clintonian politics. But it’s hard to know what much of it means, because coverage of Biden increasingly resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions.

When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the “cost” of “breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies” was too high, the New York Times headline read: “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach.” When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties because “the world is a very dangerous place” and “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.

“In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.”

This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.

The old con of the Manufacturing Consent era of media was a phony show of bipartisanship. Legitimate opinion was depicted as a spectrum stretching all the way from “moderate” Democrats (often depicted as more correct on social issues) to “moderate” Republicans (whose views on the economy or war were often depicted as more realistic). That propaganda trick involved constantly narrowing the debate to a little slice of the Venn diagram between two established parties. Did we need to invade Iraq right away to stay safe, as Republicans contended, or should we wait until inspectors finished their work and then invade, as Democrats insisted?

The new, cleaved media landscape advances the same tiny intersection of elite opinion, except in the post-Trump era, that strip fits inside one party. Instead of appearing as props in a phony rendering of objectivity, Republicans in basically all non-Fox media have been moved off the legitimacy spectrum, and appear as foils only. Allowable opinion is now depicted stretching all the way from one brand of “moderate” Democrat to another.

An example is the Thursday New York Times story, “As Economy Is Poised to Soar, Some Fear a Surge in Inflation.” It’s essentially an interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who’s worried about the inflationary impact of the latest Covid-19 rescue (“The question is: Does [it] overheat everything?”), followed by quotes from Fed chair Jerome Powell insisting that no, everything is cool. This is the same Larry Summers vs. Janet Yellen debate that’s been going on for weeks, and it represents the sum total of allowable economic opinions about the current rescue, stretching all the way from “it’s awesome” to “it’s admirable but risky.”

This format isn’t all that different from the one we had before, except in one respect: without the superficial requirement to tend to a two-party balance, the hagiography in big media organizations flies out of control. These companies already tend to wash out people who are too contentious or anti-establishment in their leanings. Promoted instead, as even Noam Chomsky described a generation ago, are people with the digestive systems of jackals or monitor lizards, who can swallow even the most toxic piles of official nonsense without blinking. Still, those reporters once had to at least pretend to be something other than courtiers, as it was considered unseemly to openly gush about a party or a politician.

Now? Look at the Times feature story on Biden’s pandemic relief bill:

On Friday, “Scranton Joe” Biden, whose five-decade political identity has been largely shaped by his appeal to union workers and blue-collar tradesmen like those from his Pennsylvania hometown, will sign into law a $1.9 trillion spending plan that includes the biggest antipoverty effort in a generation…

The new role as a crusader for the poor represents an evolution for Mr. Biden, who spent much of his 36 years in Congress concentrating on foreign policy, judicial fights, gun control, and criminal justice issues… Aides say he has embraced his new role… [and] has also been moved by the inequities in pain and suffering that the pandemic has inflicted on the poorest Americans…

You’d never know from reading this that Biden’s actual record on criminal justice issues involved boasting about authoring an infamous crime bill (that did “everything but hang people for jaywalking”), or that he’s long been a voracious devourer of corporate and especially financial services industry cash, that his “Scranton Joe” rep has been belied by a decidedly mixed history on unions, and so on. Can he legitimately claim to be more pro-union than his predecessor? Sure, but a news story that paints the Biden experience as stretching from “hero to the middle class” to “hero to the poor,” is a Pravda-level stroke job.

We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional. It was only a mild shock to see Chris Wallace say Biden’s was the "the best inaugural address I have ever heard.” More predictable was Politico saying of Thursday night’s address that “it is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did… channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.” (Really? Hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing that?).

This stuff is relatively harmless. Where it gets weird is that the move to turn the bulk of the corporate press in the “moral clarity” era into a single party organ has come accompanied by purges of the politically unfit. In the seemingly endless parade of in-house investigations of journalists, paper after paper has borrowed from the Soviet style of printing judgments and self-denunciations, without explaining the actual crimes.

