The mainstream media..

[Admin]

Biased, yes, but perhaps not in the way many on the right claim..

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has called out the “dark money machine” that is attacking him through the media over his investigation into whether ExxonMobil committed fraud by deceiving its shareholders and the public about climate change.

Schneiderman launched his probe into ExxonMobil in November 2015 after investigations by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times found that Exxon officials knew about the science of climate change decades ago but continued to fund climate denial groups for many years. California Attorney General Kamala Harrisn and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey have since followed suit and also launched investigations of Exxon.

During an October 19 forum on public integrity, Schneiderman explained that fossil fuel front groups are “directing a disinformation campaign aimed at bolstering Exxon’s case,” Politico reported. Schneiderman specifically called out Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), all of which are conservative organizations that have been heavily funded by fossil fuel industry interests, including Exxon.

He also identified how these and other front groups pursue a media strategy, stating that they seemed to have “pulled a lever on the dark money machine,” and “60 or 70 op-ed columns or editorials” appeared attacking Schneiderman’s investigation. He added: “The challenge is, in most media markets in the country, all people have heard is the other side of the argument because [the conservative groups’] infrastructure is so remarkable.”

Indeed, several of the nation's most widely read newspapers have provided a platform for fossil fuel front groups to deceptively defend Exxon. As of September 1, The Wall Street Journal had published 21 opinion pieces in less than a year criticizing government entities for investigating Exxon, including an op-ed written by CEI lawyers and a column that falsely claimed AFP has “never received a dime from Exxon.” The Washington Post also published an op-ed by officials from CEI, syndicated columns by George Will and Robert Samuelson, and a letter by the Heritage Foundation’s Hans A. von Spakovsky, all of which falsely claimed that the attorneys generals’ investigations violate Exxon’s First Amendment rights.

And contributors at USA Today and Bloomberg View also peddled the false claim that the attorneys general are threatening Exxon’s right to free speech. (As Schneiderman noted, “The First Amendment is not designed to protect three-card monte dealers. … You can’t commit fraud and argue, ‘Oh, I’m exercising my First Amendment rights.'”)

Other conservative media outlets have also provided space for CEI and the Heritage Foundation to defend Exxon and other oil companies that may have purposely misled the public on climate change to protect their profits, including the National Review, Townhall, and The Washington Times (on many occasions).

NY Attorney General: “Dark Money Machine” Is Using Media To Defend Exxon’s Climate Deceit

The infrastructure (and money) behind this is pretty awesome, and this is just one issue.

[Admin]

No bias here either, at least not the one dreamed up by youknowwho..

The press had a hand in that. An analysis by researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of eight mainstream outlets, including CBS, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, found they were more critical of Mrs Clinton than any other Republican or Democratic candidate. In the first six months of last year, she was the subject of three negative statements for every positive one; Mr Trump received two accolades for every carp. “Whereas media coverage helped build up Trump,” the researchers concluded, “It helped tear down Clinton.” An obvious explanation is that Mrs Clinton’s strengths, including the most detailed platform of any candidate, do not make interesting news. Compared with the surprising enthusiasm for Mr Sanders, they were therefore hardly covered. (Maybe that was a good thing; the Harvard researchers found Mrs Clinton was the only candidate whose platform received net negative coverage.)

Hating Hillary | The Economist

[Admin]

The problem isn't the mainstream media, but the conservative media. This really is the heart of the matter:

"Here's the thing: Trump didn't come out of nowhere now," Obama said Thursday. "For years, Republican politicians and far-right media outlets have been pumping out all kinds of toxic, crazy stuff." Obama went through a litany of conspiracy theories that have been pervasive throughout his presidency. The movement doubting his birthplace. Fears he wanted to "steal everybody's guns." The idea he wanted to "declare martial law."

"I say all this," the president said, "because Donald Trump didn't start all this. Like he usually does, he just slapped his name on it, took credit for it, and promoted the heck out of it." The president had a point. Trump's rise was no accident; rather, it was a natural outgrowth of a growing and influential faction of conservative media that for years fed the Republican base a steady diet of fringe theories masqueraded as news. And Republicans allowed it to happen, as Obama noted. 

By the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, a Republican hoping to secure office would all but need to take the hardline conservative position on every issue to avoid being characterized as a squishy moderate. If a Republican were to hold conservative positions on 90% of the issues, for instance, the conservative press would roast the candidate for the 10% on which there was disagreement. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Perhaps more important, however, the conservative media industrial complex successfully managed over the years to lock the Republican Party away from access to its own base.

Those who consumed conservative media were taught not to trust politicians or, even worse, the mainstream media. As a result, party leaders were beholden to a handful of individuals who controlled the conservative media and, thus, held the keys to their voters. Elected officials and candidates seeking office dared not criticize the conservative media’s most powerful members, for fear of the wrath that would ensue if they did. The power the conservative press held allowed its members to decide who was accepted by the base and who wasn’t. True conservatives could be painted as unprincipled moderates, and, as in the case of Trump, unprincipled moderates could be painted as exactly what the base wanted.

