Why the Mainstream Media Really Sucks

[Ari]

I hate any news report that treats twitter users like some sort of real demographic and not *the* place to go to astroturf with fake accounts. ‘And twitter got upset’ well yes, that’s what people on twitter do, it’s like saying someone wrote in to the guest Op Ed to complain about something so it must really be a big issue, I mean no one complains about petty things in an Op Ed!!

[erimir]

We live in Both Sides hell pic.twitter.com/wZP5hFDlkH

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) September 23, 2019

And here's an honest-to-goodness verbatim "both sides", from davidm's workplace. But I'm sure he'll say you can't criticize the headline if the article is good, or you can point to good reporting elsewhere by the NYT.

*screams into the void*

good morning pic.twitter.com/4G7jBn9G4d

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) September 25, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

It's that Hoarse guy, he made a post, the post asked for publications, a thread ensued of various news outlets:

The New York Times continues to not deserve its success.

Meanwhile, small pubs doing great journalistic work are starving for support.

Let’s name them and send them new subscribers.

Who ya got? What other preferably smaller pubs do you love?

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) September 27, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Fox News is reporting on Benghazi right now and I am not even kidding.

— �� Kilohana (@KilohanaKona) September 28, 2019

[BrotherMan]

Just when you don't thing things be like they be, but they do.

[The Man]

BREAKING: Tonight, “60 Minutes" has obtained a letter that indicates the government whistleblower who set off the impeachment inquiry of President Trump is under federal protection, because he or she fears for their safety, reports @ScottPelley https://t.co/RbqsYIAFXR

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) 29 September 2019

The Fuck the Fucking New York Times is almost certainly at least partially to blame for this:

The New York Times should be doing some soul-searching about how they missed a once-in-a-generation scoop because they were so obsessed with both-sides-ism.

Instead, they’re trying to out the whistle-blower. https://t.co/ABBEWJzvhS

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) 26 September 2019

True to form for a publication that literally published fawning profiles of Hitler in the ’20s.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Just imagine the other shit they've been sitting on and witholding from the papers so the books can get a bounce at launch

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 2, 2019

journalism, c 2019 pic.twitter.com/iVrkzXvWaX

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 2, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Talk

[lisarea]

Self-indulgent free association:

Flobots - Handlebars (Official Video) - YouTube

[erimir]

This is framed so as to sound sinister and conspiratorial, the better to win traffic from Trumpists looking to prove the president is the target of the deep state, but it’s actually a story about how everyone involve followed proper procedure. https://t.co/PwtRZSrapk

— Adam Serwer�� (@AdamSerwer) October 2, 2019

Read the whole thread, etc.

As Serwer notes, the article itself does say that this was following procedure. Some people might say that this makes framing that helps dishonest GOP talking points in the headline and on their Twitter account irrelevant, and that complaining about that makes you the same as Trump, you want propaganda, etc.

I don't want a propaganda outlet though, I just think that headlines and Twitter aren't irrelevant, and that many people don't read the whole story - indeed, people don't generally have time to read every single news story, so even generally informed readers will only read the headline of some stories. But many people read much less than that. Which means the headline and what NYT says in associated tweets, etc. is just as important as the article.

[Crumb]

Which means the headline and what NYT says in associated tweets, etc. is just as important as the article.

More.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

In the 34-year history of USA TODAY, the Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race…Until now.

This year, one of the candidates—Republican nominee Donald Trump is by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency https://t.co/SP3sWVzKfJ

— Trinity Resists (@TrinityResists) October 8, 2019

show spoiler

Note: the above article is from 2016.

So far, just 3 news outlets have come forward to declare Trump unfit for office and demand he step down from office.

1️⃣ https://t.co/1gYiNIIwGP

2️⃣ https://t.co/WFCF4mg6fP

3️⃣ https://t.co/0wVoKiXUYf

— Trinity Resists (@TrinityResists) October 8, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Interesting take here:

"The NYT is constructing the narrative of Trump's reality. In many ways, they're no different from FOX or Breitbart or any outlet that you instantly know is a Trump partisan. They are high-brow Breitbart." -- @gaslitnation https://t.co/3Z0Bfxd8dV

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) October 9, 2019

[erimir]

Forty-three new women came forward to describe assault and harassment by Trump. Newspapers ignored them. | Media Matters for America

Several online publications have covered this news, including Salon, The Daily Beast, Vox, Jezebel, and Vice. But according to a search of Nexis for the names of Johnson, either of the book’s authors, the book’s title, or the phrase “43 allegations,” not a single U.S. newspaper has covered this story yet. The sole mention of this story from major newspapers The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times comes from an October 9 “Happy Hour Roundup” from the Post.