The New York Times coverage of the recent staff revolt at Teen Vogue against editor Alexi McCammond noted “Staff Members Condemn Editor’s Decade-Old, Racist Tweets,” but declined to actually publish the offending texts, so readers might judge for themselves. The Daily Beast expose on Times reporter Donald McNeil did much the same thing. Even the ongoing (and in my mind, ridiculous) moral panic over Substack ties in. Aimed at people already banished from mainstream media, the obvious message is that anyone with even mildly heterodox opinions shouldn’t be publishing anywhere.

Those still clinging to mainstream jobs in a business that continues to lay people off at an extraordinary rate read the gist of all of these stories clearly: if you want to keep picking up a check, you’d better talk the right talk.

Thus you see bizarre transformations like that of David Brooks, who spent his career penning paeans to “personal responsibility” and the “culture of thrift,” but is now writing stories about how “Joe Biden is a transformational president” for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill. When explaining that “both parties are adjusting to the new paradigm,” he’s really explaining his own transformation, in a piece that reads like a political confession. “I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon,” he says, but “income inequality, widespread child poverty, and economic precarity are the problems of our time.”

Maybe Brooks is experiencing the same “evolution” Biden is being credited with of late. Or, he’s like a lot of people in the press who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead. It’s been made clear that there’s no such thing as overdoing it in one direction, e.g. if you write as the Times did that Biden “has become a steady hand who chooses words with extraordinary restraint” (which even those who like and admire Biden must grasp is not remotely true of the legendary loose cannon). Meanwhile, how many open critics of the Party on the left, the right, or anywhere in between still have traditional media jobs?

All of this has created an atmosphere where even obvious observations that once would have interested blue-state voters, like that Biden’s pandemic relief bill “does not establish a single significant new social program,” can only be found in publications like the World Socialist Web Site. The bulk of the rest of the landscape has become homogenous and as predictably sycophantic as Fox in the “Mission Accomplished” years, maybe even worse. What is this all going to look like in four years?

 

 

[GRHorn 105]

Whoopsie daisy

 

Edited March 15, 2021 by GRHorn

[Captainant 28589]

bit of a necro-bump for a "no shit" headline, but it's at least nice to have suspicions confirmed

The Guardian: Twitter admits bias in algorithm for rightwing politicians and news outlets

The study compared Twitter’s “Home” timeline – the default way its 200 million users are served tweets, in which an algorithm tailors what users see – with the traditional chronological timeline where the most recent tweets are ranked first.

The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.

According to a 27-page research document, Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany. Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach. On this basis, the most powerful discrepancy between right and left was in Canada (Liberals 43%; Conservatives 167%), followed by the UK (Labour 112%; Conservatives 176%). Even excluding top government officials, the results were similar, the document said.

Twitter said it wasn’t clear why its Home timeline produced these results and indicated that it may now need to change its algorithm. A blog post by Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s director of software engineering, and Luca Belli, a Twitter researcher, said the findings could be “problematic” and that more study needed to be done. The post acknowledged that it was concerning if certain tweets received preferential treatment as a result of the way in which users interacted with the algorithm tailoring their timeline.

“Algorithmic amplification is problematic if there is preferential treatment as a function of how the algorithm is constructed versus the interactions people have with it. Further root cause analysis is required in order to determine what, if any, changes are required to reduce adverse impacts by our Home timeline algorithm,” the post said.

Twitter said it would make its research available to outsiders such as academics and it is preparing to let third parties have wider access to its data, in a move likely to put further pressure on Facebook to do the same. Facebook is being urged by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to distribute its research to third parties after tens of thousands of internal documents – which included revelations that the company knew its Instagram app damaged teenage mental health – were leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen.

[Neonmoon 38130]

I didn't know where else to put this. I realize this is an editorial piece but shouldn't the NYT screen the articles for stupidity?

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html

Quote

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.

How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around “cancel culture.” Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

Americans do not have a fundamental right to not be shamed or shunned for their opinion. 

The fact that the NYT published this is really saying something about the media these days. 

