A Message for the Media

A meme for our time. pic.twitter.com/Hq5K5fijfY

— Lauren Wolfe (@Wolfe321) July 20, 2018

A Recommendation

If you haven't already, add Digby's Hullabaloo to your daily reading list -- some of the best commentary going.

Just today, for example, in addition to Dennis Hartley's Earth Day piece noted in the previous post, Digby has posts on Rod Rosenstein and what he's facing at the hands of Trump and his minions, the pernicious influence of Facebook, Trump's reaction to real news, Mike Pompeo's military record (oops!), and much more.

An Upside to Trump?

It occurs to me, seeing reports on the frequency with which news anchors and talk show hosts are nailing Trump's surrogates on their lies, maybe we can look forward to TV "journalists" actually pushing back on some of the bullshit that politicians spout on their shows.

Maybe?

The Pussy Tape

This is what I get for not being online last evening. The stories are all over the place, along with the reactions. (For a good run-down, see Joe.My.God. this morning, and be sure to note who is not jumping ship.)

However, having watched the way the media have been managing the election -- and if you've been following that topic, you know they're doing more than Trump's good buddy Putin could ever hope to do -- this stuck out at me. Via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice:

… On Monday, according to an NBC source, one of the entertainment newsmagazine’s producers remembered Trump’s 2005 taping session with former “Access” co-host Billy Bush…

By mid-week, executive producer Rob Silverstein and his producing team had taken a look at its contents…

By Friday morning, Silverstein had decided to broadcast it, and a script had been written. The story was not slated to air on Friday night’s edition of the show, however.

That means the earliest it would have aired is Monday night — after Sunday’s presidential debate.

Another NBC source confirmed that “Access” was working on a story, and that NBC News knew about it, but said that as of Friday morning the story “wasn’t quite finalized.” …

NBC had the story and sat on it. David Farenthold of the Washington Post broke it, because he's actually committing journalism.

'Nuff said?

Today's Must-Read

Finally, someone says it -- Michelangelo Signorile, to be exact:

But Trump can count on much of the media falling for stock phrases, engaging in superficial coverage and often running with a false narrative that the Trump campaign hands to journalists on Trump and LGBT issues rather than doing the most basic reporting and presenting an accurate story. Throughout the campaign, Trump has often been treated to a different standard than other political candidates, and that’s been true on some issues more than others as the media prioritizing what to focus on.

Our so-called "independent press" has been suffering from a couple of maladies since news divisions stopped being a public service and started being required to deliver ratings: the stenographer syndrome (typified by the "he said, she said" school of reporting) largely stimulated by the perceived need to maintain access to the movers and shakers, and the search for "hot" headlines -- click bait. This impacts not only how stories are reported, but which stories are reported -- it's a fault even more evident at the editorial level.

Signorile notes something I've also noticed:

So, from the stage last night in Cleveland, Donald Trump said, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology, believe me,” in the context of his fear-mongering about foreign terrorism and how the country is supposedly in chaos and government is supposedly inadequately responding to the threat. And ABC News, in coverage similar to other news organizations, focused on the “historic” use of the term “LGBTQ” by a GOP presidential candidate without including the context of the “historic,” extreme anti-LGBT GOP platform, and Trump’s own extreme positions, including promising religious conservatives – on the Christian Broadcasting Network, on Fox News, in a town hall with Pat Robertson ― that he would overturn the historic Obergefell ruling, which he’d called “shocking.”

A number of bloggers -- and even more commenters -- have crowed about the fact that Trump actually referred to us in his speech, without noting the context: it was just a convenient way to pivot once again to his perennial anti-Muslim plug: it wasn't about us, it wasn't about LGBTQ rights, it was about Islamist terrorism.

Read Signorile's whole piece -- it's as good a take-down of the press and its failure as an independent watchdog as I've seen.

It's symptomatic of the state of journalism in this country that we have to go to Comedy Central to get any real reporting.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome

Now that Benghazi!!1! is dead and buried -- for the moment -- it's E-mails!!1!. I've been thinking a bit about the press reaction to this (among other things), and once again, Digby to the rescue. First, quoting Brien Beutler:

What made this episode unique is that the same media that expected Republicans to overreach played a critical role in increasing their expectations of a political windfall.

Republicans in Congress and their conservative media allies largely brought this upon themselves. They were the ones who made right-wing sop out of baseless speculation that Clinton might be indicted for violating a law nobody’s ever been convicted of violating.

