The Media Industry

mchammer said:
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Was coming to post the same article. It is so rare to find a liberal journalist with integrity. He makes a very compelling case of bias at NPR (representative of most media outlets).

Of course, NPR predictable responds with "No! He's wrong" but fails to address the substance of his point.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
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RE: NPR. I used to listen pretty frequently even though I didn't agree with a lot they said. I do like to at least hear the opposing views and I called in several times to make opposing points. I finally stopped and put them squarely in the political propaganda bucket (not just bias...but lies) during the Kavanaugh case. They grasped at every straw, and ran hit pieces for like 30% of the day....BEFORE he was seated. After he was seated, there wasn't boo. They didn't care one iota about the assault charge or Ford. All they wanted was to stop Kavanaugh and as soon as that wasn't possible, they moved on to the next hatchet job.
 
It just shows that real journalism is almost dead. It is now political activism with a veneer of journalism, and it is becoming an extremely thin veneer.
 
The press has always aligned behind one political faction or another. They have always been super biased. After WW2 those in power duped people into thinking that journalism and news media was an objective exercise. The facade took about 75 years to crack.
 
mchammer said:
If GOP wins in 2024, they need to cut all public funding of NPR.
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I didn't used to be a big fan of defunding it, because it wasn't that much money involved and viewed it as not worth the political capital. At this point, they're nothing but partisan hacks. The $$ should be cut off.
 
Mr. Deez said:
I didn't used to be a big fan of defunding it, because it wasn't that much money involved and viewed it as not worth the political capital. At this point, they're nothing but partisan hacks. The $$ should be cut off.
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I would be interested in hearing the defense to maintain funding.
 
mchammer said:
I would be interested in hearing the defense to maintain funding.
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There wasn't a defense for it at any time. For me it was just a matter of cost/benefit for the trouble. In the mid-'90s, NPR was far less openly partisan, so waging a major political battle to defund something that was pretty small made little sense with much bigger budget items to deal with - wasn't worth the trouble. Now that it's basically a propaganda outlet for the far left, it's worth the trouble to gut it.
 
Horn6721 said:
National media Reporting at its' finest. From a Foxnews story
"We believe this is a criminal act," County Sheriff Otto Hanak told reporters.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

It is unclear if the crash was intentional."
Large truck crashes into Texas DPS office, injuries reported
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Clenard Parker, 42, was at the motor vehicle office on Thursday, where he was denied a chance to renew his commercial driver's license, authorities say

He most likely will never get that license now. Not a smart man.
 
Mr. Deez said:
There wasn't a defense for it at any time. For me it was just a matter of cost/benefit for the trouble. In the mid-'90s, NPR was far less openly partisan, so waging a major political battle to defund something that was pretty small made little sense with much bigger budget items to deal with - wasn't worth the trouble. Now that it's basically a propaganda outlet for the far left, it's worth the trouble to gut it.
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It's like NPR's board thought, "let's find the person who most exemplifies every negative stereotype people have of NPR and its listeners and hire that person to be our CEO."
 
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