I'm still unclear on what conservatives would have had the media do for the last two years. Ignore the story? Make up insults about Mueller and his "democrats" as untrustworthy (as some conservative outlets did)? Okay, now definitely go after opinion-meisters, talking heads, and columnists who predicted dire things. But on the news side, the media mostly reported what was available: the indictments, the known interviews, the known collection of evidence, people plea bargaining, and then dozens of people lying their asses off in demonstrable ways, on the daily. (Still hard to explain why a group of people behaved as if they were guilty, but whatever.) Some liberals got way too excited about all this, as did a bunch of left-leaning talking heads -- most definitely -- but it is a very strange thing that we were witnessing. No? A special counsel to investigate foreign interference (and he charged a bunch of Russians in this, don't forget) and possible collusion, and then... a president firing an AG early on in the whole thing, etc. I mean... it's news-worthy. I remember, even in a different era, that the media couldn't get enough of the Star investigation and stained dresses, etc. Back when a president lying seemed more dire, I guess. And then the media does what modern media always does. If there is an earthquake, go to the worst-looking block you can find and run that footage 24/7, even if everything and everyone else is unharmed or unaffected. They are just desperate for clicks and views. And here they obsessed over the smokiest smoke of all available evidence and tried to get the most emotional involvement possible from the audience. This is what they always do, and not because they are "liberal." It's more because this is their desperate business model. Hype hype hype. Loud noises. Repeat.
something to consider: https://www.city-journal.org/final-mueller-report-trump an excerpt: Surely, then, it’s time for a reckoning—starting with, say, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In “Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate,” in July 2016, he suggested that “there’s something very strange and disturbing going on here, and it should not be ignored.” On Twitter, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum chimed in that Trump was “the real-life Manchurian candidate.” The Krugman-Applebaum references were to Richard Condon’s classic Cold War novel, published in 1959, and the subsequent film, The Manchurian Candidate, about an American prisoner of war brainwashed into becoming a Communist sleeper agent. That, America was told, was Donald Trump. With Trump’s election, this argument only intensified. The Intercept found that in a six-week period starting in late February of 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow homed in on “The Russia Connection,” as she called it, with Russia-related fare accounting for more than half of her broadcasts. “If the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian intelligence services and an American campaign, I mean that is so profoundly big,” Maddow declared. Time rendered the thought balloon as a cover illustration, showing the red walls of the Kremlin and the candy-striped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral sprouting from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. The apex of such coverage was attained by Jonathan Chait, in his July 2018 New York opus, on the eve of a meeting between “Prump” and “Tutin” in Helsinki. The headline: “Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart—Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.” The mind-boggling part was Chait’s hypothesis that Trump possibly became a Kremlin asset back in 1987, when the real-estate mogul had visited Moscow. These are just samples of the Trump-as-Putin’s-tool theory, now discredited by Mueller’s report. The idea was advanced not only by liberal media types but also by anti-Trump conservatives, and it became a talking point in Democratic Party and U.S. foreign-policy establishment circles. John Brennan, Barack Obama’s former CIA director, all but called Trump a traitor to America, for being in Putin’s pocket. Of course, not all Trump opponents swallowed this improbable if seductive line—but many did. Partisan politics are one factor at work in efforts to show Trump as being in cahoots with the Russians. But mere partisanship seems insufficient to explain an abiding belief in Trump as Moscow’s pawn. After all, contrary evidence, before the Mueller Report was submitted, was not hard to find. In April 2018, Trump met with German chancellor Angela Merkel in the White House, and gave her a difficult time, according to a story that later ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, about her backing of a pipeline to ship natural gas from Russia to Germany. “Angela,” Trump said, according to the Journal, “you’ve got to stop buying gas from Putin.” Do those sound like the words of a Kremlin agent? The root explanation for the belief in a compromised Trump lies elsewhere than partisan politics, and a good place to look is the classic essay by historian Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in the November 1964 issue of Harper’s. Hofstadter was speaking, in the first instance, of the “Radical Right” of his day and its cherished conviction that Communists had infiltrated the highest echelons of the U.S. government. But the main point of his essay was to identify a recurrent pattern in our political life, going back to the republic’s early days. “I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing,” he wrote in his opening paragraph. “I call it the paranoid style,” he explained, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” In using this expression, he took pains to say, he was not speaking in a clinical sense of “men with profoundly