Look, some stories are just objectively news, and others are not. Only a propaganda outlet would cover the president being accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, and only a propaganda outlet would not dedicate their full front page to a likely nothingburger development in an email server compliance scandal, which is just objectively bigger news than this.

Why was one big news and the other one isn't? Isn't it obvious? One got on the front page and the other one was barely mentioned! Also, you're just trying to distract and deflect blame from the fact that Hillary Clinton was a shitty candidate! And also, um... Look! Over there!

(PS I won't be reading any of your replies, you despicable liar.)

[The Man]

I have a compelling hypothesis for why the coverage of Clinton was so uniformly awful: The culture of news organisations is completely shot through with despicable misogynists. The initial wave of #MeToo stories didn’t begin to hint at how thorough the rot was. Ronan Farrow’s new book may be starting to uncover a hint of it, however.

All the trigger warnings for sexual violence/abuse/harassment/etc.:

Vanity Fair has a piece detailing how NBC’s management killed the Weinstein story for years. Summarising the Vanity Fair piece, Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money writes, “NBC’s leadership knifed a lot of talented people (mostly women) in the back by firing and/or exposing them to abuse AND killed a blockbuster scoop to back up a powerful celebrity working for the network and another powerful celebrity who was good buddies with many of the network’s prominent employees. And while it’s neither here nor there morally, from the standpoint of institutional sexism it’s worth noting that the abusive host who NBC’s brass convinced themselves was an Indispensable Man and went to the mat to protect was in fact an eminently dispensable lightweight hack.”

Rebecca Traister, in her piece on Farrow’s book, writes:

Noah Oppenheim, a Today show and NBC News executive to whom Farrow reported, shruggingly tells Farrow that during the 2016 election, women in NBC’s news team had reported sexual harassment by a Trump campaign official on the trail but weren’t eager to come forward publicly. Oppenheim, Farrow discovers, has been shrugging off abuses of gender and power for a long time; as an undergraduate, he wrote anti-feminist screeds for the Harvard Crimson. “To the angry feminists,” read one, “there is nothing wrong with single-sex institutions,” arguing for men’s clubs and noting that “women who feel threatened by the clubs’ environments should seek tamer pastures. However, apparently women enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon” — a prescient description of what Brooke Nevils says happened to her in Lauer’s hotel room. “They feel desired, not demeaned,” Oppenheim wrote as a student.

It was not long after, we learn, that Oppenheim was “discovered” while a college senior by Phil Griffin. Griffin is currently the president of MSNBC, and Farrow describes him as a crude boss who waves around a photo of a woman’s exposed vagina in a meeting, commenting, “Would you look at that? Not bad, not bad”; Farrow also reports that Griffin, while a senior producer at Nightly News in the 1990s, once pressured female producers to accompany him to a peep show in Times Square. In 2000, Griffin had been caught in a blizzard on his way back to New York, along with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the longtime host of Hardball, who had been reprimanded for verbally harassing an assistant producer in 1999 and was caught on tape joking in 2016 about slipping Hillary Clinton a “Bill Cosby pill” before interviewing her. Escaping the blizzard, Griffin and an unnamed colleague had “stopped off at Harvard Square and started talking to some undergraduate girls at a bar,” Farrow quotes Oppenheim as having described. “They followed them to a late-night party at the newspaper building and one picked up a copy of the paper” and read one of Oppenheim’s Crimson articles.

That’s how young Noah Oppenheim found his way to NBC News, where he’s been president since 2017 and where he continues to work alongside Griffin and Matthews, and also Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, who Farrow reports has a history of hounding female employees into affairs with him. One former correspondent who worked for Lack at CBS describes being relentlessly pursued by him when he was her married executive producer in the 1980s: “If your boss does that, what are you gonna say? … If you say, ‘I don’t want to celebrate with you,’ you’re asking for trouble.’”

The problem is not only worse than any of us knew; it’s probably worse than most of us were capable of imagining. I am absolutely certain this problem is not unique to NBC.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

You make it sound like fragile dudes whose identities and power rely on the meting out of abuse upon submissive victims might find an uprising among the victims to be threatening.

As an aside, as I read "The problem is not only worse than any of us knew; it’s probably worse than most of us were capable of imagining." I could hear in my head a cacophony of women I know shouting some form of sarcastic version of "You mean DUDES just noticed?" I mean, that's where the angry feminist stereotype comes from, women, victims, who noticed and said something.

Still progress, though.

