In the absence of any explanation or justification from the OP about the relevance of this asinine anecdote, I assume that must be it! Perhaps while Putin hammers away trying to undermine western democracies, our friend the OP wishes to do his bit by undermining western media. The less people are willing to believe legitimate media, the easier it is for congenital liars like Trump to exercise their malignancy.
That wasn’t the question. The question was, what do YOU think you’re proving WITH THIS RIDICULOUS ANECDOTE? We know dishonest journalists exist, just like bad and dishonest doctors, lawyers, and accountants. They turn up every once in a while. But does this tell us anything useful about the overall state of any of their professions?
Your cites are worthless. None of them say anything about what the mainstream media IS; all of them are about what Americans think the media is. Perhaps because of worthless innuendoes and anecdotes like yours.
And what many Americans think can also be measured in terms of what they think about climate change, what they think about biological evolution, or what they think about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. It bears a strong correlation to bullshit misinformation, and often little relation to reality. This bit from the Columbia Journalism Review also got my attention (emphasis mine):
Is this decline in trust related to the repeated attacks on “the lying media” by President Trump and his supporters, who like to describe the press as “the enemy of the people?” That kind of analysis is beyond the scope of the latest Knight/Gallup study, but it has to be part of the backdrop. Respondents who said they paid the least amount of attention to the news were among those who mistrusted the media the most—is that because all they hear about the media is that it makes things up and is out to get the president?
Keep hammering away at ignorant hillbillies and knuckle-dragging troglodytes with those kinds of political messages and eventually the stupider and least attentive ones – like Trump followers and Fox News watchers – start to believe it. Joseph Goebbels had that principle all figured out.
Read those again, they make the point that Republicans and conservatives are the ones that are increasing on that opinion and Trump is one of the big reasons why.
This sounds a lot like when conservatives ignored that a good number of people that opposed the ACA was because a good number of liberals thought that it was inadequate and better solutions were available. That made the polls to give conservatives a misleading view of what was going on, what happened was while most people opposed the ACA, most also realized that the replacements proposed were worse and so the support grew from the ones that wanted something better before. In a bit of a reverse, now a lot of the polling results of the media comes IMHO from liberals **that include FOX news and corporate media into consideration. **
This thread has potential. It has the potential to be something. Something big! This thread has the potential to be the start of the all encompassing omnibus fake news thread!
What I see proved is that he needs the ideas of ‘MSM bias’ and lying to be true, and accepted by everyone as true, b/c he *knows *it’s true! He’s not about to let reality alter what he knows. Like the Tangerine Toddler feels about his gut.
Speaking about the point made, when liberals and independents are asked they are bound to skew the poll numbers because they can not exclude trash like this:
As noted by the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Respondents chose a variety of factors such as accuracy (including “not reporting stories before [a news outlet] verifies all the facts and being willing to correct mistakes it makes”), as well as lack of bias, and transparency (including “providing fact-checking resources and providing links to research and facts that back up [the news outlet’s] reporting”).”
Confronted with issues like the Flynn conviction most people would indeed realize that besides inaccurate, Some media are also unwilling to correct mistakes that do go against the biased view of their viewers or readers (as usually FOX news and their ilk does), Those issues seen coming from FOX or The Wall Street Journal are then included in the whole picture and drag down the polling numbers IMHO.
Der Spiegel has also engaged in questionable reporting about influenza vaccination, boosting fears about side effects (as opposed to dangers of flu infection) and credulously citing antivax hero Thomas Jefferson.*
Yes. If you’re xenophobically foolish enough to believe the worst about Americans and don’t do your job, you look, well, like enormous buffoons.
If we’re going to turn this into a thread devoted to sharing our pet peeves about media, I can play, too. The media have also done a bit of disservice to public understanding of climate change, because, sad to say, in matters of science most journalists are scientific illiterates, and in the putative pursuit of “balance”, when they publish yet another alarming announcement from the published scientific community, they feel obliged to include quotes and commentary supposedly representing “the other side” and its sentiments of disagreement. Except the quoted authority for “the other side” is invariably a well-known total crackpot spouting gibberish, usually some octogenarian long since retired from an unrelated scientific discipline or having no science background at all.
The reasons for this include the fact that the media loves controversy, and the journalists themselves don’t necessarily know better on scientific or very technical matters. But note that, contrary to the ridiculous implied but unstated implications of the OP, as is his usual custom, this is not the same as saying that the media has a consistent political or ideological bias, except the bias toward making money, and as Noam Chomsky once said, “as a broad generalization, I think it is fair to say that the media adopt the basic framework of state and private power, mostly uncritically”. The real problem with media, mostly in America, is that commercial media alone does not serve the public well. It isn’t that it’s persistently biased in any political sense, except for the liberal bias inherent in truth and reality, and obvious political agencies like Fox News which is simply a cheerleader for anything Republican. As per my earlier cite, the generalization that Trump’s core base of support consists largely of disaffected ignorant and mostly racist morons is essentially correct, notwithstanding that Der Spiegel’s attestation of the fact came from a disreputable lazy journalist prone to making things up.
this, exactly. “journalism” seems to be satisfied with just telling us “One side says it’s bright and sunny. The other side says it’s the middle of the night. There, balance. You decide!”
what journalists should be doing is looking out the window and seeing what it actually is. 'cos it might be cloudy and raining.
Dang. Der Spiegel has only got another 2,225 fake news stories to catch up to Fox News. They should promote that reporter to editor in chief if they are ever going to carry their part of the load!
I dunno, If somebody went around to all my friends and said I was too dumb to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel and they all nodded sagely and said “Yup; sounds like Bill Door” I don’t know that I would be so pleased to note that I was, in fact, smart enough to pour piss out of a boot. I would be more concerned about why my friends thought I was such an idiot.