disturbed minds.” Rather, it was “the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s was one example; another was leaders of the Populist Party in the 1890s believing in “secret cabals” of “gold gamblers” to ruin America. “Trump as Kremlin man” now can be added to these dubious annals. Hofstadter, who died in 1970, surely would be surprised. Though he did not see the “paranoid style” as the sole province of the Right, he tended to view most exhibitors of this style as figures and movements closer to the margins of American politics than to its center. A New York Times columnist, say, was not the sort of person he had in mind. Yet his insight into the “modern right wing” as feeling “dispossessed,” as living in an America that “has been largely taken away from them and their kind,” and therefore liable to the paranoid style, also applies in the current instance. For at least some of his critics, Trump’s election was so perplexing and disorienting that it was as if they were living in a foreign country. How could this be happening in “their” America? They still feel this way. The paranoid style, which can include an inability to live with complexity and ambiguity and an intolerance for adverse outcomes, is characteristic for its resilience. Mueller, the decorated former Marine and former FBI director, is apt to be attacked, in some disbelieving quarters, as a sellout: What isn’t he telling us? Even the publication of his full report—as many Americans, rightly, are demanding—will not satisfy critics, who will insist that the absence of evidence of collusion is simply an element of the vast conspiracy to cover it up.
You say "conservative" as if everyone else on the planet thought it was perfectly reasonable for British and American mass media to chuck every basic rule of journalism in order to publish unverified stories fed to them by questionable sources with a political agenda because it made money.
I feel like the big outlets have doubled down after their election polling fiasco crowned Hillary months in advance, let alone the billions in free publicity handed to the Trump campaign on a silver platter, and have been desperately searching to put that orange genie back into the bottle. It wasn’t even that long ago when the media, just like the rest of the nation and government, jumped into a war we had no business getting into...with the only hope of getting out was to find proof. The big outlets brought in generals and “war experts” detailing rosy scenarios and cool yet utterly meaningless and irrelevant info as to costs, impacts, and lives for our servicemen and the theaters they engaged into. Only with our pants down and mid thrust was it revealed that our own military controlled those experts and the news they fed. It was pretty much blatant propaganda and psyops at a level that would make Putin do 50 reps at the gym to feel adequate. Not even a word of apology or reform by the “victims”. Out are the days of all expenses paid on-site reporting. In are shoestring budgets, pooled news gathering, and hastily put together deadlines with little or no fact checking. Trump is a boon to these people and their company stock. I'm not sure how they can sleep at night knowing that they're part of the apparatus propping up that fat bloated beast. Maybe that overimposed self-righteousness is a cheap body spray for their guilt? The third estate crying about Facebook getting took is more of the same. They probably know how far and deep they could be influenced, but all that’s left are shrugs and prayers some big tech giant/billionaire with unlimited money will take a chance on their broke ass.
Funny, wanting to read the report = attacking Mueller? All we have heard is trump-appointee william barr's short summary reading of the key trump "exoneration." Wanting to better understand what evidence they saw and didn't see, what evidence they weighed, what led to the finding that there was insufficient evidence to lead to a guilty of collusion, and even how they defined "collusion"? Also seeing if there were any other related crimes considered and what the next steps might be... all seem important things to learn from the "two years of intensive investigative work". The irony... who did constantly attack Mueller and the investigation? trump and his defenders.
Interesting data... and along with the weird Washington Times placement, the ones I was a bit surprised were Politico and even more so, The Hill (seen as the more right wing version of Politico). And NPR... seems lower than expected. It would be interesting to align this chart with the one that positions news sources as right, left, or centrist sources. Suspect the ones at the more extreme left and right are the lower ones in trust. Link to full article about the study: http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/he...or-news-organizations-hint-not-all-that-much/
Mueller needs a forum before he can speak. I trust Barr communicated the essential findings (with some spin maybe) because he'd be outed in the end if he left out important elements. But that sort of accountability is only possible if Mueller has a forum. One way to accomplish that is to publish the full report (which I don't support actually -- I think it should be shared with Congress). Another way is to have Mueller himself appear before Congress and answer questions. It's not really an issue of not trusting Mueller or Barr -- it's more a trust but verify. If Americans were shrewd about understanding which news was fake, the graph wouldn't top out under 60%, nor give over 20% deference to the bottom-dwellers. This graph tells me if I round up 10 random co-workers, 4 of them would tell me the WSJ article I showed them was BS, and 2 would tell me the Daily Caller article was spot on. I wouldn't walk out thinking to myself how smart my coworkers are.