[The Man]

I mean, I'm sure women were less clueless on this front overall, but judging from the existence of people such as the execrable Bari Weiss and Christina Hoff Sommers, quite a few either are as clueless as men or have an attitude of "I suffered, so everyone else should as well."

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by The Man

"I suffered, so everyone else should as well."

Ahhh, the timeless elegance of the hazing ritual.

[lisarea]

Yeah, I honestly have that, "Oh, so NOW you're noticing?" reaction when I see men who are surprised at how pervasive this stuff is, just because I've had enough experience with men--and too often, women--assuming that I was making up or exaggerating my experiences with the way men treat women and girls. (Girls because hoo-boy, people still think I'm making it up when I talk about how common pedophilia is. I grew up in the 70s when it was fashionable and fairly mainstream and grown men would regularly try to pick up even very little girls, and I am telling you there are more pedophiles in heaven and earth than you imagine in your philosophy.)

There are stupid and evil women out there, and a whole lot of fucked up ones, too, who just sort of became OK with things being the way they are. It'd be really weird if there weren't.

I've complained about this a lot before, but the fear based indoctrination starts when girls are really little, and it perpetuates a serious culture of victim blaming women for gendered violence. So there are a lot of women who have grown up so sheltered and fearful that they've basically Talibanned themselves from regular life. At some level, I think they resent other women who've decided to live their lives anyway, so of course they blame them for being so audacious as to believe that they're allowed to participate in normal human activities without a chaperon. And, of course, they like to tell themselves that it wouldn't happen to them because they made the right choices.

And some actually get to the point that they internalize the ideas and get off on the idea that they and other women are trash. It's maddening, but moreso, it's absolutely fucking tragic.

I will say that I do every now and again have a little bit of an 'oh come on' reaction when relatively minor cases of harassment and sexism get lots and lots of play. Not that I think they're OK or anything, but that I think having a whole bunch of reporting about relatively minor or one-off incidents can create the impression that they're isolated and out of the norm.

The main reason, though, is that I kind of assume that all men are like that to some degree, and have at least dabbled in treating women like that. Somewhere around 97-99%, anyway, so it almost seems arbitrary to focus on individual incidents and offenders like that when it's clearly a societal problem.

In conclusion: The mainstream media sucks and Hugh Hefner used to publish a literal child porn magazine called Sugar and Spice.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by lisarea

So there are a lot of women who have grown up so sheltered and fearful that they've basically Talibanned themselves from regular life. At some level, I think they resent other women who've decided to live their lives anyway, so of course they blame them for being so audacious as to believe that they're allowed to participate in normal human activities without a chaperon. And, of course, they like to tell themselves that it wouldn't happen to them because they made the right choices.

You also see this phenomenon with closeted homophobes, and I'm sure in other areas of life too*.

If you designed your life around the closet, people showing that you didn't need to suggest you were stupid and/or a coward and changing your mind might make you feel like you wasted your life. So some people react to that with a lot of anger.

*Fundamentalist religious people, for example

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I'll use this thrad given the current flow of topic.

I see what’s happening here. https://t.co/KuTxFSkE1s pic.twitter.com/4nt19uxd6e

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) October 12, 2019

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

This ought to be a fairly somber reckoning moment for the American news industry re 2016.

I don't think it will, but it ought to be. (Because here comes the exact same play from the exact same bad-faith actors for 2020). https://t.co/aouZOKDvXx

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) October 19, 2019

Something 38 retroactive slaps in wrists emails something

[BrotherMan]

I stared at your post for a few minutes last night.

I literally could not even.

But, thanksfully, I saw this somewhere and it gave me a chuckle.

They should build the wall with Hillary's emails because people cant seem to get over them.

[The Man]

For months, @nytimes put stories of Hillary Clinton’s email on its front pages. The final investigative report clearing all of wrongdoing? That is on page 16 today. https://t.co/zyFCtneQJ8

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) October 19, 2019

There is no defensible journalistic rationale for how differently these stories were played. pic.twitter.com/hodQ0H4AwU

— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) October 19, 2019

Literally the @nytimes and @maggieNYT specifically should do a written assessment of how and why they reported what they did. And what they’ve learned from the mistakes that they specifically made. https://t.co/TNKkTEHtCh

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) October 19, 2019

And the American people. And the world. But we know they won’t because they aren’t interested in actually learning from their mistakes.

— Andrea Nuñez (@andreanewnyez) October 19, 2019

Fuck the fucking New York Times.

[Crumb]

I love (read hate) how they pretend in the headline that they are not the ones deciding that this story is"quiet". Like they are just shrugging their shoulders and saying "I dunno, it was already not being reported when we got here."