How conservative media plays the refs
How conservative media plays the refs
A scrubbed byline and allegations of throttled traffic are the most recent examples.
Over the course of my career, there was only one time I took my name off a story. It was a pure marketing play for the publication I was working for, some kind of bullshit award that management wanted to push out with the imprimatur of editorial. So instead of my byline, we put “Staff.”
This happens from time to time at many outlets, where reporters are uncomfortable having their byline attached to something they don’t believe in. It’s rare, but it happens. But I’ve never heard of a publication putting someone else’s name on a story they had nothing to do with. Until, apparently, yesterday when the New York Post slapped a byline on its cover story from last week about Hunter Biden.
For the last four years, the president and his allies have cried foul over and over again, tossing epithets like “fake news” and “lying media” towards reporting that shows the reality as it is and not as he wants. They’ve also complained, often and loudly, that the social media platforms are in the tank for Democrats and do everything they can to prevent Republican stories from spreading.
(Image via Doug Mills for the New York Times)
Over the weekend, two stories emerged that, in a rational society, would put these two claims to bed. Reader, I hate to break it to you, but we do not have a rational society.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that
Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
A Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid pushes a conspiracy story (NY Post is one of the most-read newspapers in the nation) that is so outlandish the reporter wants his name scrubbed. Which, of course, raises the question, why did Golding write the story if “he had concerns over the article’s credibility.” And emphasizing even more poor journalistic judgement, the Post added a byline from someone who “had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article,” per the Times.
The second nugget from the New York Times piece about the NYPost’s story:
The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.
Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”
Rudy gave the “story” to the Post because he knew that other publications wouldn’t do the hard work of, you know, journalism. In other words, the very people who point their finger at media companies like CNN and NBC News and the New York Times saying they make up stories are the ones who are literally propagating “fake news.”
All this while Trump plays the refs. For instance, here he his trashing NBC’s Kristen Welker at a rally over the weekend. Welker will be moderating the next presidential debate. Which is interesting since in January he congratulated Welker on her new show.
But it’s a coordinated attack. Here’s Newt Gingrich.
The conspiracies have moved from the margins to the mainstream, and you should check out this package from CNN about this weekend’s Save the Children/QAnon protest in Los Angeles. Many people have lost the capacity to think rationally.
For decades, we’ve referred to the television as “the idiot box” or “the boob tube,” phrases to indicate television rots our brains. But the last decade looks to flip that script; TV’s not rotting our brains, but social platforms are. And it’s not just our noggins that are getting corroded, but society.
The Wall Street Journal has a great piece today that shows how social platforms are doing an incredible job at dividing us, a key component of rotting our brains.
Americans are more polarized than ever—at least by some measures.
A growing body of research suggests that social media is accelerating the trend, and many political scientists worry it’s tearing our country apart. It isn’t clear how to solve the problem. And new research suggests that one often-proposed solution—exposing users on the platforms to more content from the other side—might actually be making things worse, because of how social media amplifies extreme opinions.
The effects of polarization-as-determined-by-the-platforms are disastrous, and are slowly coming to light. But perhaps the most damning aspect of it all is how Facebook knowingly “throttled” traffic to progressive sites while boosting traffic of far-right sites.
(Please read through Clara Jefferey’s thread; she’s the editor of Mother Jones and lays out how Facebook lied to her and her team. Repeatedly.)
You should also look at this Twitter account by the New York Times’s Kevin Roose, who looks at CrowdTangle data to show the top-performing link posts in Facebook each day. You’ll notice that conservative media, the ones who consistently moan about how Facebook is stifling their free speech by not pushing their content, routinely dominate the top 10.
Politicians have cried about the media being for one candidate and not another forever. In 2008, for example, John McCain and Republicans kept talking about how “the media” that shapeless chimera is biased for Barack Obama. Today, NYMag writes that the media, contrary to Trump’s claims, isn’t against him but actually for him.
When conservatives complain about Trump’s coverage, they are decrying not the standards being set but the outcomes. If their president is unable to clear even the lower bar set before him, it must be lowered further still, so that he can hop over it at least occasionally.
His inability to grasp basic facts about public policy, avoid obvious lies, or conform to minimal standards of ethical behavior guarantees he will fail even the forgiving standards the media has been forced to adopt. The conservative view is that this failure reflects badly not on Trump but on the media.
This is not wrong. If the media, this argument goes, can’t hold Trump accountable for how he’s eroded norms (this is a MUST READ; a list of how Trump has eroded and destroyed both norms and taboos), how can the fourth estate then hold others accountable. Say all the Republican Senators who in 2016 said vociferously that a Supreme Court appointment should not be jammed through until after the Clinton/Trump election.
This is why the hurls of “fake news” combined with a distribution network from the platforms that push one ideology is the biggest media story of our time. Journalism is supposed to tell stories that find the closest thing to truth, but how can political journalists do this when there are so many unreliable narrators?
In Brian Stelter’s daily media newsletter, media reporter Oliver Darcy sums it up:
If Trump loses re-election next month, what happens to the conspiratorial version of right-wing media that he has molded over the past four years? Will some breathe a sigh of relief that they no longer have to defend the indefensible and aim to return to a less-extreme model that is somewhat tethered to reality? Or is the cat totally out of the bag? I tend to be pessimistic and think, for the most part, there is no turning back, but it will be fascinating to see what happens...
I wouldn’t call it fascinating. Instead, one of the president’s common words: Sad!
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Green Day, “American Idiot” (Live)
Some interesting links:
For continued coverage of local news deserts:
As local news dies, a pay-for-play network rises in its place (NYT)
Partisan sites posing as local news expands ahead of election (WSJ)
For publisher pivots:
The Dodo, Group Nine’s Animal Brand, Is Getting Into Pet Insurance (WSJ)
For platforms destroying civility:
Twitter and Facebook should mute Donald Trump (Washington Post)
For media companies reckoning with their past:
Disney adds warnings for racist stereotypes to some older films (NYT)
For the future of media in a country with a billion people:
TV versus digital: News in a streaming world (BloombergQuint)
For political advertising down the stretch:
How Biden destroyed Trump’s TV ad ‘Death Star’ (Politico)
For tech bits:
Paleontologists see stars as software bleeps scientific terms (NYT)
Computer scientists break the ‘traveling salesperson’ record (Wired)
For marketers:
Life insurance marketing heats up as pandemic fuels interest (Ad Age)
For shameless self-promotion:
I was on a podcast about newsletters (Media Voices)