Correct, that was the role of Meuller (and now the House, Senate, SDNY, and state investigations). The media's job is to report on the investigation. News consumers have pushed on the media to get the news out faster, and with "analysis" of what they are reporting on. That has been exasperated by the growth in all sources of news... including social media (blogs, newsletters, twitter, facebook, etc). People don't simply want the reporting, but the analysis, and even more so, they want the analysis that they want to read/hear. And, they want the analysis they can communicate to others, to convince others to think the same they they do. And they want predictability. When the rare time that source veers from that... the consumer of news gets upset. Complains. And its "both sides" of the political spectrum. Note how many times a Shepard Smith gets criticized by devout fox news viewers and gets told "they should get a job on CNN". Or when someone on CNN like Chris Cuomo gets criticized by saying "they should get a job on fox news". Many times... those same people complain about the media. What they should do is look in the mirror.
essay at The Week that argues the Mueller report should not be released. I agree that any remaining collusion conspiracy theorists who still believe the pee tape exists (and will be revealed in a Mueller report footnote) are likely morons. Excerpt: What about Democrats? It's hard even to know where to begin. For two years the Mueller investigation has been the blank canvas on which liberals have painted all their fantasies. Hillary Clinton didn't lose the election because she was an unlikeable candidate who all but stole her party's nomination from a would-be challenger who had more energy, to say nothing of policy prescriptions voters are actually interested in. It was stolen from her, and from all decent patriotic Americans, by evil James Bond-type Ruskie villains, who cut a deal with her opponent over a failed hotel bid. This sounded dumb back in 2016. Today it sounds both moronic and passé. If you think "The pee tape might still be out there, guys, we just have to read read Mueller's footnotes!" is going to win back Ohio in 2020, go ahead. But I suspect at least some of these people know better. The only people who really stand to gain anything from the release of the full report are journalists. Because we all know people who have lived and breathed the Russia investigation for as long as two of my children have been alive, we fondly imagine that there is some kind of unquenchable thirst out there for more. I doubt it. https://theweek.com/articles/831422/dont-release-mueller-report
nope, no bias there. "Dershowitz: ‘I Was Banned From CNN’ By Jeff Zucker" Excerpt: Dershowitz isn’t the only person complaining that the networks stopped calling when the commentary didn’t seem anti-Trump enough. Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show Monday night and said he and other commentators stopped being invited on MSNBC because the network was invested in presenting only one side of the issue. In fact, Greenwald argued it was intentional disinformation designed to boost the failing network’s ratings. . . . One of the other liberals dropped by MSNBC was Matt Taibbi. Yesterday I wrote about Taibbi’s very similar argument, i.e. that MSNBC intentionally lied to viewers for two years because it brought the network’s viewership up 65% and that was too significant to risk with a nuanced presentation of evidence. Despite the strong case being made in places like the Intercept and Rolling Stone, and now by Dershowitz as well, the story doesn’t seem to be getting much media traction. Fox is covering it but CNN and MSNBC are understandably not interested in showing it to their audiences, especially when their hosts are in the midst of inventing new theories to keep the narrative (and the ratings) going. So it seems the media reckoning that is badly needed at this point is not going to happen because these networks are going to continue to ignore the point of view that doesn’t help their bottom line. https://hotair.com/archives/2019/03/27/dershowitz-banned-cnn/
judge jeanine, fresh of her two week suspension, er, vacation/"family emergency" after spouting offensive comments about rep Omar and the Islam faith...
What she said is true: the hijab is anti-rape device given to women by allah. Also, allah’s messenger was a 7th-century illiterate pedophilic slave-owning warlord.
