Far more consequential, in terms of failed objectivity, is the journalistic tone of moral contempt for politicians, officeholders, and the democratic process in general. News is a rhetorical style, a form of persuasion: and the rhetoric of political coverage pours out toxic levels of cynicism and distrust. People in politics are assumed to be liars and cheats. As long ago as 1992, when Thomas Patterson asked “several of the nation’s top journalists” why they chose to portray the presidential candidates as liars, the usual response was “Because they are liars.” Candidates are depicted as making promises they never intend to keep. They say things that are incredibly ignorant or insensitive – often self-detonating by means of the dreaded “gaffe.” Elections are decided by money rather than a gullible electorate, in any case. Elected officials, the wise consumer of news must conclude, are pawns to powerful but unaccountable interests.
Read the whole post. I do not entirely agree. I think that the press in dealing with President Obama was quite far from “toxic levels of cynicism and distrust.” However, the Obama case may be an anomaly.
Most of his essay is on the “fake news” issue. He adopts the view that social media works to correct and filter out fake news. I am not so sure. I think that whether or not fake news has an effect gets caught up in the larger issue of political cognition, and I am not confident that anyone understands that very well.
The WaPo’s Chris Cillizza writes,
In the general election, 77 percent of the coverage of Trump was negative as compared with 64 percent of the Clinton coverage. (For the entire campaign — including the primary — Clinton had the more negative coverage — 62 percent to 56 percent.)
He cites a Harvard study. But how this coverage affected political cognition is not clear. For example, suppose that the public’s (unstated) baseline assumption is that the Republican candidate will receive 60 percent negative coverage and the Democratic candidate will receive 40 percent negative coverage. Relative to those hypothetical expectations, the coverage of Mrs. Clinton may have actually come across as the worst of the two candidates.
Note that the Harvard study looks at positive and negative content of stories, not at whether the stories were biased. As Cillizza points out, if Mr. Trump was genuinely bad, then negative coverage by the Harvard study definition does not indicate bias. Instead, it might indicate the antagonism toward politicians that Martin Gurri discusses.
Most accurate debunkings never get anywhere near the attention as the original story, don’t tend to ‘go viral’ because sober argumentation based on evidence doesn’t provoke the same emotions, and don’t do much to dislodge many uncontroversially inaccurate ideas from public consciousness.
Social media isn’t much good for correcting the record, and instead spreads senatorial nonsense like wildfire.
Hands up, don’t shoot!
You have to incorporate the things that made zero sense from the jump.
They would have had us believe that Zimmerman called 911 ro announce he was going to stalk and murder Martin, that he had him mounted and then shot him ONCE.
Also, clear examples of unjustified force get no traction whatsoever like the Charleston cop who shot him in the back and planted the tazer while a black cop watched (institutional corruption=much worse).
Well, Zimmerman did call 911 and felt it necessary to continue pursuing Martin. I think Zimmerman is a terrible guy playing some want-to-be Batman looking for African-American criminals. However, the given evidence there is no way they could find him guilty.
The most concerning part of the whole case is if Martin had killed Zimmerman and took the 5th then the jury should have found him not guilty as well. Realize Martin was pursued by an unknown large man with a gun and he could have claimed he was protecting himself against an assailant.
I’m talking about the blatantly false narrative the media fabricated.
Zimmerman was simply a desperate if somewhat misguided person compelled into vigilantism by incompetent law enforcement.
Btw, my neighborhood is being picked clean by young black criminals and to all the macho guys who say they are going to sit on their porches with guns I try to warn them that this is exactly what happened to Zimmerman. I think they don’t understand because the media lied about what the story was about.
Zimmerman called the cops and was begging for help.
The cops have no right to tell him to cower and retreat.
1) Of course, most people get media from TV so I do believe Trump was covered better than HRC in 2016. Cable news often cut to his live rallies and there was not a HRC speeech where a pundit complained about her voice. Also, if you read the NYT, you would swear every Trump voter came from a poor WWC in ex-factory town in Applachia and every HRC voter was a rich white liberal in MA. (Some truth but HRC still did better than Trump with lower incomes if you include minority voters. It is Trump did better than most past Republicans with lower income voters.)
2) Maybe Obama was a bit of an anomaly politician. His lying and exaggeration was slightly less than average politician.
3) Finally, it is time to accept there is no longer a Mainstream Media. You can get you news from a lot of different sources including a lot foreign sources. If a big story hits in the Middle East, I can read about from Al Jazzera to avoid all our various media slant. Note 90% of our media is very pro war in the area.
4) I find it ironic that for a free market libertarian it upsets you that WaPo is anti-Trump when their subscriptions and revenue are going up! Like Fox New/Obama years, their business model benefits by the ‘Joker’ to Trump’s ‘Batman’ (Or is it the other way around.) Watch Fox News or CNBC are in orgy of the Golden Age Of Trump.
4) Libertarians make an exception, if you want to call it that, for fraud. That is why my greatest wrath is laid on lying politicians, lying media, and lying academia.