[956 Worldwide 35600]

12 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

I didn't know where else to put this. I realize this is an editorial piece but shouldn't the NYT screen the articles for stupidity?

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html

Americans do not have a fundamental right to not be shamed or shunned for their opinion. 

The fact that the NYT published this is really saying something about the media these days. 

Reminds me of a great joke about a traveling salesman who stops into a tent revival down south one sultry evening some decades ago. He gets caught up in the public testimonials and confessions. One man receives the Lord’s and the congregation’s forgiveness for leaving his wife and kids. Another for carousing in bars and bawdy houses. 
 

The salesman feels the spirit and answers the call. Down at the altar he says “I need forgiveness and healing!” The preacher says “don’t be ashamed brother, claim your forgiveness! No matter what you have done the Lord forgives!”

”When I am alone, I put on my wife’s garters and stockings and then pleasure myself with her rolling pin!”

Record scratch. Silence. No hallelujahs. Preacher: “Mister, I don’t believe I’d have told that.” 
 

I can’t believe the NYT published a “I have a right to be as offensive as I want with no consequences” column. 

[elfenix 34760]

nsiap:

Quote

How a 27-Year-Old Texan Became the Face of Russia’s American TV Network as It Imploded

RT America had to fold when it was kicked off the air after the Ukraine invasion. But Rachel Blevins is still broadcasting Kremlin propaganda.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texan-face-of-rt-america/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

 

wood anyway

[Biff Tannen 46192]

5 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

I didn't know where else to put this. I realize this is an editorial piece but shouldn't the NYT screen the articles for stupidity?

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html

Americans do not have a fundamental right to not be shamed or shunned for their opinion. 

The fact that the NYT published this is really saying something about the media these days. 

That is really what the right thinks the first amendment is.  It's a fundamental ignorance of one of the fundamental bedrocks of our society.  Good job morons.

[Cement 314]

 

[Neonmoon 38130]

Your brain should be studied 

[bolverk 30362]

1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Your brain should be studied 

He's about the most broken brained poster around these parts since Swam. Makes one wonder.

[YChang 3571]

Dunno if it’s been posted elsewhere, but the latest Jon Stewart episode seems appropriate here:

 

[Cement 314]

 

[Satchel 6983]

11 minutes ago, Cement said:

 

He must be an equal opportunity racist since I saw black people running out of the train for their lives too. 

[Biff Tannen 46192]

1 hour ago, Cement said:

 

I think the point is that one is an all around crazy person and one is just an asshole.

[elfenix 34760]

when did kyle delete his accounts?

Edited April 16, 2022 by elfenix

[RomaVicta 30614]

5 hours ago, Cement said:

 

Let's see how far the NYC criminal gets by floating a "I was just there to help" defense in front of a white jury. I'm also sure he'll become the darling of BLM and the never-Trumpers just as Kyle has become with their counterparts. You'll have a field day when all the ebil libs on here raise an outcry that he did nothing wrong and shouldn't be punished.

Pitiful effort. 

[Immaculate Vibes 114]

Was going to put in the Elon thread, but this place is as good as any. 
 

 

[Pato del Muerto 53568]

14 minutes ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Was going to put in the Elon thread, but this place is as good as any. 
 

 

No Murdoch properties on that list?

[elfenix 34760]

Every billionaire is a policy failure

[RomaVicta 30614]

21 hours ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Was going to put in the Elon thread, but this place is as good as any. 
 

 

Perhaps you could illuminate why you posted this. 

Is The New York Times a "social media firm?"

There is and has long been reason to be concerned about the wealthy owning news outlets. For news outlets, there is usually an editorial board and staff who work with a pretty high level of independence, but the relationship is indeed worrisome. I need not name the outlet which is the poster child for this disease.

Here's another cancer from the right, Alden. From Atlantic Magazine

Quote

According to industry experts Coppins interviewed for the story, Alden’s strategy for newspaper ownership is simple: gut the staff, sell the real estate, and jack up subscription prices while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it’s alienating in order to wring out as much cash as possible. One ex-publisher told Coppins that Freeman believed local newspapers should be treated like any other commodity in an extractive business. “To him, it’s the same as oil,” the ex-publisher said of Freeman. “Heath hopes the well never runs dry, but he’s going to keep pumping until it does. And everyone knows it’s going to run dry.”