The GOP "has appeased it, they've sucked up to it, they've been afraid of going up against it," said Charlie Sykes, an influential conservative radio host in Wisconsin. "I think that you have seen that played out this year. Has there been any willingness on the part of any mainstream conservative to call out this alt-right media? I'm not seeing it."

In this case, however, Ziegler said those "who were wrong" this year had "an enormous power to control the narrative." "Drudge, Breitbart, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, [Laura] Ingraham — those people are completely invested in another false narrative to cover up the first false narrative," he said, adding, "and if there's one thing I have ever learned in life, it is far easier to dupe people than to convince them that they have been duped."

Trump's effect on the conservative media - Business Insider

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The Wall Street Journal botched its latest attempt to scandalize the investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails by tying political donations made by Clinton ally and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee to the wife of an FBI official. The FBI said it was not a conflict of interest because the FBI official wasn’t part of the investigation until after his wife’s run for office. Journalists took to Twitter to mock the Journal’s report, calling it “embarrassing.”

WSJ Botches Its Latest Attempt At Scandalized Clinton Coverage

[Admin]

If these mainstream media are so biased, why doesn't any spend any time on some of Trump's recent scandals?

Hosts of the Sunday morning political shows neglected to press surrogates for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on new investigative reports detailing how Trump humiliated and sexually assaulted women, lied about his charitable givings, and may have offered NJ Gov. Chris Christie the vice presidential running mate position before rescinding it. The hosts instead allowed FBI Director James Comey’s letter to congressional leaders regarding the bureau’s investigation of Clinton’s email server to dominate the shows.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway appeared on the October 30 editions of Fox News’ MediaBuzz, ABC’s This Week, and CNN’s State of the Union. Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday. During their appearances, the Trump surrogates were given platforms to capitalize on Comey’s letter indicating that the bureau is reviewing newly discovered emails that may or may not be relevant to their investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server. Conway and Pence both rehashed the false claim from Republican lawmakers that the FBI was “reopening” the investigation into Clinton’s email server.

During the appearances, the Sunday show hosts largely let Comey’s letter drive the conversation, ignoring several new pieces of investigative reporting that detail Trump’s treatment of women and his lies about charitable giving. These investigative reports include:

• An October 28 Huffington Post report which included video of Trump in 2011 “sexually humiliating” a Miss Universe pageant winner on stage in front of thousands of onlookers.
  

• A report from The Telegraph on October 27 which detailed accusations from former Miss Finland, Ninni Laaksonen, that Trump sexually assaulted her, making her the 12th woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault.
  

• An October 30 article from The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold in which he explained Trump’s pattern of having “sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.”
  
• An October 30 New York Post report that alleged “Donald Trump initially offered the vice-presidential running-mate slot to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie but then withdrew it,” before offering the position to Pence.
  

Interviewers Prioritize FBI Letter, Ignore New Investigative Reports About Trump

And there is more, the story above missed the most damaging ones:

• A very detailed report from Slate about a Trump server only connected to Alfa bank in Moscow, taken off the air when the NYT got wind of it (some extracts here)
  
• A very detailed report from Newsweek about Trump's routine business practices, obstructing justice, destroying evidence (yes, including emails), stonewalling and defying court orders, etc. etc.
  

So the week is dominated by emails which even FBI director Comey argues he doesn't even know whether they contain anything, but we're all focused on this, with stories about a coming Clinton impeachment and stuff..

Yea right, the 'mainstream' media really is biased.. To the right.

[Admin]

The heart of the problem is the conservative media..

The problem, as establishment-oriented and even some staunchly conservative Republicans see it, goes beyond Trump. Right-wing media outlets have grown increasingly willing to whip the GOP base into a frenzy with fact-free nonsense — and even mainstream Republican politicians have often been unable or unwilling to resist their demands.

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, dubs this “the conservative entertainment complex.” It “has become the tail that wags the dog that Washington leaders, policymakers, and conservative leaders are terrified of,” he says. The complex’s leading members include many Fox News commentators (especially Sean Hannity), talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, and leading online outlets like the Drudge Report and Breitbart. And it soon may include Donald Trump himself, if reports that he’s looking to participate in a post-election media venture of some kind pan out.

For years, commentators and media outlets like these have loomed large over the Republican Party’s messaging and policy priorities. “I’ve seen with my own eyes conservative leaders alter their message and public priorities in response to Fox’s demands,” David French writes at National Review. Talk radio hosts and outlets like Breitbart would frequently give Republican leaders heartburn by denouncing them as not conservative enough, or as unwilling to truly fight against Obama. But when Trump rose, most of these personalities either enabled him or actively promoted him, despite his lack of conventional conservative credentials. Some, like Hannity, have become particularly fawning backers. As in the Republican Party writ large, some of these commentators will likely turn against Trump if he does lose big to Clinton. 

