One of my friends on MSNBC talks about tonight’s debate. Joel is one of the smartest people I know, and he was also the first to insist Trump was a real threat.
Category: Media
Now, think about this
The media fabricated how many fake Clinton scandals in the past year? And if it wasn’t for the Washington Post, would anyone even know about the Trump foundation? So given the opportunity to ask Hillary Clinton, guess what this reporter asked?
That’s right. She validated a right-wing rumor by treating it as if it should be taken seriously:
A Tampa, Fla., ABC News reporter asked Hillary Clinton whether she would be willing to take neurological exams in the wake of recent health concerns.
Clinton laughed off the question by ABC Action News reporter Sarina Fazan, who said some doctors had called on her to take “neuro-cognitive” tests.
“I am very sorry I got pneumonia,” Clinton said. “I am very glad that antibiotics took care of it and that’s behind us now. I have met the standard that everybody running for president has met in terms of releasing information about my health.”
The Democratic presidential nominee added that she saw no need for such tests.
“The information is very clear, and the information, as I said, meets the standards that every other person running for president has ever had to meet.”
Will the media correct Trump’s debate lies?
I’m guessing the odds are slim to none:
A top Clinton adviser is now pushing the media to hold Trump accountable for his lies at the debate: https://t.co/2k94A9q9a1
— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) September 22, 2016
They didn’t know bin Laden was dead
Since the 1950s, right wing groups and foundations laid the groundwork to defund public schools and push everyone into for-profit private schools or charters, because poorly educated students become easily-manipulated voters. Look at the results:
Veteran journalist Alan Miller tells the story of the high school students who, years after the fact, didn’t know that Osama bin Laden had been killed. These were seniors, no less — in a journalism class at a well-regarded New York City charter school.
“Their reaction was ‘Wait, what? He’s dead?’ ” said Miller, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
His story, though, has a happy ending. After immersion in the News Literacy Project, a Bethesda-based nonprofit organization that Miller founded to give teenagers the tools to know what to believe in the digital age, the students became news junkies. They were seriously annoyed if their classroom copies of the New York Times didn’t show up on time.
Every bit as dead as bin Laden, it sometimes seems, is many American citizens’ basic knowledge of news. Young people, especially, get their news in isolated bursts on their phones (the experts call this disaggregation). That makes it harder than ever to tell established truth from opinion, propaganda or pure fiction.
I always thought this is where people like me would find a niche. People so immersed in news, readers would pay for someone to filter out the rest. That happened for a while, but not enough to make a living.
You could see that last week when, during NBC’s commander-in-chief forum, moderator Matt Lauer didn’t even raise a skeptical eyebrow as Donald Trump claimed — again, and falsely — to have opposed the war in Iraq from the start. Although, as a broadcast pro, Lauer should have been far better prepared to parry this and other politically expedient flights of fancy, his ailment — apparent ignorance — is a common one. (Consider Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson’s query in an MSNBC interview: “What is Aleppo?”)
“There’s a cacophony of untrue information out there,” and it’s drowning out what’s dependable and accurate, said Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, whose new book, “The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know,” provides some help in question-and-answer form. (For example: “How dependent is journalism on leaks?” and “How are private interests trying to manage news now?”)
Seth Myers is no Jimmy Fallon
All those things reporters don’t ask because Hillary is shrill
Trump is deep enough with mob guys that none of the media orgs want to take them on:
How did an alleged and notorious Russian mobster connected to an illegal international gambling ring run out of Trump Tower end up as a special guest at a Donald Trump event in Moscow in 2013? This may be one of the odder questions of the already-odd 2016 presidential campaign.
On April 16, 2013, federal agents burst into a swanky apartment at Trump Tower in New York City as part of a larger raid that rounded up 29 suspected members of two global gambling rings with operations allegedly overseen by a supposed Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The Russian was not nabbed by US law enforcement. Since being indicted in the United States a decade earlier for allegedly rigging an ice skating competition at the 2002 Olympics, he had been living in Russia, beyond the reach of Western authorities. And this new gambling indictment did not appear to inconvenience Tokhtakhounov. Seven months after the bust, he was a VIP attendee at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe 2013 contest held in Moscow. In fact, Tokhtakhounov hit the red carpet within minutes of Trump. An alleged crime lord who was a fugitive from American justice was apparently a celebrity guest at Trump’s event.
When will the media start a countdown clock for a Trump press conference?
As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported this Sunday, it’s been two months since Donald Trump gave a press conference. So when is the media going to start one of those “countdown clocks” for Trump the way they did when they were badgering Clinton not long ago and reading talking points that came straight from the RNC? Here’s… Continue reading “When will the media start a countdown clock for a Trump press conference?”
Your librul media, folks
In which a music critic does more to investigate the Trump Foundation while waiting for his kid to be done with a playdate than the New York Times:
https://twitter.com/hriefs/status/776584915114725377
Credit where credit is due
Whereas Washington Post opinionista Chris Cilizza is, well, not intellectually up to the task, the Post’s investigative reporters have been doing strong work on Trump’s foundation and his businesses:
Sullivan said he had given the owner $325,000 for a share of the property, and he told Stowe he planned to buy it outright, in partnership with two others. One was Kenneth Shapiro, a man later publicly identified by authorities as a financier and agent in Atlantic City for a Philadelphia mobster named Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.
Trump also happened to be interested in the property for the location for his first casino. In April, Trump’s lawyer contacted Shapiro and soon entered into lease negotiations with him, Sullivan and their partner, even though they did not yet have title to the property.
On June 26, the three partners closed on the property sale, paying about $2.7 million. Just days later, Trump signed off on a 98-year lease with the partners that could cost him tens of millions. The transaction was one of several Trump had to make to cobble together parcels of land for the casino.
The deal put Trump in contact with a mob associate, who would later play a central role in a mob scheme to secretly influence Atlantic City’s mayor. And it also put him close to an FBI informant whose shady past would imperil Trump’s casino plans.
One of the biggest scandals, as spelled out in “The Making of Donald Trump,” David Cay Johnston’s latest book, is how the NJ Casino Commission, which was supposed to protect the casinos from organized crime, repeatedly ignored Trump’s known mob connections in favor of firing low-level employees for minor infractions.
Poll: American trust in mass media at an all-time low
(Image via Twitter) According to a new Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has sunk to a new low of 32 percent, down eight percentage points from last year. The measure has been on a steady decline for more than a decade and “consistently below a… Continue reading “Poll: American trust in mass media at an all-time low”