Though famously reluctant to speak to the press, Freeman told Coppins that the papers Alden bought “were in many cases left for dead by local families not willing to make the tough but appropriate decisions to get these news organizations to sustainability”—a claim that ignores how many of the newspapers were profitable before they were purchased by Alden. As Coppins writes, “In truth, Freeman didn’t seem particularly interested in defending Alden’s reputation. When he agreed to the interview, I expected him to say the things he was supposed to say—that the layoffs and buyouts were necessary but tragic; that he held local journalism in the highest esteem; that he felt a sacred responsibility to steer these newspapers toward a robust future … but I had underestimated how little Alden’s founders care about their standing in the journalism world. For Freeman, newspapers are financial assets and nothing more—numbers to be rearranged on spreadsheets until they produce the maximum returns for investors.”

The reliable altruism of market forces.

Back in the '80s, it occured to me that America transitioned from being an advocate for liberty and freedom to become a blind celebrator or whatever the hoi polloi thought capitalsim was. Government foreign policy largely serving big money interests has no desire to see nationalization of resources which could cut into profits. The will of the native population and even the conditions of their existence was way down the list of what we aimed for. 

Now it's taken full hold. Market capitalism is the answer for everything. Look how it worked out for Russia! No Teddy Roosevelt or other government entities stepped forward to oppose the robber barons. Our way isn't always the best way for everybody else unless our way limits itself to the useful ideals of liberty and freedom. 

But it's all too late now. 

[elfenix 34760]

2 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Government foreign policy largely serving big money interests

that happened long before the 80s.

[956 Worldwide 35600]

On 4/17/2022 at 1:52 AM, Immaculate Vibes said:

Was going to put in the Elon thread, but this place is as good as any. 
 

 

The New York Times is owned by the New York Times Company, class A shares are traded publicly and class B are held privately among Ochs descendants.  Carlos Slim only owns 17 percent of class A public shares and can’t be said to “control” the Times. 
 

Right wing tweeters are reliably full of shit and right wing posters can be reliably expected to believe them .

[Biff Tannen 46192]

FYI, Fox News is now BELOW Breitbart on the bias chart.

https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_StaticMBC_Image&utm_medium=OnWebSite_Link

[Biff Tannen 46192]

Submitted without comment:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/

 

Spoiler

I have a secret. I kept it hidden for longer than I care to admit. It felt unprofessional, vaguely shameful. It wasn’t who I wanted to be.

 

But here it is: I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years.

It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” Every morning, I read The Washington Post, the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. In my office at Time magazine, I had a TV playing CNN on mute. I listened to NPR in the shower. On weekends, I devoured the New Yorker. It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it! Usually, it made me feel more curious, not less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But half a dozen years ago, something changed. The news started to get under my skin. After my morning reading, I felt so drained that I couldn’t write — or do anything creative. I’d listen to “Morning Edition” and feel lethargic, unmotivated, and the day had barely begun.

 

What was my problem? I used to cover terrorist attacks, hurricanes, plane crashes, all manner of human suffering. But now? I was too permeable. It was like I’d developed a gluten allergy. And here I was — a wheat farmer!

So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news. By then, I figured, I could gut it out until dinner (and wine).

 

But the news crept into every crevice of life. I couldn’t avoid exposure — in my email inbox, on social media, in text messages from friends. I tried to toughen up. I gave myself stern lectures: “This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem is, I wasn’t taking action. The dismay was paralyzing. It’s not like I was reading about yet another school shooting and then firing off an email to my member of Congress. No, I’d read too many stories about the dysfunction in Congress to think that would matter. All individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.

I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong. Wasn’t it important to be informed? Quitting the news felt like quitting the world.

 

Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in “The Social Dilemma,” when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?

Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men. It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.

 

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So maybe there is something wrong with the news. But what? A lot of people say the problem is bias. Journalists say the problem is the business model: Negativity is clicky. But I’ve started to think that both theories are missing the most important piece of the puzzle: the human factor.

Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans. As Krista Tippett, the journalist and host of the radio show and podcast “On Being,” puts it, “I don’t actually think we are equipped, physiologically or mentally, to be delivered catastrophic and confusing news and pictures, 24/7. We are analog creatures in a digital world.”

 

I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out what news designed for 21st-century humans might look like — interviewing physicians who specialize in communicating bad news to patients, behavioral scientists who understand what humans need to live full, informed lives and psychologists who have been treating patients for “headline stress disorder.” (Yes, this is a thing.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I distilled everything they told me, I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it.

First, we need hope to get up in the morning. Researchers have found that hope is associated with lower levels of depression, chronic pain, sleeplessness and cancer, among many other things. Hopelessness, by contrast, is linked to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and … death.

 

“Hope is like water,” says David Bornstein, co-founder of the nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network. “You need to have something to believe in. If you’re in the restaurant business, you’re gonna give people water. Because you understand human biology. It’s weird that journalism has such a hard time understanding this. People need to have a sense of possibility.”

Last December, the New York Times published an ambitious multimedia project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” chronicling how climate change has altered life in 193 countries. It led with a graphic of the Earth in flames, spinning in space, and the words, “Cities swallowed by dust. Human history drowned by the sea.” I kid you not. This was a well-intentioned effort, but it was simply not designed for humans. I don’t know what species it would work for, but it’s not one I’m familiar with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By contrast, consider another recent New York Times article, this one about a different problem — homelessness. That piece detailed how the city of Houston moved 25,000 people experiencing homelessness into their own homes. It was not credulous; it featured extensive reporting and plenty of caveats. But reading it, you feel a space open up in your chest — like unlocking a trap door out of a dungeon.

 

Second, humans need a sense of agency. “Agency” is not something most reporters think about, probably because, in their jobs, they have it. But feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something — even something small — is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. That self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy.

Nowhere is the crying need for agency and hope more apparent than in climate coverage. Of all the climate stories aired on nightly news and Sunday morning shows in 2021, only a third discussed possible solutions, according to a study by Media Matters for America. What would agency look like? It might look like The Post’s April article detailing six ways to halt climate change. Or it might look like the viral videos on TikTok, where non-journalists such as @thegarbagequeen have started to fill the void, celebrating incremental environmental victories and debunking “climate doomers.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, we need dignity. This is also not something most reporters think about, in my experience. Which is odd, because it is integral to understanding why people do what they do.

 

What does dignity look like? Shamil Idriss, the head of Search for Common Ground, which works to prevent violence in 31 countries, explains it simply: “To me, it’s the feeling I have that I matter, that my life has some worth.” In journalism, treating people like they matter means, most importantly, listening to them — maybe the way WBEZ’s “Curious City” listens to its audience to decide what to investigate, for example. It can mean inviting viewers to talk to each other, with civility, like Atlanta NBC station 11Alive did, enlisting local parents skeptical of critical race theory to interview school officials and historians on camera. And it means writing about people as more than the sum of their circumstances, as journalist Katherine Boo did so famously in the pages of this newspaper.

There is a way to communicate news — including very bad news — that leaves us better off as a result. A way to spark anger and action. Empathy alongside dignity. Hope alongside fear. There is another way, and it doesn’t lead to bankruptcy or puffery. But right now, these examples I’ve listed remain far too rare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to generalize about the news media. The category includes hard-working beat reporters, dedicated fact-checkers and producers, as well as shameless propagandists, dupes and conflict entrepreneurs. It’s almost too big a category to talk about with any clarity. But it’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now.

