(...) Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged â and that the mainstream news ârevolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.â
Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as âanchor left, pivot right,â and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book âClinton Cash,â an investigation of the Clinton familyâs blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer.
Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you wonât find his work in mainstream outlets. Heâs over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.
And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannonâs nightmare, and Mr. Benklerâs fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Bidenâs doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.
âSO USA TODAY DIDNâT WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,â the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News.
âThis is â60 Minutes,â and we canât put on things we canât verify,â Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.
The mediaâs control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers canât actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Bidenâs knowledge of his sonâs business. But what Mr. Benklerâs research showed was that the elite outletsâ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.
We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along â one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant. (...)
I don't think the NYT is particularly problematic or worrisome in that context. I can certainly see a centrist and establishmentarian streak as well.
and
haresfur wrote:
It's pretty hard to consider the staff as left-leaning anymore when the tea party and trump have shifted the right wing so far to the extreme that pretty much anyone, including true libertarians could be classified as left-leaning.
This is the problem with one-dimensional political thinking: it's left or it's right. The rainbow is reduced to shades of gray.
There is more than one way to be a fan of entrenched power. Left and right don't define it. Venezuela has an authoritarian regime, so does the Philippines. The NYT (as an institution—there a a few writers on staff who aren't completely comfortable with this, but it can't be long before they make the mob that seems to be running the place feel "unsafe") has no problem with concentration of power, it just wants it in the hands of people who think like they do.
If you can't figure out where libertarians belong on your map it's because you map needs more dimensions. Defining one's political identity based on what other people think is like setting your thermostat based on the temperatures in Jakarta and Moose Jaw.
I don't think we need to worry too much about Mr. Cotton being deplatformed any time soon. I suspect he's a beloved regular on platforms that cater to the right.
As such, that makes it all a bit of a straw man, seeing how Mr. Cotton's screed still exists (now with NYT mea culpa) and how the criticism in the article is more nuanced than simply censoring a frothing law-and-order hawk. It could've used some editing...
Not worried about Tom Cotton finding a platform, I'm worried that the NYT media bubble so many people are in is getting bricked up. Here's a little more on the topic.
I don't think we need to worry too much about Mr. Cotton being deplatformed any time soon. I suspect he's a beloved regular on platforms that cater to the right.
As such, that makes it all a bit of a straw man, seeing how Mr. Cotton's screed still exists (now with NYT mea culpa) and how the criticism in the article is more nuanced than simply censoring a frothing law-and-order hawk. It could've used some editing...
Not worried about Tom Cotton finding a platform, I'm worried that the NYT media bubble so many people are in is getting bricked up. Here's a little more on the topic.
It's pretty hard to consider the staff as left-leaning anymore when the tea party and trump have shifted the right wing so far to the extreme that pretty much anyone, including true libertarians could be classified as left-leaning.
I don't think we need to worry too much about Mr. Cotton being deplatformed any time soon. I suspect he's a beloved regular on platforms that cater to the right.
As such, that makes it all a bit of a straw man, seeing how Mr. Cotton's screed still exists (now with NYT mea culpa) and how the criticism in the article is more nuanced than simply censoring a frothing law-and-order hawk. It could've used some editing...
Not worried about Tom Cotton finding a platform, I'm worried that the NYT media bubble so many people are in is getting bricked up. Here's a little more on the topic.
No no we can't have that! Some voices must be silenced, some opinions are too dangerous.
Shame on the NYT! What if people read those words and formed their own opinions? We can't have that.
I don't think we need to worry too much about Mr. Cotton being deplatformed any time soon. I suspect he's a beloved regular on platforms that cater to the right.
As such, that makes it all a bit of a straw man, seeing how Mr. Cotton's screed still exists (now with NYT mea culpa) and how the criticism in the article is more nuanced than simply censoring a frothing law-and-order hawk. It could've used some editing...
Greenwald is one of my journalistic heroes but he really needs an editor. This reads like he typed it into his phone, ran up against a deadline, closed his eyes and clicked "send".
The tactics from No 10 echo those of Trump in the US, who has been known to try to exclude journalists from reporting on his activities, and represents an escalation of Johnsonâs tensions with the media, which have been increasing in recent weeks.
The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixonâs direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide later recalled, Nixon believed that it was necessary to âfight the press through ⦠the nutcutters as (the president) called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.â
The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were âthe oppositionâ that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.
The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. âThere is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,â he told a House subcommittee.
What about the number of victims? Bonnerâs article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization. Elliott Abrams, whoâd just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that âthe numbers, first of all, were not credible. ⦠Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.â This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.
Then came the assault from the administrationâs outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined âThe Mediaâs War.â Americans were âbadly confusedâ about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a âmassacre.â On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was âcredulous,â âa reporter out on a limb,â and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for âcommunist sources.â One of the editorialâs authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that âobviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.â
Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging âa propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.â Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a âreally viciousâ whisper campaign about him.
Salon received the following statement from a spokesperson for The New York Times:
While, as a general matter of policy, we do not comment on personnel matters, Mr. Cunha makes claims in his story that merit a response. We can say that there was a broader pattern of issues including when he ignored our standards and removed the administrationâs on-the-record response from a news article. Responsible news organizations allow the subjects of their coverage to respond.
Mr. Cunhaâs insinuation that The New York Times has been soft on President Trump does not stand up to the facts. Without our newsroom covering Trump and his administration, the world would not know that Trump had ordered his staff to fire Mueller, or tried to have then FBI Director James Comey commit to a loyalty oath. They wouldnât know about the "instances of outright fraud" in Trumpâs tax practices, which led to investigations that are still unfolding. But aggressive coverage that holds power to account still needs to meet our standards for fairness and accuracy.
And far from courting Mr. Trump, our publisher A.G. Sulzberger has met with the president in person twice to voice concerns about the real and tragic consequences around the world of the presidentâs anti-press rhetoric.