There’s a fundamental discrepancy in incentives between Republican leaders, who want to win the presidency and need to win over swing voters to do so, and the right-wing media, which wants to stoke outrage and appeal primarily to the faithful. “We’ve got this online media where the profits are driven by controversy and clicks,” says Sarah Rumpf, a former Breitbart contributing writer who’s joined Evan McMullin’s presidential campaign this year out of disgust for Trump. “It’s just an activism problem in general, where it’s easier to fundraise and easier to get members when you can declare an emergency, when you can declare a crisis, when you can identity an enemy.”

So there’s a growing sense among anti-Trump Republicans that, in some way, the power of these media outlets must be challenged — that their incentives have developed in a way that’s fundamentally incompatible with the Republican Party’s electoral success in presidential years. “I think there will be some effort with certain elements of the conservative media, with the talk radio folks, that there will be some effort to at least try to come to terms with that, and to try to some extent reduce that influence,” says GOP consultant Patrick Ruffini.

Still, the problem here is that these commentators and media outlets get their influence because they can get ratings and clicks — and behind those ratings and clicks are actual people attracted to that content. Breitbart has set traffic records this year as it’s championed Trump when other conservative websites wouldn’t. Hannity recently bragged that his show “pays the bills” for Fox.

In many cases, these hosts are deliberately delivering what their viewers want, as Robert Draper recently concluded in a New York Times magazine feature. And when some big-name conservative commentators have ended up criticizing Trump, they’ve been subjected to intense backlash from his fans, as Fox’s Megyn Kelly and Redstate’s Erick Erickson were.

“There’s clearly a market for Trumpism,” says Schmidt. “So anywhere there’s opportunity to communicate to a sizable market, there’s gonna be people doing it.” Indeed, even if the biggest names abandon Trump, he could still have conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in his corner, plus the newly-minted pundits have sprung up supporting Trump this year and the legions of websites that post false pro-Trump content optimized to go viral on Facebook.

Breitbart in particular seems set on establishing itself as the home for Trumpism after the election, whether Bannon and Trump end up going into business together or not. “I think what you’re gonna see,” Schmidt predicted to me, “is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.”

Bannon himself was nearly as blunt to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green and Sasha Issenberg, saying the Trump campaign had built “the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”

We’ll see about the “victory” part in a week, but Bannon is suggesting that his post-election ambitions will be very big indeed — and that he doesn’t want to stop with merely getting more clicks and making more money. He wants to transform the GOP.

The Republican civil war starts the day after the election - Vox

And think about that "He wants to transform the GOP"

As if it's not already right-wing enough..

[Admin]

Thorough article sets out why the email stuff isn't really a scandal, but more importantly, it's staggering that the media dedicated more airtime to coverage of it than all policy issues combined!

In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined. This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

And, indeed, it turns out Colin Powell also used a private email address for routine work. Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright didn’t use email, and back before Albright only weird nerds even knew what email was. So at the time Clinton took office, only one previous secretary of state had ever faced the question of what email account to use, and he reached the exact same conclusion Clinton did — just use your personal email address.

The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign - Vox

[Admin]

The article makes a valid point and it is concerning:

Things are very different on the modern internet. Most people today don’t get their news by going to the home page of CNN or the New York Times. They open a social media app — most often Facebook — and read news stories that pop up in their news feed. The result has been a disaster for the public’s understanding of current affairs. Reporters have come under increasing pressure to write “clickbait” articles that pander to readers’ worst impulses. Too-good-to-check stories gain more traction online than stories that are balanced and thoroughly reported. That has worsened the nation’s political polarization and lowered the quality of democratic discourse.

Facebook is harming our democracy, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to do something about it - Vox

Facebook is especially problematic here, and they are in denial about the problem, as the article argues, convincingly.

[Admin]

Remember the outrage on the right about stories that Clinton could have known that a question about Flint (polluted water) in advance of a presidential debate? 

But you haven't heard this..

In another instance, she writes that the Republican presidential candidate called Fox executives after learning that Kelly would begin the debate by asking a question about his treatment of women. Although Kelly's book does not say where that information came from, it suggests that ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes — who briefly joined the Trump campaign as an advisor — may have provided Trump with the question ahead of the debate.  In response, Trump called Kelly “overrated” and a “bimbo.” The continued attacks set off Trump's legion of supporters, some of whom joined in ridiculing Kelly. She reportedly received death threats and hired an armed body guard when she traveled with her family to Disney World.

Megyn Kelly accuses Donald Trump of threats, harassment in new book, 'Settle for More' - Business Insider

[Admin]

Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance?

Remember, over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues — all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

The Populism Perplex - The New York Times