Changing that may require journalists to accept that some of their own core beliefs are outdated. “The journalist’s theory of change is that the best way to avert catastrophe is to keep people focused on the potential for catastrophe 24/7,” Bornstein says. That used to work — kind of. Reporters could rigorously chronicle threats and corruption, and then sit back and let the accountability rain down. But that dynamic only works if the public is more unified and journalists are widely trusted. These days, it doesn’t matter how many of former president Donald Trump’s lies reliable fact-checkers count; it won’t change anyone’s mind. A lot of journalists, perhaps frustrated by their impotence, have responded by getting louder and more shrill. Which only causes more people to (yes, you guessed it) avoid the news.

A better theory of change, Bornstein suggests, might be something like: “The world will get better when people understand problems, threats and challenges, and what their best options are to make progress.” He and his colleagues have now trained over 25,000 journalists to do high-quality solutions stories all over the world.

Finally, and this is closely related: The people producing the news themselves are struggling, and while they aren’t likely to admit it, it is warping the coverage. News junkies tend to drink deeply from the darkness, mistakenly thinking it will make them sharper. All that angst has nowhere to go — and it leaks into our stories.

I know what you’re thinking: What about the money? The business model for news requires clicks. And the easiest way to get attention is through a fire hose of outrage, fear and doom.

But how do we know people won’t click — or subscribe — if the news were designed for humans? How do we know, if hardly anyone has tried?

There aren’t many major news outlets systematically creating news for humans yet, but one that I admire (and now subscribe to) is the Christian Science Monitor. Each issue features reporting from around the globe, vivid photos, brutal realities — right alongside hope, agency and dignity. Stories include a brief explainer called “Why we wrote this,” treating readers like respected partners.

It’s a kind of low-ego, high-curiosity journalism that I’ve started trying to emulate in my own work. I don’t always succeed. It can feel uncomfortable to, for example, let listeners dictate the subject of the podcast I host. But last month, I spent four hours at an antiabortion rally with a camera crew and did something I’d never done before: I just tried to understand, deeply, what people told me. I didn’t try to extract the most chilling quote or the vivid, ironic anecdote. I just asked deeper questions, without judgment. It felt less transactional, more human. I also felt more informed.

So, as we brace ourselves for the coming midterms, variants and cataclysms, here’s my plea to all my fellow journalists: Please send a search party for the 42 percent of Americans who are avoiding the news. We can’t all be wrong. Or oversensitive or weak. And we might just be you.

 

[SydneyCarton 49520]

11 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Submitted without comment:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/

 

  Hide contents

I have a secret. I kept it hidden for longer than I care to admit. It felt unprofessional, vaguely shameful. It wasn’t who I wanted to be.

 

But here it is: I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years.

It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” Every morning, I read The Washington Post, the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. In my office at Time magazine, I had a TV playing CNN on mute. I listened to NPR in the shower. On weekends, I devoured the New Yorker. It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it! Usually, it made me feel more curious, not less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But half a dozen years ago, something changed. The news started to get under my skin. After my morning reading, I felt so drained that I couldn’t write — or do anything creative. I’d listen to “Morning Edition” and feel lethargic, unmotivated, and the day had barely begun.

 

What was my problem? I used to cover terrorist attacks, hurricanes, plane crashes, all manner of human suffering. But now? I was too permeable. It was like I’d developed a gluten allergy. And here I was — a wheat farmer!

So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news. By then, I figured, I could gut it out until dinner (and wine).

 

But the news crept into every crevice of life. I couldn’t avoid exposure — in my email inbox, on social media, in text messages from friends. I tried to toughen up. I gave myself stern lectures: “This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem is, I wasn’t taking action. The dismay was paralyzing. It’s not like I was reading about yet another school shooting and then firing off an email to my member of Congress. No, I’d read too many stories about the dysfunction in Congress to think that would matter. All individual action felt pointless once I was done reading the news. Mostly, I was just marinating in despair.

I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong. Wasn’t it important to be informed? Quitting the news felt like quitting the world.

 

Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in “The Social Dilemma,” when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?

Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men. It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.

 

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So maybe there is something wrong with the news. But what? A lot of people say the problem is bias. Journalists say the problem is the business model: Negativity is clicky. But I’ve started to think that both theories are missing the most important piece of the puzzle: the human factor.

Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans. As Krista Tippett, the journalist and host of the radio show and podcast “On Being,” puts it, “I don’t actually think we are equipped, physiologically or mentally, to be delivered catastrophic and confusing news and pictures, 24/7. We are analog creatures in a digital world.”

 

I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out what news designed for 21st-century humans might look like — interviewing physicians who specialize in communicating bad news to patients, behavioral scientists who understand what humans need to live full, informed lives and psychologists who have been treating patients for “headline stress disorder.” (Yes, this is a thing.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I distilled everything they told me, I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it.

First, we need hope to get up in the morning. Researchers have found that hope is associated with lower levels of depression, chronic pain, sleeplessness and cancer, among many other things. Hopelessness, by contrast, is linked to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and … death.

 

“Hope is like water,” says David Bornstein, co-founder of the nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network. “You need to have something to believe in. If you’re in the restaurant business, you’re gonna give people water. Because you understand human biology. It’s weird that journalism has such a hard time understanding this. People need to have a sense of possibility.”

Last December, the New York Times published an ambitious multimedia project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” chronicling how climate change has altered life in 193 countries. It led with a graphic of the Earth in flames, spinning in space, and the words, “Cities swallowed by dust. Human history drowned by the sea.” I kid you not. This was a well-intentioned effort, but it was simply not designed for humans. I don’t know what species it would work for, but it’s not one I’m familiar with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By contrast, consider another recent New York Times article, this one about a different problem — homelessness. That piece detailed how the city of Houston moved 25,000 people experiencing homelessness into their own homes. It was not credulous; it featured extensive reporting and plenty of caveats. But reading it, you feel a space open up in your chest — like unlocking a trap door out of a dungeon.

 

Second, humans need a sense of agency. “Agency” is not something most reporters think about, probably because, in their jobs, they have it. But feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something — even something small — is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. That self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy.

Nowhere is the crying need for agency and hope more apparent than in climate coverage. Of all the climate stories aired on nightly news and Sunday morning shows in 2021, only a third discussed possible solutions, according to a study by Media Matters for America. What would agency look like? It might look like The Post’s April article detailing six ways to halt climate change. Or it might look like the viral videos on TikTok, where non-journalists such as @thegarbagequeen have started to fill the void, celebrating incremental environmental victories and debunking “climate doomers.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, we need dignity. This is also not something most reporters think about, in my experience. Which is odd, because it is integral to understanding why people do what they do.

 

What does dignity look like? Shamil Idriss, the head of Search for Common Ground, which works to prevent violence in 31 countries, explains it simply: “To me, it’s the feeling I have that I matter, that my life has some worth.” In journalism, treating people like they matter means, most importantly, listening to them — maybe the way WBEZ’s “Curious City” listens to its audience to decide what to investigate, for example. It can mean inviting viewers to talk to each other, with civility, like Atlanta NBC station 11Alive did, enlisting local parents skeptical of critical race theory to interview school officials and historians on camera. And it means writing about people as more than the sum of their circumstances, as journalist Katherine Boo did so famously in the pages of this newspaper.

There is a way to communicate news — including very bad news — that leaves us better off as a result. A way to spark anger and action. Empathy alongside dignity. Hope alongside fear. There is another way, and it doesn’t lead to bankruptcy or puffery. But right now, these examples I’ve listed remain far too rare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to generalize about the news media. The category includes hard-working beat reporters, dedicated fact-checkers and producers, as well as shameless propagandists, dupes and conflict entrepreneurs. It’s almost too big a category to talk about with any clarity. But it’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now.

Changing that may require journalists to accept that some of their own core beliefs are outdated. “The journalist’s theory of change is that the best way to avert catastrophe is to keep people focused on the potential for catastrophe 24/7,” Bornstein says. That used to work — kind of. Reporters could rigorously chronicle threats and corruption, and then sit back and let the accountability rain down. But that dynamic only works if the public is more unified and journalists are widely trusted. These days, it doesn’t matter how many of former president Donald Trump’s lies reliable fact-checkers count; it won’t change anyone’s mind. A lot of journalists, perhaps frustrated by their impotence, have responded by getting louder and more shrill. Which only causes more people to (yes, you guessed it) avoid the news.