Where is the fraud in these discussions of WaPo coverage? Yes it is slanted but not fraud. Saying Ben Carson is poor pick for HUD is a slant but not fraud. What does Ben Carson know about government housing and why not make Surgeon General? And I do agree HUD right now accomplishes very little and might as well be closed down. Otherwise, their columnist are completely worthless so I am not buying a subscription. (Cohen and Samuelson haven’t anything worthwhile since 1990.)
Can we claim Fox News was fraud when they spent 8 years claiming inflation was going through the roof? Or what about cable news panic of Ebola in 2014 with five cases in the US?
People who are selling truth but delivering lies, that is fraud.
Give a specific example and we can discuss it.
I think Ben Carson probably is an odd pick. But I haven’t been told about other historical picks or alternative picks.
I’m talking more about stories like claiming Trump was torturing Romney when that makes no sense except as extrapolation from the past lies about Trump. Lies from the media create their own demand.
Carson checks 2 boxes for Trump, he was loyal and also an impressive person. That is why he got a job when other hacks didn’t. Why HUD? Who cares?
He also apparently accepted a reasonable job rather than demanding secretary of state.
See how news off the top of my head is better (to me) than hours of reading media narratives?
Just to belabor the point, Giuliani is like “I’ll only accept 2nd in command.” You can’t have Giuliani as Secretary of State.
And a Frickin neurosurgeon is like “HUD? Kewl.” How refreshing for Trump.
But the more you read the official news, the less you will understand these very simple common sense comcepts.
And Romney is like “I’ll be secretary of stat, bUT I,won’t apologize to the guy I believed the narrative about and reinforced the narrative.”
What a nutcase. And yet the narrative is that Trump is the nutcase sadist torturing Romney.
I think that the press in dealing with President Obama was quite far from “toxic levels of cynicism and distrust.” However, the Obama case may be an anomaly.
That’s putting it mildly, I think. In the non-anomalous case, there’s still the “he might a SOB, but he’s our SOB” thinking (conscious or not) among members of the media, not to mention there’s just the natural tendency to brush away ugly stuff done by your “side.” So when the Bush Administration puts a few AUSA’s out to pasture, they’re “politicizing the Justice Department,” but when the IRS delays and denies non-profit status for Republican-oriented PAC’s, everybody simply shrugs and quickly goes back to complaining about Paul Ryan’s latest Swiftian proposal to starve the poor or whatever.
Note: not that people on the right don’t do this, too. Compare the intelligence failures that led to the Iraq War vs. the intelligence failures that led to the Benghazi assault. The former is a whoopsie, the latter is the biggest scandal since…I dunno, the Dreyfuss Affair?
Perhaps consider this take on the role of the parties, news (or ‘fake news’), and social media – by Ben Thompson, March 2016:
https://stratechery.com/2016/the-voters-decide/
‘The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side.’
There is far too much emphasis on drama over policy. Don’t cover what BLM wants, cover their dramatic tactical errors like holding up traffic. Don’t figure out that Romney had the job if he simply gave Trump a nice apology, a reasonable request, make the story about a Game Of Thrones version of Trump wasting time to “torture” Romney because that fits the existing dramatic narrative. I suspect the largely results from the 2 party system. Because libs own the media, they set the pattern of the prevailing narratives. I’m extremely doubtful that the negativity ratio wasn’t even more skewed than those given.
With regard to the Cillizza quote, I’m betting that they get the high percentages of supposedly “negative” coverage of Hillary by counting as “negative” all the MSM coverage that was defending her – strenuously – from the negative stories she generated herself. So, for example, a report purporting to debunk the private server scandal (or the grifting through the Clinton Foundation, or Benghazi, or laughing about the defense of a child rapist, etc.) would be counted as “negative.” Otherwise, I don’t see how they could get such a high “negative” percentage for her coverage.
Trump’s relatively low “negative” percentage over the course of the whole campaign must be the result of the fawning coverage he was given during the primaries. And then, once the general campaign was on, the MSM suddenly discovered that he was unfit. What a surprise!
What fawning coverage? Can you give me an example? IIRC, a continuing theme was “this guy is bound to implode”.
How about all the Trump rallies the cable networks broadcast during the primaries? They gave him free publicity without critical commentary. The networks outsmarted themselves – they wanted him nominated because they thought (as everybody did) he would be the weakest general election candidate. Only after he was nominated did they hit him on things like the Billy Bush tape (which NBC could have released earlier).
You mean the ones with violent protests that were blamed on Trump and his supporters? Or the one that was cancelled in Chicago because of threats? Or the time protests blocked the main road in Arizona?
I like the thank you tour better. He’s on right now.
I don’t have cable. I can’t remember any positive coverage of Trump. Beyond negative, most of it was fraudulent.
When you say a Mexican judge probably can’t be 100.00000000000% objective after everyone has been constantly told you are an anti-Mexican racist (sic) you are telling a fact, not reinforcing the racism narrative.
The Mexican judge controversy came after he had the nomination wrapped up.
I myself don’t watch cable news, and I certainly agree that the MSM is anti-Trump, but I think its generally agreed that they were relatively easy on him during the primary. The idea that the MSM was hard on Hillary is ridiculous.
I think what you mean is they covered him.
But almost all of what they covered was things he said that they thought were outrageous.
I can’t call that positive.
So, any theories on this newest Red scare? It’s all BS, right?