Media Bias Debate
Four White House correspondents flew out to Las Vegas for this past week’s 2019 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show and, as is usually the case with such public events, journalists offer revealing takes that are both good and bad. Most notably, they condemned the President’s rhetoric toward the media, suggesting it places their lives in “serious danger.”
The 2019 National Association of Broadcasting convention wrapped on Thursday and, back on Monday, NAB CEO (and former Republican Senator) Gordon Smith waxed poetic love notes to four prominent White House correspondents on-stage as “heroes and icons” to “this younger generation” as the supposedly dastardly Trump administration has made journalism cool again.
On Wednesday's Cuomo Prime Time, during a discussion of a study finding Democrats who use Twitter are further to the left than average Democrats, CNN host Chris Cuomo admitted that "the media vibes so much off Twitter," tacitly admitting that the far left, or "progressives," have substantial influence over what the dominant media give air to. He even suggested that journalists use sources from Twitter who may not even be who they pretend to be.
Former porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti is back in the headlines after being indicted Thursday on 36 charges ranging from fraud to tax dodging. Incidentally, this is the same Michael Avenatti whom broadcast and cable news networks have hosted a whopping 254 times over the past year, according to the MRC's latest count of the spotlight-loving attorney's televised escapades.
In a long-winded puff piece for The Hollywood Reporter, writer Jeremy Barr gushed about blowhard Prime Time host Chris Cuomo and how he was “fighting for his life on CNN.” The piece was filled with a load of gag-inducing puffery, but here’s just a few doses.
The Hollywood Reporter performed a poll on the news media, and the finding is still unexpected and shocking to some. The headline was “Americans Think All Network News Channels Lean Liberal, Poll Finds.” Common sense has won. Can we dispose with the ridiculous fiction that the network news product is objective, strictly balanced, and nonpartisan?
If House Democrats are sinking to a new low by using their subpoena power to rummage through the President's personal tax returns, you wouldn't know it by the way they have been treated on CNN over the past few days. Hosts on the liberal cable network have routinely lobbed softballs at Democratic interviewees, while challenges to the legitimacy of their quest see the President’s taxes were few and far between.
During an interview with Third Hour Today show co-host Sheinelle Jones aired on Monday, PBS anchor Christiane Amanpour denounced criticism of the media as being “corrosive and destructive” to democracy. The comments came just days after the reporter vilely attempted to link Fox News to the recent terrorist attacks in New Zealand.
The April 2019 issue of Esquire features a long, eye-opening article on how attacks on Trump may have permanently damaged the media’s reputation (always fragile) for objectivity. Boyer's main focus was the New York Times: “Donald Trump Changed The New York Times. Is It Forever? -- Donald Trump has shattered presidential standards. In response, The New York Times and other elite news organizations have scrapped their rigorous, long-held standards of objectivity. But will the Times’s changes have unintended consequences? And what does Trump himself think of all this?" The president had some criticism for one Times story in particular.
Following a week where the liberal media suffered an arguably crippling blow to their credibility by the Special Counsel investigation finding no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, CNN offered little reflection on their role in pushing and generating fake news and conspiracy theories. And during their program dedicated to the worshiping the media, so-called Reliable Sources, host Brian Stelter once again obsessed about what Fox News was doing and how the network was called out his colleagues.
Despite the fact Attorney General William Barr’s letter explicitly quoted the Special Counsel’s report, stating, “[t]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd was on NBC Sunday suggesting the President wasn’t really cleared of the collusion conspiracy theory.
CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper poses as a Just the Facts Man, but his command of the facts vanished on Sunday. When Trump's chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the " media got it wrong for so long" speculating on collusion in the Mueller investigation, Tapper offered the spit take that "I'm not sure what you're saying the media got wrong....Other than the people in the media on the left, not on this network, I don't know anybody who got anything wrong."