A better theory of change, Bornstein suggests, might be something like: “The world will get better when people understand problems, threats and challenges, and what their best options are to make progress.” He and his colleagues have now trained over 25,000 journalists to do high-quality solutions stories all over the world.

Finally, and this is closely related: The people producing the news themselves are struggling, and while they aren’t likely to admit it, it is warping the coverage. News junkies tend to drink deeply from the darkness, mistakenly thinking it will make them sharper. All that angst has nowhere to go — and it leaks into our stories.

I know what you’re thinking: What about the money? The business model for news requires clicks. And the easiest way to get attention is through a fire hose of outrage, fear and doom.

But how do we know people won’t click — or subscribe — if the news were designed for humans? How do we know, if hardly anyone has tried?

There aren’t many major news outlets systematically creating news for humans yet, but one that I admire (and now subscribe to) is the Christian Science Monitor. Each issue features reporting from around the globe, vivid photos, brutal realities — right alongside hope, agency and dignity. Stories include a brief explainer called “Why we wrote this,” treating readers like respected partners.

It’s a kind of low-ego, high-curiosity journalism that I’ve started trying to emulate in my own work. I don’t always succeed. It can feel uncomfortable to, for example, let listeners dictate the subject of the podcast I host. But last month, I spent four hours at an antiabortion rally with a camera crew and did something I’d never done before: I just tried to understand, deeply, what people told me. I didn’t try to extract the most chilling quote or the vivid, ironic anecdote. I just asked deeper questions, without judgment. It felt less transactional, more human. I also felt more informed.

So, as we brace ourselves for the coming midterms, variants and cataclysms, here’s my plea to all my fellow journalists: Please send a search party for the 42 percent of Americans who are avoiding the news. We can’t all be wrong. Or oversensitive or weak. And we might just be you.

 

Thanks for this, it was a great read. 

[Biff Tannen 46192]

1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

Thanks for this, it was a great read. 

I actually think it misses a huge point, but wanted to get other's opinions on it.

[SydneyCarton 49520]

2 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I actually think it misses a huge point, but wanted to get other's opinions on it.

I mean, of course it misses several big points. But the reality is that people are ignoring the news, staying uninformed, and the problem is worsening. Looking at things from a fresh perspective on how to deliver the news is part of the solution. It's not the ONLY part of the solution, but it's a big one. You can't really make corporate interests that are peddling clicks for money change their tunes. But understanding how to deliver the news in ways that won't make people bury their heads and quit is something. 

[Mullet Free 39]

Didn’t know where else to put this. Funny how Jon Stewart can get officials so riled up. BOTH SIDES can appreciate this one. 
 

 

[956 Worldwide 35600]

I am sympathetic to what she’s trying to say even as she is not holding up well under the lights.  In an organization the size and complexity of the U.S. military (consider at a minimum, how much of its inventory is designed to blow up or be blown up), an inability to do a great audit is not necessarily evidence of corruption, abuse, fraud, or even waste. And equally true, much of the stuff that might be corrupt won’t be captured by an audit. This is a person unprepared to do media, especially against a giant like Stewart. 
 

What I find funny is framing this as somehow related to the political spectrum as if military waste or procurement corruption has ever been anything but a constant regardless of who is elected.

More interesting is to think about how often “MSM” has a uncovered non-partisan corruption within bureaucracies and institutions regardless of who is in office, and compare it with the “bombshells” right wing media produce, which are invariably political. 

[pacman 7510]

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13634]

The political movement whose God conspired with The National Enquirer to kill the Stormy Daniels story is actively engaged with CaNceL CulTuRe?

[TheStoicPaisano 9953]

 

[elfenix 34760]

LiBeRaL mEdIa