But due to a strange brew of incentives that proved toxic—the competition for eyeballs, the lack of subject matter expertise, the industry standard of reportorial balance—the mainstream media did nothing to puncture this myth. To the contrary, it treated the threat of indictment as a permanent question mark hovering over Clinton’s campaign like a dark cloud. In a different media ecosystem, this wouldn’t have happened. A mix of common sense and truly basic research and reporting would have established a consensus that Republicans were trying to gin up intrigue and damaging innuendo, but that an indictment was extraordinarily unlikely. Instead, the remote odds of one came to be seen as something like a 50-50 proposition, to the point where even professional Democrats began to worry Clinton might be charged with a felony and prosecuted.

I don't know that this is particularly unique. The media, for lack of a better term, ceased to practice journalism a long time ago, with a few exceptions -- most of them on Comedy Central. We're seeing the same kind of bullshit mantras repeated again in the wake of the Dallas shooting, and we've seen it time and time again in the aftermath of just about every high-profile event over the past couple of decades. The idea of any news anchor or interviewer holding anyone's feet to the fire over obvious distortions, or even challenging their bullshit, is simply not in the mix.

Digby's summation is, I think, pretty much on the mark:

I would just add that liberal journalists are also subject to a herd mentality and seem to find themselves searching for reasons to reassure the public that they aren't political hacks so they add to the atmosphere by being heavily critical on the "optics, judgment and narrative" aspects of these scandals which leads to a different kind of distortion. These dynamics play into each other creating the sort of febrile environment that characterizes these passion plays.

This is what leads to a sort of political establishment consensus that "something is terribly wrong" that the rest of the country finds confusingly out of touch.

I would just add that what's "terribly wrong" is the fact that the political establishment is so completely out of touch. It's at the point where Washington is damned near a closed system, and entropy is taking its toll. (Note that one reason the Republicans -- and even a few Democrats, although they tend to be quiet about it -- hate the Clintons so much is that they were "outsiders" -- they weren't part of the Village.)

Maybe it would help if the news departments were not part of the entertainment division.

Today's Must-Read: Who Would Have Guessed?

The headline says it all:

Inspector General's Report On Clinton's Email Greatly Exaggerated By Media Outlets

It goes on:

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) released its anticipated report on the State Department's handling of email and cybersecurity. The report covers Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, but also includes an examination of other State employees use of email, including Colin Powell's use of a private email service.

Almost immediately, the media was full of headlines such as "State Department report slams Clinton email use" from CNN, "State Dept. inspector general report sharply criticizes Clinton’s email practices" from the Washington Post, and "IG: Clinton didn't want emails 'accessible'", from The Hill.

Lost in the hyperbole is the fact that the OIG report was meticulous and thorough, but also dispassionate, just like any other OIG report I've read. There was no direct criticism of Clinton, sharp or otherwise. The OIG was examining the State Department's practices, not specifically investigating Clinton's actions.

You may have noticed in the past that I've come to have a certain -- shall I call it "disdain"? -- for the press. Stories like this only reinforce that attitude. Everyone wants to be Fox News, apparently.

Don't believe everything you read in the papers. Or on the Internet.

Footnote: Add "sloppy" to "bias":

Oh. my. gawd. Someone put up a TrumpTweet on CNN's screen with replies before they'd actually read the first reply in the chain.

If they had, they would have thought twice, because it asks if Trump's penis is as orange as his face.

Spotlight

I haven't seen it. I think I probably will. (Frankly, I pay so little attention to movies, except for superhero epics, that I hadn't even heard of it until seeing lists of Oscar winners this morning.) And then two stories I ran across this morning brought it right front and center.

First, from Digby, a post about the background story:

But I have to say that I think it's pretty amazing that the biggest Christian church in the world has been revealed to have covered up thousands of cases of child rape over the course of many decades, perhaps centuries, and they somehow came out with their moral authority intact. This I will never understand. This wasn't just a slip-up. These are among the worst crimes human beings commit, a total taboo, particularly in a church which has no compunction about policing the sexuality of its flock.

I don't know that I agree with the "moral authority intact" part: granted, the Church never had much moral authority with me to begin with, but after the revelations of child sexual (and other) abuse not only in Boston, but in Chicago, in Ireland, in Germany, in Australia -- globally -- what little respect I had for the Church is gone. Not even in tatters, just gone.

And then I ran across this story:

Vatican finance chief George Pell admitted Monday the Catholic Church “mucked up” in dealing with paedophile priests and vowed he would not “defend the indefensible” before an Australian inquiry.

The jaw-dropper was this comment:

But he denied the Church’s structure was to blame for the way it handled paedophile priests, despite counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness saying many inquiries around the world had found those in senior positions did not take proper action.

“I don’t think it calls into question the divine structure of the Church which goes back to the New Testament, the role of the pope and bishops,” he said.

The Church's structure has had everything to do with the way this was handled, starting with the Church's contention that it is above the law and with its first priority: protecting its privilege.

Australia, at least, has called a Royal Commission to investigate. One wonders why the House Witch-Hunt Committee wasn't on top of this.

And for those who thought Pope Francis was going to fix everything, Digby has this quote from an article by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker:

Before I left, we talked about Pope Francis and his often disappointing response to the crisis, as well as the Church’s inflexible positions on the celibacy requirement, women in the clergy, contraception, homosexuality, and so on. I told Rezendes a theory I’d heard from the comedian and childhood-rape survivor Barry Crimmins: that Pope Francis is the Church’s way of changing the conversation without changing the Church. Rezendes looked thoughtful. “That makes some sense,” he said.

(Emphasis added.)

Granted, Francis has a lot of very conservative inertia to overcome, but the idea that his election is a way of deflecting attention from the moral bankruptcy of the hierarchy makes a lot of sense.

And for those who haven't seen it, here's a trailer for Spotlight:

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How Times Have Changed

Here's an interview with Keegan Hirst, the first professional rugby league player to come out as gay:

If you can decipher his accent (even I'm having a bit of trouble with it, and I've been watching English murder mysteries), it's pretty interesting, not only for the actual content, but perhaps even more for the subtext: it's all very matter-of-fact, as though the interview was about the upcoming rugby season or something.

Of course, this is from BBC.

Freedom of the Press

To self-censor?

From Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

If there was a golden age for American media, it was long ago and it was short.

Over at The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett has an excellent, utterly unsurprising article about a photograph taken in the last hours in the first Gulf War.

The work of the the then 28 year old photographer Kenneth Jarecke, the image captures a fact of war hopelessly obscured by the shots that angered Jarecke enough to postpone a planned hiatus from combat photography. “’It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.” — or, once combat actually began, gaudy displays of gee whiz toys, the disembodied beauty of missile exhausts, or bloodless shots of tires and twisted metal. War as video game, or a spectacle for the folks back home.

The bulk of Levenson's post is an embroidery on DeGhett's article (at the link, where you can also find the photo, which is under copyright and so does not appear here) detailing the history of this photograph and the fact that no major "news" outlet would touch it.

DeGhett goes farther, though:

Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Under this so-called “pool” system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges.

The "free press" has learned its lesson. Granted, it's impossible to present all the news that's happening every day. Editorial choices have to be made, priorities implemented, but if you view more than one news source, you know some stories are being buried. Levenson, though, points out something from DeGhett's article we all need to keep in mind:

The key here, as DeGhett writes, is that there was no military pressure not to publish Jarecke’s photograph. The war was over by the time his film got back to the facility in Saudi Arabia where the press pools operated. The decision to withhold the shot from the American public was made by the American press, by editors at the major magazines, at The New York Times, at the wire service. The chokehold on information at the top of the mainstream media was tight enough back then that most newspaper editors, DeGhett reports, never saw the image, never got to make their choice to publish or hide.

You can guess the excuses. “Think of the children!” For the more sophisticated, a jaded response:

Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: “We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”

Why yes, Mr. Sullivan, you do.

Emphasis added.

There are days I just want to give up. Read both articles.

Celebrity News

Let's face it, we live in a world where what celebrities do is news -- even if their claim to fame is merely that they're "celebrities" of some unspecified nature. (I think you can come up with some names that fit that category.) The latest example of that is Tom Daley's "coming out" and the speculation on who his boyfriend is.

Now, this is the sort of thing I usually ignore -- there are a lot of things happening in the world that are way more important, but this one has some meat to it, starting with Daley's manner of revealing his current status -- in his own words, in his own time, and eschewing any labels or specifics. One of the few news sources I've seen that has displayed any integrity in this whole thing is Pink News, which had this to say about why they are not repeating the speculation about the lucky man:

Many reports have taken speculation about who Tom Daley is dating as gospel, and some have gone further to bring up old issues over past private issues.

Until one of the pair decide to confirm reports, and make a statement about their relationship, PinkNews will not report or speculate about it, in the same way that (after some lessons quickly learned) we would not apply a label to his sexuality.

Working in this industry it is easy to lose track of things, or make snap decisions in following a big story (trust me, I’ve had to make a few), but what this comes down to is that Tom Daley is a 19-year-old dealing with coming out, with the added pressure of attention from the world’s media.

I commend him for making the decision to publicly reveal that he is dating a man, but who that man is is only his business, unless an announcement is made.

My sentiments exactly. Otherwise, you turn into Drudge or Politico. Or Fox News. (Benghazi!!1!)

And yes, I included a picture of Daley because he is just plain cute.